God, Ozempic, Chat GPT – this human needs a handrail

If God had a name what would it be?
And would you call it to his face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?

I’d ask him why I was born in an age of too much choice, that’s for sure. Why wasn’t I born in an age of rationing, when I couldn’t eat as much as I am able to do, and processed at that. The diets of people in the 1940s, however poor, didn’t contain so much processed, addictive, e numbered food. 

I wrote a fortnight ago about Chat GPT, and was it able to feel my feelings for me. I wonder how far AI will go, before it can get into your soul. 

While I’m at it, I’ll have a whine about the current state of affairs. I’m a late millennial. I didn’t have a phone until I was in my last year of school, doing my A Levels. We had a computer room at school, and we wrote all our essays by hand. There were no laptops and certainly no smart phones. A lucky escape, you might say. 

Yet we were fed the feminist postmodern idea that we could have it all. Teenagers in the 90s, we saw Sara Cox, now polished on Radio 2 as being a boozy party girl, along with Zoe Ball, now gentrified, but back then, at festivals getting lashed and being photographed doing so. 

Yet women weren’t supposed to get drunk, so when we did, it was all quite confusing. Out with the lads, work like them, but don’t become then – and certainly don’t get paid like them, but we won’t give you maternity pay unless you fight for it BUT we still want you to join the workforce AND produce the generations to come. 

So we need handrails. I can’t seem to lose weight despite trying (!) to be careful and having an amazing PT who’s helped me to feel so much better. I’m seriously thinking of taking the weight loss drug. I went to a talk last week about the benefits of the drug, with Allison Pearson from the Telegraph who was brilliant and describes it as ‘fatty’s little helper.’ A bit like mother’s little helper in the 1960s (valium). 

I couldn’t get over chronic anxiety and depression without medication, ditto ADHD. I can’t seem to crack on with the difficult second draft without Chat GPT to give me a chaptered outline. Now it has done it, and reassured me (always dodgy territory if you have OCD like me) I feel I can start. I am wondering if Chat GPT can really get into your soul? 

I asked a friend in their mid 30s last week if they remember Short Circuit and they didn’t, so if you’re young, Google it. The AI predicted in the 80s. Bit like Kurt Cobain saying for a joke that the world would be mad enough to one day have Trump as President. Where are we headed?