Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy

On Saturday I asked a large language model to help me think about how to live my life.

Use everything you know about me. Give me a few possible paths. Pros and cons. Ratings out of ten.

Also, explain it simply using a silly caveman metaphor.

This particular AI has accumulated quite a lot of context about me over time. The actual options are staying private. But looking at them, I had this feeling:

Yeah. This is quite right.

Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s quite right.

It was giving clearer expression to something my intuition was already feeling. Something I could recognise when it was put back in front of me.

And it looked quite different from the conventional path.

Career. Money. Achievement. Doing what you’re supposed to do. Whatever the current societal measures of a successful human happen to be.

I keep thinking that choosing a life path is one of the most consequential decisions we make. Because you actually have to spend your days doing it.

What resonates? What interests me? What do I want an ordinary day to feel like?

It’s easy to look at someone else and think I should be like this, I should be like that.

But they’re a different person. Different nature. Different circumstances. Maybe they’re flowing in a way that suits them. Maybe they’re following conditioning. I don’t know.

Either way, they aren’t me.

I seem to quite like building systems. Making stupid silly jokes. Making stupid silly cartoons.

There’s something interesting about designing a thing and seeing whether it can affect reality. Some ability to control what happens. Maybe more in theory than reality sometimes, but still.

And ideally the thing can run without constantly depending on me. Save stress, time, energy, money.

Then what would I do with the space?

Play with reality, apparently.

Laugh, love, live.

Which is abstract, but fairly accurate.

And building the systems already feels like part of that. Mostly playing and living, with a tad of preparation mixed in. It’s on a spectrum.

I don’t need the whole system finished before the day counts.

There’s something here that reminds me of Taoism, of wu wei, often translated as non-action or non-coercive action. I’m interested in that idea of acting without constantly forcing it.

The river flows.

There are still difficulties. Which ones do I actually want to engage with? Which ones keep drawing me back?

Something else has been interesting recently.

I received some critical feedback on a system I’m building for company operations, with agents and humans working together.

In the past, similar criticism would have hurt emotionally. I might have started defending an identity of being someone who knows.

This time I didn’t really feel much threat. There was one golden point in the feedback, and I could take it and improve the system.

I’m becoming more accepting that there’s far more I don’t know than I do.

That seems to leave a bit more room to find things out.

I’ve also noticed feelings of contentment across different weather. Physical weather, other people’s emotional weather.

My hypothesis is that some deeper acceptance of my worth, regardless of various other factors, might be helping.

We’re experimenting. I think it’s working. There are too many other variables to confidently say what’s causing what.

But the experience is interesting.

“Your nature is your nature. You flow the way you flow.”

I keep coming back to that. There’s room in it to learn, change direction, discover something doesn’t suit me after all. I can follow an interest without needing to know where the whole thing ends.

Money still matters, obviously. There are real limits and risks to work through.

And I’ll probably still catch myself comparing. Who knows if that conditioning ever goes to zero.

But if I’m enjoying my days and earning enough, I don’t think being conventionally impressive would matter that much.

What excites me about AI here is the speed and depth of reflection it makes possible for me. A question, a lot of context, several possibilities, and suddenly something I’d been feeling becomes clearer.

Then I get to try living it and see.

Maybe change the compass’s direction a bit.

My current caveman explanation would be:

Caveman need food.

Caveman also quite like making clever things.

Mammoth have itchy back.

Caveman build ridiculous scratching machine.

Mammoth very pleased.

Caveman quite enjoy figuring it out.

Still need work out food. Very important.

But caveman also like drawing stupid pictures on cave wall. Making jokes. Wandering about.

Caveman not need finish every clever thing before enjoying afternoon.

Can build a bit. Draw a bit. Laugh a bit.

Excellent use of afternoon.