A Meta-tative Post
In which I start by using my massive intellect to predict a timeline for the end of the world and end with admitting that I couldn't remember whether I'd read a specific book or not.
I.
The other day my father texted me out of the blue to ask me when I thought the world would end. (You know, as one does.) He meant it figuratively, not literally, but the figurative end of the world still covers a lot of potential ground so I asked him what he meant by “the end”. Christ returning in his glory? (Remember, we are latter-day saints.) Some cataclysm that marks the end of the world as we know it? (Nuclear war, a pandemic that’s 10x as bad as COVID, that sort of thing.) Or something else?
He said he was interested in the answers to any category I cared to address. So I responded:
That is an extraordinarily difficult question. Without spending a week thinking about it here are my off the cuff answers:
1- Significant reduction in living standards US no longer hegemon. Like the 70s, but worse. - late 2030’s
2- Significant cataclysm: (nuclear war, a pandemic that's 10x covid, dissolution of the US) by 2050s
3- Second coming around the 2070s with a standard deviation of 7 years?1
In offering this up to the wider world, I need to specify several caveats (on top of the “off the cuff” one I already mentioned). I’m not a big fan of predictions, but you obviously can’t turn down a request from your father. This is not me planting a flag, this is more of “if things are going to go bad here’s a reasonable ‘dark timeline’”. Are we in a “dark timeline”? Ever since the Great Awokening I’ve felt more like we’re in the “weird timeline”. There’s a certain narrowness to events in good or bad futures, but a weird future is far more capacious. Which is to say I expect that whatever happens I’ll be surprised.
II.
The foregoing, as heavy as it might appear, was actually only a lead-in to the discovery of another use case for AI. As I was considering my father’s question it occurred to me that I could ask ChatGPT (“thinking”, I never use “fast”) to comb the hundreds of posts I’d made since 2016 and distill out answers to these questions. In other words, rather than answering the question of what I thought at the moment about these questions, I could plausibly get an answer that encompassed all my public thinking over the years. This might include things I had forgotten. And indeed it did pick up somethings that I don’t remember writing, for example:
Under Christian eschatology (the one I am most familiar with and the one that fits best with the God Exists explanation) we read concerning Christ’s second coming, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” That said, I think everyone would agree that if it’s going to happen it should happen in the next few hundred years. Let’s round that up to a thousand. I will happily say that if Christ doesn’t return by 3018 that Christians are wrong about everything
The answer I provided to my father was more pessimistic, but it was interesting that I had totally forgotten about this statement. As to the rest, it was more helpful than I expected in some respects and less helpful in others. The middle answer of the 2050’s draws heavily on many of my past statements (some of which I dimly remembered). Which gave me more confidence (and somewhat belies the “off the cuff” designation). On the less helpful side, it didn’t synthesize things in the way I had hoped it might. I thought that there was some chance that it might extract something novel out of the thousands and thousands of words I’ve written. Like “Well if you consider timeline X here, and timeline Y in this other post, you’ll realize that to be intellectually consistent, Christ would have to return no later than October 23, 2073.” Okay, that level of specificity would have been amazing, but I expected a little bit of amazement, and mostly what I got was just reminders.
This tool should be added to my previous musings about AI as a great search tool, and to my overall attitude about AI. Since that time I’ve come across several pieces which have been very anti-AI. And I’m entirely open to the idea that while some people will see large benefits from AI, that, as a whole, humanity will not. (Whether I fall into the first group remains to be seen.) Which is to say I’m open to the idea of a Butlarian Jihad, but I’m not going to be on the front lines.
III.
Since that last post, I’ve been further reflecting on AI and the state of things, and it’s put me in a meditative, but also a meta mood. (Thus the clever title joke.) Perhaps I can’t shake the approaching ensloppification? Perhaps it’s a late onset mid-life crisis (I did just buy a new car.) Perhaps I’m obsessed with figuring out how to shake a little bit more writing productivity out of the dwindling amount of time I have to devote to it. An hour or so in the morning that is continually being squeezed by an ever tightening vise. On the one side by the ever increasing demands of my “day job”. On the other side my slowly dwindling energy as I near the halfway point of my sixth decade on the planet.
Or maybe I’m just wondering what the hell I’m trying to do in this space?
All my cards on the table, as close readers of the blog know I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2007. (Not a great time to start that, btw.) And during much of that time I was only vaguely successful. (You can find the majority of that story here.) PODCAST LOOK UP EPISODE. Over the last five years or so things have been going much better, and in the most recent year and a half things have been going extremely well. So much so that it’s increasingly hard to argue that I’m not a “success” on most of the metrics people care about.
As a side note “success” feels different than I thought it would. Actual success feels very similar to moderate success, and depressingly close to temporary failure as well. Also actual success turns out to also be very time consuming. And yes, there’s always the possibility of trading money for time, but it turns out that’s more difficult to do than people led me to believe.
One of the things I hoped to get out of “success” was not having to struggle so much—things would be easier. Some things are easier, but some things have just gotten harder. As a business scales you keep all the problems you had already and add new ones on top of them. (And yes, I’m familiar with the principle of delegation.) So we end up in the aforementioned vise. As I reflect on all this there’s a voice inside that says: “You’re a success! Why do you need to continue to spend your time among the grubby wordsmiths of Substack! You did one big thing. You don’t have to do all the things. There’s nothing left to prove!”
That’s when I cut the voice off because the phrase “nothing left to prove” is so cliched that I’m embarrassed to have thought it. Additionally, in my religion, we’re commanded to “endure to the end”. Which makes it sound like proving ourselves isn’t done until life itself is done. Still, the question remains, What is the point of spending hours a week producing writing for an audience of a few hundred people, whose attention, if they’re anything like me, is split among dozens of Substacks? This is a pretty competitive environment even before we consider the tens thousands of other Substacks out there, and beyond that the tsunami of AI crap—a tsunami which is still a long way from cresting.
IV.
As I consider how to allocate the limited amount of time I have for writing, I always come back to the book reviews. If I’m going to review every book I read, that's going to create a floor for my writing. A certain number of hours is going to have to be devoted to reviewing books, and if those are all the hours I have then the only thing I’ll do is review books.2 If reviewing books doesn’t take up all the writing time I have, then I can do other writing, but that hasn’t been happening as much as I would like.
There are various ways of mitigating this issue. I could review only a selection of the books I read. I could write (even) shorter reviews. I could even read fewer books. Or, I could just stop writing and publishing reviews altogether. Let’s eliminate one option right out of the gate, I’m not interested in reading fewer books. I don’t want to bring in the supernatural, but there’s a sense in which I feel like reading books is what I was put on the Earth to do.3
As for the other options I always end up deciding that there’s no point in reading lots of books if I don’t create some record of what I took from the book. And as long as I’m doing that I might as well turn it into a publishable review. Which is to say writing reviews is for me, not you. I hope you enjoy them. I hope that I’ve been able to direct people towards some good books and away from some bad ones, but ultimately I don’t care. (Or rather I care very deeply, but I’ve decided to write as if I don’t.)
One of the points of this post is to draw a line in the sand. (Again for me, not you.) Book reviews are not going away, and additionally I’m going to do something I’ve been avoiding for a long time. I’m going to experiment with publishing them as they’re ready, individually.4 In the past I have avoided doing this because I figured it would overwhelm everything else. And indeed it might, but I decided to pretend that I don’t care.
There’s some other stuff I’m going to try, but I’m not going to announce it just yet. We’ll see how much time I have left after I’ve caught up on all my reviews.
A final story: Just recently someone asked me if I’d read Brain Energy and the title seemed familiar, but that could mean anything. Then he started describing it, and it began sounding more familiar but I still wasn’t sure if I had read it. So I searched my blog, and sure enough I had. And even though the review was relatively short it brought me back to the place, time and circumstances when I had read it. And all sorts of things about the book came flooding back. Honestly I’m surprised that more people don’t review all the books they read.5 It ends up being an interesting form of journaling.
All of which is to say I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m a lone, weird man in a very noisy crowd who’s mostly talking to himself. The crowd is just getting larger and noisier, and I don’t have to be there. Despite this I’m going to continue to add my voice, but most of all I’m going to try to understand what all the fuss is about.
tl;dr Lots of narcissistic navel gazing, followed by an announcement that book reviews are now going to be published individually. Which could have just been made in this space as a brief addendum to another post and saved everyone a lot of time.
If I’m fully transparent, this is not an exact quote of the text I sent back. I’ve cleaned it up a little bit, and more consequentially, after a bit more reflection I changed 2050 to 2050s and 2070 to 2070s.
And if I have less hours to write than is required to review all the books? Then I guess I’ll just fall farther and farther behind, which is not outside of the realm of possibility.
This is not some claim of special competence. It’s closer to a diagnosis of psychosis with voices.
I may be some thematic grouping: Series, and non-fiction books on the same subject.
Maybe they do and post them on GoodReads and I’m just doing it in the wrong place. Though I do have a plan for posting all of my reviews on GoodReads.
Most importantly, why would you say that Christ will return in the next century if at all? Look at how many Christians through history were sure the signs were pointing to a quick return of Christ, and we now know they were wrong. I agree the signs look likely now, but no more likely than they did to Augustine or Luther in their own eras.
On book reviews - I write book reviews largely for the sake of helping myself digest my thoughts about the book and remember the book better. Secondarily, they point out books I have something to say about or want to recommend to others. If they're helping you with any of that, great. If not - maybe just compress it down to one sentence or so a book if anything?
As Kip said, you've got a lot of more original things to say. I'm not going to be sorry if you focus your energy there.
In my opinion, AI killing everyone seems the most likely catastrophic event, more likely than a big nuclear war.