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 :)
Feels familiar. I feel like the root cause may be a dopamine imbalance. Phones just fuel this imbalance more and more, and there's never really a break from it. Our modern diet (food - eh sugar?) also feeds into that. So we're constantly in a state of wanting to feed our dopamine system with more inputs. In the end, I also feel like it's hard to make sense of your own feelings and the changes in your environment when your brain is constantly distracted.
Judith, would love to ponder about this with you because I’ve been thinking about it too although from a legal perspective - what does human dignity mean in the world we’re progressing toward? I’m not a doomer myself but would agree that the signs are there.
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 :)
❤️💯
Feels familiar. I feel like the root cause may be a dopamine imbalance. Phones just fuel this imbalance more and more, and there's never really a break from it. Our modern diet (food - eh sugar?) also feeds into that. So we're constantly in a state of wanting to feed our dopamine system with more inputs. In the end, I also feel like it's hard to make sense of your own feelings and the changes in your environment when your brain is constantly distracted.
Judith, would love to ponder about this with you because I’ve been thinking about it too although from a legal perspective - what does human dignity mean in the world we’re progressing toward? I’m not a doomer myself but would agree that the signs are there.
Judith, ich werde wohl immer mehr zum Fan-Boy 😉. Du hast einen tollen Schreibstil und ich freue mich immer sehr über deine Beiträge.
Ich habe zwar keine Ahnung wie Du das bei Deinen vollen Tagen hinbekommst, aber bitte mehr davon 😀
Beautifully written. As a writer, how do you think about AI vis-a-vis writing in particular?
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