With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?
I know AI as an honest utility is itself a lie to some extent, but this only aids my argument further. People’s career struggles are panning out to be valueless because of a nothing-fad that no one could have predicted.
The best reason to try is not based on the chance of success.
The best reason to try is that it hurts less than doing nothing.
When you’re active, life hurts less. This is the most rational reason I have found, in my 40 years of searching, for getting out of bed in the morning.
Finding motivation is a hard problem for me. The most consistent source I’ve found is the understanding that giving up does not bring relief. It brings hell.
How do you avoid the feeling of superficiality? That’s what I struggle with most. It just doesn’t really seem to matter.
I lower my sights. My plan has been to orient myself to the highest good I can conceive of. For years, for me, that was “Help humanity survive WW3”.
But then I realized the practice is different. The highest good that I can conceive of is actually much lower, and it’s like “I have $5k buffer and am developing friendships with my neighbors”.
I realized that if I couldn’t visualize the scenario, concretely, then it was beyond “the highest good I can conceive of”.
So when I lower my sights to something my imagination can actually see, it’s at least meaningful enough to get me moving. It’s like the gravitational field strength equation: a smaller mass can have more gravitational effect just by being closer. That’s why we fall toward Earth and not toward the Sun, which is far bigger. Earth’s gravity is dominant because it’s close.
For me, the stuff I can visualize is closer than the stuff I can just say.
Also, the feeling of superficiality hurts less than the feeling of having given up. So even if I keep moving and it feels fake, that still hurts less than sitting there having given up.
This resonates well with me. However, still struggling with the last sentence. I can’t ignore how superficial life has become for me. A therapist told me to consider my value for simply existing. There are days when I’m able to do that, but many in which nihilism takes over.
Stop doom scrolling for one.
Apathy is death