Attending Mass, teaching Latin, and taking care of toddlers may not be most people’s idea of a party, but I knew exactly what Patrick meant. We enjoyed a good life that was dependent on a very different sort of life and, arguably, a different set of values. It wasn’t just that we both draw our livelihoods from Beltway Bandits. We were all subsidized by the Pentagon and Northrop Grumman, he argued.

To exaggerate the case: We get to play RETVRN behind a high-tech wall.

This idea echoed in my head after I got the news that Wendell Berry died. Berry was a formative writer for me — one of the most formative. After I spent freshman year of college studying Plato and Aristotle and Euclid, I lined up a job as a farm hand in Vermont. In my downtime, I mostly read Berry.

I dreamed of being a farmer, but instead I was playing at farmer during a break from college. I returned to my parents’ suburban New York home partway through the summer.

The parallel here is not so much that my play-farming was “party in the back.” The parallel is that my upper-middle-class college-educated life was the party in the back. The business up front was actual farmers who grew enough food that it was easy for Americans to get as many calories as we could possibly need for a small fraction of our income.

Put another way, the Good Life — whether the upper-middle-class suburbia of my youth, or the traddish-but-normie big-family-Irish-Catholic suburbia of my adulthood — seems to depend on an abundance that most of us are not actively providing.

I’m fine with this idea, though not totally comfortable. In part because I wonder what Wendell Berry would say.

In a 2008 essay in Harper’s, Berry wrote about mankind’s need for limits. It’s not merely that we need to remember our limits. Limits shouldn’t be thought of as a necessary evil. Limits literally define who we are.

“As earthly creatures, we live, because we must, within natural limits, which we may describe by such names as ‘earth’ or ‘ecosystem’ or ‘watershed’ or ‘place.’ But as humans, we may elect to respond to this necessary placement by the self-restraints implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

That is, the Good Life is fueled by self-imposed limits. The awkward question is whether we should celebrate how technology (whether in weapons, AI, or modern farming) makes the natural limits seem so much further away from us and makes our culture’s wealth and power seem nearly limitless.

Part of Berry’s argument is that one day we will pay the price for today’s abundance, like a farmer who spends down his topsoil for a more lucrative harvest today. That’s a pragmatic, ultimately materialistic argument for limits and restraint.

The deeper part of Berry’s argument is that we humans actually suffer moral harm when we try to live without limits. Yet so much of the modern project is about destroying those limits.

I searched the New York Times archives for the words “limits” and “tradition,” and two of the first headlines were what you would expect: “What is a family? Traditional limits are being redrawn” and “A nun not content to observe traditional limits.”

The sexual revolution and modern capitalism were both supposed to tear down limits. Maybe that’s good, because it creates a safe space (to borrow a term) where families and communities can erect their own limits.

But maybe the limit-destroying urge is not so easily contained. Berry, in his essay, makes it clear that this grand limit-destroyer is the devil.

The limit destroyer on my mind Sunday night — and again on Monday night when I learned Berry died — was artificial intelligence.

Patrick, at another point in our conversation, made me realize what AI will do to the algorithm that feeds us short videos. Currently, if I watch a video on YouTube, the sidebar is trying to feed me stuff about retirement income. On Facebook, the algorithm sends me golf videos and woodworking shorts.

“Right now,” Patrick said, “the algorithm tries to read your mind, and then it scrapes the internet for any existing video that might be relevant to your interests.” I instantly knew where he was going with this: Soon, the algorithm won’t be limited by the corpus of existing videos. The internet already seemed like a bottomless well of brain-numbing videos, but your possible content was always limited by what other people had already created.

The future of the algorithm has no limits, thanks to AI. I’m not worrying that human videomakers will create a ton of AI videos. I’m saying that once the algorithm senses you like watching a woodworker use a lathe on red oak, the algorithm’s own AI will custom generate for you an oddly satisfying lathe video. It might be 100 hours long.

“Have you read Infinite Jest?” Patrick asked me. I haven’t, but I know the premise: Someone has created a video so entertaining that people simply watch it, not wanting to do anything else, until they die. That idea was always too ridiculous to me in the 1990s. Now it’s not.

DC’S SPEED CAMERAS ARE CASH GRABS, NOT SAFETY DEVICES

Immediately gratifying video content is no longer limited by what someone thought to create. It’s not limited by anything but bits and data centers.

Limitless energy. Limitless military power. These aren’t just fictions. They are dangerous promises. Sometimes it feels liberating when the limits recede beyond the horizon. But then we come face to face with the abyss.