I had an idle thought the other day. It’s the same idle thought I have… well maybe a dozen times a day. “What the fuck am I actually doing here.” I am, it may surprise you to learn, not a particularly happy person by default. Quelle surprise, I know. I’m working on it.
Anyway, the particular the-fuck in this case was doing a mindfulness exercise as part of my daily journaling. I keep two forms of journal, actually. One is a physical diary. I don’t write in it daily, but I try to. The other is more about the running of my life, a digital daily bullet-journal, more or less (if you’re a form purist on journaling, you’ve already lost the goddamned thread). That isn’t to say that my daily tasks lists and such are devoid of introspection. That seems like a shame, so in addition to the to-dos and such is a daily reminder to think about things, specifically:
- What are you thankful for?
- What are you afraid of?
- What are you hoping for?
Nothing particularly wrong with such an exercise. Dig deep, touch your feelings, reflect on them, write them down. In general, only good things are going to come from knowing yourself, and I think spending a little time daily reflecting on “what the fuck am I actually doing here?” is useful.
But not like this, and not like that on that particular day. I bounced right off the exercise. Or rather I didn’t bounce off the exercise. I’d filled it out in its entirety before I’d actually thought about the prompts. That’s like… the failure case for a mindfulness exercise. You can’t just pencil whip them.
Having noticed that I was doing work for no damned reason, I stopped, took a breath, and then another so I could reflect on the meaning of slack. In that moment, I was enlightened: this is exactly the thing I hate about LLMs.
Now, bear with me, it’s a walk. Not a long one though. What is the total value of a mindfulness exercise? Is it the output? Fuck no. The words on the page might be a curiosity in a year or two. Maybe they’ll amuse or outrage my kid in the wake of my death. The value of the exercise is in forcing yourself to slow down and reflect on something about yourself. The output is a byproduct of the thing that had any value, the work.
Anyway, there I was, metaphorical dick in my hands, looking at words that had affected no change in me, which was their whole purpose in the first place. So, I did the obvious thing: I changed the exercise. The questions are different now, and when I start to pencil whip them without pausing to reflect, I suspect I’ll change them again.
The more important thing though isn’t that I’ve got a new mindfulness exercise. It’s the change that happened in my thinking. Before the exercise, it hadn’t occurred to me that one of my major beefs with LLMs is that the value of writing or coding is rarely the artifact itself. More often, it’s the changes that producing the artifact bring on in the creator. That isn’t to say outputs count for nothing, but holy hell, they are not the entire story.
Whenever I find myself saying something so puritanical it borders on calvanistic like “Work has value”, I stop and wonder if my baptist upbringing didn’t permanent damage. Happily, no; like any proper subgenius, I still think there’s no value in work for work’s sake. The value isn’t the work itself. The mindfulness exercise isn’t valuable because I wrote down what I was afraid of, and it isn’t valuable because it can be hard to be really honest with ourselves. It’s valuable because I am reflecting on how I feel about the state of things in the moment I have brought my attention to them, and that attention will ultimately change how I feel and act.
Let me try it with another example. I produced a paper for an academic conference recently. There’s value in the paper of course. It’s part of the scientific record now. Anyone that wants to understand how to… well, best leave it, as it’s under review. Anyway, when it eventually gets published somewhere, people will be able to look at it and reproduce the results. There’s value in that. The larger value, by far, was in forcing me to organize my thoughts on the subject. The hours spent slaving over a hot latex buffer clarified my thinking in a dozen ways that will make the next steps in the research possible.
Anyway, my point is that work and struggle have value in so much as they change us. In our rush to commoditize thought work and further devalue labor in the world, we’ve forgotten that things like institutional knowledge, learning, and introspection have value. Or maybe we haven’t forgotten it, but assholes are doing their level best to convince people that outputs are the only thing that matters, and that’s wrongheaded.
Again, outputs inarguably do matter in most cases. We need our annual report before we go into the yearly review with our boss. The meeting needs an agenda. The feature needs its code. My blog needs this essay. Without the outputs, we’re left in a lousy position.
That said, in each of those cases, the output is almost secondary. I need to reflect on my last year — We need to make sure that the meeting is focused and someone has to be prepared to lead it — the friction in creating a new feature gives you a chance to reflect and avoid scope and mission creep. Yes, in each case, the artifact has to exist, but if we just fucking pencil whip them with an LLM, we’re going to be in a worse position. We will have outputs that make it look like something thoughtful happened when no such thing actually occurred.
That is the insidious things that LLMs let us do to ourselves. We feel as if we’ve put in the work by crafting the prompt, by collecting the input sources, by evaluating the output and refining it. All of that feels like work, and it all feels like learning. And yet I suspect a great many of us have the rough experience of having studied from an answer key the week before an exam, then fucking bombing it. That all felt like studying too, didn’t it? And yet, without the work? Without the effort? Without giving a shit, what did we actually accomplish? Not much.
So, there you have it, I guess? The pop absurdist call to action. We must imagine Sisyphus happy because getting the boulder up the hill was never the point in the first fucking place. Thought has value because it clarifies and invites exciting new thoughts. If some of those make their way to paper or buffer, well, so be it. Don’t fall for the siren’s song of output for outputs’ sake. Please, I beg of you, give a shit.