Building the inner cathedral
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. The story is probably apocryphal, but it is a good story. Archimedes was not concerned with what the soldier thought of him, or whether he would be praised or punished. He was concerned with increasing his own understanding of the world, his own world model. In my words, he was building his own inner cathedral.
The great medieval cathedrals took a long time to build. Every stone was cut by hand, and many of the builders never saw the building finished. Still, they cared about every stone. 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. And like those builders, you will never see your cathedral finished. That’s fine. What matters is that you care about every stone.
External reward is so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine a world without it. Praise, grades, money, status, your CV and all the rest. It is all about how you look to others and, importantly, how you compare to others. Some of it is fine. Money pays the bills, and a bit of praise feels good. But in my opinion, when it becomes the reason you do something, it is not the good kind of reward. It does not build you up from the inside. It makes you chase somebody else’s life. It feels rented, never truly yours.
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. It has always been the more fulfilling way to live, but in the age of AI it might play an even bigger role. 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. That is why external reward becomes your enemy. It hollows you out and hands your reward system to the company that controls the AI model. Your sense of accomplishment then depends on a tool you don’t own, on terms you don’t set. The company can change the model, raise the price or switch it off, and what you thought was your ability goes with it. If you no longer feel the friction of trying to accomplish something hard, you will not improve. You will live a rented life, and the rent you pay is your skill and your independence.
More than ever, the right kind of motivation matters. It will set apart the people who flourish by using AI to amplify their understanding from those who outsource it. If you care about your own 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. In the story, Archimedes would rather die than leave his circles unfinished. Nobody needs to go that far. But you should be willing to give up some of the praise, the grades, the status and all the rest. And I believe that, ultimately, a society of people building their own inner cathedrals is more curious, daring and resilient.
So embrace the friction. Keep building the cathedral.