What I Learned at Ghibli Day

Thoughts after a week of reflection

I.

It’s been a week. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Ghibli Day — as we might as well call it, given that OpenAI didn’t bother to name the model that set it off — was special. Full of unexpected joy (especially for spouses of AI nerds) and also full of excess. That day, I had a bittersweet insight: humans don’t know how to deal with abundance.

We think we do. We treat it as something good by definition (who doesn’t want full supermarket shelves, for instance?) and rare (modernity gave us a kind of surplus unknown to any other era; we should be grateful). But we’re not built for it. And that’s something we don’t want to understand: we didn’t evolve for abundance; we evolved for scarcity.

Now, sure, you could still argue that abundance is better (you won’t catch me saying otherwise; I’m merely acting as the devil’s advocate here). But here’s the thing: a circumstance we’ve developed no evolutionary tools to face might be more dangerous than the old foe we’ve outgrown and whose shenanigans we know by heart (literally, our DNA knows).

So we end up in this fragile spot where, for once, that proverb I usually dislike suddenly makes sense: Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Especially when already knowing might save you.

But this wasn’t about survival. Art is great — the most quintessentially human thing we do — but it isn’t a matter of life or…