Confessions of a Venture Capitalist
Yearning for the old world while anxiously anticipating the new one
Like never before, I now live with almost constant existential questions about my own identity, and increasingly, broader questions about our identity as humans.
I know how delulu it sounds but nowadays, I often wonder if I shouldn’t simply enjoy some peace and quiet in the countryside, far away from all the madness, during what may be our last years on earth, at least as we know it. Before you jump to conclusions: I am not an AI doomer. I don’t know whether AI will kill us all or bring about utopia for everyone. I believe most likely neither, but rather something in the messy middle between both extremes. Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that something of immense magnitude will change soon, is in fact already changing. It’s like there‘s a fuzzy force around me. I feel it tugging at my navel, gently, but the sensation is becoming more pronounced over time and I don’t quite know where it will lead me.
Am I suffering change fatigue? Am I simply a closeted Conservative and need to come to terms with that? Maybe. But I generally like change, because change means progress. I like progress because people like me have massively benefited from progress over the past decades. At the same time, I love the world as it is right now. Or as it was when I grew up? I realise how selfish this is because the world as it is right now has served me. It has raised me. I’m familiar with it, I look around me and I feel home. And even though I am generally very pro-tech excited about a lot of the technological breakthroughs we are witnessing, I am really beginning to struggle with the rate of change. I love the smell of old books, newspapers, and old movies. For lack of a better word, I love the smell of the old world. I like the feeling of not looking at my phone for prolonged periods of time, drinking a glass of wine in a bar and watching a movie with friends. But I notice how I am less and less able to do any of those things. My phone has long become an extension of me, one without which I feel nervous and lonely, one which always plays some role, no matter how enjoyable the real-world experience I am currently in. It is my constant pacemaker. Highly effective and delightful AI experiences are adding to this struggle.
Unlike younger generations, I still vaguely remember my old self, the one pre-smartphone, her nose buried deep in books, and lost in slow conversation with friends for hours and hours. I miss her. I also miss her because the world felt simpler, and more stable then.
Increasingly, things around me feel like a layer cake with different flavours, so many that I can’t distinctly taste any single one of them anymore. But the more I chew on it, the more the whole thing tastes kind of like cherry. And then I sit there, chewing and wondering if I actually like cherry or if it wasn’t actually a strawberry and cream cake I wanted to bake. But I have taken the first few bites and the sweet and sour cherry leaves a tingling feeling in my mouth, so I might just as well eat the whole damn thing. Cherry is a weird analogy for AI, but I live in the countryside and not in San Francisco, so cut me some slack.
There is much talk about an AI bubble, a massively overhyped technology, circular Ponzi-scheme deals between the biggest companies and AI agents that mostly aren’t that useful yet. I know many people are rubbing their hands just waiting for Nvidia to catch a cold and the entire stock market to get hospitalised for it. As an investor, I have only lived through the boom and bust during the Covid years, and the current market certainly reminds me of those times. But at the same time, I instinctively feel that this is only the beginning of something profound and I struggle, like maybe never before, to unite my rational (it’s overhyped) brain and my instinctive brain (it’s underhyped). Tell me, what exactly is the right amount of hype for something that may potentially be species-altering?
And so it happens that more and more often, I have weird experiences that both make me exited about the increasingly transformative force of AI technology, while at the same time reinforcing my human instinct to somehow escape it. It’s like my old self is looking at me through a foggy window, and I’m not quite sure if she is waving at me in encouragement, or waving at me in alarm.
Great read Judith - resonates strongly with me as a VC as well. I see the way information is now structured (high on emotional stimulus, low on factual) and delivered (short-form, visual-first) as a fundamental driver of this overload. For me, the antidote has been curating a smaller set of reliable, factual, and state-of-the-art sources - making input more efficient and leaving space for actual thinking. Balancing high-quality intake with offline processing feels essential in a job that depends on pattern recognition, not just reaction speed.
reading this was such a pleasure just now - reminds me of old-internet melancholy. it’s reflective, diaristic, slightly self-mocking but earnest underneath :)
i relate to what you’re feeling, and i think, this is the very condition of being alive in a moment of tectonic change. every generation likes to believe its anxiety is unique, but ours may be the first to watch its own world morph in real time, not over centuries but in software updates.
i think millennials sit on the fault line of this ongoing tech change; we remember that dial up tone, the weight of such heavy books, pre-streaming waiting for new episodes/movies that won’t reach DVD til a year or two later. yet we now live through glass, phones, screens, algos, and define it connection. there’s always a quiet grief that comes with progress. we’ve gained convenience but lost friction, and with it a certain texture of life.
perhaps we’re yet another part of humanity’s shift: the industrial revolution uprooted communities, the printing press unsettled empires, the enlightenment dismantled certainty itself. but there’s something more intimate about what’s happening now. tech/ai no longer just changes what we do; it’s continuously affecting brain development (for the good or bad) of young children (and adults) who’ve easy access just ask gpt if they can spit out a 5,000 word essay on a specific literature. and the new generation miss out on this friction; a writers block, sitting down for hours on how to structure one’s writing, tonality, etc. then bam, they have it in 30 seconds. i suppose this can equate to using the abacus vs calculator, in some way.
and maybe that friction you write about hits harder for those of us who work in tech and investing - we’re trained to spot the next big shift before it becomes obvious, to lean into the chaos, to build conviction early (atop tech, also politics and a tweet or two from POTUS that largely moves the market) it’s exhilarating, but it also pulls us deeper into the current. so we end up craving its opposite: the quiet, the countryside, the space to breathe.
your write up shows you’re simply awake. that strange ache you feel, the sense of missing your old self, is what it means to live in the hinge between eras. it’s a good nudge to remind ourselves being human is still about consciousness, absurdity, tenderness, and taste.
the world will change again, as it always has. but if we can hold on to this small refusal to be automated out of our own minds, we’ll be just fine. still gloriously, maddeningly human :)