I understand that gender is complicated and difficult, for the whole species (and honestly probably more so for some other species). And it can be hard to tell exactly if anyone is behaving badly regarding it, at least in my modern bubble. Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages? Maybe the thing I’m saying is just boring and a man is saying a more interesting thing?

But a thing that is undeniable is that women want to open jars, dammit! What’s your nuanced explanation there, Bonne Maman? Does the proper amount of friction for maintaining spread safety fall just between the male and female human grip strength distributions?

This study suggests that would be about 400N Fmax (though this would not avert most elite female athletes acquiring jam, see second figure, and the pictured participants are young adults):

The distributions are really surprisingly not-overlapping!

90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects.

We know that men and women have different grip strengths! We know that about half of people are women! Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)

Yes, strength required to open packaging ranges across a wide distribution, but I note that very few are impossible for anyone to open, so it seems like some effort somewhere goes into keeping them in the feasible range, and that effort does not seem to care about it being reliably feasible for people like me. I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.

I thought about this most when I lived in a group house with a shared bulk stash of Gatorade, and any time my woman housemate or I wanted to drink a red one we’d have to ask a guy to open it for us. But these days I also often hurt my hands opening (or failing to open) things, and while I’m sure I’m low in the female grip strength distribution—and may also be high on the ‘unreasonable anger about anything nearby when my hands are hurt’ distribution—I don’t think it’s just a me issue, and in the moment it always feels like a ‘fuck you, raspberry jam isn’t meant for you’.

But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things. Here’s my list of games and their interesting real-world updates, as experienced by me or my friends:

Dominion: Don’t invest for eternity. When casually improving or protecting or investing in things, it’s easy for me to treat life (and perhaps even the present period) as basically eternal. In fact I shouldn’t, but it can take many years of living to really feel how likely it is that you’ll leave your perfectly wonderful house within two years, or just keep on aging. Dominion lets me feel that in a matter of hours, by tempting me to invest in a beautiful and effective deck that will do amazingly for the rest of eternity, then making the other player win by haphazardly buying a handful of provinces before I’m done. Which is very annoying, and I do hold against it.

**The Witness: **there is nothing in The Witness (at least near the start, I haven’t played it all) that you can pick up and take with you. No objects, no points, no manna, no health. It’s just you, walking around in a world. Something about that feels like it would be deeply unsatisfying—like what is a game, if you can’t get, y’know, things, dings? Part of me thinks that GETTING is equivalent to satisfaction, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary I keep pointing out to it. And The Witness is not where I came to realize that. What The Witness made me feel is that knowledge is a REAL thing you can GET, like an object. Not some hand-wavey second-rate bullshit thing that philosophers pretend to get off on. In The Witness, while your character walks around, impermeable to the world, you come to know more things. And knowing more things lets you go to places you couldn’t go to when you knew fewer things. The game on the computer concretely changes from you picking up knowledge, that ethereal thing in your mind. This is of course how everything is, but I suppose the absence of any other form of ‘picking up things’ in The Witness made me actually feel it.

**Minecraft: **How many of my difficulties in life are not this-life specific. How to live as a creature with different boundaries of personal-identity, e.g. the world spirit. Much more about these in my previous post, Mine-craft.

Return of the Obra Dinn: If at an event where lots of people are saying their name and what they do or something, I am usually bored and don’t expect to remember these things. Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you have to figure out from minute clues the names and causes of death of a lot of characters. Once at a networking event, I decided to think of it as like a sequel of Return of the Obra Dinn—I could see all these people sitting around the table, and my quest was to pin a name and a deal to each of them, and this introductory section was currently showing me crucial information. I found that this was a very different mental state. So I suppose I learned that whatever I was normally doing in ‘trying to learn’ things about the other attendees, it is an extremely pale cousin of the curiosity I can feel in a different mental state, and that different mental state is actually fairly different, and naturally invoked in RotOD and not networking introductions.

**Dungeons and Dragons: **Caitlin Elizondo says DnD has given her a few concepts that make a difference to her thinking more generally. The concept of ‘will saves’ has given her more empathy for situations where someone wanted to but failed to do something. The six DnD stats helps her access the framework where there are different types of competency that are valuable for different tasks—obvious in theory, but easier to think in terms of with this structure.

**Poker: **the feeling of being ‘on tilt’

Boggle, Set, Ragnarock: the feeling of flow. Ragnarock is mine, and I would have said I’d experienced ‘flow’ elsewhere, but Ragnarock is sometimes more like an altered state than other such experiences I’ve had.

Civilization IV: I used to lose at a scenario then go back and play it again over and over changing things slightly until I won, which gave me a vivid sense of how suboptimal my native strategy is, presumably also in life. Which is obvious in theory, but it’s different to really feel how much better I would live this day if I was doing it the twentieth time with a laser focus on winning.

Games in general: the experience of addiction, sadly. I’ve always struggled to keep up habits of taking addictive substances, so I infer I’m unusually safe from chemical addictions (I used to play Civilization for five minutes as a reward if I remembered to take my amphetamines). Games are I think the thing I find most seriously addictive. Which has definite downsides, but it is certainly also an interesting experience that helps me understand the wider world better, and where I would be missing something if I just read about addiction in the abstract.

Do you have any to add?

[ETA May 1: I’m adding more I hear in the above list, and also see many good additions in the comments!]

Interviewer: It sounds like you’re pretty excited about self-driving cars. Weren’t you just saying that unemployment from AI is on some kind of very overlapping continuum with extinction from AI? Isn’t rooting for self-driving cars rooting for AI unemployment here, and thus extinction?

Katja: Hmm. Well first I should say, I’m actually fairly neutral on unemployment in general from technology. If technology makes it overall easier to produce what we want, but empowers some people over others, that change in power might be a downside (or not), but if so, it’s one I’m inclined to solve with direct redistribution rather than having the people who would be disempowered do unnecessary busywork to ‘earn’ their living.

Interviewer: Ok, so you think AI unemployment is different?

Katja: Yes, because it involves the disempowerment of humans in general in favor of non-people entities whose empowerment has a decent chance of spelling our ruin. Doing things the hard way to avoid that happening isn’t busywork, it’s very valuable. I don’t usually want to take sides between different humans systematically—society seems probably best served by letting the most effective production methods win out in most cases. But sometimes there are entities who produce things efficiently, and you still shouldn’t trade with them because it empowers them. It’s a lot like not trading with Nazis (broadly—I’m not saying AI entities are evil in the same way, just that their empowerment has a good chance of leading to genocide or omnicide).

Interviewer: Ok, but aren’t self-driving cars AI?

Katja: Yes, but the class of entities I don’t want to empower isn’t ‘AI’ really—it’s more like ‘AI agents’. Though also, the processes that are creating them, such as LLM companies, which complicates things. Self-driving cars are narrow and not much like entities that can be empowered. And my understanding is that we could have perfectly great self driving without using risky AI. But maybe I should be opposed—I’m not sure how to think about what class of entities I should not want empowered.

Interviewer: Are you just in love with self driving cars because they would be so personally convenient for you?

Katja: That is probably playing a role. A car with a random stranger in it is just so much less what I want most of the time than a car by myself. I like to imagine that Uber was invented like, “New startup idea: Chatroulette but you’re stuck in a moving vehicle with the person!” I would feel worse about the end of driving as a human profession if I felt like human drivers consistently did the job acceptably well. But the rate of drivers around here seeming chemically impaired or choosing to drive on the kerb of the freeway to get around other cars, etc, and also talking to me when I don’t want to talk, means there are a lot of cases where I would like to go somewhere in a car except it seems to awful so I don’t.

Interviewer: So how was the self driving car last night?

Katja: non-existent. Once I arrived at the airport, the Waymo app informed me that I wasn’t allowed to get cars there, because they are rolling it out slowly or something. I considered trying from one transit stop outside the airport, but since the available Waymo map was a very uninformative cartoon of the Bay Area and it was after midnight, that felt risky.

Interviewer: Did you give up?

Katja: Not immediately. I had also been told that people are taking ‘robotaxis’ all over, so I looked that up. I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was by Googling and looking on the Android app store, so I messaged some friends, and they directed me to an app called ‘RoboTaxi’ purportedly from Tesla but with barely readable and amateurish font and 57 reviews. As is often perplexingly the case with things of importance to a lot of people from very well known brands, I felt like I was exploring an obscure frontier that nobody had tried to use before. (You want to do what?? Get a ride in one of our cars?? And you want to do it through an app?? And you want to know where they are available??) I logged in and it told me the airport was also out of bounds. So then I gave up.

Interviewer: How did that make you feel?

Katja: ashamed

Interviewer: That makes sense. Why did you even so brazenly think you would probably be able to get a self-driving car from the airport?

Katja: well locally, because Waymo had a map indicating that the airport was within their zone, and I figured Tesla wouldn’t have such a can’t-do attitude. But more fundamentally, I guess I haven’t properly internalized how opposed airports are to efficient travel. Seeking a human-driven car after all this, I was reminded further because the location of the rideshare pickup at the airport and the signage indicating the location, both seem like they should probably be crimes.

Interviewer: Might it be an even broader problem with your level of techno-optimism? Weren’t you just the other day very disappointed by a futuristic kettle? Perhaps you need to learn that everything is shit?

Katja: maybe, but I don’t know, sometimes technology really changes things. I remember before Uber, when I just had to phone a person at a taxi company and ask them to come and collect me and then wait for an unknown period of time, and worst case give up and walk home.

Interviewer: How was your ride home last night?

Katja: Pretty good. The Lyft driver didn’t perceive my initial desire not to talk, and so we had a detailed discussion of Yemen, his life as an immigrant, his family, arranged marriage, romance in Islam, experiences running different businesses, the nature of business partnership, AI risk, and other drivers’ views on automation. We exchanged details so we could interact again.

Interviewer: Do you really think your quest to instead drive home in sterility wasn’t completely misguided?

Katja: Humans are great, but you have to be allowed to want solitude sometimes. It follows that you should probably be allowed to want solitude while also getting to another location. That said, I probably want solitude unhealthily much, and underrate the loss of human connection from these innovations. Maybe there should be a tax or something.

In my own life at least, their actual arrival has been gradual and underwhelming. At some point I learned that you could call Waymos to drive you around a subset of the city of San Francisco. This was wild and exciting, but not actually very useful, since getting anywhere in San Francisco seemed to require traversing a greater subset of it than that, plus I nearly always want to also drive to or from Berkeley. I took Waymos a couple of times, and one of them might have even had transport value.

In the last few days, multiple people not from the Bay Area have casually assumed that I take self-driving taxis all the time, which caused me to investigate and learn that Waymo is now all the way up and down the West Bay Area, seemingly including the airport. So tonight when my plane lands I hope to finally get half way home without a driver! It’s not clear this will improve my experience, since I will then have to catch a Lyft in downtown San Francisco, and probably explain to them that I have all this luggage because I took a self driving car as far as I possibly could before resorting to a human driver. But I am still excited.

The next day I saw Jonathan Groff perform at the start of a TIME 100 event. He did feel like another human right there in the room, but still somehow surprisingly distant. His song didn’t touch me, though my previous experience delighting in his presence on YouTube led me to have other expectations. And his song was Sondheim, which should also support other expectations. Toward the end he said something about—I think—his work being about connection with us all and being together, and that explicit thought reached me better than anything in the music.

Having enjoyed the first Broadway show of my life the day before, and still being in New York, that evening we went to see another one: Every Brilliant Thing. It was a one-man show currently starring Daniel Radcliffe, and involved a lot of Daniel running on and off the stage and borrowing objects and asking audience members to briefly represent his high school teacher or vet or crush. It was also quite poignant. So if any performance was going to feel like a real person was in the same room as me, and like that person was reaching me emotionally, this would seem to have a good shot. And Daniel did seem like a real person over there. But I recognized the movingness of the story more than actually being moved.

The play was about a long list of things in life that are ‘brilliant’, which I hear as both ‘great’ and as ‘brightening’. The list made me feel uneasy, because I recognized the things as good, but I didn’t feel it. Ice cream, sure. The smell of an old book, okay. Bed, yeah I guess I like it quite a lot more than not-bed. This was all somewhat fitting with the themes of the play, in which the brilliance of things was recognized to different degrees by different characters at different times and levels of depression. But it still made me feel improper and distant from other people: the audience was meant to understand these things as brilliant. I cried a little about that afterwards.

But it also reminded me later of an obvious-but-hard-to-enact thought: if you don’t feel the goodness of things much at some point, it’s not an indication that everything has gone wrong, or that the world is no longer good, or never was, or that there is something badly wrong with you. This is clear in writing, but if I don’t explicitly consider the issue, it is easy to interpret such experiences of nothing seeming good as some variant of ‘nothing is good’. Which is about as correct as having a numb foot and describing the situation as ‘there is no floor’. The picture in my mind is of a sailor in darkness: sometimes you can’t see the stars, and then you have to navigate by memory. And the darkness is about your current location, not the world—it’s possible to get to other non-dark places, even if you can’t see them from here.

One of the last brilliant things involved the sound of a record crackling into the start of a song, which I was surprised to learn that I did feel something about. Perhaps because it reminds me of being alone, in a nice library, with pen and paper. That kind of state quite close to the sublime! Which reminds me that things can be sublime.

These forays into group emotion left me feeling somewhat like a distant and unmoved observer, but an earlier example is also interesting. In our first hours in town, we rushed out to see a live comedy show. It was in a crowded underground bar, and we were in flip-out seats in a walkway. I was struck by how much even the emcee made us laugh—they were funny, but I bet we laughed more than watching the most celebrated comedians on a screen. And it seemed like a fuller laughing experience—laughing with group, together. I hadn’t really thought of comedy as much better live. I wonder if in-person social orchestration is a big part of making people laugh, beyond the performance-as-separable-pixels-and-sounds. For this show at least, I was easily brought along with the emotions intended, and felt closer.

Is it less vulnerable to go along with comedic emotions than be moved by serious ones? And with a crowd I feel self-conscious? I wonder if my relationship with the other people in the room matters more than the performer.

Sitting outside a restaurant later, watching people and cars pass by, I thought about how sometimes everything seems brilliant to me, and remembering that made everything seem a bit brilliant.

Feeling dehydrated and migrainish at the end of a day of travel, I wanted to make tea. I quickly found a promising looking plug-in kettle among the minimalist counter apparatus and plugged it in. It was voluminous, smooth, emanating modern perfection, broadcasting with its textureless heft and electric glass interface, “have you lived a life of unnecessary want, guessing if water is remotely the right temperature after you pressed a single primitive button some time ago and then forgot about it? Understand now that everything is truly simple! You have been wronged, misled. The past has been corrupt, but it is over. We have reached the time of professional water heating. Every person can have buttons for every desirable temperature, effortless buttons of light, giving you the simple information you deserve on a luxurious but reasonable lit up interface”. The kettle was even clean. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before. It should have been a warning.

I put in water and closed the lid, and was presented with eight lit-up buttons and a big ‘69°F’. I pressed the ‘boil’ button. That made the °F number change and flash, but then it returned and this did not seem to cause anything else that suggested water heating. I pressed the power button. I couldn’t tell if that turned it on or off or neither. I pressed the boil button again. I decided to microwave my water and get on with my life.

I microwaved my water, and we did something else for a bit.

Afterwards however, the kettle was still there. It looked so tantalizingly proficient. I wanted it to boil water. I wanted sleek, efficient boiled water. Water that made you feel like not having water at any well-labeled temperature you wanted whenever you wanted was some kind of thing you had almost forgotten about from your childhood in a developing country. Also, the kettle only had about three kinds of buttons, how hard could it be to find the pattern that made it boil water?

I pressed the boil button and the power button more. I pressed the ‘warm’ button and the ‘green’ button. Sometimes when I pressed a button, most of the other button lights went out. Sometimes things flashed. I tried different orders of buttons. I tried long-pressing buttons. I tried opening and closing it, taking in off and on its stand. Sometimes the water temperature moved to a promising 70, but then just meandered back to 69 again.

My boyfriend suggested that it was broken. Which was very plausible. But it was so responsive that I couldn’t really believe it: it just didn’t have a ‘broken’ vibe. It had a vibe that it was extremely effective and easy and perhaps I was broken.

I’m pretty good at paralyzing electronic devices. It’s as if iPhones have been going about their lives mindlessly doing iPhone stuff until they meet me and suddenly everything is strange and different and they feel self-conscious can’t remember how to receive text input. Once I merely opened the box of a new laptop and it died, so that one at least can’t be imputed to my poor security or tab-management lifestyle. (I hope this trait bodes well at least for contributing to an AI pause one day.) So even though I had tried pretty hard to make this kettle work, and I’m an intelligent person capable of many kinds of puzzles, I kind of believed that my boyfriend would not have this problem.

So I asked him to help, and while he did apparently share the opinion that he would be able to figure it out near-instantaneously, he was not very interested in prioritizing this. So I played at trying to goad him into it: probably he couldn’t fix it, he was bluffing, I was going to look it up online and he would lose his chance to prove himself. He apparently didn’t need to prove himself.

Somehow though he did become interested shortly after, possibly just out of compassion. He went to the kettle and started pressing buttons. I went to watch. Possibly that broke the magic: he just did the kinds of things that I could think of: press the small number of buttons in different orders and for different durations. It didn’t work. So the situation was just as bad, except now he too really wanted the kettle to work.

Even though this was a very compelling puzzle, I moved to do the reasonable thing and look up the instructions. In bed with a mostly-legible photo of the numbers and words under the kettle, I Googled. The kettle didn’t seem to exist much. Like, one of the most promising links was something that suggested the right kettle was being sold on a shoppping site in Botswana, where I was greeted with a popup asking if I wouldn’t rather have the Brazilian version of the site, before being directed to a generic message that the item I requested is not available.

I found a kettle on Amazon that looked suspiciously similar but with a different brand name. Some buyer videos failed to clarify exactly what to do with the buttons. I found a YouTube video from someone purporting to love the kettle, in which he seemed to just press the ‘boil’ button to boil the water, but where the video also cut briefly right there, so who knows? (Why did he cut it? Is there some secret?)

In further search results I found a Reddit post “Is this a good kettle for beginners”, which struck me as both an absurd question, and a question to which “no” was an absurd answer and also clearly the correct one here.

I wonder how much the reason technology often disappoints me is that I have too many hopes for it. I love efficiency and systems improvements that pay off forever, and if a kettle appears and whispers to me that it understands that everything could be better, that it too is on the side of progress, that of course things can be simple and good, then I believe it fully until the moment it betrays me, when I am SHOCKED. Perhaps the world is mostly cynics who never expected their smartphones to lay down the letters they wanted, or prevent them from being woken by spam callers throughout the night, who would have just rolled their eyes at this kettle.

We still haven’t made the kettle work. My boyfriend says he now really thinks it’s broken. He listened to it the old fashioned way, and what it is saying is ‘wee-uhh-wee-uhh-ee-ungk’.

If you are reading this, you are probably familiar enough with the decades-old AI safety community to know this isn’t true. But I don’t have a good direct way to reach the people who could use this information, and still I hate to leave such a falsehood uncontested. So if this is obvious, I hope the post is still perhaps useful to point more distant and confused people toward.

~

I personally know that AI risk was not invented by the tech CEOs because I have been near the middle of it since at least 2009—before any of the prominent AI companies existed, let alone had CEOs who might be trying to hype their products.

Here’s are some miscellaneous events over the years to give you a sense of the implausibility of this:

• 2008 - I attempt to contact Eliezer Yudkowsky to inform him that I am ‘trying to figure out the optimal way to use my life’ and would like to hear a better account of why his plan (of worrying about AI risk) is good. I have read about it online, but would like a clearer account. Traveling the world shortly after undergrad later, I meet a handful of people in person in the Bay Area who care about this, and one argues strongly that I should prioritize AI risk over my previously preferred causes e.g. climate change. I decide to think about this.

• 2009 - I am still not very convinced that AI is the most important thing to work on, but go to stay with the people who are worried about it for a few months. I argue about it a lot with a handful of them. There seem to be about twenty of them locally in the South Bay, though many more who comment on the relevant blogs. My photography collection from this era is quite sparse.

  

  I go to The Singularity Summit for my first time (and its fourth), which is very lively and full of people who are thinking seriously about the future of AI.

• 2010 - Deepmind is founded. (I am back at school.)

• 2011 - I start a philosophy PhD at CMU, hoping to be eligible to work at somewhere like the Future of Humanity Institute one day, which is a happening hub of discussion about existential risk, AI and other important issues, that I like to visit.

• 2012 - I visit the Bay more and hang out with the growing AI risk community there. I visit the UK and do the same. I go to the AGI 2012 Winter Intelligence Conference.

• 2013 - I move to Berkeley and work at MIRI for a semester during grad school. I measure algorithmic progress over time across various computer science domains, as input to expectations for artificial intelligence in future. I visit the UK and attend the Center for Effective Altruism’s ‘weekend away’ where we have a debate on which cause is best, between global poverty, animal welfare and extinction risk. Extinction risk wins—the crowd leaves having changed their mind in that direction on net. The three advocates just before or after:

  

• 2014 - I join MIRI properly. I research The Asilomar Conference and Leó Szilárd as evidence about whether it is worth people trying to deal with risks early, because people around mostly believe that the risks from AI are at least a decade away, and there is disagreement about whether that makes it futile. I run an online reading group about Superintelligence, a new book about AI risk. I co-found AI Impacts, a project to answer questions about the future of AI, because AI risk seems at least fairly plausibly the most important thing to work on, and I want to investigate more and share my thinking with others.

• 2015 - I attend the first FLI conference—it seems that more people and more prominent people are interested in AI safety! OpenAI is founded.

  

• 2016 - I lead a team to run the first Expert Survey on Progress in AI. The median probability given to an outcome of advanced AI that is “Extremely Bad (e.g., human extinction)” is already 5%.

• 2017 - Some people around me are getting very worried, and saying AGI will happen within several years. My survey gets a shocking amount of media attention, becoming the ‘16th most discussed paper’ in 2017 according to Altmetric. Apparently there is interest in this topic..

• 2018 - I go to a big workshop for people working on AI risk in the English countryside, and a Chilean summit where I talk on TV and the radio about AI risk. It feels like interest is still picking up, and I feel optimistic about talking to the public.

  

• 2019 - GPT-2 comes out. Someone tries to get it to name our house. My favorite names include things like “World peace: tigers and humans” and “rooftop hillside: the highest place in the world”. It is hilarious and useless, but also magical and wild. The things we have worried about for years are feeling more tangible, and people’s ‘AI timelines’ are shrinking.

• 2020 - The world is reminded that really crazy things can happen. AI Impacts becomes remote. I spend the year with my household, who are almost all working on AI risk. We enjoy whiteboards a lot and run at least one good house conference in this period.

  

• 2021 - Anthropic is founded

After a blur of climbing and descending stairs and seeking objects and forgetting what I was doing and appreciating how beautiful my bag is, I set out. After remembering I should take various medications and going back inside to do that, I set out.

Often my favorite cafe seems too far away, at about four blocks, but today I had wandered half way there while I considered my options, so I decided to go. It’s a German place that feels homely and wholesome to me in its unamericanness. I too-carefully contemplated different places to sit, and chose outside: today a sunny explosion of roses and umbrellas with words like ‘Reissdorf kölsch’.

I stared at the menu until the waitress had asked me a couple of different questions she hoped would open a conversation about ordering. I tried to go along, but digressed into the pronunciation of ‘Spätzle’ to give myself longer to think. I nearly forgot to order coffee. I slopped my coffee on floor on the way outside, which the waitress offered to clean up. She brought me my food outside just as I was deciding to move all my objects to a different table, at which moment I slopped much more coffee all over my computer.

My computer was closed, but she seemed concerned by this, and perhaps concerned about me in general. She had already told me where to get silverware and napkins, but she went and got them for me anyway, which was nice because otherwise I was maybe just going to not eat things for fifteen minutes until I became fully conscious that that was why I wasn’t eating.

I’m not usually like this, but sometimes I am, and it’s hard to put a finger on what the difference is, except to point at behaviors such as ‘how long will I inexplicably stare at my arm? If I go to buy a drink, what is the chance I will lose it?’ My understanding is that this kind of thing is called ‘executive function’ and that I don’t have heaps of it at the best of times, but much less at the worst of times.

This restaurant was providing me with a certain amount of executive function alongside afternoon breakfast, just out of kindness and obligation. But what if I could recognize the need, and intentionally buy it? Just go to a place that specialized in that, where they wouldn’t only make sure I order eventually and get my utensils and clean up after me, but actively take charge on causing me to get my shit together and do something in the day?

I was reminded of an idea I had before (from ‘10 things society might try having if it only contained variants of me’):

Shopfronts where you can go and someone else figures out what you want. And you aren’t expected to be friendly or coherent about it. Like, if you are shopping, and yet not having fun, you go there and they figure out that you are the wrong temperature, don’t have enough blood sugar, are taking too serious an attitude to shopping, need ten minutes away from your companions, and should probably buy a pencil skirt. So they get you a smoothie and some comedy and a quiet place to sit down by yourself for a bit, and then send you off to the correct store.

I had thought of the value-add there as ‘figure out what you want’, but I think part of what I was imagining is that they take charge and keep the process happening and ensure that decisions are made and blood sugar is acquired for instance. Instead of the thought of blood sugar leading to staring into space or being reminded of a different idea to do with blood sugar that you want to write down but you can’t figure out where to write because there are too many tabs in your computer and you think you should close them but first you want to record the idea..

You can buy executive function in some formats—for instance, I recently hired a Chief of Staff. But what if for instance you just want to buy a little bit of executive function sometimes, on demand? Like on the occasional morning when you are failing particularly hard at being a coherent agent, or when you are stressed or in pain and failing to figure out what to do about the stress or pain because you are stressed or in pain? Are these things that only happen to me? (Humorous ADHD YouTube suggests no.)

In my vision for this kind of service, it might live in the category of ‘way to treat yourself’, like getting a manicure (which—for those who haven’t done that—often involves more hand massage and offers of champagne than it might if treated as a more pragmatic nail improvement chore). Instead of just sitting in your living room considering stuff you should maybe do, you can sit in a comfy chair in a nice smelling place petting a cute puppy while someone charming and encouraging talks to you, figures out how you should proceed, and prompts you to do it in easy and compelling pieces.

• I haven’t exercised lately

• I have developed a vague background sense that I’m fragile and if I were to exercise it should be by walking around the garden or something

• I’m dressed in what is too shlubby to even count as comfortable

• I am otherwise behind on some basic life things that take effort and are normally subsidized by social incentives, e.g. showering, putting tissues in the bin, eating things that aren’t power crunch bars

• I am habitually avoiding other people

• I am habitually avoiding places where other people go

• I am habitually treating myself as a contamination threat

• I’ve been lying around in bed quite a bit

I posit that a problem with this is that these things are somewhat self reinforcing, so the period of indisposition can insidiously take hold and last substantially longer than the sickness. Feeling unfit, poorly dressed, fragile, gross and contaminatory make various things less appealing, such as visiting a gym, seeing other people, going to the office, leaving one’s room at all, leaving one’s bed at all, embarking on ambitious tidying up ventures.

Worse, it is fairly ambiguous when one stops being sick, so there may not be a moment where it’s very clear you should change your behavior, especially if you continue to feel vaguely bad from these depression-flavored lifestyle factors.

Last time I was sick for a while I was in a fairly good mood during the sickness itself, but was relatively depressed for maybe a month afterwards, which I suspect is related to this kind of thing.

I was sick last week, and seemed to be better on Saturday. To avoid this kind of problem this time, I had an idea: an official end to sickness ritual, where you abruptly do all the things a non-sick person would do, and reset your expectations about yourself.

This was is my tentative ritual plan:

• exercise: run to the gym and do 15m+ intense exercise

• groom: shower, shave, apply substances to body, dress nice

• share air: go to a cafe, get a manicure

• Share more (optional): share a drink, share a kiss

These are designed to often hit multiple factors (share a drink: saliva, socializing, unhealthy behavior that can self-signal non-fragility!)

I wrote this draft up to about here, then set out to try it out. I started out in bed, with a bit of a headache, my mouth tasting like powercrunch bar and time. Going to the gym seemed like not what to do. I intended to report back.

A first obstacle with this plan was that it was actually like 6:30pm by the time I finished writing down this idea, and it turns out that gyms, cafes and nail salons near me mostly consider that past their bedtime.

I’m a member of three different gyms near me though, and one of them was still open for half an hour, so I briefly emotionally reckoned with the fact that I really had to go to the gym RIGHT NOW if I was going to make this work, then got a move on.

I put on some shoes and went out, intending to run there. It was excitingly rainy, and the cars seemed to have a shared sense that politeness to pedestrians is a kind of luxury nobody can afford in this weather. Happily the run was short. The gym is actually a climbing gym with a bit of gym equipment in the back, a tiny bit of it cardio-directed, exactly one machine of which was not taken. So I jumped on and started cycling, without sparing moments to figure out how to adjust it to my height or anything. I think I flipped between being present, thinking thoughts like “okay that’s three minutes, I only have to do that four more times…” and playing a game on my phone. It was okay. I did it, just as the gym was closing. Check.

Ok, now if I wanted to get a manicure, I needed to change the order of things, because the two purportedly still open were closing at 8, and painting fingernails takes time. The one across the road looked intensely not open. So I set off jogging toward the one five minutes away. This was a bit more ‘race against time scavenger hunt’ style than I had had in mind, but that’s a thing that works for me. I saw a friend walking parallel across the street, and we had a friendly but confusing mimed conversation in which he seemed to indicate that he would like to race me to the corner, so I ran there but then he seemed to have a restaurant to go into, so we waved goodbye. (Social interaction: check!)

The nail salon of my hopes had light and someone painting someone else’s nails inside it, but the door was locked. Was this such a dicey part of town that they just came and unlocked the door for registered guests or something? I waited a little until what looked like a convenient break in the nail-painting and knocked, but the woman painting nails indicated that I couldn’t come in. I was at a bit of a loss then. I didn’t want to give up, but I also didn’t want to go considerably further away to considerably less real looking nail salons. I considered going to the body-decoration shop right there that was open, but they seemed to sell tattoos and additional body piercings, which I didn’t seem to be any more down for than usual. It also glowed with an eerie futuristic blue light, and if this was to be the day I got a tattoo that probably wouldn’t be the vibe I’d go for.

I looked more for suitable replacements, and found a tiny inside area with shops I’d never seen. I went into a pool bar and downstairs into their giant pool basement, which had a vast number of pool tables and quite a few people, so that’s kind of surprising and good to know.

Even if I didn’t find a good replacement per se, I was feeling good about my exploration of the town around me. In a perhaps overambitious act of non-fragility I went into the McDonalds a couple of blocks from my house. I indeed found the visit slightly intense, and left after merely looking at the menu.

I got home and moved on to becoming clean and well kept. I realized I actually had a party to go to with a dress code: business casual (which I understood to be humorous fancy dress, not serious). So I got pretty professional, which is not what I generally do professionally.

My boyfriend also emerged from some friend-visiting and wished to go to the party pronto, so I made a dash to a local board game cafe that is actually open till late and got a decaf latte to complete my outfit and my tentative ritual plan, then headed over to share air and eventually a drink.

A couple of days later, evidence is consistent with this helping. I’m in a very good mood at least, and today went on a bike ride and hike, and to a cafe and a restaurant. My friend pointed out to me that I could consider including other people in my ‘celebration’ next time, so that’s an interesting idea.

I hate my current nominal method: keeping them folded on open-front shelves, because they fall out on the floor and I can’t see almost any of them without taking a bunch out. My shelves also happen to be too tall, so I throw my sweaters at the top shelf and they tumble out and impressively twist their arms around and yank down other types of clothing on their way, which on net I hate though I’m glad to have observed it once.

I hate my current actual method: keeping them in a giant mound on the floor in front of a set of open-front shelves. It stops me from being able to reach the shelves, so is self reinforcing. I do enjoy observing feedback loops, so it has that going for it. But in downsides: the only underpants I’ve been able to locate lately are those which I left in my boyfriend’s room and he washed and put in his more functional clothing system.

I hate wardrobes. It’s really annoying to hang things on coat-hangers or to take them off. But honestly I don’t think that’s my true rejection. I may not have tried wardrobes much since childhood, when I used to wait for sleep fearfully in a dark room looking at the big wooden wardrobe with the shape of a fox’s head in the wood, much like the wardrobe in the horror story we read at school in which a wardrobe contained a dead fox which was involved in some then-barely-conceivably fucked up shenanigans, which triggered a years-long departure from acceptable mental health for me. But while that may color my view, the coat-hangers are no good anyway.

I hate chests of drawers, and there my mind doesn’t even raise practical considerations before recollecting chests of drawers of my childhood. Chests of drawers are where you worry about rotting easter eggs that you had hoped to hoard as treasure among your underwear. Chests of drawers are what you stare at while you try to calculate how likely the marks on your leg are to be from a deadly snake, and whether you should be so bold as to tell a parent, and decide to just wait it out and see. And also, you have to pull the drawers out, and they are often sticky, and you can’t see lots of clothes at once, and they are always wanting to be too full to easily open. And they are just unaesthetic somehow. And generally made of fake wood, which I hate.

I hate a chair for keeping not-quite-clean clothes. Chairs are not great for this and are great for sitting on, so what is this nonsense? Most of humans need an object for this purpose, and the best we can come up with is repurposing an object designed for a totally different use that is only serviceable at all because it has two bits that things can hang on and a flattish surface? What if we didn’t have clothes racks and just always used bikes?

I changed my mind, I don’t really hate little bins on shelves, but I don’t love them. You can’t see into them without moving them, and you can’t see very well even if you do move them. So you have to dig around in them but they are too small for that and it’s like trying to mix too much cake mix in a too small bowl. I guess I could have a lot more of them and keep them emptier, but then it’s hard to know which one you should move to a poke-around-able location. Also they tend to be unaesthetic.

There are some more obscure options, which I suppose I merely expect to hate if I tried them. A thing with rotating arms for hanging things, since half the annoyance of hanging clothes is wedging them awkwardly between too-tight other clothes. Just lots and lots of hooks. Several big baskets on the floor. Just don’t wear clothes. Surreptitiously leave all of my clothes in my boyfriend’s room. Nothing good here.

This afternoon I once again set out to find the ideal or at least okay clothes storage system, since I’m moving rooms and changing everything. And I came across the idea of ‘Grab & Go No Fold Clothes Organization’, which is to say storing clothes like potato chips: in boxes with partially-but-not-fully cut out fronts. I wonder if this is the answer: see the clothes, but the clothes don’t fall on the ground. No moving things, no shoving clothes awkwardly between clothes. Underpants on tap. No risk of this reminding me of any part of the past, at least until the future.