🌑Staring Into the Void

M.D. Singer — April, 2025

A friend recently told me about an interview with famed German filmmaker, Werner Herzog. Herzog said:

“Go out and work as a bouncer in a sex club. Work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Go out to a cattle ranch and, and learn how to milk a cow. Earn your money that way, in real life."

His point was this…if you’re an artist, you won’t make enough money to support yourself early in your career. You must work other jobs. So, let those jobs push you to life’s extremes and enrich your human perspective.

Then I read this post…

I love the quote,

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

― Confucius

So recently, I’ve been asking myself:

• What chapter of life am I in and how do I want to fill its pages?
• How can I be content with turning this page when the chapter ends?

The magnitude of questions like these can be scary.

I recently saw a tweet about someone who was good at “staring into the void.” In other words, they could ask questions with potentially scary answers without discomfort. “Should we have hired that person?” “Should we be in this business?” Should I be dating this person?” We tend not to ask ourselves important questions at the risk of discovering uncomfortable answers. Now, here comes AI.

ChatGPT is actually great at this. It has never been easier to dig into your own psyche with a couple of creative prompts. ChatGPT can hold your hand and walk you through these questions so that you can live a truthful and rigorous life.