This screenshot has been rotating in my brain like a microwave plate. Clean sans-serif font. Before-the-AI-times stock photo energy. The kind of thing that gets 47k reposts from men whose LinkedIn says “serial entrepreneur.” It says: unless you’re playing at the absolute highest levels, every game in life is just you vs you. And then it lists the enemies: the voice that tells you you’re not good enough, the desire to quit, being lazy, staying stuck. Take your focus off the supposed competition, it commands. Just improve yourself.
And I find myself nodding along. Which is the first sign something is wrong.
Because—and here’s where I lose the right to critique—I do tell myself I’m not good enough. I do want to quit. I am lazy in the specific way where your bones become overcooked hand-pulled noodles and moving feels like it would violate some law of thermodynamics. The graphic isn’t wrong about any of this. That’s precisely the problem. The diagnosis—you are the problem, you are the solution—lands like being told to smile.
Around the same time, because I still use Tweetdeck and my lists are structured so POVs collide every morning like some kind of self-imposed psychological stress test, I’ve been watching another discourse unfold. The AI one. With the grim attentiveness of someone who suspects the test results are about to come back bad.
There’s a post written with the breathless urgency of someone who has seen god, and in a way, maybe Ilya has seen god because if not him then I’d bet on Demis: it’s hard to overstate how deranged the [AI] pace is at the moment, the author writes. We’re in this weird liminal epoch where reality is outpacing people’s priors so fast that most minds just silently segfault. And then, the kicker: we’re living through a chapter that historians will write like scripture.
Scripture. Like the world is ending and beginning simultaneously, and we are the chosen witnesses.
This hit hard. I keep turning it over like Kalbi caught in my teeth that my tongue won’t leave alone. These two texts—the self-improvement platitude and the tech-eschatology post—seem like they’re coming from entirely different worlds. One is the language of the wellness industrial complex, the other the dialect of venture capital and AI accelerationism. One addresses you as a project to be optimized, the other as a spectator to the sublime.
And yet they’re doing exactly the same thing.
Both of these narratives are drugs. (Not in the lazy metaphorical sense—thing I disapprove of = addiction—but in the precise pharmacological sense: substance that produces altered consciousness as a way of managing pain.) The pain, in this case, being the simple unbearable fact of having to exist in the present tense.
What both texts offer—and this is the trick, the sleight of hand I keep falling for like a lab rat pressing the lever—is a way out of now. The self-improvement gospel relocates you into a perpetual future: the you that will have conquered laziness, silenced the inner critic, optimized the morning routine. The you that is always arriving. Never here. The tech-rapture narrative does the opposite but achieves the same result: it places you in the position of someone looking back from a future so transformative that the present becomes mere prologue. Historians will write like scripture. Meaning, this moment only matters because of what it portends. You are not living; you are witnessing. You are not a person; you are a before-photo.
(Full disclosure: I am addicted to both drugs. This month alone I have: (1) convinced myself that the right ratio of meditation to running until my post-COVID lungs scream fuck you would alchemize me into a person without a permanent pit in their stomach, and (2) reframed my existential dread as sophisticated pattern-recognition about civilizational change, which is a very flattering thing to call being scared. I am not diagnosing from outside the problem. I am writing this from inside the pharmacy, behind the counter, wearing the white coat.)
But here’s where it gets worse. The part I can’t outrun.
The reason we reach for them with the desperation of someone hammering ctrl-z ctrl-z ctrl-z, is that the present has become genuinely unprocessable. Not in the overwrought everything is chaos sense that every generation flatters itself with, but in the specific, technical sense that the bandwidth required to actually engage with what is happening exceeds what a human nervous system can provide.
The tech-rapture guy is right about one thing: minds are segfaulting. But he thinks this is a bug of insufficient vision, a failure to appreciate the magnitude of the moment. I think it’s something else. I think we are reaching for narratives—any narratives, whether it’s you vs you or we’re living through scripture—because narrative is the only anesthetic strong enough to make the present bearable. And the present has become unbearable not because it’s meaningful but because meaning itself is what’s breaking down.
The present has become unbearable not because it’s meaningful but because meaning itself is what’s breaking down.
The cultural singularity isn’t that we’re living through an era of unprecedented significance. It’s that we’ve lost the ability to tell whether anything is significant at all, and so we’ve outsourced that judgment to stories. The self-improvement narrative says: the meaningful thing is the project of becoming. The tech-eschatology narrative says: the meaningful thing is that you are a witness to history. Both of them let you off the hook for the much harder question: what if nothing that is happening means what I need it to mean? What if the present is just a place I have to live?
I keep coming back to this line from the AI post: most minds just silently segfault. He means it as an indictment of the normies, the unenlightened masses who can’t keep up. But I read it differently now. I think the segfault is the appropriate response. I think the minds that don’t crash are the ones that have installed some kind of override—some Gibsonian narrative firmware that intercepts the input before it can be processed honestly. You vs you. Historians will write like scripture. These are not ways of engaging with reality. They are ways of not having to.
I think the segfault is the appropriate response. The minds that don’t crash are the ones that have installed some kind of override—some narrative firmware that intercepts the input before it can be processed honestly.
And here’s the crux. Both narratives promise agency while delivering its opposite.
The self-improvement gospel says you are in control, the only obstacle is yourself—which sounds like empowerment until you realize it’s actually a demand that you take responsibility for circumstances that were never within your control, that you internalize systemic failure as personal deficit. The tech-rapture says you are a witness to THE most important moment in history—which sounds like significance until you realize it’s asking you to be a spectator to your own displacement, to find meaning in your own obsolescence.
Just improve yourself. Just watch.
Both of them ask you to do something with your attention that isn’t quite being here.
(And god, I want to be anywhere but here. I want to be the YouTube-guided-meditation-future-version-of-myself who has figured this out. I want to be the historian looking back at this moment with the benefit of knowing how it ends. I want to be anywhere in time except the place where I am, which is sitting in my apartment delaying my Thanksgiving morning run because writing temporarily fills the pit in my stomach that I’ve had for five years now that no amount of morning routines has touched.)
Mary Gaitskill has this line. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that Americans process experience through the lens of self-improvement. Every trauma → lesson. Every suffering → growth. Every breakdown → breakthrough. She was writing about something else entirely, but the observation has colonized my brain. We cannot tolerate experience that doesn’t have a redemption arc built in. And when the present becomes too chaotic to narrate as growth, we reach for whatever story will make it tolerable. You vs you. Scripture. Anything that turns the formlessness into something we can metabolize.
But anesthetics don’t actually fix anything. They just make you not feel it while it’s happening. And when you wake up, the thing that was wrong is still wrong, and now you’ve also lost time.
I don’t have a solution. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I think maybe the first step is noticing when you’re reaching for the needle. When you’re about to tell yourself that your suffering is just you vs you, when you’re about to reframe your dread as historical consciousness—noticing the moment when you’re choosing narrative over presence. Not because narrative is bad. We need stories to live. I need stories to live. But because some stories are actually just ways of leaving the room and locking the door behind you.
The present is hard. It was always going to be hard. Maybe the work isn’t optimizing ourselves into people who can handle it, or learning to witness our own obsolescence with the appropriate historical awe. Maybe it’s just staying in the damn room. The room with no guarantee that the story will eventually make sense, no redemption arc waiting in the third act, no future self who has figured this out and is sending back instructions.
I don’t know how to do that. I’m not even sure it’s possible.
But I’m trying. It’s Thursday. It’s cold. I still haven’t gone for that run. I’m here.
