Disillusion
What do you do when you realize your dreams won't ever be realized?
Early spring of 2023, a creeping and winding thought that I had kept in the background for years finally pierced through my adaptive frameworks, suddenly obliterating my mental frontline, so to speak. A cutesy little video from an old anime was, strangely, the final straw. And there it was, a spiral of thoughts all leading to the same conclusion: your dreams will not come true. For the first time in years, I was hit with a panic attack. This one left a lingering cloud of dread and anxiety over me, and the spiral of thoughts would not cease. Everything you dream of will not be realized; it is unreality, and you cannot achieve it. For weeks I suffered through this pattern, crying more than I had in my whole life put together before that point. This was accompanied by a rapid onset of misanthropy; a caustic feeling that people were all just wasting their lives on pointless things and that I wanted nothing to do with humanity at large. And just as quickly as my emotional response to the realization had started, I descended into a period of deep numbness. The feelings went away and were replaced with… nothing. I was at peace, but it felt empty; I didn’t feel much at all. Nothing I had cared about before mattered anymore. All of my routines came to a halt; I listened to nothing, I watched nothing, I read nothing. All of my goals fell to the wayside. A new thought then emerged: maybe you’re just losing it, maybe sanity is just over for you, maybe there is solace in being somewhat crazy. If I was disillusioned with reality, I may as well invest in unreality. I threw myself into a singular project: LLMs. Despite feeling a fear and dread of reading, watching, or hearing of fictional worlds, I somehow pressed forward with this strange project to interact with fictional entities. My particular focus was the usage and development of frontend services by which one can interact with large language models as they take on the visage of some specified character; roleplaying. 2023 marked the start of a large uptick in LLM capability, and you could create quite a convincing simulacrum with little more than some character descriptions and example conversations.`