To clarify my thinking and make it legible for others, here’s my “plan” — and particularly, the context into which any such “plan for my life” needs to fit.
In less than a generation, the world & our society has changed to be nigh-unrecognizable. This was not some freak, one-time event, but is part of the same accelerating trend that has been going on for decades, centuries, millenia, or even from the origin of our species, depending on how you look at it. This trend will continue, and it will continue to accelerate at an ever greater rate. This is significant now because it is only now-ish that things are changing fast enough that individuals must take the acceleration into account when planning their lives and careers.
When it comes to the question of “What is your plan for your life?” we all need to be futurists. Without a view on the next few decades, you’re liable to end up in a dead-end. Like being a factory worker just before factory automation took over, or a carriage driver just before the automobile, or an office worker in the mid-2020s, probably. If you want your work to be meaningful — for yourself and for the world — you need to be ahead of the trends.
(And if you don’t care about your work being meaningful and just want an income… Well for your sake I hope that when technological unemployment really starts hitting, your government has some kind of basic income guarantee, or you’ll be dependent on the kindness of others — which is the same thing, just biased against the uncharismatic and unfriendly. What a moral philosophy you must have if you think that’s somehow more fair.)
Take a look at the current-coolest tech out there: GPT-3. At the moment it still looks like a toy, but it has the potential — not some improved successor technology five years down the line, but this itself right now — to start affecting people’s livelihoods. “First they came for the buzzfeed listicle authors, and I did not speak out—”
“But my job is complex, a computer could never do what I do.” The computer doesn’t have to do what you do, the 80% most automatable parts of your job can be chopped up and automated, while someone who is specialized into the other 20% (putting the parts together, the “human touch”, and so on) will take over on the rest. Many companies will not survive this kind of restructuring and will just end up out-competed by new companies built on the new tech. (Compare: classic taxi companies vs the likes of Uber and Lyft.) Fortunately in this kind of war, the marketplace is the battleground and human lives are not lost. Companies that cannot adapt, however, are on the chopping block.
Beyond pure AI automation, consider how being a skilled lecturer is being supplanted by… videos of lectures. When all the students in the world can listen to the best lectures, the job of being a teacher radically changes. And that’s just one specific, obvious case where things are bound to change. The present situation with the internet is similar to how the world mid-printing-press-adoption must have been: a few things have radically changed, others are still poised for revolution but not yet rolling. There are plenty of copies of the Gutenberg Bible, but books are still a luxury good — there are plenty of places to shout your opinion online, but vetted, high-quality education is not quite accessible to everyone. Telepresence (“Zoom calls” and the like), healthcare, and the entire “fintech” industry are some other particularly obvious things where we’re part-way through a hundred different revolutions.
All this is to say: Many of today’s jobs, companies, and “highly-valued skills” have a shelf-life measured in years, not decades — and I cannot bring myself to care about them. (This is, additionally, a pathology of my own: If I can see a path leads somewhere unpromising, I can’t bear starting on it, even with the intent to pivot beforehand.) Like that overused-but-accurate Wayne Gretzky quote says, you have to skate to where the puck is going, not where it is right now. And in this case, the puck is going all across the map, faster than we’ve ever seen.
It should be no surprise that where we need to go looks nothing like where we’ve been.
This worldview gives more negative advice than positive, but from these “things to avoid,” a true path forward can be gleaned.
What skills are not being eaten by software? (Yet, at least.)
Decision making under complex situations. Advanced research in every field. Hand-crafts, athletic excellence, and other forms of self-expression (though AI-driven art is coming). Problem solving, especially to the whole process of understanding what people need and giving it to them.
What this all points to for me is: An entrepreneurship of your self. You need to develop proficiency in many different skills — in many different kinds of skills — and apply them independently and creatively to make things that people want ahead of the curve, using the tech that will shape the future, instead of being passively swept along with it. Taking your future-vision for granted and working around it.
Start companies that do interesting things that nobody else is doing — don’t work for these impossibly-slow megacorps. These dinosaurs are boring; the future is exciting! Agility and alacrity are the way of the future — don’t bind yourself to anything that doesn’t move you forward.
The hard part is, of course, developing these skills and discovering within yourself the projects that will push you forward. I am currently in what Robert Greene would call my “apprenticeship phase,” in which I am developing skills. And if I am taking longer than others, well who cares!
The future is rushing forward; we must either be swept along — or surf it.
My “plan” is to make the future — be a part of all the creating and shaping mentioned above — acting with fluidity and poise to do what seems right at the moment of decision, with my intuitions and tastes fashioned in this current time of learning and practice so that my ideas & works are good & useful.
What am I doing now? Improving skills and making projects, on the path to mastery over a portion of this incessantly complex world we find ourselves in.
[Is this still too vague and illegible? Well… perhaps.]
Still lying low through the pandemic.
Doing some writing. It is a triumph every time I put words on the page. I’m very happy to have brought back this, my personal website, to publish these small works.
There are a few greater projects on the horizon that I am reluctant to engage with. A fear of failure? Of uncertainty? Or do I just need more energy/alacrity?
Meditation, walking, and exercise help. I got an Apple Watch recently and it is surprisingly motivational for health and fitness, even for me who uses all kinds of external systems. The biometric information is also interesting — I’ve never had a clear view of my heart rate or caloric expenditure before. Most data like that is a distraction, but if it can inform your actions, make good use of it.
The world feels especially complex these days. The stage is set for grand changes to be made, new ideas explored.
I don’t especially have a plan.