I’m working my way through all the Studio Ghibli back catalogue and it’s amazing. Until about a year or two ago I had only seen Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. I can’t say enough positive things about all of these movies.

Is there more anime like this? I know Studio Ghibli is probably the pinnacle, but surely there is other anime out there that is attempting to be Ghibli-esque.

I don’t feel like I have any projects right now. Nothing to work toward. I see possibilities but none of them motivate me.

The thing is I’m doing ok in the routine day-to-day stuff, I go to work (and recently got a new job) and maintain an active social life, but I don’t feel I’m working toward anything. It’s all so passive.

I don’t know how to get out of this rut…

In many ways, my life is going better now than it ever has in some objective sense. I have more and closer IRL friendships than I ever have, I have social plans on most days now, I recently accepted an offer for a new job with a 50% raise that will involve more interesting work, I have my own place and am financially independent, I’ve been exercising regularly for the first time in my life and have lost 20 pounds, and I have significantly reduced my social anxiety. 

And yet, I often feel a lack of meaning in my life. Everything feels good in the moment, but when I come home and I’m alone I often feel this deep emptiness. Occasionally I break down crying when I’m alone. Everything feels transient, and I feel like I lack purpose. I go to work to make money to pay rent so I can engage in hobbies with friends and then do the same thing over and over until I die. 

I suppose the one area where my life is (arguably) worse is my romantic life. I broke with with my long term partner nine months ago. It was mutual and really was necessary, but it was deeply sad. I invested so much in that relationship, it really was where I found most of my meaning in life, and yet I feel like what I got in return was a series of experiences that left me feel neglected, misunderstood, or even traumatized. My partner was *not* abusive, rather she had real mental health problems that caused her to not always be the best partner to me. For example, withdrawing when I was upset or trying to assert a need, or having depression so bad I had to essentially be her emotional caretaker for years. 

But I feel like a breakup might lead to sadness or anger, but not a sense of meaninglessness. And not for so long, and not for so many things outside of dating and relationships. 

I’m not suicidal or anything, but I don’t know where to go from here. I’d rather be alive and have a meaningless existence than not alive, but that’s a low bar. 

And again, the bizarre thing is I’m doing everything right, and I am having lots of positive experiences. But they don’t add up to a sense of purpose or meaning. 

I’ve looked into getting involved in volunteering, religion, and effective altruism, but the prospect of doing so doesn’t make me feel any different. I just feel indifference to them, a deeply felt knowing that they’ll disappoint.

I’ve also looked into new hobbies, but it’s the same feeling every time.

I feel like I invested so much in my former relationship and I don’t have that kind of meaningful emotional investment left in me anymore.

I have been feeling strong mixed feelings about generative AI recently. No, that’s not right, I’ve been feeling negatively about it in two different ways which are at least partially in tension.

One of those feelings is a strong sense of skepticism. Maybe I’m just a dumb newb AI user, but I have not been able to replicate many of the supposedly impressive and useful results these AIs produce in demos. I suspect there’s a lot of cherrypicking going on, as well as a shallow conflation between superficial impressiveness and actual utility. 

I also feel that there’s a real lack of intelligence underlying these models which only becomes apparent the more you play with them. At least for me, the first few interactions feel almost magical, but the more I interact with them the more I start to sense that they’re bullshitting stochastic parrots. Whatever they are, it is simultaneously unnerving, lacking in some fundamental properties of intelligence, and not obviously super useful. I’ve felt it really hard to get excited about these products once I interact with them, and indeed I find them almost boring now.

And what’s worse is I’m seeing this huge rush in the tech industry to embrace generative AI in a way that is reminiscent of the crypto boom to me. The rhetoric, the hype, the capital, the coverage, it’s making me feel so skeptical.

The other negative feeling is one of dread. I worry about people outsourcing thought to these models. I worry about the internet being flooded with AI generated content. I worry that the role for human beings in the creation of art and media will becoming more and more narrow over time. 

Is the future really that the average person will be reduced to a passive consumer of AI-generated art in their free time while working unfulfilling blue collar or service jobs for a living while being ruled over by a small group of AI companies, tech capitalists, and AI engineers? 

I sometimes see the seeds of AI destroying the human spirit. All the worst things about modern society, but more so. Much more so. 

While these can both be true, there is a tension here. If generative AI is mostly hype, than those doomerist ideas seem less likely, and visa versa.

Either way, both lead me to feel a sense of emerging meaninglessness around me. 

Coming back to Tumblr, the discourse here is so radically different than on Twitter or among people I know IRL. It’s truly wild. I think in hindsight my spending so much time here gave me a very distorted view about what society or people in general, or even just young educated people, thought and believed.