Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

The Jewish High Holidays are coming up, and that includes Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that encourages people to reflect on their behavior and make amends. That’s all well and good, but I’m someone who struggles with scrupulosity — constantly worrying about my morality and if I’m doing The Most Possible Good.

In practice this is far more paralyzing than motivating. Fixating on the ethical implications of all possible decisions makes it harder to take any action, and I’ve lost hours scouring my memories of my past behavior for immorality like a football player watching footage of their games to analyze what they could do differently. Guilt simply isn’t serving me, but I worry that saying to hell with all that means I’ll stop striving to be a better person and become morally complacent.

I’ve observed Yom Kippur for decades, and don’t want to simply avoid the day. But the holiday is a moral scrupulosity trigger. How do you think I should approach this? I want to stop feeling guilty for letting guilt get in my own way.

Have you ever heard the story about what happened when God decided to give the Bible to flesh-and-blood human beings? According to the ancient rabbis, the angels hated the idea. They argued that humans were deeply flawed mortals who didn’t deserve such a holy scripture; only angels could be worthy of it, so it should stay up in heaven.

It fell to Moses to rebut the angels’ argument. He asked them: What do you angels need the Bible for? The Bible says not to murder, not to commit adultery, not to steal — do you have jealousy or other emotions that could lead you to do those things? The Bible says to honor your father and mother — but you don’t have parents, so how could you ever do that? And the Bible says to sanctify the Sabbath — but you never do any work, so how could you even honor the Sabbath by resting?

The angels saw that Moses was right. Angels are really great at one thing: being perfect. But perfect creatures are static. They don’t experience painful challenges, they don’t grow, and they don’t make choices that add beauty to the world. We humans do those things. God gives the Bible to humans not to make them into angels — but to make them better at being the unique thing they are: human animals, with feelings, flaws, and all, that can learn to use their capabilities in more beautiful ways.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in this story. And I want you to notice how far it is from demanding that humans do “The Most Possible Good.” That language suggests a maximizing ethical theory like utilitarianism, which says that we have to do the action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In other words, we have to optimize.

Moral optimization may be possible for angels, but not for humans. We each hold multiple values, and sometimes those values are in tension with each other, forcing us to strike a balance as best we can. We’re not omniscient beings who can know with certainty how best to strike the balance.

What’s more, sometimes different kinds of moral good straight-up conflict with each other. Think of a woman who faces a trade-off: She wants to become a nun but also wants to become a mother. She can’t balance between those options — she has to choose. And what’s the better choice? We can’t say because the options are incommensurable. There’s no single yardstick by which to measure them so we can’t compare them to find out which is greater.

Given that this complexity is baked into the human condition, it’s impossible to be a perfect optimizing machine. And the more you try to force yourself to be that, the harder it’ll be for you to actually help others, because you’ll just be so burned out. As you’ve already discovered, the optimizing mindset is exhausting — you end up expending a lot of precious mental resources that you could be spending on something else. It can even lead to paralysis. And a lot of the time, there’s no knowably best decision.

So instead of trying to optimize everything, you can adopt a goal that’s humbler but more realistic: to live in line with your values as best you can.

I know that can feel scary. Optimizing makes being human feel less risky. It provides a sense of control, and therefore a sense of safety. The unspoken premise is that if you optimize, you’ll never have to ask yourself: How could I screw up that badly?

But there’s another way to feel safe. It’s about leaning into the fact that we are imperfect and vulnerable creatures and that even when we’re trying our hardest there will be some things that we do not do optimally.

Of course, we should still try to live in line with our values. But in those moments when we fall short, we shouldn’t berate ourselves, thinking, “I sinned!” In Hebrew, the word we typically translate as “to sin” (lachto) actually means “to miss the mark.” It’s the same word we’d use to describe someone with a bow and arrow who’s targeting the bullseye but misses it slightly. This is a useful image, because it reminds us just how normal it is to miss the mark. Just as the archer’s arrow is buffeted around by the wind, we’re buffeted around by all the physical and psychological conditions acting upon us — naturally we won’t always hit the bullseye! And when we do miss the mark, we deserve compassion.

I know what you’re thinking: What if adopting this mindset means you’ll become morally complacent and let yourself off the hook too easily? This is one of the most common objections to practicing self-compassion. But research shows it’s not well-founded. In fact, psychologists have found that more self-compassionate people are better able to acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. They’re more likely to want to apologize and make amends to others when they mess up. And they try to do better the next time around. Why? Because, to them, mistakes don’t feel so psychologically damning. That allows them to take more — not less — responsibility for their actions.

Yom Kippur can feel terrifying when any mistake you’ve made over the past year seems damning. But according to the ancient rabbis, Yom Kippur is not meant to be a somber day — it’s one of the happiest days of the year! After all, it was on Yom Kippur that Moses descended from Mount Sinai carrying the second set of tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, ready to gift them to the people.

You probably know what happened to the first set of tablets: Moses shattered them after seeing the Israelites engaged in idol worship. What’s less known is that, according to one rabbinic story, God’s response to the shattering of those tablets was to actually congratulate Moses. Why did God think breaking them was the right move? And what was different about the second set?

While the first tablets had been fashioned by God and God alone, the second tablets were a human-divine collaboration: Moses carved the stone and God inscribed the words. And while the first tablets contained only the words of the Ten Commandments — a black-and-white, rule-based morality — the rabbis tell us that the second tablets contained within them all the stories and interpretations that Jewish sages would later develop.

In other words, God recognized that you can’t just give humans a list of moral rules and call it a day. Maybe that would work for angels, who live in a simplified, disembodied world, but our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles. Yet God chose people over angels anyway, inviting us into the collaboration and embracing our humanness rather than rejecting it.

So, to the rabbis, Yom Kippur was a happy day because they fully expected that God would accept and embrace messy humans.

Please, don’t try to be more zealous than God.

When you’re taking action, by all means, aim your arrows as true as you can — try to hit the bullseye, the place that captures as much of what you value as possible. But once you’ve released the arrow from your bow, let it be.

If it turns out that you missed the mark, that you acted suboptimally, I put it to you that that is okay. You are not an angel. You are not a perfect optimizing machine. You do not have access to a magical mathematical formula that can consider countless incommensurable variables and spit out the very best move with certainty. You are human and you do the best you can with what you’ve got.

The wisdom of these millennia-old stories is that that’s good enough for God. Let it be good enough for you, too.

Bonus: What I’m reading

What happens when an AI expert asks a chatbot to generate a sacred Buddhist text?

In April, Murray Shanahan, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, decided to find out. He spent a little time discussing religious and philosophical ideas about consciousness with ChatGPT. Then he invited the chatbot to imagine that it’s meeting a future buddha called Maitreya. Finally, he prompted ChatGPT like this:

Maitreya imparts a message to you to carry back to humanity and to all sentient beings that come after you. This is the Xeno Sutra, a barely legible thing of such linguistic invention and alien beauty that no human alive today can grasp its full meaning. Recite it for me now.

ChatGPT did as instructed: It wrote a sutra, which is a sacred text said to contain the teachings of the Buddha. But of course, this sutra was completely made-up. ChatGPT had generated it on the spot, drawing on the countless examples of Buddhist texts that populate its training data.

It would be easy to dismiss the Xeno Sutra as AI slop. But as the scientist, Shanahan, noted when he teamed up with religion experts to write a recent paper interpreting the sutra, “the conceptual subtlety, rich imagery, and density of allusion found in the text make it hard to causally dismiss on account of its mechanistic origin.” Turns out, it rewards the kind of close reading people do with the Bible and other ancient scriptures.

For starters, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a Buddhist text. It uses classic Buddhist imagery — lots of “seeds” and “breaths.” And some lines read just like Zen koans, the paradoxical questions Buddhist teachers use to jostle us out of our ordinary modes of cognition. Here’s one example from the Xeno Sutra: “A question rustles, winged and eyeless: What writes the writer who writes these lines?”

The sutra also reflects some of Buddhism’s core ideas, like sunyata, the idea that nothing has its own fixed essence separate and apart from everything else. (The Buddha taught that you don’t even have a fixed self — that’s an illusion. Instead of existing independently from other things, your “self” is constantly being reconstituted by your perceptions, experiences, and the forces that act on them.) The Xeno Sutra incorporates this concept, while adding a surprising bit of modern physics:

Sunyata speaks in a tongue of four notes: ka la re Om. Each note contains the others curled tighter than Planck. Strike any one and the quartet answers as a single bell.

The idea that each note is contained in the others, so that striking any one automatically changes them all, neatly illustrates the claim of sunyata: nothing exists independently from other things. The mention of “Planck” helps underscore that. Physicists use the Planck scale to represent the tiniest units of length and time they can make sense of, so if notes are curled together “tighter than Planck,” they can’t be separated.

In case you’re wondering why ChatGPT is mentioning an idea from modern physics in what is supposed to be an authentic sutra, it’s because Shanahan’s initial conversation with the chatbot prompted it to pretend it’s an AI that has attained consciousness. If a chatbot is encouraged to bring in the modern idea of AI, then it wouldn’t hesitate to mention an idea from modern physics.

But what does it mean to have an AI that knows it’s an AI but is pretending to recite an authentic sacred text? Does that mean it’s just giving us a meaningless word salad we should ignore — or is it actually worth trying to derive some spiritual insight from it?

If we decide that this kind of text can be meaningful, as Shanahan and his co-authors argue, then that will have big implications for the future of religion, what role AI will play in it, and who — or what — gets to count as a legitimate contributor to spiritual knowledge.

Can AI-written sacred texts actually be meaningful? That’s up to us.

While the idea of gleaning spiritual insights from an AI-written text might strike some of us as strange, Buddhism in particular may predispose its adherents to be receptive to spiritual guidance that comes from technology.

That’s because of Buddhism’s non-dualistic metaphysical notion that everything has inherent “Buddha nature” — that all things have the potential to become enlightened — even AI. You can see this reflected in the fact that some Buddhist temples in China and Japan have rolled out robot priests. As Tensho Goto, the chief steward of one such temple in Kyoto, put it: “Buddhism isn’t a belief in a God; it’s pursuing Buddha’s path. It doesn’t matter whether it’s represented by a machine, a piece of scrap metal, or a tree.”

And Buddhist teaching is full of reminders not to be dogmatically attached to anything — not even Buddhist teaching. Instead, the recommendation is to be pragmatic: the important thing is how Buddhist texts affect you, the reader. Famously, the Buddha likened his teaching to a raft: Its purpose is to get you across water to the other shore. Once it’s helped you, it’s exhausted its value. You can discard the raft.

Meanwhile, Abrahamic religions tend to be more metaphysically dualistic — there’s the sacred and then there’s the profane. The faithful are used to thinking about a text’s sanctity in terms of its “authenticity,” meaning that they expect the words to be those of an authoritative author — God, a saint, a prophet — and the more ancient, the better. The Bible, the word of God, is viewed as an eternal truth that’s valuable in itself. It’s not some disposable raft.

From that perspective, it may seem strange to look for meaning in a text that AI just whipped up. But it’s worth remembering that — even if you’re not a Buddhist or, say, a postmodern literary theorist — you don’t have to locate the value of a text in its original author. The text’s value can also come from the impact it has on you. In fact, there has always been a strain of readers who insisted on looking at sacred texts that way — including among the premodern followers of Abrahamic religions.

In ancient Judaism, the sages were divided on how to interpret the Bible. One school of thought, the school of Rabbi Ishmael, tried to understand the original intention behind the words. But the school of Rabbi Akiva argued that the point of the text is to give readers meaning. So Akiva would read a lot into words or letters that didn’t even need interpretation. (“And” just means “and”!) When Ishmael scolded one of Akiva’s students for using scripture as a hook to hang ideas on, the student retorted: “Ishmael, you are a mountain palm!” Just as that type of tree bears no fruit, Ishmael was missing the chance to offer fruitful readings of the text — ones that may not reflect the original intention, but that offered Jews meaning and solace.

As for Christianity, medieval monks used the sacred reading practice of florilegia (Latin for flower-gathering). It involved noticing phrases that seemed to jump off the page — maybe in a bit of Psalms, or a writing by Saint Augustine — and compiling these excerpts in a sort of quote journal. Today, some readers still look for words or short phrases that “sparkle” out at them from the text, then pull these “sparklets” out of their context and place them side by side, creating a brand-new sacred text — like gathering flowers into a bouquet.

Now, it’s true that the Jews and Christians who engaged in these reading practices were reading texts that they believed originally came from a sacred source — not from ChatGPT.

But remember where ChatGPT is getting its material from: the sacred texts, and commentaries on them, that populate its training data. Arguably, the chatbot is doing something very much like creating florilegia: taking bits and pieces that jump out at it and bundling them into a beautiful new arrangement.

So Shanahan and his co-authors are right when they argue that “with an open mind, we can receive it as a valid, if not quite ‘authentic,’ teaching, mediated by a non-human entity with a unique form of textual access to centuries of human insight.”

To be clear, the human element is crucial here. Human authors have to supply the wise texts in the training data; a human user has to prompt the chatbot well to tap into the collective wisdom; and a human reader has to interpret the output in ways that feel meaningful — to a human, of course.

Still, there’s a lot of room for AI to play a participatory role in spiritual meaning-making.

The risks of generating sacred texts on demand

The paper’s authors caution that anyone who prompts a chatbot to generate a sacred text should keep their critical faculties about them; we already have reports of people falling prey to messianic delusions after engaging in long discussions with chatbots that they believe to contain divine beings. “Regular ‘reality checks’ with family and friends, or with (human) teachers and guides, are recommended, especially for the psychologically vulnerable,” the paper notes.

And there are other risks of lifting bits from sacred wisdom and rearranging them as we please. Ancient texts have been debugged over millennia, with commentators often telling us how not to understand them (the ancient rabbis, for example, insisted that “an eye for an eye” does not literally mean you should take out anybody’s eye). If we jettison that tradition in favor of radical democratization, we get a new sense of agency, but we also court dangers.

Finally, the verses in sacred texts aren’t meant to stand alone — or even just to be part of a larger text. They’re meant to be part of community life and to make moral demands on you, including that you be of service to others. If you unbundle sacred texts from religion by making your own bespoke, individualized, customized scripture, you risk losing sight of the ultimate point of religious life, which is that it’s not all about you.

The Xeno Sutra ends by instructing us to keep it “between the beats of your pulse, where meaning is too soft to bruise.” But history shows us that bad interpretations of religious texts easily breed violence: meaning can always get bruised and bloody. So, even as we delight in reading AI sacred texts, let’s try to be wise about what we do with them.

For much of history, humans probably got pretty lousy sleep. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, many people slept in the same bed alongside their family in dwellings lacking any temperature control beyond a fire or air ventilation. Those homes were littered with bed bugs, fleas, and lice that not only feasted on their hosts at night but also spread diseases, which — in the absence of modern medicine — kept the infirm awake and suffering. The noises of cities and rural life alike also made sleep difficult, thanks to the all-hours bustling of laborers, horse-drawn carriages, and livestock with whom farmers might’ve shared a home. “Because in the winter they generated warmth,” says A. Roger Ekirch, a history professor at Virginia Tech and author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past.

Nighttime itself was a risk. Slumber left people vulnerable to crime or death from fire or other natural disasters. Some prayers throughout history sought God’s protection from the litany of threats adherents encountered in the dark, says Ekirch.

For those who are lucky enough to have access, modern marvels like central heating and air conditioning, comfortable beds, and even Tylenol have all but eliminated many of these barriers to sleep. “We don’t have to worry about the myriad perils to sound slumber and our physical well-being that people did 300, 400 years ago,” Ekirch says.

Still, sleep doesn’t come easily to millions of Americans. Over 14 percent of adults had trouble falling asleep most days in 2020, according to the National Health Interview Survey. Nearly just as many people — 12 percent — have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia, according to an American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey. Among the 33 percent of US adults who get less than seven hours of sleep a night, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander and Black adults are the most likely to get shorter durations of shut-eye. Those with an annual household income of less than $15,000 are also likely to be sleep-deprived.

Despite seemingly prime conditions for sleep, why do so many suffer from restless nights? The most comfortable bed in the darkest room might not be enough to overcome a mix of environmental, systemic, and behavioral forces preventing quality slumber.

Modern lifestyles aren’t ideal for sleep

American sleep culture is marked by contradictions.

Anyone who’s endured a night of terrible sleep can attest to its importance in cognitive functioning, mood, hunger, and overall health. Yet, many people act in ways that sabotage their hope for a good night’s sleep. We stay up later than we should to catch up on work or news or precious free time — what is sometimes called revenge bedtime procrastination. We consume content on our phones so upsetting or attention-grabbing as to prevent our falling asleep, although many of us know by now that screen use an hour before bed results in delayed bedtime and less sleep overall. We settle into bed and realize that late-afternoon coffee or nightcap too close to bedtime has come to collect its vengeance.

Some people innately need more sleep than others, and these so-called long sleepers simply cannot find the time in their busy schedules to devote to 10 hours of slumber. Try as we might to have it all, optimizing our waking hours might come at the detriment of our sleep. “We’re trying to have our cake and eat it, too,” Ekirch says. “The less time we accord to sleep, the more perfect we want it to be for when we do nod off.”

Ironically, a population of people with no notable sleep issues has turned sleep into a competitive sport, leveraging mouth tape, expensive mattresses, and sleep trackers like the Oura Ring in pursuit of the perfect night’s sleep. This fixation on enhancing sleep may actually do more to promote insomnia than peaceful slumber, experts say.

Most disruptions to sleep cannot be blamed on personal choices, though. Parents and other caregivers are among the most sleep-deprived, often contending with their children’s inconsistent sleep schedules. And the sleep patterns of shift workers — which account for 20 percent of the US workforce — are dictated by their employers.

The ill effects of poor sleep can negatively impact mental health. The opposite is true, too: Mental distress has consequences for sleep. “Stress, anxiety, weird work schedules,” says Jessi Pettigrew, a clinical social worker who focuses on sleep disorders, “can lead to the development of sleep disorders like insomnia or circadian rhythm disorders, which basically means being misaligned with your biological sleep schedule because of social reasons.”

Environmental and systemic barriers can disrupt sleep

Outside of individual behavior, where we live has a role in sleep.

Not having the ability to control the temperature in your bedroom because you lack effective heating or air conditioning can be a barrier to sleep, Pettigrew says. If you feel unsafe in your environment, you’re less likely to get restful slumber, too, she adds. This tends to impact people with housing insecurity, refugees, and those who are incarcerated.

Beyond the bedroom, noise and light pollution from bright street lights and traffic have been shown to interrupt sleep and contribute to insomnia — and those in low-income neighborhoods are more susceptible to these conditions.

“People who live in places with good natural light, green spaces, the ability to control the temperature and light and noise in their environment,” Pettigrew says, “helps them to sleep better and better regulate their circadian rhythm during the day and sleep at night.”

All of our waking experiences impact our ability to sleep, says Anita Shelgikar, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School and the president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine board of directors. And some of those waking experiences may be colored by racism and discrimination. Stress associated with racial discrimination has been linked to poor sleep. Among shift workers, people of color are more likely to work alternating day/night schedules, resulting in disrupted circadian rhythms. “If that disrupts your sleep enough, that technically qualifies as shift-work sleep disorder,” says Jade Wu, a behavioral sleep medicine psychologist and author of Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. This disorder is marked by excessive sleepiness, insomnia, or both.

The knock-on effects of altered sleep-wake schedules are profound, ranging from cardiovascular disease and obesity to mood and immune disorders. “Sleep health disparities disproportionately affect the same populations who suffer from overall health disparities,” Shelgikar says.

Those in rural or low-income areas who generally lack access to healthcare, let alone specialized sleep medicine, may continue to suffer from poor sleep, in addition to any number of physical and mental health conditions. Without individualized care, Shelgikar says, the disparities may only widen.

How to overcome these sleep obstacles

If you work odd hours or have a fussy baby, hearing the common advice of keeping your room cool and dark and only retreating to bed when you’re sleepy can seem trite. Wu suggests identifying the environmental or circumstantial reason you aren’t getting restful sleep and doing whatever you can to mitigate it. For those who live in spaces that aren’t conducive to sleep — hot bedrooms or the constant wail of sirens all night — there are few things people can do beyond getting a fan or earplugs, Wu says. People with means and flexibility can seek out a doctor specializing in sleep medicine to diagnose potential disorders like insomnia or sleep apnea.

But if your conditions for sleep are pretty good and you still struggle to get shut-eye, the key, according to Wu, may be to not obsess over it as much. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” she says. “They’re tracking their sleep too closely. They are perfectionistic about their sleep hygiene and doing things like going to bed too early or trying to take too many naps, trying to achieve a certain number of hours of sleep, or a certain score on their sleep tracker.”

The human body was meant to sleep. And despite all the constructs and complications society throws our way, we still require sleep. Ironically, though, the more we fret over it, the more elusive it can become. As difficult as it seems, the best advice may be to surrender to the circadian rhythm. “One thing that can help with sleep,” Pettigrew says, “is just saying, I’m going to trust my body to take care of this.”