We Were Not Meant to Know Everything—Only to Know What Is True
Facing AI’s flood of perfect words and rediscovering truth, wonder, and holy mystery on the other side.
Quick disclaimer. I run several ventures that involve it—tools, automations, copilots. Most of them are designed to help businesses do things faster, cheaper, more efficiently. So what follows isn’t a Luddite screed or a fearful outsider’s rant. It’s an internal critique—an ache from someone who’s inside the machine, watching what it’s doing to the human spirit. And I want to record that I thought about this, before the wave crashes fully.
Because it’s coming.
I am writing this because I want to record that I thought about it before it inevitably comes. Though I am no prophet I do think the writing is on the wall. The way AI is disrupting our world is unbelievable. Of the few fellow creatives I’ve talked to, it has created some kind of interior estrangement on the nature of creating things. Something about the act of creating now feels subtly haunted. Like you’re being followed by a ghost of your own mind, moving faster than you ever could.
Maybe you feel it too.
AI is ushering this new era of hyper-production of text, stories, images, videos, and anything creative. At first, I was naïvely optimistic. Like many, I thought: Finally—I can conjure the images I see in the eye of my mind. I can translate what I feel into something visible. There was wonder in that. Magic, even.
But the more I watched, the more I realized that this magic has a cost.
Anyone with a laptop can now type a few lines, press enter, and watch a torrent of polished prose spill out in seconds. It no longer takes years of reading or the slow apprenticeship of style; the engine supplies grammar, rhythm, even “insight” on demand. That is why the internet is filling with AI-made Slop—endless articles that sound thoughtful, feel authoritative, and line up their arguments like well-trained soldiers.
Yes, there is still a priestly class of interpreters, the prompt-writers who know the right incantations, who can coax tone and nuance from the model. Good prompting does demand clear thought and precise language, at least for now. But the barrier has fallen so far that almost anyone can play oracle: a handful of keystrokes, a click, and out comes orderly meaning. The machine turns raw keyboard noise into a seamless stream of sentences, as effortlessly as a calculator turns numbers into answers.
The spiritual dimension to all of this
But there’s a deep spiritual dimension to this. Truth, as the ancients knew, is not just correspondence—it is communion. It requires a knower and a known. A soul that sees and submits to something outside itself. Truth isn’t just what’s accurate. It’s what is, rightly ordered, and rightly understood. It carries with it a sense of reverence.
I of course don’t subscribe to Humean skepticism, though this isn’t the essay to unpack why. But I hold, firmly, to the belief that being exists—and that it comes to the intellect. Not in some chaos or abstraction, but in order of existence. In the Thomistic tradition, truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. Things are, and they can be known, because the world is intelligible and our minds were made to receive it.
So yes, in theory, a pattern of keystrokes—taps on a keyboard—can be parsed by a machine into sentences that reflect something real. That carry the shape of meaning. That’s what makes AI so tempting. It offers the appearance of intellectual encounter without the discipline of intellectual formation. It generates patterns that resemble knowledge without ever touching the substance of knowing. And of course, AI doesn’t revere anything. But it can reaffirm and simulate reverence. It can sound poetic, even sacred. But that’s a costume. It does not see. And it cannot love.
Words can be strung together in endless ways. Plato would have welcomed the boundless combinations of ideas. The trouble is that our modern word-storms aren’t anchored to the deeper truths they once pointed toward, or the metaphysics that give reality and language intelligibility. And for centuries now, we’ve slowly drifted away from the solid core of meaning that gives language its ballast.
For the ordinary reader, already stretched thin by screens, this will be more than confusing; it will be spiritual vertigo. Trust becomes a moving target: if prose can be manufactured at will, then comprehension risks slipping into perpetual suspicion.
Trillions of walls of text, images, and videos will be mass-produced, and both the reader and writer will lose the ability to distinguish between the hard-won fruit of contemplation and the fast-food clarity of syntactic mimicry.
That is my first observation.
An Epistemological fatigue awaits us
The next danger is epistemological. It isn’t that the machine can’t form a sentence. It’s that we no longer care whether that sentence is a revelation of true reality or just a reflection of our own noise.
And that noise was always there in the human mind. The entire Western philosophical is proof of this. Then comes the Internet. The internet promised information, but AI promises an avalanche. Spawn any fact, any style, any argument, on command. The human mind was never built to bear such a flood.
Pascal warned about this, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever would act the angel acts the beast.” We are now tempted to know like angels while loving like beasts—omnivorous, restless, unanchored. In former ages, a man might know little, yet he was taught what he was for. Today a man can know everything and forget that he has a soul.
And this will get worse through mimicry. René Girard warned that people learn what to want by copying others—mimetic desire. For most of history, we copied the few we knew best: parents, local heroes, the saints our town celebrated. Desire grew slowly, shaped by place and time. You see this in Jung a little bit with archetypes. I’ll go in deeper in another essay about this.
The internet is a whirlwind of imitation. Every hour algorithms parade thousands of lives before us—vacations, wardrobes, flash-outrage. We copy without noticing: a little of this influencer’s style, that podcaster’s voice, some pundit’s hot take. In itself, imitation isn’t evil; we’re meant to learn by mirroring. When the pattern we copy is ordered to truth, it shapes us well. The danger comes when we mimic fragments—images and slogans detached from their deeper meaning or the fullness of Truth. Then the self becomes a patchwork of half-understood truths and falsehoods spinning in the storm.
This new flood of borrowed desires will wear down our sense of what is solid and true. AI won’t need to tell blatant lies; it will mimic truth so precisely that we lose the feel of the genuine article—like tasting flavored syrup until real fruit seems dull. When everything sounds right, we stop asking whether it is right. That is epistemological fatigue: exhaustion of the very faculty that knows, judges, and loves the true.
If we let language unravel, we lose the ladder that once carried thought up to truth. Language was once the bridge between soul and world, the way we named what was good, and true, and beautiful. Now it risks becoming just output—product—detached from the lived encounter that gives it weight.
And we’ve seen this type of problem before.
In the first half of the last century, Nietzsche, Darwin, and Spengler read the smoke of the factories and told us man had changed. They were the first ones in a way to be “Post Truth” after the pill of the enlightment was fully swallowed. Their ideas pressed against the old order until the Great War snapped whatever empirical “faith” remained in steady progress. What followed was epistemological fatigue—a weariness of mind that no longer trusted its own ground. The trenches ended the nineteenth-century hope that knowledge, power, and beauty would march upward forever through pure human will.
I believe AI is ushering in the next wave of that fatigue. It will craft words, music, and images with such uncanny accuracy that most people will stop asking who made anything. The very question will feel quaint. What will count is how the output performs—whether it entertains, soothes, or scratches an itch. Or makes money.
That is the first death of the soul: the moment you no longer care about origins, only sensations. When the search for the source goes silent, meaning slips out with it.
I also believe our soul which is stamped with the image of God, was built to :
seek the hidden thing,
long for what it has not yet seen,
be surprised by grace,
sacrifice what is lesser for what is greater,
obey a voice outside itself,
be remade through the rough alchemy of suffering.
But when every epistemological hunger for knowledge is predicted, simulated, and instantly met, that same soul begins to
stop reaching,
stop aching,
stop changing.
Need is still there, but the friction is gone. And without friction, growth stalls. A person can stand in a palace of high-definition beauty and feel nothing—weightless, numb, sheltered from the very costs that would have carved depth into the heart.
Soon we may see an entire generation living inside a glowing cathedral of content: images, arguments, melodies flowing day and night. Not counterfeit—just costless. When nothing demands effort or sacrifice, the relationship to knowledge shifts from pilgrimage to delivery service. The soul, deprived of holy strain, forgets how to feel wonder—and without wonder, it forgets how to live.
The ache will be a map, as it always is
An untethered worldview—one that treats reality as optional and truth as mood—will pass through three rough stages as the AI flood rises.
1. Euphoria of control
At first the tools feel like sorcery. Essays appear at a click, images bloom out of thin air, predictions seem omniscient. The user feels sovereign. Why wrestle with books or teachers when a prompt delivers instant expertise? Revelation is reduced to convenience.
2. Vertigo of sameness
Soon the novelty dulls. Every feed looks familiar because the same models power all of them. Language flattens into corporate eloquence; art begins to rhyme with itself. Trust erodes. If everything sounds authoritative, nothing is. The mind, built for contour and contrast, starts to slide. Anxiety spikes, attention fractures, cynicism becomes the default setting.
3. Collapse into surrogate meaning
A spirit cannot live long in perpetual doubt, so it hunts substitutes: partisan myth, ironic nihilism, designer spirituality, transhumanist dreams, post-post irony or whatever. Anything that promises friction-free belonging. Yet these idols demand no sacrifice beyond the click, so the hunger returns fiercer than before. The soul cycles between stimulation and numbness—ever fed, never filled.
And here, I think, the great fatigue will turn into a strange mercy. When language and what we see feels hollow and desire feels prefabricated, the restless will start hunting for the one thing that cannot be generated on demand: being itself.
Within that great churn the question of origin will surface. Some will sink deeper into Edenic simulations, but many will reach for metaphysics because nothing else endures. They will taste the difference between generated prose and a single sentence that costs blood to write, between virtual community and a body kneeling before the Eucharist. That recognition—small, stubborn, terrifying—could be the moment grace gets in. They will follow the trail from epistemology to metaphysics, from metaphysics to God. They will discover that the Eucharist is not a symbol but an act of stark reality—bread and wine transfigured, Presence among us. That is the breathtaking audacity of the Church: to claim not only the deposit of faith but the custody of truth, tangible and eternal. In that scandal of Real Presence lies her abiding strength; in a world of infinite simulations, she alone dares to say, This is my Body, given for you—and means it.
So our task, for the glory of God, is to step into that Matrix-like moment—lean close and say, Wake up. The dizziness you feel is not a glitch; it’s the soul’s own alarm, proof that you were made for more than infinite content. Show them where language still meets being, where symbols still break open into reality. And remind them of mystery. This is the big opportunity in this century for the Church to offer it’s counter-spectacle: mystery. Not mystery as puzzle, but as the luminous depth that refuses to be flattened into data. I sketched this in a short essay recently. The Church has always kept a veil over certain things, not to hide truth but to protect its holy depth. We were never meant to know everything; that is not a defect but a design. Some realities—like the Eucharist—can only be received, not analyzed. They draw us beyond calculation into adoration.
And mystery kindles myth. Tolkien called myth both the great “sneak attack” of truth, smuggling longing past the watchful dragons of cynicism and the “echo of God’s voice,” a flash of eucatastrophe that breaks the gray spell of ordinary days. As Eldredge loves to show, good stories are not escapist daydreams; they are signposts for the homesick heart. Such moments wound us with joy and prove the ache is real. Myths keep the restlessness alive until it finds rest in Truth Himself. Myth bursts the walls of ordinary time the way sacrament bursts the walls of bread and wine. It reminds us that our restlessness is a homing signal—and that the home we seek is not a simulation but a Kingdom, already breaking in.
And true wonder is the ache’s pulse. John Eldredge taught me to name it; Lewis called it sehnsucht, Tolkien called it eucatastrophe: that sudden rush of joy that feels like home and exile at once. Wonder isn’t childish escape; it’s the soul’s homing instinct—proof we were built for more than algorithms and endless scrolls. It tugs us toward the Real, refusing to be satisfied by simulations.
Together, myth and wonder guard the restlessness that keeps us searching until we finally step into the Kingdom.
“ You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You. ”
— St. Augustine, Confessions I.1
It’s that ancient line is the compass that will lead us out of the AI fog. Restlessness is not a bug in the human system; it is the homing-signal of the soul. When the flood of generated words finally leaves us hollow, that ache for something solid will drive us to seek the One who cannot be simulated.
Providentially, the Church now has a shepherd formed in Augustine’s school of desire. Pope Leo XIV—an Augustinian at heart, even in his academic work has chosen the name Leo for a reason: we stand on the brink of another cultural unraveling, much like the age faced by St. Leo the Great. His first encyclicals hint at a confident Augustinian realism: human progress is real, but only if steered toward the City of God; technology is a gift, but only if ordered to love.
That gives me hope. Because if Augustine is right, and if Leo XIV keeps sounding that note, the world’s new fatigue may actually become the doorway to conversion. The soul’s holy restlessness will not be quenched by infinite content. It will keep clawing its way past every algorithm until it finds—once again—the Bread of Life that no machine can bake.
So, while Leo XIV calls us back to Augustinian desire, the Church simultaneously invites us into sacramental wonder, into signs that do not collapse under analysis but expand into communion. In a world of endless exposition, she still dares to whisper, Here is a sacred secret—come and see. And that whisper may be precisely the sound that wakes the restless heart from its algorithmic sleep.
The machines will keep talking. Our work is to teach hearts to hear the silence beneath the noise, to reverence the truths that can only be approached on our knees.
What the future holds
In the garden, Adam and Eve lived in a liminal brightness; an ontological clarity we can barely imagine. It was bliss, yes, but not the bliss of ignorance; that is Lucifer’s lie. They knew, yet their knowing was transparent, ordered, unfractured.
The Fall cracked that transparency. We entered history’s long middle where knowledge comes through sweat and shadows. Every insight is double-edged: luminous and laced with doubt. This is the epistemological condition in which we now labor.
But the story arcs forward. At the end, when our wills are healed, we will behold the Beatific Vision—truth cascading without limit, never tiring the mind, never bruising the heart. God did not have to shape reality this way; He chose to. In the first act of creation, He already saw Calvary, Pentecost, and the great wedding feast, and the Trinity laughed—not in mockery, but in the delighted certainty that every shard of history would be gathered back into wholeness.
I’m really writing all of this mainly for one small listener: my daughter, who will soon open her eyes to this world. I can’t see the whole path of AI’s unfolding—no seer’s mantle here. But I do know this: we must cling to what is real, and real things are slow. They ask for presence, silence, struggle, mystery. They cannot be summoned; they must be received.
I don’t pretend to have the programmatic answer. If I glimpse anything, it’s pure gift. Every talent I wield, every venture I shepherd, is on loan from the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. My job is to steward that loan well, to keep my gaze fixed on the Real, and to stay small enough that—when truth knocks—I can still hear it, and then pass that sound along to her.
What an astoundingly beautiful essay!
Is it too soon for 'AI fatigue'?