Great thinkers have disagreed on how to find happiness. Some find it in work, others in leisure. Some say we receive it. Others say we create it. These days, many suggest that artificial intelligence technology promises an easier, and therefore happier, life. But when using A.I. or, really, any addictive app, users often feel disembodied. In these pseudo-places, it is difficult to get one’s bearings, to feel real: Is this my opinion, or am I being manipulated to extremes by the algorithm? Is this image real, or is it A.I.? Do I like this or am I just scrolling to numb out? These questions came to the fore recently when I visited, of all places, an amusement park. 

This summer, I took my children to Elitch Gardens, a theme park and water park in Denver, Colo. My children, ages 8, 11 and 14, had ridden water slides but never roller coasters. My youngest learned about roller coasters from a teacher who used them as an analogy for emotions in his second-grade class.

I picked him up from school that winter day and all he could talk about was roller coasters. “Have you seen a roller coaster? Are they real? Can we ride one? Can we go today?”

“In summer, when the park reopens,” I promised. For his birthday in spring, we got tickets to Elitch’s, as it is known locally, for June.

I had not been to the park since I was a kid. In my memory, the park was huge, the teenagers were cool, and the best ride was the big wooden roller coaster that moved and swayed at the back of the park. I planned the day for everyone, researching when to get there and where to park. I measured my youngest to make sure he was tall enough to ride the scariest rides. He was, just barely. I thought about what everyone would need: sunscreen, water bottles, snacks. Never once did I think about what the day would be like for me. This was my first mistake.

Elitch’s was smaller than I remembered, and the cool teenagers now looked like little kids. I hurried everyone to the back of the park to ride the old wooden roller coaster. It was closed.

My husband, Geoffrey, came up with a backup plan. His eyes fell on a yellow, metal roller coaster called the Boomerang, the tallest ride in the park. It had several vertical loops and almost no waiting line. Geoffrey caught my eye. He could see that I did not want to ride it. He looked at me and, with his eyes, said, Don’t act scared or you’ll spook him.

“Let’s just rip the Band-Aid off,” he said. It’s an expression he often uses when we’re about to do something terrible that must be done. My youngest squeezed my hand and said, “I want to ride next to Mama.” So I got in line.

A teenager pushed a metal bar covered in foam down over my shoulders and the car began to lurch with an ominous clicking sound. My son screamed, “Am I going to die?” I was strapped down and unable to look at him, but I squeezed his leg and said, “You’re not going to die.” By which I meant, not right now.

And then we were hurtling through space. I’d imagined us screaming and laughing, sharing a moment, but I couldn’t even open my eyes, let alone my mouth. It felt like being in a blender. I could not produce a single thought. The machine had us now; there was nothing to do but hold on until it was over.

We got through the loops and the sideways turns, and I started to feel relief, only to realize that we were now going to do the same nauseating series backwards. Finally, we were deposited back on the platform, pale and motion sick. I got out and took my son’s small hand. “You were so brave,” I managed. “That was terrible,” he said, and we all laughed.

I rode a few more rides. The Sea Dragon swung us high and low in an ersatz Viking ship. My stomach rose and fell. I thought I might pass out. After we got off, I found myself bargaining in my head with no one. I would rather rock climb without ropes, I thought. I would rather give birth. Give me something else. Anything.

The 8-year-old remained brave as the day wore on. He did not like the first two rides, but he liked the Turn of the Century one, where you spun around on swings. He liked the log ride, where you came off soaking wet. The older rides were better, I thought. Designed to be fun, not to be photographed.

The whole day I told myself, “You never have to do this again.” It wasn’t just the motion sickness; it was the sense of helplessness. Unlike giving birth or doing a sketchy rock climb, riding these roller coasters left me with no sense of accomplishment. My body felt lifeless, like an object being manipulated. The machine did all the work. Each ride offered both too much stimulus and not enough challenge.

It is very easy to describe unhappiness: I was nauseated, hot, bored and overstimulated. Even the kids liked Elitch’s but didn’t love it.

It’s harder to describe bliss.

The day after we went to Elitch’s, we went rafting. We don’t usually do two big outings in a row, but we are in the midst of a drought in Colorado, and this was the last good weather window before the water levels on the Arkansas River would be too low. So we put some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sparkling waters in a cooler and drove to Cañon City to raft the very next morning.

If the day at the amusement park felt like nervous system overload, the day on the river felt like a cleanse. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

Everything about river life is magical. You put your phone in a dry bag and can’t access it for most of the day. You are present. On the river, we are humans; we are able to act on our environment even as it acts on us. You push your arm against a rock and the boat slides back into the flow. On the river, physics is interesting. It makes sense.

We met up with the family we raft with: Luke and his kids.

When we got to the drop-in spot, everyone started helping without being asked: putting on life vests, spraying sunscreen, taking turns pumping up the raft. We had purpose, a mission. The raft had a small leak. Geoffrey, Luke and my oldest set about patching it while the other kids waded in the water and skipped stones. It was a problem, but a problem we could solve. We had the pleasure of feeling competent.

On the river, we are not just bodies, flesh and bones; we’re people. Someone says: “Forward right. Left back. Lean in.” And we do. We’re not isolated individuals; we’re a tribe. Working together, laughing, sitting in comfortable silence. Making jokes about the teenage geese. We tell stories. We paddle. We swim.

At one point we stopped on a sandy bank to eat. Luke’s daughter, who is 11, asked me if I wanted to play mermaids. To my surprise, I did. We made up a game of swimming against the current. It was hard and fun, and I couldn’t stop grinning. The day was hot; the water was cold. I didn’t want to get out.

Rafting creates the conditions for being neighborly. When one of Luke’s girls fell in, I had to grab her by the life vest and yank her back into the boat. She fell on top of me in the process, wet and smiling. It felt good to be useful. At another point, I was swimming and rapids were approaching and someone had to pull me in. It felt good to be helped.

The two days were so different. On the first, I got credit simply for participation. I checked something—roller coasters—off a list. On the second, there were real problems to solve. At one point we got stuck on rocks, and two of us had to get out into the rapids and push, but the problems were ours to puzzle over.

It was also healing and restorative to be in nature, surrounded by family and friends, instead of in concrete and steel, surrounded by loud music and strangers. We saw wildlife while on the Arkansas: a herd of bighorn sheep, two egrets, hawks, fish. We cliff jumped. We chose to hurl our bodies off rocks. High, medium or low. Everyone chose differently.

Roller coasters are truly impressive feats of engineering. Yet they remind me of using technology like ChatGPT. They can do incredible things, but they leave many users feeling like they have learned nothing and accomplished little. Amusement parks feel to me like another strange pseudo-space where I begin to ask what is real. 

Rafting the same stretch of river year after year might sound boring by comparison, but it returns me to myself. It gives my family a sense of place, of what T. S. Eliot called “significant soil.” Here is where we cliff jump. This is our favorite rapid. Here is the bridge where the swallows make their nests out of mud. Look up, but with your mouth closed.

On the river, we were present and experienced beauty. I watched my daughter hurl herself off the highest cliff into the icy river. Later, she was steering the boat. “Okay, we’re going into the grass; that happens sometimes,” she said, laughing at how hard it was. Only when there is the possibility of failure is there the possibility of success.

The apps and A.I. assistants being foisted on us rob us of the possibility of looking stupid or getting it wrong. A.I. can summarize the book. It can write the paper. It can catch the stupid grammatical mistake. But maybe happiness is also found in the pleasure of puzzling it out, of coming to understand it, of feeling our power increase, of steering the damn boat.

Anna Keating writes and podcasts on Substack as “Inner Emigre.” She is also the co-author of The Catholic Catalogue: A Field Guide to the Daily Acts That Make Up a Catholic Life and is the co-owner of Keating Woodworks.