Building the inner cathedral
As the story goes, Archimedes died while drawing circles in the sand. He was so absorbed in his work that he did not notice the city had fallen, and when a Roman soldier ordered him to come along, he refused to leave his problem unfinished. He did not care what the soldier thought of him. He cared only about increasing his own understanding of the world, his own world model. He was building his inner cathedral.
The great medieval cathedrals took generations to build. Every stone was cut by hand, and many of the builders never saw the building finished. An inner cathedral grows the same way: slowly, stone by stone, over a lifetime. Each stone is a piece of understanding you had to work for. That work is the friction, and without it there is no cathedral. You will never see yours finished either. That’s fine. What matters is that you care about building it.
External reward is everywhere: praise, grades, money, status, your CV. It is all about how you look to others and how you compare to them. I don’t think it’s the good kind of reward. It does not build you up from the inside. It makes you chase somebody else’s life.
Intrinsic reward is different. You enjoy improving your own ideas and dive deep into a topic just for the sake of understanding it. You build a cathedral nobody can see. That has always been the more fulfilling way to live, but in the age of AI it matters even more. If you chase praise and grades, AI offers you a shortcut. It can fully generate output that you can present as your own, and you collect the reward without building anything inside. It leaves you empty and hands your reward system to the company that controls the AI model. You will live a rented life, and the rent you pay is your skill and your independence.
The right kind of motivation is what will set apart the people who use AI to amplify their understanding from those who outsource it. If you care about your inner cathedral, AI is not a threat, just as it is not a threat that there are a million people smarter than you. The only question is whether those people, or those machines, can help you build it.
I firmly believe that building your own cathedral is worth some risk and sacrifice. Archimedes was willing to die rather than leave his circles unfinished. That is a bit extreme. But you should be willing to give up some of the praise, the grades and the status. And a society of people building their own inner cathedrals is more curious, daring and resilient.
So embrace the friction. Keep building the cathedral.