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This is what Heidegger called thrownness. you didn’t choose your starting conditions, the year you graduated, whether your college roommate happened to be starting a company in 2018 or if you landed at Anthropic or OpenAI.
The people outside that $20M circle aren’t failing. they’re experiencing what every human always has, the radical contingency of life. SF just makes the “throwness” more visible. most people never get that data, here you get it every day in real time.
Heidegger’s answer is authenticity. you don’t overcome thrownness but you own it. stop measuring your throw against everyone else’s and ask what you actually want to do from here? most people never get to that question.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
So putting my optimistic hat on for a second. Forget curing diseases, that's the obvious stuff. There's a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker who wrote a book in 1973 called The Denial of Death. His big idea is that pretty much everything we do comes back to the fact that we're going to die and we need a way to cope. So we look for ways to feel like we matter, and for most people that's been work. Thinking back at what people spent their whole lives building toward in the past.. a cathedral, a cure, a theory. Those projects took generations and most people only ever got to see one part. Maybe AI shrinks those timelines enough that an ordinary person gets to see something huge actually come together by their own means in their own lifetime. That’s me forcing myself to come up with a positive angle.
Two things I’ve been thinking about regarding AI:
• People often highlight the risks involved in AI, which are surely very real. I’m struck, however, by how hard it is to understand the contours of the positive scenario. There are easy-to-perceive and frequently invoked elements of a positive vision — more diseases cured, more material abundance, etc. — which sound great, but these are by themselves just ingredients. I’m curious what the larger equilibrium is supposed to look like. Do people work? If so, why? What is their marginal contribution? If not, how are resources allocated? What is scarce? What is the ratio between humans and AIs? Are humans in control, whatever that means? One sometimes hears the Culture novels invoked as one scenario, but I’m not sure they depict a desirable outcome. (AI runs everything and humans compete in games? Iain Banks himself said that the humans in the Culture are “somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”) There is Richard Brautigan’s famous poem, but do we want to be “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters”? (Isn’t that rewinding Genesis?) We could say that it was hard to imagine the world of 1900 from the vantage point of 1700, and that’s assuredly true. But nobody in 1700 was trying to recast humanity itself within a couple of years — things necessarily unfolded slowly and by increments, and therefore with the possibility for error correction. Given how rapid the rate of progress in AI may be, it feels strange for the upside case to be so opaque.
• There is increasing discussion of whether AIs are conscious or how we would know whether they are, with conclusions there often assumed to be relevant to matters of moral worth. At first blush, this seems a rather arcane, benign, or even absurd issue. (Remember the response to Blake Lemoine’s fears.) Setting aside the terms of the debate itself, or the relevant demarcation criteria, it seems to me a quite high-stakes question, for an affirmative answer — that is, granting moral worth to AIs — would presumably mean that the aggregate worth of AIs would soon outweigh that of humans in any utilitarian calculus. The AIs will be exceptionally wise and intelligent, and vastly more numerous (especially once one considers the imminent future and the AIs not yet born). As such, even epsilon of moral worth will multiply to a lot once one considers the quadrillions that could soon exist. (This is effectively a distributed version of the Nozick’s utility monster.) If this conclusion is unpalatable, I think one of three propositions needs to be rejected: the premise AIs can have moral worth; utilitarianism itself; or the belief that there is even a possibility that they will be far more numerous than humans.
With both of these matters (contours of future society; AI moral worth), there is the possibility of dramatic change. Today, people argue about datacenters. I’m curious how popular support for AI will evolve as more people come to understand these medium-term questions and the relevant stakes. What is the vision for AI that most people would be excited about?
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“And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” Ecclesiastes
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Without law and justice, man is the most savage of animals. Someone who cannot live in a state is a beast; someone who has no need of a state must be a god.
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Even better is to be a “flaneur”. Someone who embodies the art of wandering the city streets to experience and study society while remaining detached from it.
Søren Kierkegaard on the Importance of Walking
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
When you get a recommendation from someone like Russ you add it to the list
I want to recommend two books that few people have read and that many have not even heard of. The first is Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday translated by Anthea Bell. It's Zweig's memoir. His life is fascinating in and of itself. But his observations about Vienna and Germany and the world between the two world wars are superb. The second is The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann. This is a novel set during the decline and decay of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Not that much happens but the writing and the atmosphere is exceptional, at times funny, at times almost unbearably tragic. Among many things it captures what it's like to be a person who feels unmoored as the world around him falls apart. A little too timely for my taste and your mileage may differ, but I really enjoyed it.
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“For the sake of distant days.”
Ok so there’s a phrase that has been living in my head and I promise you were never taught this in any history class.
Ashurbanipal. The last of the great Assyrian kings (668 to 627 BCE). This is a man who sacked whole kingdoms, and hung severed heads of his enemies from trees during dinner parties. But besides all that he was one of the greatest librarians of the ancient world.
But during his regime he felt something shifting. Something shifting underneath him. And so quietly, obsessively, he spent his reign collecting and indexing every significant piece of writing engraved in clay tablets he could get his hands on. Curating the great library at Nineveh. And throughout those tablets, again and again, scribes wrote a phrase that really made me pause when I first read it.
He had no idea Assyria would collapse fifteen years after his death. Never to recover. He had no idea those tablets would sit underground for two thousand years before being dug up in Mosul in 1853. He had no idea that phrase would eventually reach a small but growing account on the internet.
He preserved it anyway. That’s the only reason I’m here doing this.
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I saw this statue in Copenhagen and it had a sign with a QR code to hear some inspiring Kierkegaard quotes and this is what it said:
You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices, it's in romanticizing your life. A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. In life, we must choose our regret.
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Gris retweeted
1/ A more serious thread with a speculation.
punchline? Putin + Russia.
Putin has been weaponizing migration against the EU for the past 15 years, effectively.
Why attack it from outside? Why trigger Article 5?
Attack it from within. With migrants.
Would be funny if Memory ends up not being a commodity but Korean degenerates and leverage drive divestments which then destroy capital/investments and memory makers lose out on $$
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Everyone is using AI for stock picks, so I asked Fable for something harder. Find me 3 emerging painters worth holding for thirty years. It came back with these: Xylor Jane, Alex Hutton, Danielle Fretwell. Below a combined image of the 3 works I found to showcase their talent
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Alex Hutton paints rollercoasters and empty waterslides in oil. Kind of like an abstractionist Edward Hopper capturing iconic American places of entertainment that echo the days of the 1960s.
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Honestly this is the type of AI news we need. Can’t wait to descent into a cozy pool of golden light!
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BASF german chemical pioneering firm that essentially invented a machine that turns air into food and its only worth $50B … just about the same as a few pre-rev labs in SF.
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Highly recommend this book. Fascinating insights into the world of fertilizers and how it led to Bolivia losing its access to the sea, bird poop creating a boom in Peru, a troubled inventor releasing Chlorine Gas in the trenches of WW1.
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