why do i feel stuck?

maybe this is not the right question. maybe the right question is: who do i want to be?

what do i want my life to look like?

i want to make the world better. i want to do something that matters; not just that, i want to do something that matters a lot. i want to be, as AW says, one of the live players – i want to try really hard to be one of them, to make the future go well.

i want to look back and feel, in my bones, that i have made the world a better place. in my bones. deep in the recesses of my soul. i want to know that somehow, somewhere, something i did was counterfactually valuable; i want to know that i mattered. i don’t care about the consoling glittering generalities of moral worth – to know that everyone matters on some scale – that is not what i care about. i want to matter, in a meaningful way, to the future. call it delusional if you wish. i’ve got the same delusions as many of my friends. i always have.

to know that i could make the difference? that i have always felt, on some deep level. but how?

i was reading AW’s ‘fiercesome joy’ post earlier today. i first read it in cambridge, and i was reminded of it when i looked at his new personal site (we were talking about it on a walk recently). i read it again.

it’s funny to me. i used to feel so alone, so out-of-distribution. i joke that i spawned into a place with few other (no other) live players; my hometown felt so isolating. i always had grand delusions of the things i could do, the people i could become, the wrongs i could right, how i would implement rank choice voting to solve political polarization and buy the amazon so no one could cut it down and ban factory farms and bribe the politicians to do the right thing; i converged on earning-to-give in elementary school. my visions feel like they are the norm, now – for the people i have chosen to surround myself by, i am far from alone, far from the only person who believes such things. indeed, it is rarer to find someone in my inner circle who does not.

i read a quote earlier today:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

to live in the bay, surrounded by the loveliest friends (although it doesn’t always feel this way? my friends are all so busy, working on impactful things), to have the freedom to learn and grow and work on things i think are truly important. i am so grateful.

little sophie has come a long way from those miserable middle and high school days. from those constrained horizons. there is a past version of me that would have, hearing about my trajectory, been so taken aback, that wow, we actually made it, in some sense. she knew i’d go to stanford. she knew i’d drop out. (i knew everything when i was young…)

but at some point along the way, it became somewhat clear, that earning to give wouldn’t be the way to go, that there are not enough people working on this big problem directly and you can and should be one of them, because we do not have time. also working on a startup that doesn’t directly help the world would be miserable. i do not want to catch the last chopper out of saigon. MW tried that, and hated it; i do not think i could actually bring myself to do the work.

i do not want to do the work. i am so tired of doing things for instrumental gain. i could not do it when i went to stanford; two weeks in, i was gone. i could not bring myself to do the assignments. i wanted to work. i wanted to work on things that mattered.

what am i saying? i guess i feel pretty uncertain and lost at the moment, about what the right path is. i think i care too much about how people perceive me, but more than that, i care too much about feeling as though i belong, somewhere. i also care about wanting to enjoy my work, and wanting to work a lot. and at present, all of this has led me to want to work at a lab.

the people who work at anthropic, openai – they belong somewhere. they belong, quite clearly and legibly, to a thing. and they are working with some of the greatest talent in the world, all in pursuit of a brighter future. to work at a lab, to me, feels like belonging. more so than anything else. it feels, also, as though it is clear that you’ve ‘made it,’ that you’re there, in the rooms where the future is decided. you can see the future first – from sf, yes, but not just anywhere in this city: from the labs in particular.

i care about utopia. i deeply desire, and believe it is possible, for the immense suffering of this world to end. and i have enormous, insurmountable hope for the things AI could do.

and yet. deep in my bones, there is the feeling, that being in a lab might not be good! unless i can work on alignment research, and alignment research only.

i want to work on alignment. i want the AIs to help us, because by God there is so much to be done, there is suffering to such incomprehensible degree everywhere, why are we living this way, how can we live this way?

yudkowsky might be right, though. and that would be so tragic. i cannot and will not accept it. call it motivated stopping, but i need more evidence. and i need to try.

strawberries taste perfect, and EH is so morally good, and water is beautiful, and AM is right that sunsets are never duplicates. i love squirrels and forests and stars and most of all, i feel like i love you. not in the complicated way, maybe – love doesn’t need to be complicated like that. i just love you. and i’m going to let it be simple.

Something I valued about working at the art gallery (2021-24) was that I made a lot of friends who were in their seventies and eighties, and when they talked about their lives, I would be reminded that what to me seemed like my whole life to them was just one episode among many. It felt viscerally that I would live multiple lives beyond the one that now filled me to the brim. In a similar way, I find it comforting right now to look at the five years Hockney spent confused in the context of his full career—what followed the years he spent grasping for the right question was 46 very productive years exploring the answers that came from it.

So, yes. I might be confused and frustrated right now; my essays might be falling apart, unable to contain what is rushing through me. But life, if we’re lucky, is very long. We have plenty of time to try different things, to live different lives, to be confused, and figure things out, and then be confused again.

—henrik karlsson