AI, Comment Sections, and Fear: A Stoic's Perspective

Journal Entry, March 26, 2026

Aaron Burden: Unsplash

This morning, I read an interesting article about the fear of AI encroaching on our lives. It emphasized how uneasy many Americans feel about the technology. I’m not much of a doom-and-gloomer, and I like to think I move through most situations with very little fear. Still, in the National Review article, the real fear was not so much in the piece itself as in the comments section, where anxiety was on full display. It seems the largest share of those convinced technology is marching us toward ruin are those ever-aging Boomers.

A word about comment sections:

Personally, I support any publication that allows readers to voice their opinions. Otherwise, in today’s bleak media climate, we are too often handed a steady diet of journalistic opinion dressed up as news, with no chance for readers to punch back with research, facts, or counterarguments.

Frankly, echo chambers without a voice are boring. National Review, on the other hand, offers a comment section that is often a colorful fireworks display, as it’s a conservative publication that also attracts a large independent and liberal readership, making for interesting, if not frothy, debates.

Back to AI. One fellow Gen Xer wrote that he does not fear AI because once Boomers fully embrace it, it will go the way of Facebook and die a slow death. I don’t agree with him about AI, though Facebook, in my humble opinion, is silly and ought to fade away for the unproductive rabbit hole it is. Still, the comment made me laugh.

Fear, however, deserves more serious attention. It must be examined and conquered for what it is. Anxiety over an event that has not yet occurred may sometimes be prudent, but just as often it is a sign of an ungoverned imagination. The Stoics would remind us that fear becomes dangerous when we surrender to shadows rather than facts. Better to meet reality when it arrives than to rehearse disaster in advance.

As my good friend Seneca might say: “We suffer more often in our imaginations than in reality.”

Now, how to have AI fix the spreadsheet I’m working on, I’m afraid I’ll never figure this out. Say what?