So it’s been a long time since I sat in silence and made a blog post in the middle of the day. Maybe even years. Hard to say.
Thing is, there are so many forces mitigating against posting on your own blog these days. Or at least my own blog. As in:
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I’m a parent with two teens == busy, busy life
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Work wants 60+ hours a week from me and mostly gets it
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Almost any platform you use for anything has some sort of chat, commenting, or reviews that eats what you have to say about many things in life
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Now there’s also AI, with which you end up getting conversational despite yourself
So you don’t really have time to breathe, and then the things you think about your stuff go on Amazon reviews and the things you think about politics go on X or YouTube, and the questions you have and reflections you have are accidentally pounded out into GPT, or Claude, or Gemini, or OpenClaw on local inference (oh yes, I “have” all of the above) because you’re co-working with these things and then it’s like chatting with a co-worker.
And so, at the end of the day, when you finally get a second, your brain is glazed over and inaccessible on the one hand but that’s sort of inconsequential because on the other hand, it’s basically empty.
I don’t exactly know what’s different about today. I think I’m just getting older and grumpier and some of this stuff is starting to break down because I begin to feel like I (and many others) have been fully “virtualized” and I don’t like that. I think the closer you get to your own mortality, the less you like the idea of “virtual you.”
I mean, dead is dead, but data is certainly more dead than, say, a corpse. A corpse at least lays there for a few years. Your immortal soul, if such exists, is eternal. Your physical possessions are good for decades, or even generations in some cases, as long as your offspring see fit to continue to pass them down.
But virtual stuff? Made of bits? Anyone who has worked in software, and then looked back at the last five years of work and realized that unlike many others they’re not building a “body of work” and in fact the things that they have built usually only live for 3-6 months before zapping back out of existence again, understand that a “virtual you” exists in the same way that ClarisWorks or Netscape or the Metaverse exist, which is to say, not at all.
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Meanwhile, on the point of local inference, the weird thing is that now that I have it set up and fully deployed and working well and robustly configured as a systemctl service pointing to LiteLLM as a fellow systemctl service with watchdogging and dashboarding and blah, blah, blah and calling tools and doing research and writing code, I don’t feel like I want to use it for anything.
I have this weird impulse to maybe just put all of it to bed and go outside and make three-legged stools.
I’d love to say that at least the experience was worth something, as in maybe it’s a business model or a useful skill to go and build people out local inference machines with a bunch of stacked GPU cards on PCI-E X16 in Linux with some sort of repeatable deployment package, only despite claims of “shortages” and “supply chain trouble” over the last couple of years the channel is already absolutely full of purpose-built local inference computers that are effectively the next generation of PCs and that already make my local setup with a big fat case and three GPU cards just to get to 76GB VRAM look pretty ridiculous. Hello, Strix Halo and Mac Studio.
Once upon a time I’d have been excited about all of this but now as a person with student loans that I will not pay off within my lifetime who is in the process of prepping to leave SAVE, it all just seems dumb.
The social contract was never really that great, but now it’s pretty much a scam. And, as time has gone on, we’ve gone to this kind of post-linguistic-turn version of The Matrix in which we’re all farmed, yes, but we’re actually being farmed without compensation or freedom for our words, because it is words that power the economy for the billionaires.
But I digress.
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The other thing worth mentioning is that we’re all lonely out here. Funny thing. I have all these friends in my age group, fellow Generation Xers, who I sometimes talk with.
With a single exception, we are all single, we all don’t/won’t date each other, we all regret just how disconnected and isolated everyone has become, how hard it is to make friends, how hard it is to find significant others, and how easy it is in the age of endless consumer life+self customization to arrive at the point at which you basically can’t really get along with other people as anything other than utilities anyway, in the same way that we are utilities for the billionaires.
If we had any guts, we’d all do what the hippies did and carry out the equivalent of a “turn on, tune in, drop out” move, only we apparently don’t have the guts so we all call our friends and talk about how we don’t have any friends with them and bemoan the fact that there’s no one to date and the fact that you can’t really date anyway because it just makes you hate people and realize how much you’re destined to be alone.
This is not the natural state of things. I don’t know whether it’s unique to Generation X, but I think not. From everything I hear, other generations have their versions of the same thing, even if it’s mostly not identical.
People say that social media and technology and wealth inequality have broken the social contract, but in fact what they have broken is us; the social contract’s failure is collateral damage farther down the line, as what a bunch of broken us voted for.
To fix us we would have to kill off half of tech and most of modern convenience and now of course AI, and lose the activist ethos that has basically destroyed everyone and everything, and just quit and be normal and talk to each other like people.
But fucking what?
Be normal and talk to each other like people?
No fucking way, we’d rather die.
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Such is life in 2026. So instead, we’ll still die, but we’ll just do it alone. We’ll only talk to our friends when it doesn’t matter. We’ll only date people so long as we don’t care about them. We’ll only socialize so long as it’s with strangers, around banal, meme-land topics. And we’ll only vote for candidates we don’t respect.
Because this is America, and because we’re all modern, well-educated people.