A reflection on remembering, lament, and re-membering in an age of automation
I didn’t expect to learn anything important while driving.
It was just another long stretch of road—
cruise control on, horizon soft and wide,
nothing to do except be there.
And here’s the ironic part:
I actually hate driving.
I tell my kids all the time I’d rather teleport everywhere.
(It’s become a running joke—
the kind that earns me a guaranteed
“Dad, please stop”
or whatever new word teenagers use
when they’ve evolved past “cringe.”)
But somewhere in the stillness,
I realized my dislike of driving
had nothing to do with the driving itself.
Because even in my grumbling,
something deeper was happening.
I wasn’t enjoying the drive
because it was convenient,
or efficient,
or “smart.”
I enjoyed it because it forced me
to be present.
Driving holds you in a way
very few things still do:
Your eyes must stay open.
Your mind must stay here.
Your body must stay engaged.
Your awareness widens into a kind of soft vigilance.
It’s not tension.
It’s not escape.
It’s a panoramic presence—
a remembering of how to be human.
And that remembering awakened something deeper.
Long before cars,
wanderers lived this way:
Hobos walking the rail lines,
nomads crossing open land,
vagabonds tracing towns by foot,
gypsies carrying their stories on the move.
Movement wasn’t escape.
It was attention.
It was agency.
It was life lived in real time.
Driving—at least for me—became the modern remnant
of that ancient posture.
But as soon as I felt the remembering,
I also felt the lament.
Because moments like these
are slowly disappearing.
Not just because of self-driving cars—
though they are the symbol.
But because of automation everywhere:
- tasks we no longer have to do
- choices made on our behalf
- systems that think for us
- screens that fill every empty second
- conveniences that remove the little frictions
that once kept our awareness awake
You don’t need to drive to feel this loss.
You can sense it in:
Scrolling instead of wondering.
GPS instead of noticing.
Streaming instead of pausing.
Autofill instead of remembering.
AI instead of effort.
Optimization instead of agency.
The technical backstory is dry—
just “efficiency” and “improvement.”
But the spiritual cost is real:
We are losing the places
where we once felt ourselves.
That is the lament.
Not nostalgia.
Not fear.
Not resistance to change.
Just an honest grief
for the quiet spaces
that used to gather us back
into presence and coherence.
But lament is never the end.
Lament opens the door
to re-membering—
to stitching back the parts of us
that the world no longer asks for:
Attention.
Wonder.
Choice.
Agency.
Breath.
Presence.
A sense of scale.
A sense of self.
We cannot stop the world
from becoming more automated.
But we can choose
how we inhabit the moments
automation gives back to us.
So here is the invitation:
Where in your life do you still feel awake—
and how can you guard that space
before it disappears?
And where the world has stopped requiring your presence,
how might you re-member yourself anyway?
Because presence is not a task.
It’s a way of being.
And it’s worth choosing—
even for someone who still wishes
teleportation had launched by now.