Category: Philosophy for Everyday Life

How AI Helped Me Make Peace with Science: A Journey Through Psychology, Medicine, and the Humanities


Why would anyone turn to AI to work through a psychological aversion to the natural sciences — or to process complicated feelings about medical school classmates they’d rather not see? The answer, it turns out, is stranger and more revealing than the question itself.
In this post, I reflect on an unexpected journey: using AI conversations to untangle a deep-seated psychological distaste — not just for medicine and biology, but for the whole constellation of natural sciences, from chemistry and physics to geology and astronomy. What began as an oddly specific inquiry into whether doctors are boring slowly became something far more personal: a reckoning with how our inner landscape distorts our perception of the outer world.
Perhaps the most unsettling insight is this — we don’t see fields of knowledge as they are; we see them as we are. Our psyche, in its quiet wisdom or its quiet woundedness, nudges us toward certain domains and away from others, not always by rational design but by emotional necessity. For those of us who needed the humanities and social sciences to feel whole, that detour wasn’t a failure of intellect. It was a form of healing.

Are doctors a tad boring?


What happens when a doctor defects to economics and the humanities — and then asks an AI whether doctors are a tad boring? The answers, from both Claude and Google AI, reveal something deeper than professional stereotypes. Claude argues that medical training, by design, rewards convergent thinking — getting the right diagnosis — over the exploratory, question-generating mind that the humanities cultivate. Years spent in a closed intellectual world produce a certain narrowness, though brilliant exceptions like Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande remind us it is medical culture, not doctors as people, that deserves the critique. Google AI, characteristically, opts for balance: doctors are not boring, merely exhausted. But perhaps the most honest insight lies in the afterthought the questioner himself appends — that his intense dislike of medicine may be colouring his perception of those who stayed. Self-knowledge, as ever, is the beginning of wisdom.

“You Cannot Save a World You’re Still Trapped In” — Nisargadatta Maharaj on Desire, Help, and Liberation


What does it truly mean to help the world? In this piercing dialogue from I Am That, Nisargadatta Maharaj dismantles our noblest intentions — revealing that the urge to save others is itself rooted in the same ignorance that creates suffering. Desire builds worlds; worlds breed pain; and the one who wishes to help is often the one most in need of waking up. From the nature of creation to the limits of avatars and saviours, Maharaj offers something more radical than solutions: a mirror. “Get out of the picture,” he says, “and see whether there is anything left to save.”

The Sacred Withdrawal: When Spiritual Sadhana Becomes Your Raison d’être


What looks like retreat to the world is often the most courageous advance inward. In this deeply personal reflection, I address a well-meaning piece of advice — that I shouldn’t “shut my door” simply because someone hurt me. But my withdrawal from worldly engagement is neither sudden nor born of wounded pride. It is the culmination of a 50-year spiritual quest, a decision quietly forming since December 2021, now firmly made. Drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, I explore how most of us mistake the shadows of the material world for ultimate reality — and how spiritual sadhana is the very act of breaking free from those chains. As Rousseau reminds us, man is born free, yet lives everywhere in bondage. True freedom isn’t found in the world’s noise; it is discovered in the sunlit stillness beyond the cave. This is not an escape. This is a homecoming.