I so enjoyed falling into Wikipedia holes for hours, or scrolling /r/todayilearned until I fell asleep but I am overcome with an enormous sense of responsible dread. The same technology that has reinvigorated me to make weird stuff for myself again, which almost feels like when I used to carry a camera everywhere I went (hell I used to plan trips around it) and that I can build every silly little idea I have with no need to go deep, ask for permission, or feel like I'm wasting my time in experimentation - things that before were reserved by the astronomically rich or absurdly talented polymaths of old on drugs.
At odds with this feeling comes the same struggle I've had as a person who is interested in everything, if I can do anything anytime, what am I supposed to do? I used to dive into topics in an obsessive manner only to let them go after a few months and occasionally pick them up years later or never again. I now have a litter of half baked, half thought thoughts through lil projects clogging the arteries of my computer and GitHub account. Zombie processes and weird half empty folders litter my digital life, weird little notes I can't read or maybe I can't understand are a hallmark of this time. It's productive litter, but litter. At least I'm not selling anything, that's not a dig of who is, but a dig at the idea everything must and will be commoditized. That your silly project, or something your passionate about needs to become a business is the only way to survive now is a pretty scary thought. Starting a business is hard and we're making it look easy, look being the operative word.
I think what's worse is that I've become increasingly insular with frustration, since with AI comes an obsessive compulsive desire to outcompete, to over-inform the same news or to just poke at everything. Because, what is success if not performance? Have you tried this tool? Or this model? Every use case for productivity is SO dull to me, maybe because my life is not made up of small, atomic routines like so many of those who read Atomic Habits (lol). I don't have emails to triage because I'm obsessive, I don't have client databases to enrich, workflows that need optimization because so much of what's missing for me and so many others is not more time, it's the right kind of it. Focused, interested but particularly, interesting time. Lost in deep thought over an interesting problem, not a pedestrian, optimizable one.
It's been both the most invigorating and frustrating time, as someone who used to pride himself in being a "deep thinker," (groan) a drive-by intellectual if you will, who drove people nuts with insane analogies and orthogonal concepts that I discovered that week, that I can't do that anymore. My world is becoming increasingly, infuriatingly, surface level. I've never believed more that we need to ban the sale of podcast equipment and every associated behavior like thought leadership born out of thought not actual leadership. Volume is not proficiency when writing effort has been reduced to zero and we find ourselves in the age of plenty, at least as it relates to content. Without any sort of barrier of entry we're entering a thoughtless liminal state where we're kinda all talking around each other and maybe connecting two thoughts once in a while to our own great dismay. We gave everyone an personal printing press and instead of being thoughtful with it we all started our own publishers with increasingly diminishing readership.
So, are we all fucked? Is this it for brain power? Are we doomed to be replaced by our consciousness uploaded to rented out GPUs in a data center? Fuck I hope not. So maybe I’ll write for myself, someone will read and most won’t. Maybe I’ll fall into some weird traps and get in trouble for having stupid opinions I didn’t think through well enough or for writing like a maniac who’s learning to write again from scratch.