Originally posted on my X
When I was a kid, I was very curious about things outside my regular day of school, homework, etc. I would be out all day - playing with sand in our garden, building sandcastles, experimenting with my bike, breaking things and not fixing them, and doing a lot of other things. I think this is what most childhood looks like, where kids do whatever sparks their curiosity.
But then when you grow up, reality hits you. For me, it was preparing for engineering entrance examinations so that I could get into the best engineering college I could. And once you are in college, you follow the curriculum and make sure you get good grades. I mean, there are definitely times when you can bring up your curiosity and do something different, but still, at the end of the day, most of us want to get that job.
Once you are in a job, that’s when things started getting even more weird. You get stuck in a constant cycle of performing because you want that promotion, more money, more stability, etc.
Somewhere in that whole time, you lost that itch for working, for that curiosity, and over time even that curiosity dies. And I am not saying it’s wrong; as you get older, you have more responsibility, and you start prioritizing because you only have 24 hours in a day, and everything takes time.
So your side project you always wanted to do, you don’t have time. You want to do some gardening, and getting started takes time. You want to build a maker space for yourself, but you don’t have time. There’s a lot of grunt work you have to do before doing anything, and a lot of people give up and don’t have enough time.
But in the last few years, things have changed. With the breakthrough in consumer LLMs, a lot of that grunt work has gone away.
You can code something super fast.
You can plan your garden super fast and ask ChatGPT what to do (I did this one finally)
Never touched/programmed hardware before; now is the time.
You can just ask anything that you ever thought of doing.
That’s why this is the Age of Experimentation. The barrier to starting something has dropped, and the ceiling for thinking about something and doing it has gone way up. The only bottleneck is your imagination
A lot of people talking about AI doom don’t realize this is the age of abundance too. If you embrace that fact, you will see how beautiful the current times are. The future is only gonna get better, so get moving.
Start experimenting.