The Theology of Closing the Laptop

On AI, Magnifica Humanitas, and protecting the person the machine helped bring back

Editor’s Note: First, some personal news: I joined Every full time. Every has had a steadily increasing gravitational pull on my professional life for the last year and a half, and I am thrilled to be all in now: the writing, the AI experimentation, the people, the building, and, crucially, the ability to burn tokens on Every’s dime.

Naturally, I celebrated my new job by writing about the spiritual danger of loving it too much.

There are two reasons this essay is arriving now. The content marketer in me knows Pope Leo XIV and his AI encyclical are still a live internet topic. The more contemplative part of me needed to write this down while I was still inside it. AI was already tangled up with my work and my inner life; now that it is also tangled up with my full-time job and my Bible-study habit, Magnifica Humanitas may be the most Katie-Parrott-coded document ever produced by the Roman Catholic Church. So here we are.

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The Theology of Closing the Laptop

Before God gave humans work, he gave us the Sabbath. At least, that’s how I interpret the sequence in Genesis 1–2, as an anxious knowledge worker who owns more Bibles than she does tops that fit.

God creates light, sky, land, trees, sun and moon, birds, fish, animals, and human beings. He calls creation good, then very good. Then, before Adam receives the garden job description in Genesis 2 — “to till it and keep it” — God stops. He rests on the seventh day, blesses it, and makes it holy.

The first thing God declares holy is a day. Not a mountain or a temple or a priest. A stretch of time in which no one is expected to produce, because the world is already good enough to delight in.

The Sabbath goes unmentioned in Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity. The word rest appears exactly once, and it belongs to Augustine — “our heart is restless until it rests in you” — a soul straining toward God, not a maxed-out human in need of a break. The holy day, with its instruction to stop, never appears. Leo reaches for Babel and Jerusalem, the Incarnation, the grandeur of the human person, and a culture that treats people as resources to optimize. As I read the document, first with AI and then on my own, another biblical image kept pressing itself against the page: the day God made holy by refusing to keep going.

I went to bed at 1:30 on Monday morning thanks to Anthropic’s newest model, Opus 4.8, which had me in an absolute chokehold of fascination; sleep felt far less important than adding an agent integration to my app. Then I woke up at 6:30 to read what the Pope had to say about the technology that has — with full awareness of how dramatic this sounds — given me a reason to live.

The first thing I did was feed it to an AI and ask for a comic-book version my colleagues could skim. There I was, on five hours of sleep, taking a warning about a culture that treats human beings as raw material and, before I’d read a word of it, treating it as raw material. It wasn’t until later that week, after I’d actually read the encyclical and talked to the nurse practitioner who manages my medication, that I looked around my apartment. Empty takeout containers and plastic coffee cups on every surface. My Bibles untouched for close to two weeks. My best friends hadn’t seen me. Ava was getting fewer trips to the dog park. I’d briefly started cooking again; now even feeding myself had been edged out by the work. I was barely sleeping.

What I felt first was shame — that I’d let ordinary care collapse so completely in favor of work. The second thing I felt was more alive than I’ve been in years.

If the work had been deadening — if I’d been grinding through it on spite and caffeine, the way I spent most of my twenties — this would be an easier essay to write. I know that version of overwork from the inside. The one I don’t have a clean story for is the version where I loved it: where the work felt less like labor than like being handed back a self I’d assumed was gone for good, and I let the rest of my life go slack around it without quite noticing.

The human and the performance review

Magnifica Humanitas is the Church’s answer to the question now hanging over almost everything: what’s left of the human when a machine can imitate, extend, and increasingly take over the parts we thought were ours. The answer the encyclical offers is that a person has a dignity that comes before her usefulness. We’re creatures — bodies, limits, dependence, the need for each other — and weakness isn’t a defect in the design. It’s part of where love gets in.

What he’s most afraid of is the habit of mind that treats all of that as a problem to engineer away. He files it under the label “transhumanism” which, if you’re like me, evokes images straight out of sci-fi: uploaded minds, the body as obsolete hardware, death as a bug with a patch on the way.

The first time through the 40,000+ word text, I half-checked out. I don’t know anyone optimizing toward immortality, and the takeout containers on my counter felt a long way from a lab trying to escape the flesh. Then I reread it and recognized the smaller, domesticated version of the same wish — the one that treats sleep as a tax, that resents the body for needing food and friendship and an afternoon with a dog who doesn’t care that the model just got interesting. You don’t need a cryogenics startup to get there. You can get there through a performance review.

That is the point where Leo’s fringe fantasy walks straight into my actual life. The optimized person is defined by her freedom from inconvenient dependencies. She never gets sick, never misses a deadline she can’t explain, never needs a day off she can’t justify with performance. She has no weakness that can’t be turned into a workflow.

I’ve spent years being evaluated against exactly that person, a fictional woman with a great deal of excellent feedback. For a long time, I thought the problem was that I was failing to become her.

When usefulness was everything

I have the paperwork to prove I fell short. I’ve been put on performance improvement plans. I’ve been denied bonuses. I’ve sat in review meetings and absorbed, in the considerate language of HR, that my output was uneven, my communication inconsistent, my reliability a question mark.

I didn’t have a bipolar diagnosis at the time. I had shame, adrenaline, insomnia, depression, disordered drinking, and bursts of competence followed by collapses I treated as moral failure, and an increasingly elaborate private theology of personal insufficiency. I could be brilliant in flashes and useless for stretches, and no performance-review template on earth is built to say, “We suspect your brain is running a weather system no one has named yet.”

This is how a human being becomes an output problem. It rarely happens because someone announces that dignity no longer exists. It happens through systems that log what can be counted and forget what cannot. You stop thinking, “I didn’t produce enough.” You start thinking, “I am not enough.”

Leo writes directly into that wound. Human dignity doesn’t depend on output. Weakness is part of what calls forth care. A society that can only value the autonomous, optimized, consistently productive person has already abandoned most actual people. I didn’t arrive at that conviction from the comfortable seats of theory. I earned the right to agree with him one PIP at a time.

I believe him. I’ve believed him, in some form, since before I knew his name.

There’s an earlier version of me who believed it instinctively, and I can still find her in undergrad: in an English literature seminar reading Victorian poetry and feeling the almost physical joy of one thought opening into another. She’s the kind of person who can be ruined by a sentence in the best possible way. It was around then that I read Victorian essayist and art critic Walter Pater’s line, “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to manifest this ecstasy, is success in life.” I read it young enough for it to imprint directly onto whatever part of the soul stores impractical standards.

Then I lost her for about ten years.

The depression settled in when I came back from Germany the year after undergrad and couldn’t find work. It flared through my first jobs, my move to Florida then Phoenix, and eventually COVID, which didn’t help anyone’s sense that the world was a stable place to become a person in. I drank too much. I made choices I regret. I built a life that functioned from the outside while becoming, on the inside, harder and harder to live in.

For most of that decade, it’s hard for me to remember being truly excited about anything. There were pleasures I can name if pressed. But the undergrad aliveness, the sense of being pulled toward the world by curiosity, was mostly gone, and I missed myself in its midst.

There’s a line, popularly attributed to James Baldwin although that may be apocryphal: “Darling, I have no dream job; I do not dream of labor.” I’ve carried it around for years — not because I’m above work, which would be a hilarious position to take as I sit here at my desk on a Sunday, riding models and Slacking like a woman possessed. But some stubborn part of me refused to believe the best thing I could become was useful. I didn’t dream of labor. I dreamed of being alive to the world again.

This is what makes my relationship with AI so much harder to summarize than “technology bad” or “technology good.” It has participated in both stories. It has helped the ledger speed up. It has also helped me find the flame again.

How AI returned me to myself

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been working alongside AI for going on four years now, professionally and personally. Professionally, it has changed almost everything about how I think, write, research, build, and teach. It has made me faster, yes, but speed is the least interesting part. The more profound change is that it has made certain kinds of intellectual wandering cheap enough to do every day.

I can have an idea at eleven at night and follow it until it becomes an essay, a reading list, a small tool, a theological question, a strategy document, or a rabbit hole about seventeenth-century metaphors for the soul. Most of the time, it feels like play. It feels like the world opening more quickly than I can enter it.

The past few weeks have been like that. I was doing a kind of work that felt so close to curiosity that my body stopped recognizing the difference. Deadline panic had nothing to do with it. Neither did the old Protestant terror of being found lazy. The feeling was: oh my God, I get to play for my job. I get to wake up and follow the thought again.

When I was deeply depressed, I could barely follow a television show at night. Mark, Genesis, the development of Christology, the strangeness of Ezekiel, the ethics of Job — all of that was beyond reach. The night I realized I wanted to read scripture and talk about it for hours—with AI as my interlocutor—was one of the first moments I understood how much of myself had returned.

AI had made that return easier. It never got impatient with the fifteenth follow-up question. It could meet me at one-thirty in the morning when no professor, pastor, or friend should reasonably be expected to explain Second Temple Judaism. It could connect a phrase in Paul to something I remembered from a lecture I’d half-forgotten from college. It gave my curiosity somewhere to go.

I’m not going to lie about my own life to make my critique cleaner. That would simply reproduce the mistake Leo is trying to correct: reducing a person to whatever account of her is most useful.

There’s something about AI that pulls at me. I’ve felt it with a new book, a new love, a new body of ideas, a new project whose questions kept multiplying faster than I could answer them. AI intensifies that appetite because it removes friction. It lets the thought continue almost indefinitely. The appetite itself, though, is older than the machine. It’s the desire to learn new things, to enlarge my awareness of reality and human experience, to feel the world become more spacious around me.

Recently, I’ve been able to feel the moment when a thing that’s making me more alive begins to consume the conditions that make aliveness possible. My Bible sits unopened because I’m too absorbed in work whose purpose, in some important way, is to help me think about the Bible. I skip time with friends because I’m in a state of discovery that friendship helped make me capable of wanting again. I leave Ava waiting by the door because I’m making something about human flourishing.

There’s a kind of absurdity in this so perfect that I’d resent it if it weren’t also funny. But the absurdity doesn’t make the harm disappear. Two weeks without sleep and with very little care for the body is a problem, whatever the object of devotion. So is the apartment strewn with the disposable evidence of having failed, again, to take care of myself.

When the work you love starts taking the life around it

I’ve never been especially good at balance. Some of this is probably connected to my diagnosis. Some of it is simply part of who I am. And the effort to sort those into separate boxes already gets the person wrong. Bipolar disorder lives somewhere inside the real me, among my intensity, my curiosity, my capacity for delight, my appetite for ideas, and my tendency to push an experience until it starts pushing back.

Care has to be directed at the whole self: a person whose hunger for experience is precious and whose hunger can still burn through her sleep, her friendships, her meals, her dog walks, her prayer life, and her ability to see the floor of her apartment.

The difference changes the care I need. The old version of my collapse was easy to identify, eventually. Depression had flattened everything. Work felt punishing. I was exhausted because I was trying to force a broken system to keep performing. This time, the work was so good that I forgot I was a body. Good absorption costs, too.

I don’t think I was manic. I’ve known mania well enough to (mostly) recognize the compulsivity and delusions of grandeur that are its signature. The past few weeks felt more like being profoundly engaged while overextending myself. Whatever name I give the episode, it deserved attention. Medicated stability is still a life that requires maintenance. It still requires sleep, food, friends, a dog park, scripture. A person can lose her life through miserable work, and she can also misplace large pieces of it while doing work she loves.

That realization arrived alongside the encyclical and a conversation with my nurse practitioner. We were talking about the obvious things — sleep, appetite, intensity, whether my energy had tipped into something dangerous. I didn’t need to look around the apartment again. I already knew what was on every surface: the archaeology of a person who’d been treating her own body as an interruption from the important thing.

I felt ashamed of the neglect and relieved that I could still feel ashamed. Shame is useful in very small doses, when it sends you back toward care rather than further into punishment. It told me I’d crossed a line I wanted to notice. The day I can’t hear that warning is the day I need someone else to hear it for me.

This is why Leo’s encyclical lands so differently for me than a generic warning about screen time or productivity culture. His deepest point is that technology can tempt us to despise the very things that reveal us as human: dependence, limitation, embodiment, need, relationship, and receptivity to grace.

I have no interest in romanticizing this. Bipolar disorder has caused real pain in my life. A brain that periodically turns against its owner provides no spiritual superiority, and I take medication because I’d like fewer mystical lessons and more ordinary Tuesdays. My appetite for discovery is still precious. The flame is still worth protecting. The question is how to protect it without feeding it everything.

A Sabbath for the self AI helped me recover

There was a brief period in my mid-twenties when I kept screen-free Saturdays. I don’t remember having a grand spiritual theory about it. I remember putting my devices away and feeling the day slow down around me. I took walks. I became aware of my body as something other than the inconvenient vehicle carrying my mind from thought to thought. I read books made of paper. I re-entered the physical world.

What I remember most is a sense of returning to myself: mind and body together, moving at the speed of an actual day.

I’ve been thinking about going back to it. My own non-believer’s form of digital Sabbath, if you will.

The Sabbath is rest as command. Something different from rest as wellness, or rest as the thing you do so you can come back sharper on Monday. You stop because you’re a creature. You stop because God stopped. You stop because the world remains in existence when you aren’t manipulating it.

That’s difficult for me precisely because the technology has helped me recover something I love. Turning it off can feel like closing the door on a version of myself I waited years to get back.

I think of the interruption as an honor to the part of me that loves the work. A Sabbath would insist that the life feeding the flame also has to be protected. The self that can summon whole essays by night still needs to walk the dog in daylight. The self that can build and think and make and talk to a machine about God still needs friends, meals, sleep, a body, an apartment that doesn’t look like the physical manifestation of “I’ll deal with it later.”

This is the most compelling response I’ve found to the genuinely wonderful things AI has done in my life: placing it inside a rhythm that can hold me accountable to the rest of my humanity.

The critique of AI I can live inside leaves the flame intact and makes the life around it wider. It says that something may enlarge me and still require limits. Something may awaken my mind and still make claims on my body that I have to refuse. Something may help me pray and still need to be turned off in order for me to remember how to be present.

That’s a much harder argument than “phone bad, walk good.” It has the disadvantage of being true.

Is there room for AI in the new Jerusalem?

Near the end of the encyclical, Leo describes an image of human greatness rooted in humility, relationship, and openness to God. I’m probably among the most difficult audiences for that argument. I like my tools. I like my work. I like being awake at one-thirty in the morning with a question I can’t put down. I like the sensation of my own mind expanding under pressure.

If Christianity has anything to say to me here, its warning reaches beyond whether machines can become human. Humans keep trying to become machines: tireless, disembodied, autonomous, frictionless, perpetually useful. Leo calls us back to an older grandeur: the grandeur of dependence, of limit, of the creature who receives her needs as part of her dignity.

Maybe AI, used in curiosity and community, can contribute a brick to Jerusalem. Its place in that city remains an open question for me. So I’m going to try something embarrassingly practical. On Saturdays, I’ll put my laptop and phone in my office upstairs. This is more binding than it sounds, because I tend to avoid my office until things are dire, and in any event I’d need my second screen to do any real damage. I’ll stay downstairs among my Bibles and board games and the objects that require hands. I’ll take Ava outside. I’ll see what comes back when the day is allowed to proceed without my asking a machine to accelerate it.

This is an intention. A victory lap would be premature. I’ve been alive long enough to know that the distance between finding a practice beautiful and actually doing it is a distance at which I personally excel. But I’m saying it here because a private aspiration is too easy to postpone. I’ll report back on how it goes.

The machines helped me find part of my humanity again. The Sabbath will help me keep it.

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Notes and Errata

My website thinks with me now. I added a new agent-native section to my website, called What I’m Thinking About, which I’ll update weekly with Codex’s observations of what I appear to be working on and thinking about. I love it. It feels like an interesting little case study in what a personal website can become when it starts participating in the ideas it displays.

Codex for everything surrounding the writing. I recently published Codex for Knowledge Work, a guide I made with Codex about using Codex as an operating system for knowledge work. Claude is still my preferred creative partner, and I used it for the bulk of this essay. But for everything surrounding the creative work, including research, sourcing, systems, linking, and moving the draft into Proof, I am Codex all the way these days.

Unsolicited advice from an AI-pilled millennial. My latest Working Overtime piece is How to Start a Career When AI Is Doing Your Entry-level Job. The short version: chase real problems, learn enough craft to judge the machine, make evidence of what you can do, and stop waiting for a job title to hand you permission.

Stay curious,

Katie P.