Last year I challenged Artificial Intelligence to produce a column in my style of writing, and the results were published in this newspaper. This year I repeated the experiment to see what advances AI had made.

Working with Matthew Berube, head of Information Services at the Jones Library, ChatGPT-4o was fed five representative columns of mine. After AI produced an analysis of my writing (a quite flattering analysis, I must say), it was given the title of a new column and its opening sentence, and told to write in my style. I had already written a column on the same subject. What follows is both AI’s column and my column. Readers can form their own opinion as to their similarities, differences and merits.

On one day in my life, to cry or not to cry, that was the question.

When I was 5 years old, the first day of kindergarten carried a different emotional load than it does now. For a far greater percentage of kids than today, it was the first time they left the womb of home, the day they were cut from their mother’s apron strings, so to speak.

At that time, far fewer women worked outside the home in full-time jobs. When my mother graduated from high school, she went to work in a factory that made radio components. She stopped working at that factory after she married my father at the age of 22, and didn’t work outside the home again until her last child, me, entered high school.

The reason that my mother did not work outside the home for all those years was not that we couldn’t have used the money. We needed the income from two jobs to maintain what I call our “upper-working-class” lifestyle. My father worked those two jobs, as a firefighter and a roofer, for as long as I can remember. At one time he even added a third job.

The reason my mother did not work outside the home was that we lived in a time and place where it was common for the father to be the breadwinner and the mother to be the bread baker … and child caretaker, and household organizer, etc. I never saw or sensed any dissatisfaction either parent had with their respective role. You may think what you will about that division of labor when you look at it through the lens of modern society, but that’s the way it was then and there.

It was also a time when there were significantly fewer single parent households, so fewer mothers had to be both sole breadwinner and sole bread baker.

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With fewer mothers working outside the home, kids did not typically leave home months after birth, like so many do now, to begin a continuum of daycare and pre-school leading to kindergarten. Thus, the first day of kindergarten was much more of a watershed moment (no pun intended) than it is now.

It was also a time and place in which boys did not cry. Babies cried, but after they were not that many years old, boys either stopped crying or got labeled crybabies.

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I went off to the first day of kindergarten, but I know “don’t cry” was at or near the top of the list.

I remember standing in the line the nuns had formed on the side of the school building, consisting of all the 5-year-olds who’d been summarily dropped off that day for the first time. I remember some of the other kids unabashedly crying or whimpering, “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” to borrow a phrase. I remember being scared, all the more so because of other kids’ crying. I remember “manning up” and not crying. I remember feeling proud that when I got home after that horrific day was over, I could tell my older brothers I didn’t cry. They hadn’t put any particular pressure on me to maintain a stiff upper lip, but that’s what stand-up guys did.

So, for more than 20 years, I was a guy who didn’t cry on the first day of school. During that time, I became a hockey player, and there’s no crying in hockey.

Then one day, when I was in the latter half of my 20s, I was telling someone about that first day of school, somewhat matter-of-factly, I thought, and I felt a wetness on my cheeks. My first thought was “what the (bleep) is that?” Then I realized it was tears coming out of my eyes.

Bob Dylan wrote, “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Well, I don’t think you have to be a psychologist, or even an amateur one, to know those tears had been held in storage for a couple of decades.

I have written before that, as a columnist, I seek to bring to the surface the depth charges of everyday life. In this case, the depth charge was within me. It was time for those droplets to come to the surface. It was time for me to be a crybaby, so to speak.

On one day in my life, to cry or not to cry, that was the question.

I was standing in the hallway of a hospital, the kind where the polished floors seem to stretch on endlessly, and the smell of antiseptic seeps into your bones. My father had just been admitted for what would turn out to be his final stretch of days. I had held it together up until that point — fielding the questions from doctors, making sure my mother had eaten something, checking on logistics like a good, responsible son. But as I stood alone in that hallway, the weight of everything pressed down. I felt a lump rise in my throat.

But then came the question: To cry or not to cry?

It seems like an absurd question in a way, doesn’t it? You would think that tears should come naturally in those moments, but life doesn’t always follow a script. There’s a certain expectation about how we’re supposed to behave when the world crumbles — whether it’s at a funeral, a hospital, or after hearing bad news. Yet, in that moment, I felt more like an actor unsure of his lines than someone simply grieving.

I stood there, frozen, weighing my options like Hamlet pondering his own existential crisis. I could let go, allow the tears to come, give in to the rawness of it all. Or I could hold it in, lock everything down, and continue being the dutiful son who always had things under control. Would crying make me weak, or would it be a release, an acknowledgment that even the strongest of us are still human?

As I stood there debating my next move, I remembered a line from C.S. Lewis in “A Grief Observed”: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” He was right. It wasn’t just the sadness that threatened to spill over — it was the fear. Fear of what life would be without my father. Fear of becoming unmoored, of losing not just a person, but a part of myself that only he had ever known.

I felt, in that moment, like I had a foot in two different worlds. One world demanded composure, the world of hospital procedures, comforting loved ones, and making decisions. The other world was quieter, internal, where I could let the floodgates open and just feel everything at once. Both were real, both were valid, but neither could quite win out.

So, I didn’t cry — at least not then. I took a breath, straightened my posture, and walked back into my father’s room with dry eyes. There was still time for crying later, and for now, I had other roles to play.

Looking back, I realize that we are often far too hard on ourselves when it comes to our own emotions. We expect them to behave in neat and tidy ways, as if grief, sadness, and love could be scheduled like appointments on a calendar. But they can’t be. Life, as I’ve come to see it, is a series of moments where you get to choose — to cry or not to cry, to feel or not to feel.

And sometimes, you just have to choose not to. But the tears, like the moments, will wait for you when you’re ready.

Can you guess which column was written by Richard McCarthy and which was written by AI?