Your Humanity is For Sale... Just Download the App

People often ask me where I get my ideas for the pieces that I write. The truth is that I see pretty much everything that happens in my life, no matter how trivial,  as a potential idea for a good story. Recently while I was visiting with my friend at the Phoenix airport, we joked about the fact that if someone challenged me to write a story about tomato sauce, I could come up with the idea and generate a 1500 word written piece about it within a couple of hours. I take that as a great compliment, and at the same time I realize that the only reason that creating the potential tomato sauce story is even possible is because I have done the work of honing my craft over decades. 

The trivial stuff like tomato sauce can be fun fodder for good storytelling, but often it is the transformational life experiences that are the fuel behind the more powerful pieces of writing that I do. I keep an idea file on my smart phone that has over 100 writing topic ideas currently in progress. Sometimes those ideas get developed into full blog posts. Other times they get saved to be chapters within a larger piece of writing. Once in a while, a few different topic ideas get fused into one unified concept, and that is what is about to happen right now. 

Last week I took note of how much air travel has changed and that literally every single upgrade one might be seeking is now for sale. I decided I wanted to write a piece about that. A few months ago, I started a piece about AI writing which I never fully vetted out, but I held it in my idea file. Then just this morning, another friend who has followed my writing and my time in the hospitality industry for many years and who actually offered to let me hold our wedding at her Chicago home, forwarded me a piece about how third party reservation services are gobbling up the prime time restaurant reservations in New York city and reselling them. The wheels started to churn! The synthesis of these three distinctly different, yet similar threads opened a window for me with an invitation in my brain to weave them into a story with one theme, and that theme is this:

We are a lot closer to living in the post-apocalytic, Skynet ruled world of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator than we might prefer to think about. In fact the year that The Terminator was allegedly sent back in time from in the movie was 2029, which if you hadn't noticed, is only five years from right now. A lot can change in five years. I guess we'll see just how prophetic James Cameron was when he wrote and directed the original Terminator movie 40 years ago. To me, it's not just the fact that technology and machines have taken over so much of the structure of our daily lives as it is the fact that literally everything is for sale these days. The more one is willing to pay to experience life the way they want to, the more likely it is that they will be able to create the illusion of being in control of life. In the end it's just an illusion anyways.  

Last week when I traveled to Los Angeles, I experienced air travel for the first time in seven years. My friend Tom took care of our travel arrangements and booked us the basic economy fares, which was a perfectly reasonable decision based on the fact that we were each traveling alone to meet in LA and had no attachment to where we sat on the plane. Once our fares were booked, I received almost daily emails asking if I wanted to choose an assigned seat for a fee so I could have more control of my travel experience. Window seat? No problem that will be an extra $59 Mr. Herbert. Exit row for more leg room? That luxury will cost you $129 Mr. Herbert. All you need to do is download the app and tell us your preferences so we can keep you advised of other conveniences you might enjoy.

Also for sale were early boarding privileges to ensure that my carry on bag would find a safe home directly over my head. If I pre-purchased a premium seat, I would also be afforded the privilege of getting priority food and beverage service even before the plane took off, while those in basic seats waited with hunger pains and dry mouth for their food and water, which by the way came at an up charge in either case. Never in my life had I felt more like my great grandfather Henry William Herbert who came to the United States as an orphan in the early 1900s by saving up his money to by a steerage class ticket on the RMS Majestic out of Ireland's Queenstown port, the same port that was the final port of call her sister ship, the RMS Titanic. What a blessing for me that Great Grandpa Henry chose The Majestic and not The Titanic, or my life story would be the greatest story never told! 

When it comes right down to it, there is way more to air travel than just first class and the rest of us. Like nearly everything in our modern world, air travel is a pay for play arena and those with the most resources can choose whether or not they want to settle for the basic experience or buy their way up the mountain of conveniences and upgrades that exist. I wonder what would happen if we ran restaurants the same way? Read on for more about that! 

Chat GPT and other artificial intelligence writing services are everywhere now. Content creators can download apps and other services to help them write blogs, speeches, social media posts and all sorts of other things. Over the last month I have been in a number of conversations where the topic of my writing came up and I have shared that I am currently co-authoring/ghostwriting a client's memoirs. In most cases the topic of ghostwriting has sparked some curiosity and follow up questions which have included, "How much does something like that cost?" People are somewhere between surprised and stunned to find out that top quality ghostwriting services start in the multiple five figures and can even reach six figures if the author has a track record of producing bestselling manuscripts. 

"Why wouldn't someone just use AI instead?" has at times been a conversation segue after the initial sticker shock wears off. Some people will even flat out ask me if I think my writing skill set will become obsolete with further advances in AI writing. Ultimately, my answer to that question is "I don't know?" What I do know though, is that no computer bot will ever be able to capture the human essence of the storyteller and make the emotional connection that a piece of writing can make when it is generated by the creative force that exists inside one's own heart. Within this story alone, the subtle nuances of my friend who offered her home for our wedding, the fact that my great grandfather was an orphan from Ireland or my tomato sauce story in the Phoenix airport would never have been captured and used with impact to connect by a AI writing bot. 

Anyone can load a topic into a free AI writing site and get a grammatically correct, but somewhat sterile piece of writing within seconds. Download a paid app or use a premium AI writing service and I suspect you will get a better end product. Want to hire a highly skilled story teller and writer who will invest the time to put the personal touch and emotion behind your story? Well that may cost a bit more than an exit row seat or the right to put your carry-on bag directly above your head, but in my totally biased opinion, it's well worth the investment. 

When I was 18 years old I took a job as a host an a trendy new restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan and wound up running the door there for about a year. I probably learned more by doing that job at the restaurant than I ever learned getting my undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. I think the most important thing I learned was that I love to connect and network with people. I have parlayed that and many other things I learned about hospitality at that tender young age into a two decade stretch as part of the maitre d' team at Joe's Stone Crab in Chicago, which in my mind is one of the pinnacles of maitre d' jobs on the planet. A maitre d' has a number of essential job functions, but none of them are more important than hospitality itself. Great maitre d's build relationships that last years, not just moments in time. 

When it comes right down to it, the services that a maitre d' can offer to a restaurant guest are pretty simple and they include things like: 

• Recognition for the individual that helps them feel seen and known when they are with family, friends or clients
• Warm, friendly, personal connection and conversation
• Access to hard to get reservations
• Familiarity with an individual's personal preferences
• Priority seating and premium tables

While a third party table selling service like the ones I mentioned earlier in this piece can help VIP guests who are willing to pay top dollar to access the tough to get reservations, they can never deliver guest recognition or preferred seating. In some ways, those services are nothing more than a free app on someone's smart phone that can be downloaded and used to write average copy for a writing piece; both are impersonal, sterile and driven by the insatiable desire to be seen and noticed. 

Imagine this scenario. A guest who already has a reservation walks in the door at Joe's and asks for a booth. I reply by saying, "We have you assigned to that noisy table by the kitchen door, but I can upgrade you to a booth for $59." Over the years, guests will frequently ask me to put them in a section with our best server(s). If I were an airline company instead of a restaurant, I suppose that would give me the caprice to say, "Well, we have you with the person who just came out of training yesterday, but I can seat you with our most senior staff member instead for an additional $129." The whole thing seems utterly ridiculous, but in reality, the pay for play mindset has spilled over into nearly all aspects of our modern world. And truth be told, there already is a way to get the best table and a tough reservation at pretty much any restaurant on the planet without the third party reservation selling service. What can I say? if you know, you know. 

So how do all these somewhat related and otherwise different parts of the story get sewn together into a common theme? 

Some people argue that technology is dehumanizing everything in our world from writing to hospitality to air travel to everything else. I say otherwise. As many businesses, organizations and individuals place less emphasis on the personal aspects of what makes people's life experiences more satisfying, it will be those who still emphasize the human touch who stand out amongst the crowd. To me, placing an emphasis on the human aspects is like being real. As a writer, a men's community leader, a storyteller and maitre d', my plan is to continue to be as human, as heart centered and as real as I can possibly be. Just like Margery Williams writes in The Velveteen Rabbit:

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

As it turns out, maybe our humanity isn't for sale? Maybe we are just in a transitional phase in human history where we are learning how to find more balance between man and the machines we build in an attempt to make our lives easier? I for one am betting on humanity to always place a premium on understanding the value of being more real. It's the only sane choice in a world that can at times feel a bit insane.

Well that's all for this week. Thanks for reading all the way through to the end. I'd love to hear your thoughts too. Shoot me a reply email, send me a text or even be very human and give me a call. Peace and blessings for a beautiful week. 

PS.... If this multi-thousand word piece isn't enough for you, this was my week for the MenLiving blog as well. I have another couple thousand original words waiting for you at the MenLiving website with I post about understanding the balance between our masculine and feminine energies which I call Skating on Thin Ice. Click on the link to check it out. 

Jim