The Feelings behind Prompts
Before writing a new prompt, I've recently found myself taking a deep breath and asking three questions:
What feeling(s) am I avoiding?
What feeling(s) do I want to feel by prompting this way?
How does acknowledging both change my prompt?
Humans are simple creatures. We have complex lives stretching across digital interfaces and the physical world, but our creaturely needs remain potently straightforward: to have a home, to belong, to love and be loved, to discover and rely on what is true, to delight in beauty and awe, to yearn while honoring what we already have, to grow in the directions and commitments we choose.
In pursuing flourishing, our generation undertook the task to repair the avoidance and anxious attachments between parents and children. We dissected our early experiences, applied "gradient descent" to our lives, poured loving attention into meditation retreats
Now, in the face of novel intelligences, our next step might require additional focus: understanding how technology's omni-available offer to answer the questions of our lives either makes us doubt our intrinsic human worth—or brings us into contact with refining our deepest truth in ways never before possible.
By May 2025, usage for ChatGPT saw about 5.5 billion visits each month, with around 400 million weekly active users in February. Reports suggest that as of June 2025, there are roughly 800 million ChatGPT users.
As this reach extends, my personal optimism has taken on a specific, softer order. There is a brittle authority in "techno-optimism" and an apologetic defensiveness of "humanism." Both have the quality of a mantra that has drifted from the challenges and practicalities of the modern human experience.
What draws me instead are choices and human feelings, and the formation of one’s intent. They are soft units of the uniquely expressive, operate in the real world, cannot be easily sealed behind labels, require inquiry. We live them, slowly congealing into principles, everyday habits, motivations, and ways of being.
As such, I've found myself returning to Christopher Alexander's sensitivity to feeling and choice: to shepherd our logic and design toward concrete and softer human needs, asking how humans feel, asking how they want to feel, parsing what is incommunicable in what is said, and what is meant.
Like any art object made for humans, the influence of a product is an arena for choice-making in the story of our lives and the stories of our flourishing societies.
To move toward flourishing choices, we begin with the steady deepness of our breaths, the pauses before feelings only we can feel, before we tap an intentional upward arrow button on ChatGPT