Something Like Normal
It's a strange time to be a human. Then again, it's been a strange time for the last ten years, give or take. At some point strange becomes normal, and yet this will never feel normal.
I am glad that the summer is over. I wandered through it in a hot daze. It lasted both a thousand years and two weeks and either way I found myself on the other side of it disoriented and raw.
Fall is typically my favorite season, and as it's progressed, I've tried to... fall back into the comfort of it - with mixed success. After so much going on for me, and for the world, in the last few years, I find myself wishing things would just feel something like normal again. But they won't, and they don't. As soon as things start to settle, just as the flames die down, the ground shifts again and the wind picks up, whether for me in my life, or the world, in ours.
One of the latest and more destabilizing shifts for me has been the ("inevitable") roll out of mandatory AI usage at my day job. I realized pretty quickly that my personal, staunchly aggressive anti-AI stance just cannot coexist in this space. Not in a, "if I actually said how I feel, I'd get fired" way - though if I did, I would. But more like, "if I have to keep living this double life, keep swallowing this burning hatred while nodding and smiling through these "trainings" and meetings, I'll die. Or crack up."
Leaving my job is not an option. And frankly no one will be free from this conflict for long. So I had to find a way to allow myself to engage with this technology without carrying a festering coal of hate and self-loathing in my belly. I had to accept that as important as being against AI was to me, supporting my family was more important. I had to accept that selling out was, to some degree, necessary, and that while I didn't create this situation, I am tasked with navigating it with more nuance than hatred alone often affords.
I told my partner once that living in this modern world (under capitalism, specifically) requires you to shave off pieces of your heart just to survive, and the trick is, the best we can do really, is to try and shave off the smallest possible piece any given time. It upset her, and rightfully so. But as time marches on, I only see more reasons why it's true.
And yet bills need to be paid. Kitties need to be fed. And another thing I've been forced to accept is that I am not willing to sacrifice the privilege I do have - and the security - for this particular ideology. Judge me for that. I know I do.
I'm learning to accept a lot nowadays.
I will not change the world by losing my job because I'm forced to work with Claude. I will only change my world and my family's world, for the worse. I can continue to live my own life as free from AI has humanly possible. I can continue to support human thought and art. I can continue to resist the off-loading of critical thought to a third party. But I can also continue to pay my mortgage and have health insurance.
I'm not asking for forgiveness or even understanding. I'm not asking for anything. You are here reading this, and I'm not even asking for that. I'm just leaving a mark on the wall, so that someday, someone might see what now was like. This is now. This is what now demands of the people living in it. Some rise to the occasion. Others don't. I'm honestly not sure which I am.
This all sounds bleak, and it is. But it's also not — or at least the bleakness is not the whole picture. And lifting my eyes to the rest of the scene around me is becoming increasingly important, and more necessary. And...harder to do. But not impossible.
For one thing, being forced to confront AI at work has lit something of a fire under me to bring more into the world through human creativity and hands-on artistic labor. It's re-radicalized my passion for artisan, free-range, hand-crafted websites. It's rekindled my love for a not-quite bygone era of the Internet, when interesting people made weird little websites with nothing but passion and HTML, and maybe some CSS if they were feeling fancy. In a fit of rage-fueled productivity, late this summer I remade my homepage - or at least got about 90% of the way through it before the noxious cocktail of fatigue from living in this modern world, and ADHD got the better of me. But I'm back now, working to finish the project.
It feels good to make something, especially now, when the creative act itself is seen as a chore to be off-loaded to a capitalism-controlled algorithm. It is frustrating I've been so inconsistent now, and all my life really, and I wish it didn't take something as disheartening and disorienting as the rise of modern AI to get me off my ass even for a little while. But I have realized I don't really have the energy now to admonish myself. I don't have the energy to psych myself up any more either. So many times I've made whole elaborate projects to guide me into being the person I wanted to be. They've all failed. I can only walk through that graveyard so many times.
I will make things when I can. That's the promise I've made to myself. Well, half of it. The other half is, "and when I can't, I'll take care of myself, until I can again." That will be enough. It has to be. I have had to shave off a piece of my heart. But the best that I can do, the real, actual best, is to grow my heart even bigger in response. Creating things grows my heart. Taking care of my family grows my heart. You grow my heart, whoever you are reading this. You are here with me, and that is worth something. Worth everything.
There is no normal. There is only this, there is only now.
Onward.