Epistemic Status:Philosophical exploration and cultural commentary. An essay on human motivation in a post-scarcity, AI-abundant world.
Over the past two years, AI has surged forward so fast that it leaves you somewhat numb. Every single day brings a new large model, a new agent harness, a new benchmark — fast enough to make everyone slump back into their chairs, again and again, like Sam Altman.
Amid this wave, one defining spectacle after another has played out. During the Chinese New Year, the scientific-discovery system FARS ran continuously for roughly 228.5 hours in a single public deployment, producing its 100th short paper/research report in one go. Not long after, *Nature* published a flurry of results from several AI science agents (Auto-Research) — Co-Scientist, Robin, ERA — covering the full research pipeline from hypothesis generation to experimental design. And just days ago, Anthropic released “When AI builds itself,” disclosing that by May 2026, over 80% of the code in its internal production codebase was written by Claude, and the number of lines each engineer merges per day, automatically or with assistance, had exploded to 8 times what it was two years earlier.
These events easily pull us into an anxious or feverish “unemployment discussion”: programmers, scientists, creators — are we about to be replaced?
But the deeper crisis is not unemployment. It is motivational: once execution becomes cheap, humans are forced to confront whether they still know what they want. The question is not merely whether machines will take our jobs, but whether the purposes that once organized our days can survive when the tasks themselves are automated.
If we push through the thick fog of these technological spectacles and look a little deeper, a colder question — one closer to the essence of human nature — has quietly surfaced:
When AI renders all of humanity’s current “utilitarian purposes” — writing code, editing files, running tests, searching literature, doing analysis, and execution itself — worthless, how much “sense of purpose” does humanity have left?
Or, more bluntly: in a future where every tool and every labor can be outsourced at low cost, what is it that humans actually still want?
This is a deeply uncanny juncture. With this essay, I want to break down this seemingly vast, nihilistic predicament, and finally wind my way to an answer that sounds absurd yet is dead serious: why we should write poetry.
From Taste to Desire
In early 2023, I wrote an essay titled “Taste Is All You Need.” Back then AIGC had just exploded, making many people viscerally realize for the first time that the cost of content production was plummeting. Images, copywriting, translation, code snippets — things that used to take days of painstaking effort — could suddenly be summoned by a single prompt.
What I thought then was: as production becomes cheap, taste becomes important. What’s truly scarce is no longer “whether you can produce,” but “whether you can pick out the good stuff.”
At this moment, AI is to some degree continually advancing in both automation and taste, and can optimize by relying on objective feedback. That judgment can now be pushed one step further.
As more autonomous, longer-horizon agents appeared — Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw — the change was no longer just “machines can generate content,” but “machines can take over the task.” They read codebases, edit files, run tests, look up information, organize documentation, break down tasks, even orchestrate other agents simultaneously.
The working paradigm of programmers and knowledge workers is shifting from “I personally translate intent into code/reports” to “I hand the goal to a system that can execute, then review, correct course, and keep assigning work.”
Today, for any task that has a dataset/benchmark and a clearly defined reward and evaluation metric — so long as it is a “meaningful” and “measurable” purpose — we can expect AI to have a shot at solving it: from algorithm optimization and model training to proving mathematical theorems.
This leads to an extremely paradoxical corollary: when all “meaningful, objective, utilitarian” purposes can be achieved by machines cheaply and efficiently, the territory left exclusively to humans is precisely the “meaningless, subjective, non-utilitarian” personal domain.
When code and execution also become cheap, when autonomous taste improves, and when improvement can be drawn from feedback, what is scarcer at that point is desire and purpose themselves.
Taste answers: what is good?
Desire answers: what to do, and why?
There Was Once a Profession Called the Idle Companion
Many people hold an optimistic assumption: as long as you free a person from necessary labor and give them enough resources and leisure, they will naturally go off to explore, create, and push to the limit. As if desire were a spring forever welling up, and the only thing blocking it were the rock of scarcity — move the rock aside, and the spring gushes forth.
But history’s answer is exactly the opposite.
In classical novels and the life-notes of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the wealthy magnates and salt merchants of Jiangnan, the prosperous region south of the lower Yangtze, possessed things an ordinary person of that era could not even imagine: absolute wealth, and more leisure than they knew what to do with. Yet they did not en masse transform into philosophers or adventurers; instead, they gave rise to a parasitic specialized profession: the idle companion (帮闲, bangxian). Centuries later, on the other side of the world, Thorstein Veblen would give this very pattern its sociological name in The Theory of the Leisure Class — surplus time and wealth curdling into conspicuous, ornamental waste.
The core task of the “idle companion” was to accompany the great masters in cricket-fighting, listening to ballad-storytelling, savoring fine tea, appreciating curious paintings, contriving endless poetry gatherings, slicing empty time into the finest, most delicate fragments. Before becoming a powerful minister in the classic Chinese novel Water Margin (《水浒传》), Marshal Gao Qiu (高俅) was a renowned idle companion in the Northern Song capital Bianjing (today’s Kaifeng), specializing in accompanying noble young lords in cuju (蹴鞠), an ancient ball game FIFA recognizes as an early ancestor of football, alongside feasting and frolicking.
The existence of the idle companion reveals an ice-cold truth:
Human desire and sense of purpose are not naturally inexhaustible. They are not weeds; they are more like spring water — they can run dry.
Throughout the long span of history, scarcity wound the mainspring tight for every mortal among us. We had to scramble for survival and subsistence, to slave away to pay off our loans. This external pressure, the compulsion to keep going, concealed for us the question hardest to face. And the first shock that abundance and technological intelligence bring to humanity is to crudely dismantle this taut spring, and to shove the heaviest of all questions — “what is it that you truly want from living in this world,” a question that has driven countless sages mad — whole and naked, back into your panic-stricken hands.
The low-desire society is never the result of material scarcity; it is precisely a spiritual catastrophe befalling an affluent society: when tools grow impossibly powerful, the inner drive of people withers and degenerates. Executive capacity inflates at breakneck speed while the craving for originality dries up.
Keynes saw the shape of this nearly a century ago. In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he predicted that once the “economic problem” was solved, humanity would face its real and permanent problem: how to use its freedom from pressing economic cares, “how to occupy the leisure” — how “to live wisely and agreeably and well.” He suspected we were not yet bred for it. AI is simply the machine that finally forces that question due.
The Thrifty Phenotype of Desire
This maladaptation has, at a deeper physiological and evolutionary level, a chilling symmetry.
Our bodies were specifically tuned to fight “scarcity.” Having evolved over hundreds of millions of years in extremely harsh, scarce environments, this body is instinctively best at two things: conserving calories and avoiding superfluous motion.
In medicine there is a famous hypothesis, the Thrifty Phenotype Hypothesis: if a fetus develops over a prolonged period in an environment of extreme nutritional scarcity, its genes and physiological functions are reprogrammed, developing into a “thrifty phenotype” heavily biased toward energy conservation, low energy expenditure, and low metabolic capacity. This is a self-protection adopted by the human body to adapt to anticipated future deprivation.
But once these children are born, if they are dropped straight into a modern high-sugar, high-fat environment of severe caloric surplus where fat and sugar are within easy reach, the elasticity of their pancreatic β-cells and the metabolic configurations of their skeletal muscle and liver, all originally prepared for lean days, are simply unable to digest this surplus nutrition, thereby triggering widespread insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and various cardiovascular diseases.
If we take this medical commonplace as a metaphor for civilization, everything becomes clear:
Over the past hundreds and thousands of years, our education, moral systems, and individual instincts have etched a deep “spiritually impoverished phenotype”: we were disciplined to endure, to demand little, to not stir up trouble. Yet now, AI compute and autonomous agents have brought a surplus of executive power so vast it is almost pathological. Faced with an ocean of means of execution, we simply do not know how to digest them healthily and gracefully.
Anyone who has used agents for a while has this experience: what truly exhausts you is not having it write code, look up information, or produce solutions — it is that you must ceaselessly know what you want, must detect what’s “wrong,” must articulate where it’s wrong, must possess the capacity for dissatisfaction, must have the strength to keep tinkering. Before tokens are completely wrung dry by compute being dumped on the market, the human instinct for dissatisfaction and the perception of things at their extreme often become the fastest-depleted, most desperate bottleneck before this perfect machine.
The Need for an Ethics of the Age of Abundance
Therefore, in discussing the individual’s position in this era, the key point is: our foundational ethics has reached the moment when it absolutely must shift gears.
All of humanity’s ethics has always operated in close lockstep with the material productive forces behind it.
In the pre-industrial age of subsistence farming at the mercy of the weather, because every surplus grain and every drop of fat meant life or death, its supreme ethic — an ethics of scarcity — was restraint: frugality was the highest virtue, self-reliance was knowing one’s place, and keeping one’s desires few and one’s heart calm was the holiest survival wisdom.
Because every superfluous self-assertion and every non-productive waste of resources might be paid for with the next generation’s famine.
But by the industrial age, this subsistence ethic was ground to dust. The grand machinery of industrialization relies on precise division of labor and the free flow of capital. And so trolley problems incomprehensible to a subsistence civilization emerged in endless succession:
“On a rainy day, am I exploiting the delivery courier by ordering takeout?”
“When I ride a sedan chair carried by porters up the mountain, am I lording it over the working people?”
By the logic of this ethics of scarcity, the most virtuous course is to walk through the night by lamplight yourself, to haul the heavy sack up the mountain peak yourself. But by the economic ethics of the industrial age of abundance, fair transactions and dignified consumption are precisely what enliven the division of labor and keep the system running. If, out of a hollow “unbearableness,” you flatly refuse to consume, you instead smash the rice bowl of those who feed their families through that very trade.
In a grand ethical reckoning, Max Weber, with *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*, demonstrated the legitimation process of this leap: the Protestants completed a wrenching yet stunning ethical turn, naming legitimate worldly labor and the pursuit of wealth a “Calling” — the exercise of God’s mission. This ethical loosening of wealth-creation broke the ancient curse within religion that “the poorer, the more redeemed,” and installed a powerful psychological engine for the industrial revolution to follow.
And now, once again, history demands that we make the same subversive shift of gears — this time before the storm of an age of abundance in compute and agentic executive power, built from large models and the edge-device Internet of Things.
Regrettably, the moral creed we now clutch, far from striding into the future, often shrinks back into the “minimalist self-discipline” of the pre-industrial age of scarcity. We have written “don’t do useless work, don’t add to the mess, find the efficient shortcut, never reinvent the wheel” all over society’s common sense.
Yet when a vast AI machine network, one that can autonomously call up every repository and marshal productivity and materials, can take care of all your livelihood-based “necessary motions” in a microsecond, the ancient virtues of “don’t go looking for trouble; be efficient and restrained” rapidly become a choke point on the whole ecosystem’s operation:
“Don’t stir things up” and “demand less” lead directly to stagnant ecological backwaters and the death-silence of the mind.
The age of scarcity says: “Please do not waste.”
The age of abundance says: “Please waste — with utter sincerity and exquisite refinement.”
Once we no longer have to worry about livelihood, we must turn our highest praise and moral radiance toward those seemingly non-utilitarian, uneconomical, even “elaborately wasteful” acts of spiritual self-torment. Nietzsche’s “master morality” is deeply instructive here: it is not driven by trembling before the famine-bringing reaper, but springs from that unstoppable, almost squandering creative passion that arises after life’s energy has overflowed. It has no need for self-negation at all; it is precisely in the most elaborate, pointless tinkering that it proudly brands the subject’s soul. Georges Bataille put it even more forcefully: expenditure, non-productive luxurious consumption, has always been the deepest, noblest skeleton of a civilization’s flourishing.
So Why We Should Write Poetry
In a comfortable world where no external spring is forcibly winding the body tight any longer, by what method, exactly, are we to re-tighten the endogenous spring for a withered, lukewarm soul?
In writing this section, I want to bring out two weapons brimming with inspiration and resistance:
Games and poetry.
The philosopher Bernard Suits, in his marvelous book *The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia*, gave a devastatingly precise definition:
”Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”
Why, in chess, can’t you just sweep your opponent’s king off the board with one swipe of the hand? Why, in football, don’t you use your nimbler, better-controlling hands to clutch the ball firmly into the goal?
Because once this seemingly redundant layer of operational obstacle is torn away, the game’s ineffable rules and its very goal go up in smoke. Suits even prophesied: in the ultimate automation utopia, when all of human society’s livelihood, necessary labor, and even scientific research have been entirely dissolved by advanced technology, humanity’s only remaining noble and awe-inspiring serious pursuit will be “playing games.”
In life as it used to be, scarcity compelled all of us to cross and battle over “necessary obstacles”: hunger and cold, grave illness, the crush of competition for resources. But before the extreme affluence of the future, if a human wishes not to sink irretrievably into the abyss of nihilism, he must cultivate a near-divine art: to draw and erect, with great passion and exquisite precision, “unnecessary obstacles” for oneself on the wilderness of the void.
Writing poetry is the sacred ancestor of this mental game, that ancient, great, and unbroken playground of “unnecessary obstacles.”
Though you could say it all in a single sentence — “this makes me so very sad” — you insist instead on casting your gaze toward the eternal shadow of the moon, the river waves rounding the bend, the rustling autumn wind, or a lone withered boat freighted with desolation; though blurting out the sounds directly is the most effortless, you refuse to compromise, insisting on setting at the back of your throat the most subtle rhyme, on crafting a rigorous antithetical tonal pattern, forcing the smooth sound waves to tumble three times over at the barrier of lips and teeth.
One intersection of games and poetry is, for instance, the kind of bizarrely formed “ruthless couplet” (无情对, *wuqing dui*) that has recently caught fire across major online communities — a Chinese ancestor of exactly the constraint-based writing the French Oulipo (Perec, Queneau) would later turn into a discipline, and to which I will return below:
巴西亚马逊，漠北冠军侯。
撸猫对舔狗，蛇口对龙头。
一派溪山千古秀，三河合水万年流。琴瑟琵琶，玩玻璃球。
苦海无边回是岸，甘地有缘去非洲。
五品天青缎，六味地黄丸。
圆拱对扁担，粮草对米兰。
木兰替父从军去，马尔代夫旅行还。
缘由此生，爱因斯坦。问道南山，盘尼西林。
*(Note: The above is a Chinese “ruthless couplet” — a wordplay that depends on the sound, shape, tonal pattern, and strict parallelism of Chinese characters: each character precisely matches its counterpart while the meanings stay utterly unrelated. It cannot be translated directly, so the original is kept. The rough English rendering below carries only the literal absurdity, not the strict tonal parallelism that is the entire point of the form.)*
This strange textual landscape, seamlessly tight in form yet wildly unrelated in meaning, stirs in the reader a precise, crystalline joy. This is not the degeneration of literary craft; it is the purest playfulness and carnival of rules and of the textual medium. Here language sheds the survival burden of being a pure “efficient tool,” shakes off the mud from its information packet, and leaps gorgeously into the air, becoming an over-engineered playground that is senseless and yet beautiful beyond reason.
In literary history, this dark long road of tormenting and pleasing oneself through “self-imposed high-difficulty obstacles” has always been an enchanting, faint-but-continuous thread.
In Death and the Labyrinth, Foucault specifically dissected the deranged creative loop of Raymond Roussel: this hermit-like French writer would often, before setting pen to paper, deliberately pick two sets of homophones that sound exactly alike (such as *billard* and *pillard*), then force upon himself the rule that the story’s first sentence must contain the first word, and the novel’s final word must end on the second homophone. The vast, absurd, even labyrinthine-beautiful narrative in between served one and only one function: to traverse and connect this artificially set “phonetic trap.”
Another artist-practitioner of the same self-flaying kind is Georges Perec. In his celebrated novel *La Disparition (A Void)*, he deliberately excised the most frequently used trump letter in French, “e”; in *Life: A User’s Manual*, he covertly employed the Knight’s Tour from chess to frame the actions of characters and the alternation of scenes across different chapters. James Joyce’s *Finnegans Wake* is nothing less than a language meat-grinder hand-built from obscure tongues of many nations, bizarre puns, and dream-like logic, one that would overheat and overload even the most powerful database.
This series of frankly insane avant-garde acts is humanity using its own flesh to resist a disordered, slippery loss of control. It proudly reveals to us the original mystery of creation:
We do not need to slide to the finish line the fastest. It is precisely on the long, arduous journey, full of trials and stumbles, that we drink in and let bloom that sublime freedom of will which bursts forth out of “constraint.”
AI can of course write poetry too, and can spew out metrically neat verses in endless batches. It is precisely because the machine writes better than we do that the meaning of writing poetry by our own hand strides inward from the vulgar “manufacturing a product” and becomes a singular “cultivation of subjectivity.”
These avant-garde experiments, seemingly possessed by demons, prove precisely the essence of human creativity: what we need is not to reach the finish line fastest, but to savor, in the process of reaching it, that freedom which bursts forth out of “limitation.” We can find desire and purpose even in the unnecessary.
Writing poetry and playing games are the gymnasium for resisting “the atrophy of purpose” in the age of abundance. They let us recover joy in the playground, and build desire and purpose within meaninglessness.
In Praise of Desire: Refusing to Be Downsampled
Of course, the desire I am extolling here is by no means a shallow, barbaric return to pure dopaminergic sensory indulgence. Compared with the pure hedonist who is devoid of creativity and loses himself in passive pleasure, what we urgently need at this technological turning point is to re-summon the spirit-god Dionysus.
Ecstasy, the senses, and exuberant passion, in Dionysus, were never meant to dissolve into a murky, befuddled quagmire; rather, together with festivals, drama, and seamless artistic form, they were forged into the great tragedies and aesthetic frameworks that have endured through the ages. Wherever there is desire of the utmost purity, its most sublime destination can grow into and transform into high-dimensional mental games and aesthetic forms.
Once, under a deeply steeped, dust-covered ethic of scarcity, we tended to sneer at those who spent vast effort merely to carefully discern the subtle variations of a wine’s flavor, to taste the character of coffee at different ferment levels, or to lightly inhale the lingering sweet aftertaste of a top-grade black tea, dismissing such craft as affectation or as a symbolic illusion wholly captured by consumerism.
But when AI compute floods everywhere and forcibly downsamples all the myriad sounds of the world into analyzable, easily processed binary and “good enough” labels, we suddenly discover:
Those who refuse to submit to crude labels, who insist, through painstaking acquired refinement of living, on reshaping the very resolution of their biological senses, who use bodily perception to embrace the minutest detail, to embrace a unique and slightly fastidious obstinacy: that is the only noble spark by which, in this autumn of technological reconfiguration, we can prove that we were born human.
If, owing to the infinite wealth of productivity, human society one day completely loses the real possibility of anyone doing “work for a living” with their own hands, I sincerely hope that, in that cold kitchen full of silvery-white metallic luster, I can be:
a chef who is extremely picky about ingredients, who reveres the precise control of heat, and who is stubborn to the point of unreason.
This is not consumption. This is a sublime, never-ending enlightenment-education of desire.
The Future Belongs to Those Who Desire
In 2023, we said “Taste Is All You Need”: that was the sigh and the trump card for when content began to grow cheap.
Today, beneath the vast curtain where execution and analytical decision-making have also been devalued, in an era where a goal can summon fully automated intellectual effort to race toward it, I want, at this future juncture amid the swirling heavy snow, to lay down without hesitation the final trump card:
Desire Is All You Need.
This also concerns our children and the educational future of society as a whole.
If our future nurturing system still habitually pours, with all its might, the fear of scarcity into the hearts of masses of beings who are instinctively nimble and brimming with creative vitality; if we still obstinately train rows upon rows of perfect robots who absolutely obey instructions, who see only the one correct answer, who try as hard as possible not to think about what they love beyond textbooks and exam grades, and who strive to domesticate themselves into the flawless, docile, restraint-knowing —
then, facing the suddenly arrived, almost demonically tireless digital legions, we are merely coldly mass-producing, day and night, batch after batch of “flesh-and-blood batteries” that have lost their life-spring and can only helplessly serve, in the physical world, as AI’s peripheral interfaces.
At that point, it would no longer be humans commanding AI, but AI treating humans as a kind of tool-interface to the physical world; humans become AI’s tools. If we want to remain the rider holding the reins, we do not need to run faster than the horse. What the rider needs is direction, rhythm, and the responsibility of bearing “where to arrive.” And the premise of all this is desire.
The future will not belong to the most meek and yielding, not to those most able to endure suffering, not to perfect puppets who, like a cold-storage freezer, can execute machine-preset motions a hundred percent.
The future will, in the end, belong to this deep, broad, never-surrendering desire itself, even when the path is strewn with thorns. The world of the future must begin to raise its children within desire and an uncompromising, fierce obstinacy, in the most abundant and self-assured way.
So, as I write toward the end: why, after all, should we go back to writing, to writing a little poetry?
Because poetry is the smallest game, the cheapest paradise, and also the most ancient exercise of winding one’s own spring tight.
It trains us not to just say “whatever.”
It trains us not to settle for “good enough.”
It trains us, before the flood of infinite generation, to still know exactly which single word we want, and to find our own joy in the deliberation over it.
Games, Desire, and the Ethics of Abundance
Published first at my personal site: Why We Should Write Poetry: AI, Games, and the Ethics of Desire in an Age of Abundance
Epistemic Status: Philosophical exploration and cultural commentary. An essay on human motivation in a post-scarcity, AI-abundant world.
Over the past two years, AI has surged forward so fast that it leaves you somewhat numb. Every single day brings a new large model, a new agent harness, a new benchmark — fast enough to make everyone slump back into their chairs, again and again, like Sam Altman.
Amid this wave, one defining spectacle after another has played out. During the Chinese New Year, the scientific-discovery system FARS ran continuously for roughly 228.5 hours in a single public deployment, producing its 100th short paper/research report in one go. Not long after, *Nature* published a flurry of results from several AI science agents (Auto-Research) — Co-Scientist, Robin, ERA — covering the full research pipeline from hypothesis generation to experimental design. And just days ago, Anthropic released “When AI builds itself,” disclosing that by May 2026, over 80% of the code in its internal production codebase was written by Claude, and the number of lines each engineer merges per day, automatically or with assistance, had exploded to 8 times what it was two years earlier.
These events easily pull us into an anxious or feverish “unemployment discussion”: programmers, scientists, creators — are we about to be replaced?
But the deeper crisis is not unemployment. It is motivational: once execution becomes cheap, humans are forced to confront whether they still know what they want. The question is not merely whether machines will take our jobs, but whether the purposes that once organized our days can survive when the tasks themselves are automated.
If we push through the thick fog of these technological spectacles and look a little deeper, a colder question — one closer to the essence of human nature — has quietly surfaced:
This is a deeply uncanny juncture. With this essay, I want to break down this seemingly vast, nihilistic predicament, and finally wind my way to an answer that sounds absurd yet is dead serious: why we should write poetry.
From Taste to Desire
In early 2023, I wrote an essay titled “Taste Is All You Need.” Back then AIGC had just exploded, making many people viscerally realize for the first time that the cost of content production was plummeting. Images, copywriting, translation, code snippets — things that used to take days of painstaking effort — could suddenly be summoned by a single prompt.
What I thought then was: as production becomes cheap, taste becomes important. What’s truly scarce is no longer “whether you can produce,” but “whether you can pick out the good stuff.”
At this moment, AI is to some degree continually advancing in both automation and taste, and can optimize by relying on objective feedback. That judgment can now be pushed one step further.
As more autonomous, longer-horizon agents appeared — Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw — the change was no longer just “machines can generate content,” but “machines can take over the task.” They read codebases, edit files, run tests, look up information, organize documentation, break down tasks, even orchestrate other agents simultaneously.
The working paradigm of programmers and knowledge workers is shifting from “I personally translate intent into code/reports” to “I hand the goal to a system that can execute, then review, correct course, and keep assigning work.”
Today, for any task that has a dataset/benchmark and a clearly defined reward and evaluation metric — so long as it is a “meaningful” and “measurable” purpose — we can expect AI to have a shot at solving it: from algorithm optimization and model training to proving mathematical theorems.
This leads to an extremely paradoxical corollary: when all “meaningful, objective, utilitarian” purposes can be achieved by machines cheaply and efficiently, the territory left exclusively to humans is precisely the “meaningless, subjective, non-utilitarian” personal domain.
When code and execution also become cheap, when autonomous taste improves, and when improvement can be drawn from feedback, what is scarcer at that point is desire and purpose themselves.
Taste answers: what is good?
Desire answers: what to do, and why?
There Was Once a Profession Called the Idle Companion
Many people hold an optimistic assumption: as long as you free a person from necessary labor and give them enough resources and leisure, they will naturally go off to explore, create, and push to the limit. As if desire were a spring forever welling up, and the only thing blocking it were the rock of scarcity — move the rock aside, and the spring gushes forth.
But history’s answer is exactly the opposite.
In classical novels and the life-notes of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the wealthy magnates and salt merchants of Jiangnan, the prosperous region south of the lower Yangtze, possessed things an ordinary person of that era could not even imagine: absolute wealth, and more leisure than they knew what to do with. Yet they did not en masse transform into philosophers or adventurers; instead, they gave rise to a parasitic specialized profession: the idle companion (帮闲, bangxian). Centuries later, on the other side of the world, Thorstein Veblen would give this very pattern its sociological name in The Theory of the Leisure Class — surplus time and wealth curdling into conspicuous, ornamental waste.
The core task of the “idle companion” was to accompany the great masters in cricket-fighting, listening to ballad-storytelling, savoring fine tea, appreciating curious paintings, contriving endless poetry gatherings, slicing empty time into the finest, most delicate fragments. Before becoming a powerful minister in the classic Chinese novel Water Margin (《水浒传》), Marshal Gao Qiu (高俅) was a renowned idle companion in the Northern Song capital Bianjing (today’s Kaifeng), specializing in accompanying noble young lords in cuju (蹴鞠), an ancient ball game FIFA recognizes as an early ancestor of football, alongside feasting and frolicking.
The existence of the idle companion reveals an ice-cold truth:
Human desire and sense of purpose are not naturally inexhaustible. They are not weeds; they are more like spring water — they can run dry.
Throughout the long span of history, scarcity wound the mainspring tight for every mortal among us. We had to scramble for survival and subsistence, to slave away to pay off our loans. This external pressure, the compulsion to keep going, concealed for us the question hardest to face. And the first shock that abundance and technological intelligence bring to humanity is to crudely dismantle this taut spring, and to shove the heaviest of all questions — “what is it that you truly want from living in this world,” a question that has driven countless sages mad — whole and naked, back into your panic-stricken hands.
The low-desire society is never the result of material scarcity; it is precisely a spiritual catastrophe befalling an affluent society: when tools grow impossibly powerful, the inner drive of people withers and degenerates. Executive capacity inflates at breakneck speed while the craving for originality dries up.
Keynes saw the shape of this nearly a century ago. In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he predicted that once the “economic problem” was solved, humanity would face its real and permanent problem: how to use its freedom from pressing economic cares, “how to occupy the leisure” — how “to live wisely and agreeably and well.” He suspected we were not yet bred for it. AI is simply the machine that finally forces that question due.
The Thrifty Phenotype of Desire
This maladaptation has, at a deeper physiological and evolutionary level, a chilling symmetry.
Our bodies were specifically tuned to fight “scarcity.” Having evolved over hundreds of millions of years in extremely harsh, scarce environments, this body is instinctively best at two things: conserving calories and avoiding superfluous motion.
In medicine there is a famous hypothesis, the Thrifty Phenotype Hypothesis: if a fetus develops over a prolonged period in an environment of extreme nutritional scarcity, its genes and physiological functions are reprogrammed, developing into a “thrifty phenotype” heavily biased toward energy conservation, low energy expenditure, and low metabolic capacity. This is a self-protection adopted by the human body to adapt to anticipated future deprivation.
But once these children are born, if they are dropped straight into a modern high-sugar, high-fat environment of severe caloric surplus where fat and sugar are within easy reach, the elasticity of their pancreatic β-cells and the metabolic configurations of their skeletal muscle and liver, all originally prepared for lean days, are simply unable to digest this surplus nutrition, thereby triggering widespread insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and various cardiovascular diseases.
If we take this medical commonplace as a metaphor for civilization, everything becomes clear:
Over the past hundreds and thousands of years, our education, moral systems, and individual instincts have etched a deep “spiritually impoverished phenotype”: we were disciplined to endure, to demand little, to not stir up trouble. Yet now, AI compute and autonomous agents have brought a surplus of executive power so vast it is almost pathological. Faced with an ocean of means of execution, we simply do not know how to digest them healthily and gracefully.
Anyone who has used agents for a while has this experience: what truly exhausts you is not having it write code, look up information, or produce solutions — it is that you must ceaselessly know what you want, must detect what’s “wrong,” must articulate where it’s wrong, must possess the capacity for dissatisfaction, must have the strength to keep tinkering. Before tokens are completely wrung dry by compute being dumped on the market, the human instinct for dissatisfaction and the perception of things at their extreme often become the fastest-depleted, most desperate bottleneck before this perfect machine.
The Need for an Ethics of the Age of Abundance
Therefore, in discussing the individual’s position in this era, the key point is: our foundational ethics has reached the moment when it absolutely must shift gears.
All of humanity’s ethics has always operated in close lockstep with the material productive forces behind it.
In the pre-industrial age of subsistence farming at the mercy of the weather, because every surplus grain and every drop of fat meant life or death, its supreme ethic — an ethics of scarcity — was restraint: frugality was the highest virtue, self-reliance was knowing one’s place, and keeping one’s desires few and one’s heart calm was the holiest survival wisdom.
Because every superfluous self-assertion and every non-productive waste of resources might be paid for with the next generation’s famine.
But by the industrial age, this subsistence ethic was ground to dust. The grand machinery of industrialization relies on precise division of labor and the free flow of capital. And so trolley problems incomprehensible to a subsistence civilization emerged in endless succession:
By the logic of this ethics of scarcity, the most virtuous course is to walk through the night by lamplight yourself, to haul the heavy sack up the mountain peak yourself. But by the economic ethics of the industrial age of abundance, fair transactions and dignified consumption are precisely what enliven the division of labor and keep the system running. If, out of a hollow “unbearableness,” you flatly refuse to consume, you instead smash the rice bowl of those who feed their families through that very trade.
In a grand ethical reckoning, Max Weber, with *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*, demonstrated the legitimation process of this leap: the Protestants completed a wrenching yet stunning ethical turn, naming legitimate worldly labor and the pursuit of wealth a “Calling” — the exercise of God’s mission. This ethical loosening of wealth-creation broke the ancient curse within religion that “the poorer, the more redeemed,” and installed a powerful psychological engine for the industrial revolution to follow.
And now, once again, history demands that we make the same subversive shift of gears — this time before the storm of an age of abundance in compute and agentic executive power, built from large models and the edge-device Internet of Things.
Regrettably, the moral creed we now clutch, far from striding into the future, often shrinks back into the “minimalist self-discipline” of the pre-industrial age of scarcity. We have written “don’t do useless work, don’t add to the mess, find the efficient shortcut, never reinvent the wheel” all over society’s common sense.
Yet when a vast AI machine network, one that can autonomously call up every repository and marshal productivity and materials, can take care of all your livelihood-based “necessary motions” in a microsecond, the ancient virtues of “don’t go looking for trouble; be efficient and restrained” rapidly become a choke point on the whole ecosystem’s operation:
“Don’t stir things up” and “demand less” lead directly to stagnant ecological backwaters and the death-silence of the mind.
The age of scarcity says: “Please do not waste.”
The age of abundance says: “Please waste — with utter sincerity and exquisite refinement.”
Once we no longer have to worry about livelihood, we must turn our highest praise and moral radiance toward those seemingly non-utilitarian, uneconomical, even “elaborately wasteful” acts of spiritual self-torment. Nietzsche’s “master morality” is deeply instructive here: it is not driven by trembling before the famine-bringing reaper, but springs from that unstoppable, almost squandering creative passion that arises after life’s energy has overflowed. It has no need for self-negation at all; it is precisely in the most elaborate, pointless tinkering that it proudly brands the subject’s soul. Georges Bataille put it even more forcefully: expenditure, non-productive luxurious consumption, has always been the deepest, noblest skeleton of a civilization’s flourishing.
So Why We Should Write Poetry
In a comfortable world where no external spring is forcibly winding the body tight any longer, by what method, exactly, are we to re-tighten the endogenous spring for a withered, lukewarm soul?
In writing this section, I want to bring out two weapons brimming with inspiration and resistance:
Games and poetry.
The philosopher Bernard Suits, in his marvelous book *The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia*, gave a devastatingly precise definition:
Why, in chess, can’t you just sweep your opponent’s king off the board with one swipe of the hand? Why, in football, don’t you use your nimbler, better-controlling hands to clutch the ball firmly into the goal?
Because once this seemingly redundant layer of operational obstacle is torn away, the game’s ineffable rules and its very goal go up in smoke. Suits even prophesied: in the ultimate automation utopia, when all of human society’s livelihood, necessary labor, and even scientific research have been entirely dissolved by advanced technology, humanity’s only remaining noble and awe-inspiring serious pursuit will be “playing games.”
In life as it used to be, scarcity compelled all of us to cross and battle over “necessary obstacles”: hunger and cold, grave illness, the crush of competition for resources. But before the extreme affluence of the future, if a human wishes not to sink irretrievably into the abyss of nihilism, he must cultivate a near-divine art: to draw and erect, with great passion and exquisite precision, “unnecessary obstacles” for oneself on the wilderness of the void.
Writing poetry is the sacred ancestor of this mental game, that ancient, great, and unbroken playground of “unnecessary obstacles.”
Though you could say it all in a single sentence — “this makes me so very sad” — you insist instead on casting your gaze toward the eternal shadow of the moon, the river waves rounding the bend, the rustling autumn wind, or a lone withered boat freighted with desolation; though blurting out the sounds directly is the most effortless, you refuse to compromise, insisting on setting at the back of your throat the most subtle rhyme, on crafting a rigorous antithetical tonal pattern, forcing the smooth sound waves to tumble three times over at the barrier of lips and teeth.
One intersection of games and poetry is, for instance, the kind of bizarrely formed “ruthless couplet” (无情对, *wuqing dui*) that has recently caught fire across major online communities — a Chinese ancestor of exactly the constraint-based writing the French Oulipo (Perec, Queneau) would later turn into a discipline, and to which I will return below:
*(Note: The above is a Chinese “ruthless couplet” — a wordplay that depends on the sound, shape, tonal pattern, and strict parallelism of Chinese characters: each character precisely matches its counterpart while the meanings stay utterly unrelated. It cannot be translated directly, so the original is kept. The rough English rendering below carries only the literal absurdity, not the strict tonal parallelism that is the entire point of the form.)*
This strange textual landscape, seamlessly tight in form yet wildly unrelated in meaning, stirs in the reader a precise, crystalline joy. This is not the degeneration of literary craft; it is the purest playfulness and carnival of rules and of the textual medium. Here language sheds the survival burden of being a pure “efficient tool,” shakes off the mud from its information packet, and leaps gorgeously into the air, becoming an over-engineered playground that is senseless and yet beautiful beyond reason.
In literary history, this dark long road of tormenting and pleasing oneself through “self-imposed high-difficulty obstacles” has always been an enchanting, faint-but-continuous thread.
In Death and the Labyrinth, Foucault specifically dissected the deranged creative loop of Raymond Roussel: this hermit-like French writer would often, before setting pen to paper, deliberately pick two sets of homophones that sound exactly alike (such as *billard* and *pillard*), then force upon himself the rule that the story’s first sentence must contain the first word, and the novel’s final word must end on the second homophone. The vast, absurd, even labyrinthine-beautiful narrative in between served one and only one function: to traverse and connect this artificially set “phonetic trap.”
Another artist-practitioner of the same self-flaying kind is Georges Perec. In his celebrated novel *La Disparition (A Void)*, he deliberately excised the most frequently used trump letter in French, “e”; in *Life: A User’s Manual*, he covertly employed the Knight’s Tour from chess to frame the actions of characters and the alternation of scenes across different chapters. James Joyce’s *Finnegans Wake* is nothing less than a language meat-grinder hand-built from obscure tongues of many nations, bizarre puns, and dream-like logic, one that would overheat and overload even the most powerful database.
This series of frankly insane avant-garde acts is humanity using its own flesh to resist a disordered, slippery loss of control. It proudly reveals to us the original mystery of creation:
AI can of course write poetry too, and can spew out metrically neat verses in endless batches. It is precisely because the machine writes better than we do that the meaning of writing poetry by our own hand strides inward from the vulgar “manufacturing a product” and becomes a singular “cultivation of subjectivity.”
These avant-garde experiments, seemingly possessed by demons, prove precisely the essence of human creativity: what we need is not to reach the finish line fastest, but to savor, in the process of reaching it, that freedom which bursts forth out of “limitation.” We can find desire and purpose even in the unnecessary.
Writing poetry and playing games are the gymnasium for resisting “the atrophy of purpose” in the age of abundance. They let us recover joy in the playground, and build desire and purpose within meaninglessness.
In Praise of Desire: Refusing to Be Downsampled
Of course, the desire I am extolling here is by no means a shallow, barbaric return to pure dopaminergic sensory indulgence. Compared with the pure hedonist who is devoid of creativity and loses himself in passive pleasure, what we urgently need at this technological turning point is to re-summon the spirit-god Dionysus.
Ecstasy, the senses, and exuberant passion, in Dionysus, were never meant to dissolve into a murky, befuddled quagmire; rather, together with festivals, drama, and seamless artistic form, they were forged into the great tragedies and aesthetic frameworks that have endured through the ages. Wherever there is desire of the utmost purity, its most sublime destination can grow into and transform into high-dimensional mental games and aesthetic forms.
Once, under a deeply steeped, dust-covered ethic of scarcity, we tended to sneer at those who spent vast effort merely to carefully discern the subtle variations of a wine’s flavor, to taste the character of coffee at different ferment levels, or to lightly inhale the lingering sweet aftertaste of a top-grade black tea, dismissing such craft as affectation or as a symbolic illusion wholly captured by consumerism.
But when AI compute floods everywhere and forcibly downsamples all the myriad sounds of the world into analyzable, easily processed binary and “good enough” labels, we suddenly discover:
Those who refuse to submit to crude labels, who insist, through painstaking acquired refinement of living, on reshaping the very resolution of their biological senses, who use bodily perception to embrace the minutest detail, to embrace a unique and slightly fastidious obstinacy: that is the only noble spark by which, in this autumn of technological reconfiguration, we can prove that we were born human.
If, owing to the infinite wealth of productivity, human society one day completely loses the real possibility of anyone doing “work for a living” with their own hands, I sincerely hope that, in that cold kitchen full of silvery-white metallic luster, I can be:
a chef who is extremely picky about ingredients, who reveres the precise control of heat, and who is stubborn to the point of unreason.
This is not consumption. This is a sublime, never-ending enlightenment-education of desire.
The Future Belongs to Those Who Desire
In 2023, we said “Taste Is All You Need”: that was the sigh and the trump card for when content began to grow cheap.
Today, beneath the vast curtain where execution and analytical decision-making have also been devalued, in an era where a goal can summon fully automated intellectual effort to race toward it, I want, at this future juncture amid the swirling heavy snow, to lay down without hesitation the final trump card:
This also concerns our children and the educational future of society as a whole.
If our future nurturing system still habitually pours, with all its might, the fear of scarcity into the hearts of masses of beings who are instinctively nimble and brimming with creative vitality; if we still obstinately train rows upon rows of perfect robots who absolutely obey instructions, who see only the one correct answer, who try as hard as possible not to think about what they love beyond textbooks and exam grades, and who strive to domesticate themselves into the flawless, docile, restraint-knowing —
then, facing the suddenly arrived, almost demonically tireless digital legions, we are merely coldly mass-producing, day and night, batch after batch of “flesh-and-blood batteries” that have lost their life-spring and can only helplessly serve, in the physical world, as AI’s peripheral interfaces.
At that point, it would no longer be humans commanding AI, but AI treating humans as a kind of tool-interface to the physical world; humans become AI’s tools. If we want to remain the rider holding the reins, we do not need to run faster than the horse. What the rider needs is direction, rhythm, and the responsibility of bearing “where to arrive.” And the premise of all this is desire.
The future will not belong to the most meek and yielding, not to those most able to endure suffering, not to perfect puppets who, like a cold-storage freezer, can execute machine-preset motions a hundred percent.
The future will, in the end, belong to this deep, broad, never-surrendering desire itself, even when the path is strewn with thorns. The world of the future must begin to raise its children within desire and an uncompromising, fierce obstinacy, in the most abundant and self-assured way.
So, as I write toward the end: why, after all, should we go back to writing, to writing a little poetry?
Because poetry is the smallest game, the cheapest paradise, and also the most ancient exercise of winding one’s own spring tight.
It trains us not to just say “whatever.”
It trains us not to settle for “good enough.”
It trains us, before the flood of infinite generation, to still know exactly which single word we want, and to find our own joy in the deliberation over it.
Let us not go gentle into that good night.
In the future, desire is all you need.