like all posts, not sure where I’m going with them I’m just writing man

I’ll start with a story. Well more of an anecdote than a story. I went cruising for the first time as a child. For some reason, it broke my brain. I think it had to do with the scale of a cruise ship, it felt like an entire city that was movable on the water. I couldn’t comprehend it properly at the time, and I remember that I questioned reality for a while. The whole experience felt so unreal and like something coming out of a story that I had a burning sense that everything around me was fake, or a simulation. At some point, I stopped feeling this, I assumed I aged out.

But recently, this feeling has come back. I guess the one word description would be surreal. My entire life feels surreal right now, and has felt really off for the last month or so.

It’s fairly easy to attribute an array of causes. The most major being I’m taking a leave of absence from college. Aside from that, working in San Francisco, working in AI, being absolutely inundated with AI has also done a bit to throw me off my bearings.

But yeah, it’s just so weird. I’m not used to living downtown in a big city, I think I’m especially still getting used to the tech culture of SF. Walking around and seeing tech billboards everywhere just strikes me as odd, even though I’ve been obsessed with tech my entire life. It makes all of reality feel wrong.

And well AI. LLMs are everywhere here, so much so that when people are talking about tech, it’s implicitly implied that AI is somehow incoporated so that people can automate xyz. It’s truly really incredible what LLMs can do, and I think we’re only really beginning to see all the innovation that’s going to come from it. But at the same time, it’s hard to reconcile this with what I’m used to as normal.

And then there’s the video models. Just yesterday OpenAI released Sora 2, and this is probably an overplayed point, but how good these models have gotten definitely makes reality feel quite off kilter.

Originally, when I started writing this post, I was planning to talk a little bit more about how to make my reality feel a little bit more real, so that I go a little bit less crazy. But now that I am writing, I’m realizing I’ve just been discarding a lot of the activities that would normally ground me.

One of the things that really keeps me sane is writing (journaling, which basically ends up like the rants here) and reading, and lately I’ve been too busy working to really attend to that. Definitely also a contributing factor, I think just writing this long-form blogpost/rant has helped me feel just a little bit more sane.

I haven’t quite resolved this feeling yet, but I’m wondering if it’s just something to get used to. This is my new normal, and as far as things go, it’s quite a good normal to be in — at least once I figure out how to incoporate more reading and writing time into my life.

Appendix: just remembered that life felt pretty surreal immediately after covid hit, but for some reason I got used to it pretty quickly (like a day?). Maybe because it just meant I had a ton of time to play video games so I didn’t really mind. I guess that was a really good normal time for me.