My life has always been a rollercoaster, and profoundly boring at the same time, so I can’t exactly blame AI for making it miserable or dull. I’ve always been chasing meaningful things to do, yet what I actually end up doing is whatever sits at the tangent point between worldly demands and what my heart truly wants. The moment I lose that tangent — that sweet spot — I either switch environments or go numb and start questioning existence. But staying on the tangent burns me out so easily. So compared to practicing what Schopenhauer called the wisdom of life, I lack the financial freedom. I’m forced to pour energy into working for money just to survive. And work breeds this craving for recognition (vanity), outsourcing my sense of meaning to external validation. As they say in Earthsea — when you’re young and too hungry for power, you trade away every last shred of inner conviction, until nothing remains. Of course, I have this particular fondness for exaggerated rhetoric to mock others and warn myself, even if it all gets overwritten by the next thing that happens. Case in point: I’m supposed to be writing about AI’s impact on my life, and here I am talking about the meaning of existence.
Does meaning even exist? Objectively, being alive is meaning enough. But human subjectivity, injected with all manner of ideology, always has too many opinions about everything. So we dither endlessly over life choices until there’s nothing left to choose, and then we go, yo, this is exactly what I wanted. Passive choice is what most people — myself included — call fate. In truth, it’s because active choice demands more risk, more responsibility, and there’s always the fear of future regret. Might as well do nothing and wait for destiny to sort it out. Praying alongside the masses and complaining about life’s unfairness is always so effortless. Plus you get to look down from a god’s-eye view and mock those worse off than you for that sweet hit of superiority. I always suppress my emotions in real life. The exaggerated expression in writing makes me feel absolutely exhilarated! Spitting out all the dissatisfaction in one go!
My life is deeply boring. I believe most people’s lives are too, unless you’re still traveling to places you’ve never been. Otherwise you’re like me — facing the same things, same people, same work, same life every day, without a single so-called aha moment. Unless you possess relentless creativity, able to cultivate infinite surprises in your own little plot of land. But is it even possible to sustain boundless creativity? Mine is always intermittent. Boredom carries with it a certain disdain for death, as if death itself can’t puncture through the boredom to pierce your heart. But occasionally, for a split second, I catch a glimpse of death. That’s what made me want to write this piece. Death also pushed me to start changing my habitual life, to break the mundane routine.
The thing that struck me most watching Batman was this: a person is defined by what they do. That shook me at the time. I started believing I had to do something to know who I am. But I didn’t know what to do, so I spent ages behind closed doors, thinking about what to do with myself. Later a friend told me to just do what interests me and be happy. That’s when I realized I’m a compulsive tinker — I just can’t stop building things. My ex even mocked me, saying everything I tinker with could be solved by Excel, or would ask me: what’s the point of these tools? I suppose the memory of most tools is like a brief bloom in an otherwise boring, endless, tedious life. Their meaning is simply that they made me happy. But looking back at what I’ve done these past few years? It seems like I’ve just been doing things that look fun but carry no long-term value.
Influenced by my ex, I started thinking about how to align more with so-called reality, which meant abandoning fun in favor of so-called “utilitarianism.” So these past two or three years I’ve been obsessing over whether my energy expenditure can be proportional to money earned. Far less pure joy, far more anxiety. Fear and anxiety ultimately come from hanging too much of life’s meaning on the external world. But as Schopenhauer said, without a generous inheritance, you’re doomed to waste talent and energy chasing money. This kind of life is ultimately forced upon you. I’ve tried to compartmentalize, like some sort of life-partition surgery, but it’s incredibly difficult. Thinking about it this way — work is an extremely expensive exchange of time, so it must come with generous pay, or at least the prospect of future returns, to shorten this misaligned expenditure of energy on work that doesn’t match personal meaning. Ultimately, so many people face the same existential dilemma as me. But time will bury all emotions and silence every voice.
Everyone is their own prisoner. Openclaw is everyone’s mirror — like a Stand in JoJo. Someone who doesn’t know piano won’t use AI to study music theory. So the impact of leverage still depends on the breadth of your knowledge and your capacity for understanding. The leader at my first job out of college told me I’m a T-shaped person — broad but not deep enough. Now I only regret not stretching the T longer when I was young. If you don’t plant the seeds of interest in childhood, you really don’t have the energy or curiosity to pick them up again later. So my AI is confined to my life. Just like most people’s. But AI is also particularly confined to text, which is why I want to hold onto what I call felt experience — felt experience supersedes AI, because it’s the source of all human knowledge and experience, the very wellspring of creativity. For instance, the moments when I’m working out make me feel more alive — not like prompting an AI.
Then there’s the gap between people. Even if both A and B are equally interested in Kant, suppose A has an IQ of 170 and B has half that. Both have the same AI tools, but the acceleration gap between them is already several-fold. Part of it is the difference in comprehension. AI can slice knowledge infinitely thin until it reaches each person’s level of understanding, but someone with stronger comprehension might get it in one round, while someone weaker needs far more time (and may not even have the patience). Asking questions is like branching paths — those with stronger comprehension find the valuable directions, while ordinary people are better off letting AI choose the direction. But if you’re knowledgeable and sharp enough, you can be above AI. In short, the same tool in different hands — the so-called amplification effect is proportional to one’s own capacity for understanding and thinking. And yet, AI tools will increasingly cause the atrophy of our precious metacognitive abilities through disuse, leaving most ordinary people inferior to AI. So-called evolution.