Collapse
2026-08-07
Man, taking that kpin yesterday really helped. Although last night, I made the mistake of drinking too much caffeine in the evening. It's a common mistake for me, especially when I am feeling waves of exhaustion and need to push through them. I went to bed a bit late, but I'm feeling alright this morning. Usually, I feel a heaviness in my chest or heart palpitations—that kind of thing—but things are feeling much more mellow. Hopefully, I won't rely too much on the kpin so that I'll still have it for those especially difficult days, but we'll see. As the Lexapro kicks in over these next two weeks, that should help too. It's such a fierce battle going through the cycles of medications; when I was first treating my bipolar disorder several years ago, I easily became despondent when they wouldn't work the way I thought they would. It's been a good lesson, though—learning not to trust my own judgment and not to be disappointed when things don't work out the way I intend them to.
I've become much better at managing my expectations, namely any sense of greater ambition. Being humbled by the world and my own conditions has been a weird blessing, something that only comes to pass once one has been through the challenges of getting older. I'm glad that I can lean on certain wisdom and experience gained in managing my health; even when things get bad again, it'll just be more of the usual—an odd vocation, it seems. But as I've grown in this project, I've come to see its importance. It's not one that necessarily gives me any substantial material benefit, and that's such a good thing to me. The clear dearth of honest-to-God writing is sad, especially because I see so many other people living in hiding—whether it be from the uncomfortable truths of modernity or their own position in the never-ceasing engines of sin we all find ourselves churning in. I'm glad to have this space to express those things, and I'm glad to have the courage and the wherewithal to express a certain median truth that people don't seem to find much of.
I've seen some of my friends in their Big Social Media algorithms get recommended content made by those suffering from conditions similar to mine, albeit with much less lucidity. Schizotok, Schizogram, or even the fabled /x/ board on you-know-where—it shows a certain gritty reality that is packaged for shock, turning all of its viewers into jeering and apathetic voyeurs. I don't know—I think when we get so desensitized by that kind of stuff, it makes us forget to take those personal inventories, or even worse, forget our own sense of agency as we slog our way through the digestive tract of that fierce and never-ending hydra. Collective action problems suck, don't they?
Yesterday evening, I was thinking about collapse again, as one does. Particularly, I was thinking yet again about how these AI technologies are going to become integral functions in mission-critical infrastructure. They are such fragile programs, and since they can operate at incomprehensible speeds, it'll cause so much havoc if they fail. Whether it be through an attack from a nation-state—or more likely, the incompetence of the maintainers of this infrastructure—it'll cause such instant and irreversible damage that entire countries will fall. The shakeup would be so catastrophic and severe that it would lead to a completely new world order. I mean, if all those structures fail at the same time, it'll be unlike anything we've ever seen: banking systems not working, hospitals unable to treat patients, the raiding and looting of stores, all communication systems completely down. Most of us have become so dependent on these things that we can't even imagine life without them, and I know that if anything like that were to actually come to fruition, I'd personally be toast. My family might be toast. My life would be burnt to a crisp.
Maybe a new one would begin, but it's tough to think about the fallout of that—who would survive, how things would get rebuilt, the new order of society and the world. It makes me hope that it never happens, but the fact that it's a real possibility is a horrifying proposition. In that Palantir Manifesto, Karp said that we are in that transition from the Nuclear Age to the AI Age, and seeing how we did in the former era, I have a bit more confidence in people. There will be small-scale failures, most certainly, but I don't think it'll be at that core systemic level I just finished espousing. No, it'll be just another case of Nothing Ever Happens, and that's fine. In that, we are safe. There's no need to move and shake things so much, and I hope to spend as much time appreciating the beauty of mundanity as I can. All the anxiety, all the trouble—it doesn't mean anything, really.
He won't give us more than we can handle.
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