what it meant to feel something in 1844, and what it means now

10.6.26

Jesus was coming back, for real this time.

At least that’s what preacherman William Miller was yelling from the rooftops throughout New England in the summer of 1844. Miller, born sixty-two years earlier in western Massachusetts, had found the Holy Spirit early in life and later adopted a devotion to Deism, a religious philosophy that said God created the universe in totality but had left his creation and ecosystem up to mankind and did not interfere with their affairs or free will. With natural laws and rules in place, so the ideology went, there was nothing further for God to manage and the world could run on its own, sort of a “set it and forget it” situation.

So, given this governance structure that he believed in so firmly, preacher Miller seemed to have felt that he had agency to bend the will of the world to his liking. Perhaps the mid-19th century version of “you can just do things.” Through what he described as some spiritually-concocted accounting and arithmetic, Miller eventually came to a mathematical conclusion — no, certainty — that, at noon on Tuesday, October 22, 1844, Jesus Christ himself was going to return to earth. You could bet your bottom horse on it.

The message was broadcasted far and wide via telegrams, adverts, and Sunday sermons. A lot of people heard the word and bought in. In the months leading up to the anticipated autumn date, more than a hundred thousand people throughout the United States — which, at that time, accounted for more than 1 in 190 people, or about 1.8 million today, the current population size of Phoenix — were convinced that the Good Shepherd was on a return trip home, ready to grace the heartland with his holiness and perhaps give us some vision about what the future held. And, most importantly, Miller said, Jesus was back to cleanse the world of its many sins. (These sins were never specified.) Tens of thousands of people who heard the calling quit their jobs, left their families, and abandoned treasured possessions all in the name of becoming part of what became known as the “Millerite movement.” They traveled the country and risked life and limb to witness the return of Him.

Of course, October 22 came and went, and Jesus never showed up.The Millerites were aghast. Said one devout follower named Hiram Edson:

"Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before…. We wept, and wept, till the day dawned."

Another, named Henry Emmons, wrote:

"I waited all the forenoon of Wednesday... but after 12 o'clock I began to feel faint, and before dark I needed someone to help me up to my chamber... sick with disappointment."

The event was immediately ridiculed and is still referred to as the “Great Disappointment.” I came across this peculiar piece of religious history a few nights ago by accident. I randomly chose October 1844 to compare to 2026 for no discernible reason. I just picked that month and that year. I’m glad I did. My immediate reaction was to mock and giggle and I stand by that reaction because the whole thing is fucking hilarious and ridiculous.

But the more I read, my ridicule began to morph into an odd comfort and understanding at what went down. The feeling wasn’t necessarily a deep empathy for everyone, maybe some of that; but rather, comfort came in learning about this movement and thinking about how, since the beginning of time, through 1844 and to this very minute we call the present, we all just want to feel something, even when the outcome is undetermined if not altogether entirely preposterous. I’m certainly guilty of it. I recently spent an entire weekend in Mississippi losing my shit over a college football game that I have no personal or professional attachment to. But I went because I wanted to feel something. I didn’t exactly leave my wife and child behind and expect a miracle — well, no, actually, that’s exactly what I did! I left them behind in New York and I needed something of a miracle to see Ole Miss beat LSU. (Unlike the Millerites, I got my wish.) I traveled all those thousands of miles to feel something, to see something new, to bear witness to an event I had heard about via the internet and talking heads. Indeed, the lines between sports fandom in this country and phenomena like the Millerite movement may share more in common than a lot of us like to admit.

We want the feels. It’s why we take Nyquil and cocaine and why we listen to music and watch Mean Girls over and over. It’s why we call our mom (or don’t) or look up our exes and why we throw a rock through a window when we’re seven years old or nineteen years old. It’s why we get up in the morning, to feel something, even if it’s a shared glance with a stranger for a few seconds on the train.

I think this simple, yet undeniably powerful desire to feel things is why we’re in a unique struggle right now with the newest technological sea change. This isn’t about whether Artificial Intelligence is good or bad for us or if it’ll succeed or if you should be shot out of a cannon if you’re using it or not using it. I don’t know what will happen and I don’t know who is right and who is wrong. We’re all probably both and never in the ways we think. But I do know this: it makes me feel nothing. For months, I’ve used the AI almost every day at my place of employment. I’ll continue to use it most days at my place of employment. But it makes me feel nothing. AI is a missing sock in a stranger’s dresser drawer. I don’t care about it. Maybe it can summarize the latest news and order me a sandwich and book my flights and secure restaurant reservations, that’s fine. But it makes me feel nothing. I don’t care about it; I don’t feel gratitude that it ordered my lunch. I read AI content and I feel nothing. I watch a video made by AI code that features AI animals and AI illustrations and an AI city and AI cars, and I feel nothing. I watch an AI tool “think” about questions and I feel nothing. I don’t remember a single interaction I’ve ever had with AI and I never will. Maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad. Maybe that means AI will be successful. I told you: I don’t know.

What I do know is I’d rather talk to a hitchhiking Millerite follower than an AI chat agent. I know I’d remember him. I know I’d feel something. And that feeling, that deep-tissue desire to feel something for or about another human being person, that’s as potent today as it was a hundred and eighty-two years ago. And that’s not going away. Not ever. There’s a comfort in that.