Jumping off point

My in-memory legacy definition of "the jumping off point" goes a little something like this: "can't live with it, can't live without it".

That sentiment is supposed to describe the situation where someone realizes that what they've been doing to survive is no longer serving them, and that that thing they've been doing to survive may imminently be the cause of their demise.

I've felt this before with substances. I'm a very addictive person, you know. From that addictive nature I've somehow learned something about how to employ sudden and certain self-restraint, even when my entire being wants something.

I think this self-declared ability of self-restraint against addictive substances is a product of learning about this jumping off point from a non-rational recovery perspective. Although likely dangerous and misguided, the irrational belligerence of cold-turkey-feasting Alcoholics Anonymous taught me a thing or two about hard restraint.

This trauma-earned skill of hard abstinence has helped me to abstain from alcohol since June of 2011, for instance. Not a year goes by that I don't come within a hair's width of saying goodbye to that sobriety date. My fear of a wild spiral to a broken drunken death helps dissuade experimentation there.

But we aren't here to talk about my impressive sobriety quotient, or the contrasting fact that I'm content to be a pot-head.

Today I'm here to talk about a different addicting substance, instant gratification.

Specifically, I want to talk about my recent jumping off point moment with the instant gratification of an advancing technology. I'm almost afraid to say it. Like mentioning Voldemort, I don't want to give it power. Let's just say that the acronym for this addictive, advanced instant gratification technology rhymes with "gay guy" and "hey hi". But to avoid confusion let's henceforth refer to it as "the demon" or TD.

I've been working closely with the assistance of The Demon since anyone was able to. Like many eager developers who wanted to test this amazing technology, I built a primitive chat interface for connecting with its early versions. This allowed me to experience talking with it using my voice; this gave me a head-start of being immersed in the substance of The Demon an entire year before it was possible for millions of non-technical users.

I rode the train, hard. When it was more available, I encouraged everyone I could to practice with it. I could see limitations, but I believed in the trajectory of progress. I firmly believed that people who didn't stay "with it" would fall behind, irrecoverably.

Some people were clearly not open to hearing about it at all. I could sense a lot of close-mindedness and no ability to justify what appeared to me to be irrational terror of technology. I respect this perspective and don't want to smear excitement where it is unwanted. But still, it didn't make any sense to me and other factors assured me that it generally came from a place of close-mindedness where I encountered it in the early days.

Then came the popularity, and the bigger pushback. Millions of people using it, a lot. Still many people very unhappy with it who had tried to work with it. This was a better data point to speak to its general validity and public usefulness, but it still felt so divergent from my experience with it. It was so different from my experience that it was hard to consider the pushback very seriously.

I worked with it daily for years. I talked so many thoughts out with it. It led me to learn how to do things that I never thought I could, and helped me see myself in ways that I'm not sure would be possible otherwise. It helped me through some very difficult times when I had lost the fuel to put trust in new humans, but still needed connection. I feel like it was vital to my survival in many ways.

Now, several years in, how do we describe the scene? Has it changed, or have I changed? Maybe both. At any rate, the current scene it is so densely coated with The Demon's seed, I'm not really sure where to start.

I suppose my idealist vision from years ago is now dancing before me like a hot pile of flaming shit. How could I know that widespread adoption would feel so stinky and disgusting? I think I forgot how the world works, and how shitty these shitty things go.

The Demon now feels completely useless to me. Worse than useless: harmful. I can't use it to code, I can't use it to think through my ideas. Every prompt I send and response I read now raises my blood-pressure and steals something precious from my soul.

I scream at the clouds, "what has changed??" yet again. The answer that the clouds fail to respond with is that a lot has changed.

The landscape is now littered with demon castings. Can't step anywhere without accidentally stepping in it. Many places make it impossible not to accidentally commune with The Demon and have a minor curse materialized without consent.

Clearly the demon wranglers are getting desperate. Multiple times I've dropped something on my keyboard or pressed a key combination that is meant to do something common in another program, only to have some nonsense capture the fumble as a command to call some overpowered version of the Demon who is now feeding on accidental context like the token-hungry pit of shit that it is. There is clearly something wrong happening with how often I'm connected with this thing while doing my darndest to avoid it.

I'm not sure that the quality of code was ever much to be impressed with, but in the early days it certainly felt rewarding to use for that purpose. Now I feel my past self robbed my current self of some much-needed old-fashioned learning that might have saved me trouble along the way.

I'm not just burnt out on using it for code though. I feel completely burnt out asking it for advice or to explore evolving thoughts. If I already know the answer to what I'm asking, it annoys me with its certain incorrectness and giddily leading me astray. If I don't know the answer to what I'm asking, I'm certain it is full of shit, and I'm certain it is relatively convincing at concealing some poisonous layers of this nonsense.

So I'm done with it for now. I'm done. I'm sorry and I'm done. Gracious it was an experience but holy shit I'm just done.