Tag: writing

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A Life Deserving of What?

Back when I first started reading, like really really reading and getting into the whole personal development world, I read something about “become deserving of the life you want.” At this time in my life, I thought this could be extrapolated out to just about anything. The idea being that you prepare yourself and when the opportunity arises, you’ll be ready for it and seize the moment. Similar blurbs are things about greatness favors the prepared.

The biggest mistake I’ve made was extrapolating this theory out to what type of relationship I wanted, as in, I would imagine my ideal woman and then think about what type of man I should be to “deserve” her. For about a year, this was my north star – I’m ashamed that I let this happen – I was fully motivated to become someone for someone else who didn’t even exist. How shallow. Well, to be fair it’s not all that bad since my ideal woman could be said to be a reflection of my ideal self. But you get the point, I should be thinking first about my ideal self.

How I came to realize the errors of my ways was when I watched the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty after it was recommended by a few of my friends. I thought the premise was greatly inspiring – a boring office-bound man breaks out and explores the world on an adventure. Then I thought more about the premise – a man likes a woman, fantasizes about being interesting to her, and then begins to take risks/adventure with her in mind (they didn’t get together until the end of it all and she hardly knew him until the end). Sorry for the spoilers. This general premise is prevalent in a lot of movies. If you don’t pay attention, you will passively accept this. I think it’s one of the worst ideas to be so subtly imbued. The idea of the one-sided pursuit, being motivated by someone who may not know you exist, putting in effort before you even truly know someone all for the chance of a fade-to-black happily ever after.

As a caveat: putting in effort to build a relationship is necessary, no doubt about it. But that effort should be mutually founded after both people agree to build the relationship together.

If you’re going to break out of your comfort zone, do it for yourself. Do what you’re interested in, do what excites you. Don’t think about some real or imaginary person and have your life decisions, energy, and money, all based on impressing them. I’ve heard so many stories of people learning a language or a skill just to get closer to someone else without knowing if that person is interested in them before embarking. Then, when it doesn’t work out, they complain as if they deserved the person. That they were entitled. You’ll see in movies the man works hard to get the woman to fall in love, or he likes her a lot and feels a sense of entitlement to her reciprocation, if only he worked hard enough or became the man she deserves. This is also the whole premise of The Phantom of the Opera, by the way (sorry, spoilers). In the end, the lesson learned is that you should be true to yourself and your interests because we live with ourselves everyday. If you like someone, you should not change to become more to their liking, and especially not before they even know you and have expressed interest.

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The Perspective Of Meaning

If you consider anything from a perspective of a time distance enough for it to not have any meaning, well then it won’t have any meaning. It’s a trueism often spoken in other ways such as “nothing matters anyway, we’re all gonna die” and the like. What I never hear anyone talk about is the opposite – instead of going further and further out into time until we reach the heat death of the universe, starting from there and coming closer and closer to the present moment until there is a difference / meaning.

Almost everything is forgotten or disappears over time. After a few generations, you will be an ancestor whose genetics and traits are all but gone along with any memory of you. With this perspective, it feels like there’s no point in trying hard or anything. It’s almost a feeling of hopelessness or whatever German word exists for realizing how little control & effect we have over most of our life and environment. It feels like the world wouldn’t really be different without me.

All this is a matter of perspective. The above is the wrong perspective. It’s just so easy to believe that the world will continue on and be unaffected by our living or dying that we don’t stop to question why it’s worth thinking this way. Not debating how true it is and with what caveats, but rather why do we let this be our default perspective? The right perspective is that everything does matter. Because we exist now and there is nothing more worth considering. If I can make someone happy now, help someone now, be valuable now, well, this is the only time it matters. How long lasting are the effects of when I went to Africa for a mission trip? Did I impact all those kids in a positive way that will ripple through time? Maybe or maybe not. But that’s not what’s important. What I would rather focus on is that in those very moments of helping is where the impact was. It’s not my concern if they remember me today or tell their kids about me in 10 years. In the moments I had to help, I did and it was significant.

For climate change and other things like that, it’s very important to consider our actions in this moment as they relate to the future. But other than that, my argument is that it’s pointless and maybe even harmful to thing too far out into the future. We will all be forgotten and lost in time. But that never was and never will be the point. The point of it all is what we do now. Not to be remembered, but to be.

PS instead of thinking whether or not something will “matter” in 10 years, ask if it will matter tomorrow, in the next hour, in the next month.

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Is Journalism Being Overtaken By AI?

I was thinking the other day about how we’ve all been hearing artificial intelligence (AI) taking over jobs such as writing, journalism, and such. First, we should all take note that AI is a very broad and encompassing term like animal, food, or sport. We’re of course talking about generative pre-trained transformers as large language models (such as chat GPT). What I came to realize though is that at least one person needs to actually report on an event. When we ask AI to summarize the news, it skips the need for people to visit a site or video and so then we skip over any ads that generate income for the news company. That part is what kills the jobs I suppose. I figure we’ll need to find a new money stream that only allows AI models to ingest news written by people if they pay. Something like that.

The main point of my thought is that although AI can do the writing, it can’t really do the seeing and interpreting (especially think about Jane Goodall – not journalism but a similar-ish concept of being in the field and reporting/researching about it). Maybe one day we’ll just have AI connected to a bunch of cameras and send out news drones where an AI model writes the news about what it sees. I don’t think this will happen. Drones cost money and so does using AI, it’s probably not cheaper than a human and also just not very fit for the complex job of going out and then writing about what happened in a news format. Humans can make mistakes for sure, so maybe AI could help create a transcript from a video a journalist took so that they don’t misquote.

I’m trying to learn as much as I can about AI in general. With my job being in the industry and my degree as electrical engineering, I’m well set up to dig into this and gain an understanding. So far after reading a lot of books, going through courses of the math and how AI models are actually built (from scratch), I can confidently say that I have no idea about 99% of AI things. Suffice to say, this is a topic where there are plenty and too many armchair experts. I like to think in terms of application, like a tool. I still can’t wrap my head around how and in what ways different AI models are and are not a tool (and if not a tool, then what?). In some regards, yes, I do understand, but in many more ways I have yet to grasp it. A lot of focus is on what we are most familiar with, such as the large language models. They are limited by language. I wonder about the other AI models such as the one that figured out protein folds. What does that look like? How do we expand that and in what ways does it get applied and really help out research, science, and humans?

We are in for a ride!