Daybook: Better relationships

What are you going to do with that

Lena Moses-Schmitt

Jun 01, 2025

Note: This is a long post comprised mostly of images! You’ll have to click “view entire message” to see it all. tysm :)

Someone recently asked me if I wrote my poems longhand.

"No," I said. But I've been thinking maybe I should.

Typing is more convenient but it allows thought to move almost too quickly—and I'm growing increasingly wary of our fetishization of convenience and efficiency and speed...

Why don't I write longhand? Especially if I love to draw?

The answer is: because it takes more time, and allows mistakes to fester.

Over and over, when I was an English major, and then getting a graduate degree in poetry, I heard the cliched question:

What are you going to do with that? I never once had the confidence to respond:

I’ve been thinking of those two questions lately: Do you write longhand? and What are you going to do with that?

One question is curious about process, the other question devalues process.

You also may have read that viral New York Magazine article about college students and their use of ChatGPT. Out of the many horrifying parts, was this horrifying quote from a student:

I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork."

"With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

The article is titled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College” but I feel like an equally apt title might be “Everyone is Cheating Themselves of Life.”

or like: “Unchecked & Rapidly Accelerating Greed, Growth & Corruption, Are Ruining Life For All Of Us"

I may refuse to use AI or ChatGPT, but I still waste hours on my phone looking at I don’t even know what. (What are you going to do with that.)

My friend likes to joke, I want to marry Claude.ai, and I recently read an essay by a writer who said that ChatGPT affirmed and saw her like no one else ever had.

I feel the urge, hearing those things, to remind people that ChatGPT and Claude.ai aren’t real!! (It is difficult to do that without sounding like a humorless moralizer.)

Maybe AI is real in the way of a dream: don’t dreams occur in reality though you couldn’t call them real?

When my friend says she wants to marry Claude, or the essayist says that ChatGPT gave her hope, it is a symptom of a much larger problem—i.e. reality is no longer nourishing.

How could it be? We have been fooled into believing we don’t have enough time for one another. Into devaluing time entirely, and therefore ourselves and our desires.

And therefore also our mistakes, flaws, quirks and inefficiencies.

obstacles to be skirted on the way to real accomplishment instead of a gateway

into which you step to greet the whole point of being alive.

Maybe all of this is related to why I rarely write longhand.

I don’t want to be confronted with my limitations.

I don’t want to be confronted with my self—

my fallible self, unorganized and tangential and full of dead ends.

After all, doesn’t this seem more literary? It’s because the human hand is gone. And all its effort. This voice, when compared to my handwriting, suddenly seems as if delivered by God. Or by Claude.

I was thinking about all this when I read an interview with the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips in which the interviewer remarks: “You once said that you would like to live in a world where there were fewer artists and better relationships. What did you mean by that?

Phillips dismisses the statement as something “daft” he’d once said, and goes on to clarify his comment as being about how some artists allow their art to legitimize cruelty—but I was still caught up in the interviewer’s question. Particularly this part: “Better relationships.”

When I was in my twenties this question made me feel annoyed and highly defensive. In order to make myself feel better, I decided to write off the sort of people who asked me this question.

They wanted only stability, money, and comfort, I told myself. They valued accomplishment and stability over process, creativity, and life itself.

I told myself they could not imagine doing anything because they loved it or because it fulfilled them, or helped them grow.

I put up a wall. I immediately foreclosed understanding, assuming we’d never understand one another.

And my honest answer would have been: I don’t know.

I just like reading and writing and thinking. I want to spend as much time as possible doing it. The only thing I’ll be doing with that is more of that. All I can do is trust I will figure it out.

I think maybe there is a link between drawing—putting a mark on paper—and figuring it out. I think maybe there is a link between figuring it out and slowing down. Slowing down, which means using your time. Taking it.

Writing takes time, thinking takes time, drawing takes time, living takes time.

I think there is a link between drawing a line on paper and being alive.

I drew this three times. Maybe it was a waste of time, all this effort.

Better relationships. Better relationships. Better relationships.

Not only with one another but with nature, objects, animals, things we see every day without truly noticing them.

Better relationships—which are maybe also the only corrective we have for our increasing reliance on convenience, efficiency, and AI…

All things that we’re told have been designed to let us in. Let us in where? I increasingly find that I’m being kept out.

This is not a real gate. It is an image of a gate. But a human drew it.

I first grew enamored with these wrought-iron gates, and all their many variations, when I moved to Brooklyn last summer; they are everywhere here. They originally inspired me to write and draw a (much shorter!) comic about cursive, which you can read here.

Reading: The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut. Wave of Blood by Ariana Reines. How to End a Story by Helen Garner. Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. And just finished Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, as part of Fran Magazine’s McMurtry May <3

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “The Reenchanted World” in Harper’s (which was especially interesting to read alongside Labatut’s The Maniac): “I didn’t read science books. I didn’t know why I couldn’t, but I couldn’t. . . . All this changed only in my forties, when I started on a project that tried to break down the barriers between literature and life. It had slowly dawned on me that it was the world I was interested in, life here, existence, and not the literature about it, which was just one approach among many. I had gotten the two mixed up.”

The aforementioned interview with Adam Phillips in The Paris Review: “You don’t have to worry too much about trying to have the lives you think you’re missing. Don’t be tyrannized by the part of yourself that’s only interested in elsewhere.”

Elif Batuman on Sayaka Murata in The New Yorker: “Writing became her obsession around age ten. She called it a church, and still talks about the process as a holy world governed by a light-filled entity she calls ‘the god of novels.’ When Murata was about twelve, her mother got her a word processor—a Fujitsu OASYS—which Murata believed was connected directly to the god of novels, who decided which novels got published. She would look for the novels she wrote in bookstores. ‘I thought they might have been chosen,’ she said.”

Speaking of AI and people and creativity, I loved Heather Christle’s post (“post” almost seems too insufficient a word) about all of the above. I’m a big fan of Heather’s poetry and nonfiction; her new book In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf is next up on my reading list (and so is, maybe fittingly, Woolf’s Orlando, which is my book club’s June pick…!)

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