| > As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was Changing the way I have worked for decades in a fundamental way has been hard, depressing even, but then exciting. My way of taking control of the AI story is racking GPUs at home and doing all my work from those. I have found those with experience programming before AI actually have a major advantage to steer things into exactly the right shape. > I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to. Community tends to help. #!:matrix.org welcomes anyone not spamming :) No replacement for IRL hanging out with other humans. Board game nights and forcing myself to do weekly social events really helped with my overall motivation for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Just made me feel like I existed as more than a handle on a screen, you know? Traveling also really helped. Maybe give yourself the chance to try the things you have never tried before and ramp up that novelty part of your brain again. I know depression and desperation. At one point in my career all I could find for work was minimum wage telemarketing and day labor while fishing leftovers out of garbage cans, taking sponge baths in gas station bathrooms, and spending nights sleeping in the trunk of a scrap car in a snowy winter trying not to freeze to death. Really really glad I kept going, and kept taking risks, moving, and changing things until something worked. I have good and days like anyone, but am on average happy now, and trying to enjoy every hour of my life I have left. It can absolutely get better if you decide you want it to be. |
I am burned out rather than sad. I can’t get across that I will struggle to travel because that requires planning and initiative that I cannot functionally sustain, or that my previously quite busy social life is gone because I fail to manage an ordinary day, let alone one that will need me to meet people. These are things I am unable to do.
It ultimately doesn’t matter what I would like to do or could fleetingly imagine doing: within an hour I will have lost focus on it or on the drive to do it. I certainly don’t have sustained aspirations because I can’t focus on them. Most days I definitely have an hour or so where I feel like it would be better if it was my last day, but I get distracted from that too.
Everything I achieve happens in these very short windows of time; sometimes maybe I can spend a couple of hours in any day on one thing if I am lucky, but I may not feel the impetus to return to it the next day.
I am lucky if I complete tasks for others that have purely external impetus or a deadline.
It is not about cutting out more compelling or distracting stimuli; my house is quiet and I can also lose focus by falling asleep if I am too comfortable.
I still don’t want hyperfocus back because hyperfocus did this to me! But it’s difficult to envisage things getting better when I can see they are getting worse.