Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Creed

Digital

14 August 2025

4 min read

ChatGPT’s answers on human desire left something to be desired

So we had a little conversation

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

OpenAI.

I recently posed a question to ChatGPT.

What do people truly desire? In this unique time in history, what does the soul of humanity yearn for? What are humanity's deepest longings?

The AI's initial response was not unusual or surprising. It was actually rather “meh.” It offered a familiar list of aspirations that could have been answered if I posed the question to a moderately intelligent crowded room:

Love, connection, purpose, meaning, authenticity, freedom, peace, contentment, truth, understanding, hope, transcendence, joy, and wonder.

It continued saying, Ultimately, the human soul's profound quest is for a deep harmony among love, purpose, authenticity, peace, truth, hope, and joy—an integrated, meaningful existence that resonates with our intended nature.

I pressed in,

That is good but it is a long list of many things. Of all of those things you listed above, can you narrow it down to ONE thing, ONE single thing people want from life?

Interestingly and surprisingly it said,

Ultimately, the one thing that the human soul longs for most deeply is: To be fully known and truly loved. All other desires like purpose, authenticity, peace, truth, hope, joy all stem from or lead back to this core need. Being fully known and truly loved means someone sees every part of who we are, with all our imperfections, fears, and dreams, and yet embraces us completely. It's the deepest validation, belonging, and security we can ever experience, satisfying the profoundest longing of the human heart.

I had to step back as I realized what I just read and how I got there. It was a moment of irony. Could it be that AI - one of the most innovative discoveries of our lifetime - identified one of the greatest and most rudimentary dilemmas of humanity? A machine, it appeared, had articulated why we find ourselves at such a cultural moment of unparalleled innovation along with a growing sense of human despair.

We are at a unique point in history, a "cultural moment—a bizarre time of juxtaposition," as articulated by John Mark Comer on his podcast. It’s era defined by the convergence of seemingly disparate events and marked by a time of profound contrast.

Historic levels of digital connectivity parallel a rise of disconnection, loneliness, and despair.

A new cultural fluidity of evolving gender identities and flexible social norms stir strong backlashes over historic claims of rights and norms.

I understand, for some, this "moment" is instead something much less dire. It is simply a moment where life unfolds and continues as it always has. However, what if this moment signifies more than just a fleeting series of advancing and contrasting events?

Why, despite all this progress and innovation, does humanity not seem to be in a better state? Why does it all still feel so woefully empty?

What if this reality presents us with a responsibility to delve into these contrasting events, prompting us to ask a new and perhaps deeper question?

Victor Frankl in his bestselling book Man’s Search For Meaning cited two revealing studies that - not surprisingly - align with ChatGPT. One was a public poll in France that showed 89 percent of the people polled admitted that man needs something to live for, a purpose greater than themselves. A second study he cited of 7,948 students at 48 colleges by John Hopkins University revealed nearly the same. They were asked what they considered “very important”, 16 percent checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”

What if our constant pursuit of innovation and progress, rather than inspiring wonder and creating soulful connection, is actually separating us from an unknown longing to be truly known and truly loved?

For many, this swift, intense interplay of progress and regress is seen as an inevitable result of our human evolution. In practice, it is the only way true discovery and radical breakthroughs can happen. However, it's clear that our current cultural challenges won’t be answered by this ongoing experiment. More progress isn’t the answer.

What if, in our super modern world where hope often feels out of reach and despair is common, an ancient book and a profound idea can shed light on what ChatGPT and Victor Frankl are getting at? The Bible consistently talks about God's desire for a relationship with us, a longing to be known and loved so that he can in turn know and love us.

Our relentless pursuit of constant change and true innovation may well reflect a profound, yet undiscovered inner yearning: a mirror of the intended two-way connection between God and people. Perhaps the intensity with which we chase external goals of development and discovery stems from our inability to resolve an inherent, unspoken dilemma within humanity.

Could the Bible, in a world shaped by AI, force us to confront and even understand the complexities of the world and our place in it? Could God use AI - a hyper advanced technological tool - to draw our attention to Him and reveal to us the ancient truth of what we truly yearn for? Is it, as ChatGPT quickly summarized, really that simple?

Ultimately, the one thing that the human soul longs for most deeply is: To be fully known and truly loved.

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Column

Creed

Death & life

Suffering

23 October 2025

4 min read

Dressing up in the dark: what Halloween reveals about our uneasy age

Why Halloween feels darker this year

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Skeleton figurines clothed in Victoria outfits.

Wallace Henry on Unsplash.

Something bothers me about the approach of this years’ All Hallows’ Eve on 31 October and its accompanying night-time Halloween parties, like an irksome background unease at an encroaching darkness behind the childlike cosplay of the event itself.

God knows, there have been infinitely darker years, some of them within living memory. Two world wars, one of them containing the Holocaust and it doesn’t get darker than that. Genocides, such as Rwanda’s, and famines, from China to Russia to Ethiopia. Terrorist atrocities: Munich, Lockerbie, Madrid, 9/11.

Mass murders of children: Dunblane, Peshawar, Sandy Hook, Southport, to name a few in such a grim litany. Harder to imagine, because they’re further away culturally in either time or place, are the great plagues, conflagrations and disasters of history: The Black Death, Indian Ocean tsunami, Hiroshima.

So one wonders if it’s impertinent to feel uneasy about Halloween this year. I suspect it’s the discomfort of something bubbling under and as yet unseen, like unexploded magma or the unbearable tension of a faultline threatening to give way.

To name it is to call out a most fragile world peace – the pretence of a peace in the Middle East that cannot hold; a peace process that hasn’t even started between Russia and neighbouring Ukraine. Both presided over by an American president who at best isn’t up to securing either and, at worst, has zip interest in democratic process and is only in it for himself.

Then there’s apparently unstoppable mass migration, driven by climate change, to western economies already going to hell in policy-free handcarts. The creeping re-growth of nationalism and antisemitism, social media fuelled hatred of refugees, the collapse of trust in institutions of state in the UK’s unwritten constitution, such as the royal family, parliament, the police and the Church. Grooming gangs and trafficked sex-slaves; we’re not in the gloaming of dusk – it sometimes feels like night has fallen.

At what price, then, do we dress our children (and ourselves) as ghouls and witches and demons and make jack o’lanterns to celebrate the dark side at Halloween? It’s the question at the heart of a debate that customarily divides between those of us who say it’s just a bit of fun and we shouldn’t be spoil-sports, against others who warn censoriously about conjuring up the devil, who once abroad will play havoc with those who so foolishly summoned him.

That’s a fairly pointless argument, as the positions just get repeated and that doesn’t get us anywhere. More fruitful may be to examine what the dark side is, what it is we’re conjuring, if anything, and whether it plays any role in what we fear we may be facing, which ranges from the breakdown of the world order, to great wars and, not to put too fine a point on it, an apocalypse.

Stumbling about in the dark, we’re bound to trip over what’s called theodicy – the theological study of how a supposedly all-loving God can tolerate human evil. One of the more recent and most accessible contributions to this school comes from the US journalist and academic Brandon Ambrosino, who imagines the pursuit of theodicy not to be climbing stairs of knowledge, but the descent to a dark basement: “If the living room is where we ask how exactly God moved Trump’s head out of the way of the shooter’s bullet, the basement is where we ask if God caused the bullet to end up in a fire-fighter’s body.”

One of Amrosino’s conclusions is that “evil is not properly a thing… Evil is nothing, literally [his italics]. It is a void in the fabric of God’s creation.” This concept of evil – the dark, as any parent would comfort a child – as empty is appealing. In the dark of that basement, there is nothing there but hope.

This idea of evil as a void, or moral vacuum, is told in the story of a student (not young Albert Einstein, as widely claimed) who demurs when taught that the problem of evil proves the non-existence of God. “Does cold exist?” asks the student. Of course, replies the teacher. But cold is only the absence of energy, which creates heat. Likewise, does darkness exist? Yes, but it has no wavelength, so it is only the absence of light.

What brings the energy of light and heat, like why there is something rather than nothing, is too big a question for now. But it may go some way to addressing the darknesses listed in the first half of this column.

And perhaps it’s a thought to carry into this Halloween. Children dressed as undead phantasms, with Mum’s lipstick tracing blood trickles from their mouths, aren’t joining the dark, but filling what is empty with laughter. And, in doing so, they’re mocking it, which must offer some sort of hope for the future.

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Graham Tomlin
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