What would persuade you, if anything could?

A political scientist presents this question each day to his followers on X, specifically addressing the “AI skeptics,” who do not believe advances in artificial intelligence have been impressive enough to merit all the hullabaloo. What would persuade them, if anything could, that AI will, in fact, transform every facet of the familiar world? Not the bots doing backflips or passing the bar exam? Not the PhD level essays inching closer to that holy-of-holies: actual “insight”? Not the disappearing jobs or the rise of AI companions? Every day, he posts stories of AI’s latest feats and calculates how quickly they arrived relative to predictions, offering the timeline itself as evidence of our predicament.

This is not a time to be precious or sentimental, he argues. A new world is being born. It is time to care about the future of AI, even if we find it grotesque – even if it feels like lifting a rock to reveal an underground world of beetles, attempting to suckle the earth.

I am scrolling in bed. I care – or at least I think I do. I care less and less as I fall asleep. The text on the screen grows inky, my phone heavy in my hand. My eyes droop into watercolors. I am too irreverent for politics, too absorbed with proximate things. In dreams, every person I meet is an angel from a foreign realm, no matter how well I know them in waking life. Their bodies are blurry, their eyes have no origin, yet their shame is rendered in the sharpest detail. I have yet to dream about AI.

What would persuade you, if anything could?

I once asked a man I met on a dating app which of the five love languages he valued most – a trite question I usually avoid, but it felt necessary. He was quiet and attractive, sometimes too quiet. This was our fifth date. I was weighing the plus sides of a life with less conversation. All my prior dates with chatty men – were they just trying to sell themselves to me? This taciturn man, by contrast, seemed incapable of rhetorical “spin.” I liked that he gave me his (much warmer) coat and had his own method for dicing an onion. The silences, when we had them, felt honest. He helped me re-pot my plants.

Still, with such little access to his interior life, I couldn’t anticipate, strategize, or plan. I yearned for clues to keep him interested, a template to summon his desire. How could I know if he really liked me? What would make our time together worthwhile? What would persuade a man like him – ten years, a house, two babies in – to stay? To keep his gaze on me and not turn over other stones?

He nodded along as I listed the five love languages like he had never heard them before. Acts of Service. Quality Time. Gifts. Touch. Words of Affirmation. Which mattered most? He nodded again and ignored them all, replying, simply, “Care.”

Was he holding me at arm’s length by answering obliquely? Or was this the plain truth? All I know is that shortly after this conversation, he slowly and quietly disappeared, dissolving back into the ether. I’ve seen his dating profile floating around since then, where he advertises himself as a “professional human pillow.” Maybe he wasn’t ready for a relationship. Maybe I cared less for him than for persuading him to care for me.

What would persuade you, if anything could?

Years ago, I was hiking with my family on a hot, desolate mountain in Yellowstone. As we trudged among sagebrush, I noticed my brother stern and unsmiling, locked inside a mood. My siblings and I share moods like we share jawlines, memories, and our last name. With a few brief questions and his few terse answers, I felt I could see the contours of his despair, the tunnels winding down and down. I rarely travel those tunnels anymore and have boarded off the way, but I still feel the chill drafting up from below, licking me between the planks. There is little light down there and many stones, each with an engraving to decipher, some claim upon my care. Therapists will say the engravings are lies. Few would admit that some are true, and yet unfit for this world.

A few steps ahead of my brother was his wife, her quivering chin jutting forward and up. She told me she had been married to him long enough (three months, at that point) to know that all she could do was remain soft and wait for his mood to pass. It did no good to ruminate on what she might have done wrong. He would have to choose what life to live.

I imagine she sometimes worries that the stones will drag him deep into the underworld and leave her alone with their future baby, their living room floor caved in. I imagine she wonders what might persuade him to stay – not just physically by her side, but turned towards her: watchful, cheerful, grateful to be out of the sunless tunnels, forgetful of other worlds entirely. What would persuade him to care for the life they had? Could she love him more in quantity or quality? Would therapy work? Medication? More God?

For now, she was decided. Elsewhere in the park, Old Faithful spits sulphurous water from the earth's interior one hundred feet into the air, every ninety minutes without fail. An audience claps each time, as if they summoned it. But my brother’s wife would wait. Some things are not a matter of persuasion.

When I was a new renter in Washington DC, I bought a 1940’s cedar dresser off of Craigslist that I worried, after lugging it home, was haunted. I had no satisfying reasons; I wasn’t even sure I believed in haunted objects. I just knew I had to get rid of the dresser fast.

Its yellow wood seemed silver and carried an odor too confusing to be quaint. The drawers posed an optical illusion; they looked generous in size but couldn’t fit much inside. The painter who sold it to me was a bit odd, himself. His stories didn’t add up. His home on the DC-Maryland border had more hallways than open space. I didn’t plan to follow him up four flights of stairs into an apartment as winding as a human colon to retrieve the dresser, but at every new twist in the path, it felt too late to turn back. He silently watched as I surveyed the dresser, which was stylish but inexplicably cold. This was, of course, impossible to communicate. I don’t like letting people down, especially not face-to-face, not even strangers from Craigslist. “Only $150? I’ll take it.”

He emailed the next day to ask if I’d like to grab a drink. He emailed again to ask why I relisted the dresser for only $30 — was I unhappy? He emailed again to ask if I’d like to grab a drink.

As inquiries rolled in from Craigslist, I fretted. Selling a haunted dresser was like passing a counterfeit bill — forcing someone else to absorb the cost. Did I owe the buyer a warning? Surely my paranoia was mine alone, an unfortunate glitch in my psyche. But if that was true, then why not talk myself out of it? Why resell the dresser at a $120 loss and restart my search for a dresser from scratch?

My sister, an attorney, once told me about a New York court case where a homebuyer backed out of a contract after learning that the house featured in local ghost tours, the seller boasting of its rambunctious poltergeists. The court sided with the buyer, reasoning that if paranormal activity felt real enough for business, the seller couldn’t pretend otherwise at the point of sale. A few states require sellers to disclose if murder or suicide occurred on the property. In this rare nod to the unempirical, the law acknowledges that a home can feel uninhabitable for reasons no inspection report can capture and that mere intuitions of danger matter.

My religion talked about spirits, but nothing pertinent to this situation, like whether spirits could leave a curse or stain or even inhabit a 1940’s cedar dresser. In fact, we were told not to think of them much, lest we tempt an encounter. Spirits straddle a funny line in religious cosmologies: real but irrelevant, empirical but not deserving attention. Indulge them, and their demands will — at best — distract from wholesome living. In Mormonism, spirits are stuck as spirits for rejecting our social contract, opting out of embodied life. They wanted bodies without risk or contingency, bodies without the sputtering lag between sensing and knowing. They wanted to have their cake and eat it, too — to have bodies without sin. Now they were bitter, stagnant, and unpersuadable — not worth messing with.

So was I my Craigslist brother’s keeper or not? On one hand, we were fellow citizens sharing the same conditions of life, if not a language to talk about them, like tribes torn apart by the Tower of Babel. On the other hand, digital strangers were like spirits — anonymous, disembodied, some of them dangerous. Like an ouija board of sorts, successful Craigslist negotiations all end in encounter; notoriously, not all buyers escape their transactions unscathed.

On Friday evening, a bright-eyed married couple arrived for the dresser. I greeted them on the lawn. They held hands and told me of their love for hosting. Not hosting parties – hosting exchange students. From China, Spain, Brazil, you name it. The dresser would go in the student bedroom. I liked them. They seemed promiscuous with trust, like me — not trust that people keep their promises, but trust that they can suffer betrayal here and there and still recover. Mosquitos nipped at our ankles as we talked, reminding that, respectfully, we agreed in the war in heaven to let them have our lawns in the late summer months. We went up to my room to appraise the dresser.

Something flashed in the woman’s eyes. As expected, she kept her lips politely sealed. “It’s such a steal,” she finally said. “Only $30!” The mood had shifted. She avoided my gaze. They insisted they could move the dresser themselves. They lifted and pulled, lifted and pulled, grunted and lifted and pulled. Their stress swelled up with my relief.

That night, guilt lingered like a stain, like the dresser was inked on my upper arm. But I knew it would rub away in time. If spirits are consigned to bitterness, watching a world they can never inhabit, then humans are consigned to hauntedness, inhabiting a world we can never fully see. We gain clarity only through focus or forgetfulness, and the latter comes easily. Until then, I was glad I sold the dresser for cheap. A $120 loss was enough to concede wrongdoing, and at a $30 price, the couple could part with the dresser if they, too, felt the chill. For tonight, this wasn’t “girl math” — it was atonement.

A few days ago, my friend Rachel Rizzo wrote a tribute to some unknown “mystical energy source” that makes Salt Lake City CorePower Yoga unlike any other franchise. As a fellow group exercise connoisseur, I too am mystified. Rachel’s post inspired me to try to identify the source of its appeal. I’m not sure it’s simply Mormonism.

Like Rachel, I grew up in Utah but currently live in Washington DC. Despite growing up in mountains, I have only skied twice — once with a boyfriend who muttered some esoteric riddle about french fries before zipping down the hill without me, and once with friends from DC. As Rachel observes, athleticism practically defines Utah, where average Joes are competitive cyclists, girls go waterskiing just to “catch up,” and nearly everyone has a shed of toys to make sport of any terrain, enough for the family and any stray neighbor kid or cousin who wants to join. As a teen, I was too body-conscious for such fun. I practiced violin, listened to my beloved “indie music”, and fantasized about being elsewhere, where people cared about principles and ideas.

It wasn’t until my LDS mission to Taiwan that I decided I should reconcile myself to exercise. I had to move between appointments with just a bike and my two pumping legs. If I hadn’t learned the lesson in Utah, I would learn it in Taipei, breathing in the pungent mishmash of diesel, tropical fruit, and stinky tofu: the spirit can’t do anything without the body.

This prepared me to fall in love with CorePower Yoga years later in DC. I knew I was supposed to be embarrassed for liking a chain, but couldn’t help myself. After a breakup one summer, I went to CorePower nearly every day. I biked to the Bethesda location where the teachers ended class by placing a cool towel soaked in lavender essential oil on our foreheads. Sometimes I cried during savasanah, the final resting pose. I was 28 and felt old. With my ex-boyfriend, I had had an opportunity to marry and reproduce the life my parents raised me to love, but I couldn’t bring myself to choose him. The twist in my stomach wouldn’t let me. My body would defy my ideals.

Over the following years, I would visit CorePower Yoga whenever I was in Salt Lake City. As Rachel says, the athletic baseline is “absolutely diabolical.” And somehow, they turn this notoriously-corporate yoga chain into some temple for the liminal Utah soul, struggling to find its shape. The effect is part ambience: ancient drum music pounds through the speakers, followed by a moody acapella choir. The hot, dim, foggy room feels like an abandoned planet slightly nearer to the sun than ours. The teachers don’t hold back: throughout class, they tell you about their divorces, their kids dropping out of high school, psychedelic revelations, their thoughts on death.

But it’s also the teaching method. Most yoga instructors believe in form, but in Salt Lake City, they seem to believe that to know form you must know how to break form. The sequences are as surprising as they are demanding, weaving silly movements that don’t seem like yoga into traditional poses. They move too fast to think. You have to keep moving as your sweat pools on the floor with your neighbors’ sweat and you start smelling like some composite, multi-gendered, dazed-but-disciplined Utahn. You look in the mirror to see your body finally mimicking some timeless yoga pose, but you are trembling through the triumph, begging for it to end. (If you live in Utah, experience it for yourself. Try to get into Kacie’s classes!)

I drive away dripping like I just emerged from one of Taiwan’s summer monsoons. I pull into the Sodalicious drive-thru to order a Diet Dr. Pepper with raspberry puree, coconut syrup, and half-and-half. (The sweetness pairs well with physical humiliation — highly recommend!) It is a moment I could enjoy nowhere else in the universe.

How does Utah do it?

Rachel jokes that it might be Mormonism – “if so, convert me,” she writes. But the teachers channel angst towards Utah’s majority religion too often for that to be the full story. I’ve heard instructors shout, midway through class: What do you need to let go of in your life – dogma? Certainty? Rigidness? Your parents’ hopes and fears? Drop them! Now! Send that text when you get home; tell them you’re never going back!

My guess: there is a heated, high-intensity climate around Mormonism made as much by its critics as the religion itself. The faith props up a form of life that few can effortlessly reproduce, like an intricate yoga pose. Believers strain to meet its ideals, and never fully make it. Haters can’t be near it without feeling the heat. It drives people many types of mad and forces all to stand and tremble in the shape of their convictions, whatever they may be. Like Mt. Timpanogas or the Salt Lake Temple, Salt Lake City CorePower Yoga classes are a distinctly Utah phenomenon, both sport and cathedral for those who find a pleasurable friction between body and spirit.

As for me, I am grateful to belong to places that reverence form. I’ll even pay for a membership. I will also never not be relieved when I get to emerge from the heat.