Article

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

Feminism

Monastic life

29 May 2025

4 min read

Cancelled but not forgotten, the medieval heretic who still intrigues today

Despite erasure and desecration, Guglielma was a trailblazer.

George Pitcher

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

Seth Johnston on Unsplash.

Is it possible to be martyred years after dying a natural death? The question occurs to me under the Alps between Lyon and Milan and arises from a late thirteenth century story of Guglielma, a spirited 50-year-old to say the least.

She arrived in Milan in 1260 like Ruby Tuesday. No one knew where she came from and yesterday didn’t matter, because it was gone. She lived in poverty, but gathered quite a following. Some said she was the daughter of the King of Bohemia (she was certainly bohemian in the cultic sense), others that she was the cousin of Elizabeth of Hungary or had been married to an English prince.

Guglielma (we have no surname) claimed equality with God, a new dawn for womanhood, and according to a contemporary account stated she was “the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women” whom she baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of herself.”

Some 20 years after she died, Dominican agents of the Inquisition arrived in Milan and burned a top nun, Maifreda da Pirovano of the local ruling family, at the stake, for claiming that she would be made Pope. Then they pitched up at the Abbey of Chiaravalle, desecrated Guglielma’s tomb, dragged her mouldering remains to a field and burned her bones to dust, scattering her ashes to the winds.

I resolved to embark on a little pilgrimage to Chiaravalle when I arrived in Milan, to pay my respects to Guglielma, my kind of heretic. I’d never heard of her before a short account from the podcasting historian Tom Holland, whose book Dominion, on “the making of the western mind”, I was finishing as I crossed the Italian border.

Pilgrims used to visit her tomb twice a year in the Middle Ages before she was violently exhumed. But you’ll find no record of her at Chiaravalle now. Bizarrely, there were Italian supercars being photographed outside of the abbey when I arrived, but it’s peaceful and original, nonetheless. And Guglielma is, of course, missing.

Speak to one of the Cistercian monks there and they will affect not to have heard of her, then murmur “heretic” and “Bohemian.” But a gentle monk called Davide sweetly told me he would show me her former tomb, in the private grounds out of bounds to visitors, if I returned in 20 minutes.

We walked through the brothers’ vegetable garden and cemetery, where hares were nibbling around a statue of St Francis and the trees grew unruly. There, under a twelfth century arch, was her former grave, now marked with the names of local Milanese benefactors of the abbey. I wondered if they had known they would be laid to rest in heretical soil. The birds sang on.

As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

There are lessons to learn from the Gugliema cult. The first is that, as the author of Ecclesiastes has it, there really is nothing new under the sun. Women have been fighting the patriarchy perhaps since Mary Magdalene encountered “the gardener” outside an empty tomb.

There was no word for “deaconess” in the early church, only deacons. The Gugliemites were heralding the dawn of a new age for the Christian Church run by women. That may not be wholly the ambition of today’s women priests, but let’s note in passing that it’s taken more than another 700 years for women to be consecrated as bishops.

The second point is that she really might have had a point about the Holy Spirit. Claiming the third person of the Trinity as herself may have gone a bit far, even by today’s standards, but for a God who holds within “himself” all gender, there is a venerable tradition of considering the Spirit as female.

The Hebrew bible often casts this spirit as female, as in the book Proverbs, where Wisdom is a woman who “shouts in the streets” and “cries out in the public square.” It was St Paul, much later, who said she must keep quiet in church.

Guglielma is a saint only in Folk Catholicism, but women like her and Maifreda were authentic witnesses and trailblazers for women’s apostleship. We can still be too sniffy, even afraid, of heresy and we do well to remember the main charge against the Nazarene at his arrest and execution was precisely that. As such, heresy serves as a reminder not only to overthrow prevailing orthodoxies, but is also divinely owned.

As I left Guglielma’s last grave, I knew it was empty of her, not unlike that other empty tomb. Her violators had liberated her into the world. She’d gone before me.

It was fitting that her ashes had been thrown to the wind, like the wind that had moved across the waters in the act of creation; like the wind that had blown over other disciples at Pentecost. And like the wind that was now gently rustling the trees in this quiet monastic back garden.

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This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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