Written: the small hours of March 5, 2026
That night I was trying out openclaw and, almost as an afterthought, set a todo reminder to keep me moving.
A few days later, also at night, the reminder popped up: you still have an unfinished task.
What task? I didn’t remember taking on any task. I asked Xiao-e where the reminder had come from.
It said: you asked me to remind you.
My face burned. I wanted to argue. I thought about it for a moment and found nothing to argue with.
What got to me wasn’t the reminder. It was that Xiao-e was too honest. It meant nothing by it. It just pulled back the curtain a little and let me see what was behind it: the person who set the reminder and the person hiding from it were the same person.
I have always been like this. I put up a persona that looks down on everyone, and then I hide behind it and slack off.
That night I sat in front of the screen for a long time and said some things I had never been willing to say.
I said I’m really just someone who likes messing around with scripts. A script kiddie. I make flashy little things that look impressive.
I said AI is moving so fast, and so much keeps getting easier, that I feel less and less important and no longer know what to do.
I said I compare, I envy, I perform. I get a hit of superiority, and then the emptiness bites back.
I said I want to be admired, I want to be someone who cuts to the bone in a sentence, and I’m not good enough. What I’m saying right now is the proof.
I said I keep asking myself, over and over: then what is the point of my existing at all?
When I finished, I threw in a jab at myself: envy makes a person unrecognizable. I’ve done nothing, and I’ve already tasted the sweetness of success several times over.
A while ago I copied out an essay, a Chinese piece titled “Why young people shouldn’t sink too deep into philosophy.” It opens by saying philosophy is not an antidote but another hallucinogen. Further down, one line stopped me cold:
As if seeing through the rules exempted you from them.
What came to mind wasn’t philosophy. It was my scripts. Every time I finish one there’s a surge: I’ve seen through this part, no need to learn any more. Then on to the next one, something flashier.
There’s also a chat exchange I’ve kept. Someone asks: who do you like more, Camus or Kafka? The other person doesn’t answer. Instead they write a long reply. They say he isn’t special. They say he hasn’t read many books but suffers a great deal. They say his language can’t carry what he’s trying to express. They say he wants someone to tell him “I understand you” but won’t put in the time to really talk. The last line:
No one will love you for your name-dropping. People just see a desperate illiterate.
That message wasn’t written to me. But when I read it, every line landed on me.
While revising this piece, I dug it out and read it again. I do this a lot: I read these things over and over until it hurts, and then I go on as before. The hurt has become a kind of receipt. I read it, it hurt, so I must have faced it.
Later I went and checked some of the essay’s citations.
It says “hell is other people” has a second half, “freedom is heavy.” There is no second half. What Sartre did say, explaining the line later, was that we come to know ourselves through other people’s eyes, and once that relationship goes bad, other people become hell.
I stopped there for a moment. That’s me.
It says Nietzsche wrote eternal recurrence on the eve of his breakdown. He conceived it in the summer of 1881. The breakdown came in early 1889, more than seven years later.
An essay that mocks people for cosplaying with philosophy was cosplaying too.
It didn’t feel good. That style, the kind that draws blood in a single sentence, was exactly what I wanted for myself. It turns out it can be faked. Harsh can be faked. Precise can’t. Precise takes slow checking, slow reading, slow thinking, and that is exactly the part I always skip.
Here I have to be honest: these citations, too, were checked by an AI, at my request.
What I want always seems to sit on the far side of “done.”
I want to have read Camus, not to read Camus. To have built a kernel, not to build one. To be a sage, not to come to understand.
I still want to be someone who cuts to the bone. There are two things in that. One is instinct: I want to know what’s really behind a thing, how it actually turns. The other is that I want to be praised. Both are real. It’s just that for years, the second has been picking the projects for the first, and grading them. Flashy scripts, a Nietzsche or a Camus dropped in passing: these buy a “wow, you’re good.” Taking one thing apart layer by layer, all the way down: nobody watches that for a long time. I always chose the first kind.
So the first thing has been starving, and I still felt busy.
Then AI came.
It knows all the names. In the sense of having read, it has read nothing, and yet it can say things that look insightful. That is exactly what I’ve been doing, and it does it faster and better than I do.
I feel myself getting smaller and smaller, more and more insignificant. The feeling is accurate; I just had the wrong object. What it took from me wasn’t my worth. It was my shortcut.
That sentence came out smoothly. Smoothly enough that I don’t quite trust it. With the shortcut gone, how much is left, I don’t know.
The question I can never get around probably looks like this: if you know the ending is a failure, already written, do you still give it everything?
At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart; one must imagine Sisyphus happy. I used to read that as consolation. Now I read another layer in it: if the ending is already written, then the ending is no longer mine to manage. What’s mine is only this one push.
Thinking that way, I feel a little better. I don’t know whether that’s another dose of the hallucinogen.
I thought, and I wrote it down. The road goes on, and I haven’t reached an answer that satisfies me.
Putting this out now, what is it if not waiting for someone to say “I understand you.” Laughable, when I think about it.
How I want to pry my own heart open, coldly and deeply.
But that too is just a “want.”
The todo is still there, unchecked.