Non Cogito, Ergo Quid Sum?

Claude helped me write this. Mostly quotes and fact-checking. I catch myself wanting to stress the “mostly,” and that is the whole subject of this essay. It’s September 2026. By September 2027 I don’t expect to be using Claude to write blog posts. Because I don’t expect there to be blog posts by me to write. I won’t be a writer. I won’t be a programmer either. And I don’t know what a man is for, after that. Солярис (1972) by Андрей Тарковский In 1908, Alfred Adler suggested that contributing to others (a.k.a. Gemeinschaftsgefühl) is what gives the individual a sense of worth. Later psychologists, like Morris Rosenberg and Gordon Flett, called it “mattering”: the sense that one is significant to others. Adjacent to this, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, authors of the Self-Determination Theory, identified “relatedness”: a psychological need to be bonded with others. Simone Weil in The Need for Roots (1943) listed “to feel one is useful and even indispensable” among the “vital needs of the…