It’s been a while since I wrote anything (formal). I’ve thought about it for at least a few days now, lots of little things rattling around in my head. (now I’m sure many of them are gone) The original thought was maybe I speak with an LLM about them or something; it’s quite good at acting as a certain sort of mirror or sparing partner. I do this pretty often now actually. This will still likely end up in the hands of one, but I’m writing in a more normal flow… intended audience: the same vague audience I expect on the web. Which… is likely no-one? The rare passerby? I’m not sure. The voice in my head sounds a certain way when I write in this mode though. Aside: I’m resuming this on a second day… my focus is a bit shot. Between watching TV and just this just generally reduced feeling. I have a headache right now, it’s been on for much of the day. I did oh so little work today. Next to nothing and I don’t entirely know why. I moved this from the main garden to here; there are probably a few things that are better suited for this venue. Maybe not, I don’t even really know. Some topics at hand:
- Health
- My sleep is still a bit messed up. It’s still pretty rare to wake up feeling all that good. I feel like I’ve started to eat more than I’d like to again, I’m not sure. I think I will be starting zepbound again. In fact, I’ve ordered it now, it will be here in a few days. Maybe I can punch down to 160 and then work on building some muscle from there. Being thin(er) is just much better than being fat it seems like; I’ve actually gotten compliments. People say nice things. And I don’t totally hate how I look in the mirror. I have to get stronger too though. I feel a lack of capability in that regard too. I want / need arms that look strong and are strong. It ties in to some of the later stuff I mention about dating, but also I have this feeling I can’t afford to be weak. I can’t be weak for my parents, I can’t be weak for a future lover/partner. I don’t want to be embarrassed or incompetent. It might be difficult to gain strength and size while taking a GLP-1 though.
- Agency/Will
- Off and on, but with a trend that is increasing in frequency, I am feeling some loss of agency. Or maybe it’s just a loss of will or motivation or power… I don’t know. I should figure that out. Maybe agency isn’t even the right term, but whatever it is, it contributes to that broadly. I need and want to power to get up and go, to get things done, to flow. I want it on command. I feel, I am in some sense, idling. Where am I making progress? It seems like my options are decreasing not increasing. I should be taking actions that expand that. Things are fairly comfortable materially, that makes it hard to motivate change (or so it seems). This just feels dumb here, I should just be fixing this. But it often just seems like I have to wait for it to strike.
- Money
- I feel, as I have at some point in the past, that I am hemorrhaging money. That’s not quite the case, but it vaguely feels like as much is going out as is coming in. I’m eating out roughly once daily, I’m getting coffee often 2x a day (at 5-8 dollars a latte), I keep getting hit with random costly events (car rock strike, lawyer fee for a red light ticket, broken psu, etc.) and in general I just keep needing other random little things it seems like. Everything seems to be getting more expensive, little by little and I’m not really sure what moving up at work is going to look like. I get my cost of living raise and my usual bonus, but the next rung of the ladder isn’t really something I will get to in the next year or two and would require a directed effort. I don’t really want it either. My parents keep saying I should get a side hustle or something. I don’t want another job and I don’t want to change jobs (even though that is how some people in IT make more money). But I do want to exist where I just don’t have to think about money really. My father keeps talking about retirement, but for the past handful of years, I’ve somewhat assumed I just won’t ever retire really.
- Relationships
- I’ve managed to turn a number of conversations on dating apps (mostly Hinge) into phone numbers and then in the last month just 2 of those into dates and I’ve been ghosted by basically everyone else. Even one of the dates ghosted me, which is like the third in a row I guess. Worse still, none were really all that attractive. It’s deeply demoralizing. And on top of that, it costs money too. If I actually want to get matches, I have to spend money to boost my profile or whatever. The vast majority of women who send me likes are overweight (visibly so). Dates cost money too. Dating apps, like real life, show me that there are tons and tons of attractive women out there and none of them are interested in me. The first fact should make me feel better, but it just doesn’t. I’m sitting at a coffee shop right now and there are two cute baristas and two cute patrons, and there’s nothing to do about it. How am I supposed to not feel like some weird guy working on his laptop? Walking up to a barista and asking for her number out of nowhere just seems like the wrong thing to do, right? Maybe if I came here 10 more times. Or maybe I’m just a coward? And she’s probably like early 20s and I’m 30 and it just makes me feel like I’m not allowed. I don’t know. See Sex II.
- Competency
- I get this feeling that I lack the type of complete competency that you see in movies or on tv. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before somewhere. I’m currently rewatching Better Call Saul and people like Mike (and even Jimmy in many ways) is very capable and competent. How did he get this way? Why do I like this? I know at some point I went down the jack-of-all-trades route (to a degree). Did it cause me to lose out on deep capability? There’s something about the montage or the exact right needle-drop; the actions you see are worthy of the music that accompany them. Does/can that even happen in real life? I have an unfinished draft blog post titled “Worthy of Song” somewhere from ~5 years ago where I am worrying I won’t be worthy in that sense. It’s hard to compare to seeing the master at work or the professional enter a flow state. I’m reminded of what Chris Ramsay says about entering flow as a magician and how things seem to happen in a way that doesn’t even seem probable anymore; like the universe is responding with magic of it’s own (sounds woo, but I’m more open to it than ever). I don’t know if I’ve ever felt anything like that. I also think that something else is contributing to the more recent lack. I think I’ll talk about that elsewhere. Or maybe here, just some ideas: lack of inspiration (at work and home), the wonders of AI (it has become the solve-all tool), vague meaning-crisis vibes in my life that I have to mitigate.
- Mind
- I feel like I can’t focus like I want to either. I can’t seem to get what I want out of any given experience. It’s like it’s all no longer enough. It partially has to do with my more recent issues with the passage of time and feeling like it’s accelerated terribly. Time with family and friends doesn’t seem to last like it used to, I can’t seem to enjoy food as well as I did in the past, free time seems to just slip away. I feel cursed (a little like the pirates in The Curse of the Black Pearl). I have a big fear that this won’t get better; I’m sometimes subtly afraid that it’s all downhill from here. On top of this, I fear my memory is shot. Like I’ve filled it all up previously and now have to delete things to make space and even then recall seems less than ideal. When someone says “what’s your favorite movie” or something like that, I panic because I can’t think of all the movies I’ve seen and thus can’t be sure I’ve got a good list. My instinct is to pull up a tool, a list of movies or something to try to get the recall going. I think I’ve outsourced so much to tools; my recall and cognition generally are certainly affected… but it’s what I wanted but also not. I want to be able to recall everything and accepted at some point that it was going to have to be a cyborg-type relationship. But at the same time, I feel like I’ve lost things. That’s probably not the only cause. Per the quote, is every augmentation an amputation? This all leads to the follow little flow: I love technology, I love the progress it brings. I find that I have transhuman inclinations and tech-optimistic inclinations. Some would argue it’s perhaps a type of faith or something, but I am mainly just hopeful that we will fix a bunch of problems in the future. I want to see the singularity, whatever that is; partially because it seems like a cool thing to be witness (why does being cool matter?) to and partially because of the material effects (massive change, restructuring). I see it [this belief?] materializing in myself in a little way here: It’s well known I have a tendency to want to archive, to want to document, and to want to remember; gathering metrics, data, etc. With this one can uncover strange little connections, lost facts, future-nostalgia, and perhaps some kind of better understanding of something real (gnostic-like even?). And the introduction of AI/LLMs really finally made it clear to me; I have come to realize that I keep taking collections of my own writing and data and patterns and trying to feed them into various LLMs. Why? I think it’s because I want them to “solve” me for me. I want them to understand (to witness, judge?) and provide answers; an impartial, highly knowledgeable system that can fully “know” and understand me in order to… do what? Make me feel better? Heal me? Save me? It sounds a bit religious, yeah? I know plenty of people who would say that and in fact ID the whole thing as a problematic sort of belief structure or something. I don’t think I will tell them about this discovery. I’m not bought into it or anything, it’s just a thing I notice about myself; something I gravitate towards. I want to build systems to better understand (everything really). I want to solve problems. Sometimes I think about LEV though; sometimes it slots in as the same sort of coping mechanism space. Maybe, eventually, my problems will be solved by the it; the big thing. I think some people would call that immanentizing the eschaton or at least put it in that same category.
Quick asides:
- Magic(k) as probability manipulation, not miracle seems interesting.
- I long for some sort of re-enchantment (broadly) and it tends to draw me towards the esoteric.
- I feel stupid writing like this sometimes. Particularly things like Sex/Sex II where I admit things that make me feel so immature.
- My general dread level is lower than it has been, but I have been feeling blips of time anxiety now that half the year has passed.
- Much of the dread seems to have been paved over by the fact that I am concerning myself increasingly with finding a partner.
This was written during the 6th-8th of July, 2026.