Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1496
Coming out of a depression bout. ChatGPT is a maturing technology, Cassie Ramone, an ebay listing for a 1974 Dart and the dad in Mosquito Coast.
Hi hi hi. Good morning. Hello. How are you? Holding up okay? I am… okay, I think. Coming out of a two-day… something. Was it an illness? A disease? Existential dread? Depression? Yes, all of those. I am sick and dying and depressed and the world is terrible. Or anyway, that was all true yesterday. I have since slept a lot. It seems to have helped. It would help more if I could get some fucking exercise but thirty or so years ago I stupidly thought computers were the wave of the future and now I am stuck behind a desk for large swaths of the day.
Child, go into the trades. But not too into the trades, where your back is thrown out by the age of 20. Light trades. With a lot of walking.
Writing GMHHAY when having a bout of depression is always interesting. As a writer, I want to capture it. I want to capture the catastrophizing and paranoia and hopelessness that runs through my head. I want to rhapsodize about how depression is a chameleon, it changes with the times and your life situation.
When I was young, I was always depressed about money or how I would be forever alone. Now that I have money and am love, well, I still catastrophize about money but not love. Now I catastrophize about health, career and about the world at large. I do not, thank god, catastrophize about my daughter. It is, just now, occurring to me what a toxic situation that would be. There but for the grace of god go I.
And when I was young, I worked so hard to capture that desperation and sadness in my writing. And sometimes, I confess, I am tempted to undertake that endeavor for you, here, in these GMHHAY chronicles.
But as an editor, though I know you guys do not particularly want to or need to hear about that shit.
But as a cultural commentator, you know, the stigma of depression, the window into someone who has largely controlled it, for a lifetime, is maybe of interest to fellow sufferers, much the way that whenever I write about Ozempic I get people thanking me for talking about it.
It’s all mixed up with middle age, too. Middle Age is so weird. I think the thing that kills us all is the death of possibility. Like as you get older, that sense that you can do anything with your life, it dwindles. And that hurts us. Because the feeling that we can always bail, reinvent, do something else, it is, for me at least, a source of strength. But as you get older, that sense becomes threatened. I think I usually, when I’m not depressed, still have a pretty good muscle there: I have my little list in my head of people who have accomplished much in their 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, people who bloomed later in life. I believe in the American phenomenon or reinvention, it’s one thing I love about this country.
But when the depression cloud is hanging, yeah, all goes out the window. I am pushing ten years in this job now. That is a long time for me. I’ve only worked the same job this long once before, at Barbarian, and I recall very distinctly feeling this way toward the ten-year mark.
These jobs I work, they aren’t just day-to-day jobs, they are master plans. Like… if I worked at a bowling alley or something, well, that would fucking rule. But I would be working that job for two reasons: the money and because bowling alleys rule. I would not be working it as a master plan. I am working my job now as a master plan. One that, like Barbarian, is taking about twice as long as I originally anticipated, which is fine. Things are still going according to plan.
But the thing is, we are mortal, we have finite lifespans, and ten years is a significant chunk of that lifespan. And boy do I feel it more this time around, spending most of my 40’s in this job, than with Barbarian, where I was in my 30’s.
And so, when the black dog is about, the fear hits me: what if you just wasted this ten years and it doesn’t go according to plan.
And, man. That is some scary shit.
I have suffered failures, major career failures. I do what most healthy people do. I suffer for a while, then after learning from it, my psyche and actions route around the damage, compartmentalize it, and move the fuck on. Don’t think about it. Because focusing on your failures is death. I know that even if this ten-year plan ends up in failure (and it’s not! it is going well!) I will survive. But when I am in the dark zone, well shit. It’s going to break me.
Anyway, moving on.
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We are listening to a woman today named Cassie Ramone. The album is called Sweetheart. I like it very much. I do not know how I came about this album or this woman, I know nothing about her. It seems I stumbled upon her track “They Hide Their Eyes” and gave the album a whirl. Me likey. Ah. I have now Googled her. She was a Vivian Girl. Checks out. I liked that band. I like this better. It is always hilarious when you discover some “new” artist and they have a Wikipedia page that’s more than a stub, and they’ve been making music for, like, 20 years and you’ve seen them live at some point but also never heard of them.
Hey how old do you think ChatGPT is now? The answer is just shy of two-and-a-half years. This just hit me the other day. This thing is old. It was launched in 2022.
I think this is interesting because I vividly remember that when it launched, a) it was going to get sooo much better soooo quickly and b) Silicon Valley was going to achieve AGI (human-level intelligence) in no time at all.
And now here we are two years later and the thing has not especially gotten a lot better. I mean, yes, it has gotten better, but not to the level that they were saying, that anyone implied back then. AGI is still a few years out but imminent, really.
And making new models is getting more and more expensive.
If you were to make a graph of two lines: the amount of improvement from each successive release of ChatGPT on the one line, and the cost of each successive release of ChatGPT on the other line, those two lines would be diverging in a big way. We are getting diminishing returns from each model while the costs are spiraling.
It really doesn’t seem very likely there is much gold left at the end of this rainbow.
Two years! They keep calling this shit new. In my head, it had been like… ten months?
Two years is not new, man. Instagram went from a startup to part of Facebook to near-universal adoption in less than two years.
I think it’s fair to say at this point that ChatGPT is a maturing technology, eeking out incremental performance gains at, unfortunately, extraordinary incremental costs.
My friend Nick sent me an eBay listing for this 1974 Dart, bronze, four door, black hard top. As in, exactly the car that was my first car. And I want it so bad. It is in Oregon. I want to buy this car, and then pay someone to store it for a month or so, and then on our return from Alaska, ditch our flight in Seattle, take a train down to Oregon see some friends, pick it up, and subject my family to a road trip across America in a 1974 Dart with no air conditioning.
I am sure that would go perfectly well. It is exactly the sort of thing the slightly insane fathers do to the subject of every autobiography I have ever read. It is exactly the sort of thing Harrison Ford in Mosquito Coast would do. Definitely someone you want to emulate. Shit I need to see that movie again.
Being a sane, normal, supportive, healthy dad is so boring my god being selfless sucks.
Do you ever think you might just crack?
But why, Rick. You made this life, you like this life, at every step of the way, you made the correct decision and the decision that you wanted and was right for you.
Closing doors, closing opportunities, the end of unlimited horizons and optionality.
You had those options, you chose this path, Rick.
Well, yeah, but when I chose a chicken dinner it doesn’t mean that I don’t eyeball Emma’s brisket and think “mmm brisket.”
Why can’t I have both.
Well, that requires money. And the oligarchy —
All right all right we don’t need to go there today.
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Jane, what can I say about Jane to close this out. She brushed her hair today, on her own, while we were in the car line. It was my “reward” because I guessed correctly that the green cloud-like thing she was drawing was going to be a tree. It was my second guess after a broccoli floret.
“Why would I draw a broccoli floret?” She asked, as if it was the stupidest thing in the world.
But my second guess counted, so I got my hair brushing. Well, you know. Not mine. Hers.
It was awesome, her hair looked great, A+ parenting, give that man a reward. I’m sure the teachers noticed. “He’s getting there,” they thought to themselves condescendingly.
I also got a reward hug but I get a hug every morning in the car and if I am being honest it is the best part of my day and I almost cry about half the time.
We are doing Worlde in the car every day and lately I have let her pick the first word instead of using my standard first word. I stand by my first word, OUTER, but I gotta say. Even when she picks words with no useful, common letters (RSTLNE hi Vanna in hindsight you had the best job in the word), it seems to work out just the same? We still haven’t lost. We never get it in two, maybe get it in three a bit more opiate for the masses games, are… my brain is rotting…. no but you are teaching your daughter and she is so smart and bright and these things help oh god it is still happening no I am better today I swear.
Moody and Quiet playlist for you. In my head, these are the ones I share most often, because I am a sad bastard and all I listen to is moody and quiet music, except it seems that that is not true, and I don’t actually post these that often? Mysterious. What do we got here… Bnny, discovered from KSUA in Fairbanks on the last trip to Alaska. Lael Neale, love her new album. Lisa Germano from my most recent re-visit of her phemenal late-period work, new Peter Murphy, a new Arcade Fire song sorry, I was trying to be generous to that album but now I feel icky. Still optimistic about Alan Sparhawk and Trampled by Turtles, though this one has a woman who sounds like Mimi on it and it freaked me out. I like the new Maren Morris. I like the new Raveonettes. Love Thor Harris, as we said yesterday. Was revisiting Rain Parade the other day, threw on the track that This Mortal Coil covered, hadn’t heard the original in a while.
Okay! Let’s do this whole work day thing we can do it no problem yessireee.
The AI summary of today’s edition: “Navigating depression, aging, and the bittersweet nature of life's possibilities.”
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.