Don't Let the Machine Have Your Life

Coming home from Bali has felt a little like the morning after a really good shroom trip.

There is no elegant way to say that, so I’m not going to try.

You know that strange clarity when something has shifted your perspective so completely that the world looks the same, but you don’t? Everything is still where you left it. The house is here. The kids are home. Laundry exists because apparently enlightenment does not exempt anyone from laundry. I spent a beautiful day with my granddaughter, Luna. Today the sky has opened over Texas, flood warnings are going off, rain is pounding outside, and my body still has absolutely no idea what time zone it belongs in.

Life is good.

And something feels different.

Bali did something to my nervous system that I wasn’t expecting. I knew it would be beautiful. I expected the temples, waterfalls, jungle, rice fields, food, flowers, monkeys and all the things you see in photographs. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly safe my body would feel there.

Not vacation-relaxed. Not massage-relaxed. Not the temporary exhale that comes when responsibilities disappear for a few days.

Safe.

The closest memory I have to that feeling is being maybe six, seven or eight years old at my parents’ gold claim in the Sierra Nevada mountains. I remember the earth, the trees, the quiet and this sense that nothing was demanding anything from me. Somewhere along the way, my body forgot what that kind of peace felt like.

Bali reminded it.

There are plenty of ways to explain what makes the island feel different. Some people talk about the ley lines said to cross there. Others point to the lush landscape, slower pace or communal culture. What struck me most, though, was something much simpler: people pray.

Prayer is woven into ordinary life. Offerings appear everywhere. Spiritual practice isn’t something tucked into Sunday morning before everyone goes back to being an asshole in traffic. It moves through homes, businesses, sidewalks, temples, meals and relationships. Whatever someone believes about the theology behind those practices, living among people who repeatedly stop and orient themselves toward something larger than themselves changes the texture of a place.

You feel it.

Several of our Balinese guides and drivers talked with us about karma and the responsibility they feel for what they carry into the world. One explained that you might wake up having a terrible day. There may be conflict at home. Money might be tight. Something could be weighing heavily on you. Yet when you walk out your door, strangers do not deserve to receive the emotional whiplash of whatever happened inside your house.

That stayed with me.

Then I came home.

Suddenly everything felt scratchy. Sharp. Fast. People rushing. Cars pushing. Horns. Phones. News. Deadlines. Algorithms. Everybody carrying invisible urgency as if the world might collapse if we aren’t moving, answering, producing, buying or reacting quickly enough.

The strange part is that I love my life here. I have a peaceful home. I live near water and trees. My children are here. I have a husband I love, meaningful work, people I adore and enormous freedom in how I spend my days. There isn’t some terrible life waiting for me in Texas that Bali temporarily rescued me from.

Yet my nervous system immediately knew the difference.

I went to the grocery store today and started noticing faces. People looked tired. Guarded. Some had what I can only describe as resting bitch face plus tax.

So I started making eye contact and smiling.

One woman looked at me suspiciously.

I kept smiling.

Then she smiled.

Another person did the same thing. Then another. Every single person eventually gave something back.

Such a tiny exchange, but I kept thinking about it while walking through the store. How many of us are waiting for the world to become kinder while walking through it with our armor already on?

Maybe joy is more serious than we think.

Esther Hicks has taught for years, through the Abraham teachings, that our purpose is joy. I have always understood that intellectually. Bali made me understand it differently. Joy isn’t frivolous. It isn’t pretending nothing hurts. It doesn’t require wealth, ease or a life without problems.

Joy can be a discipline.

Scripture says something remarkably similar: “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.” That is not advice for people whose lives are going perfectly. It is an orientation toward life. 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18 does not say rejoice when the mortgage is paid, the marriage is easy, the children behave and nobody pisses you off. It connects joy, prayer and gratitude as practices.

Perhaps we need those practices now more than we realize.

We are standing at the beginning of a technological shift that I don’t think most of us fully comprehend yet. Artificial intelligence is going to change how we work, create, learn, diagnose, build, communicate and solve problems. Nobody can say with certainty what the next five or ten years will look like, and I don’t think fearmongering helps us prepare for it.

But I do think we should be asking better questions.

What happens to human beings when productivity is no longer one of the primary ways we establish our worth?

What happens when work that once required ten people requires two? When skills someone spent thirty years developing can be replicated in seconds? When technology becomes capable of doing more and more of the things we once believed required uniquely human intelligence?

The economic questions matter enormously.

I am increasingly interested in the spiritual ones.

We have built a culture where enormous portions of identity come from occupation, achievement and usefulness. Ask someone who they are and notice how quickly they tell you what they do. Work gives us structure, social contact, responsibility, competence and, for many people, dignity. Remove those things without replacing them with meaningful forms of participation and belonging, and the problem is larger than unemployment.

It becomes a crisis of purpose.

Maybe the answer isn’t competing with machines.

Perhaps it is remembering what machines cannot make meaningful for us.

A machine can generate a birthday card. It cannot be your daughter sitting beside you while you open it. Technology can compose music, but it cannot replace the memory of your mother singing while she cooked dinner. AI can explain grief beautifully. It cannot bury your father with you, hold your hand beside a hospital bed or notice your face across the dinner table and ask what’s wrong.

Those things belong to us.

Relationship belongs to us.

Community belongs to us.

Embodiment belongs to us.

Prayer, devotion, touch, service, laughter, soil under our fingernails, children climbing into our laps, feeding people we love, sitting beside someone who is suffering, making something with our hands because making it matters to us even when a machine could do it faster: those experiences cannot become meaningless simply because technology becomes efficient.

Maybe efficiency was never supposed to be the measure of a human life.

Genesis describes humanity as being formed from the dust of the ground. I find myself thinking about that image differently after Bali. We are creatures of earth who have constructed a civilization increasingly designed to keep us from touching it. We wake to screens, work through screens, entertain ourselves through screens, argue through screens, shop through screens and sometimes maintain entire relationships through screens.

Then we wonder why our bodies feel like they are screaming.

The answer may not be abandoning technology. I’m certainly not going to. I use AI. I find it fascinating. I believe it will contribute to extraordinary advances, including solutions to problems humanity has struggled with for generations.

The danger is not simply that machines may become more capable.

It is that humans may become less human.

That possibility makes the biblical instruction in Hebrews 10 feel almost prophetic for this moment: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together.” Keep gathering. Keep encouraging. Keep loving. Keep doing good beside actual people.

We may need that instruction more in the next decade than we have in the last hundred years.

So I keep coming back to what Bali showed me.

Get closer to the earth.

Know your neighbors.

Call your sister.

Have people at your table.

Stay close to your children, even when they are grown. Love your husband. Love your wife. Build friendships that can survive inconvenient conversations. Find people who know what your face looks like when you’re not okay. Pray. Grow something. Cook something. Walk outside. Use your body. Make things even when something else can make them faster.

Keep doing work that gives your life meaning even when nobody requires you to do it.

And perhaps most importantly, become conscious of what you carry into the world.

Your pain is real. Your stress is real. Your bad morning is real. None of that means the stranger beside you deserves to absorb it.

There is something profoundly powerful about deciding, This stops with me.

The cashier does not get my anger. The driver beside me does not get my frustration. My children do not automatically inherit the anxiety I carried home. My spouse does not deserve the emotional shrapnel from something that happened three hours earlier.

That doesn’t mean suppressing emotion or performing happiness.

It means taking responsibility for our presence.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” I used to hear that primarily as a statement about faith. Lately I hear responsibility in it too.

Light changes the environment it enters.

Maybe that is enough purpose for one human life.

To become someone whose presence makes the room a little softer. To cultivate joy without denying suffering. To create instead of merely consume. To remain deeply human in a world becoming increasingly technological. To know your people and let them know you. To pray. To touch the earth. To keep your heart tender when the culture rewards hardness.

Bali did not make me want to escape my life.

It made me want to inhabit it differently.

I want less urgency. More prayer. Fewer transactions. More relationships. Less unconscious emotional whiplash. More responsibility for what I bring into a room. I want to keep making eye contact with strangers who have forgotten they are allowed to smile.

The rain is still coming down outside as I write this. The boys are at school. My body is somewhere between Texas and Indonesia, and there is laundry waiting because, again, enlightenment has apparently accomplished nothing in that department.

But something came home with me.

I intend to protect it.

Not from the world.

For the world.

— ->I came home from Bali asking myself a different question:

What am I allowing the world around me to turn me into?

Am I carrying peace into the grocery store, my marriage, my home, my friendships and the people I pass on the road? Or am I handing strangers the emotional shrapnel from whatever happened to me that morning?

Maybe changing the world is too damn big of an assignment for any of us.

But changing what the world receives when it encounters us?

That we can do.

So tell me in the comments: What is ONE thing you want to bring more of into the world around you right now?

Mine is joy.

I’d really love to see what yours is.

As always loving and praying for you and our world,

Rene Schooler

—

This post was previously published on medium.com.