It takes a worried man.

A friend (an avowed LLM skeptic) recently emailed me about a lovely and very moving interaction they'd had with The Dingus that had helped them, and here's my belated response.

I'm sorry it took me so long to respond. It's no reflection of my ardor or enthusiasm for your message—I've just been struggling with some manageable but admittedly distracting situational depression. And, yet, here I am—hello!

Jeez. This [deeply moving experience with an LLM] is really good, and you are absolutely correct that this is a marvel worth both acknowledging and even sharing.

Given how much even my dearest friends can barely conceal their free-form anxiety slash unbridled gamer rage about how Computers Do A New Thing Now, I've started to feel fully ashamed about how relentlessly my low-friction interactions with a weird robot in the sky have been improving my life in improbably wholesome ways.

I mean. Have a look. (It's fine to zoom in, but just this one time.)

Since this weekend, I've fixed a deeply bricked (and very costly) Apple device; learned the difference between hay and straw; found a moving essay about faith and motivation in difficult times;  almost found a bluegrass banjo I like for GarageBand; learned how to remove the AA battery from a conceited locomotive; and deeply researched a pretty funny joke about the absurdity of human communication. I also learned what all that guy from the latest episode of The Last of Us directed on Game of Thrones.

Despite all of this heedless rawdog fraternizing, I stand before you a man unmarred.

So far anyway, I've survived all of my deranged interactions with the impious dream engine that's gotten everyone in such a tizzy. Hell, I've identified, clarified, problematized, reframed, reinterpreted, and sometimes even integrated all kinds of new information that I simply did not have last week.

Importantly, I've also thrown out an imperial butt-ton of stuff because it was wrong, inaccurate, misleading, confused, or incomplete. But, as it happens, this is something adults already have to do a lot every day. So, the people for whom filtering and critical evaluation are a new concern now have, by my count, at least two problems.

Point is, I used that comically imperfect hillock of maths to make my life a little better, and it rules.

And all it ultimately took was me remembering I could do it. Remembering primarily that, regardless of how I do it (and whether my friends like it this week), I can always choose to luxuriate in the exploration of some dumb bullshit no one else cares about. And I can explore it as shallowly or as deeply as suits me, and until it feels like I'm done for now. A ribbon was neither awarded nor sought.

The point is not that any given technology should or should not exist[1]; the point is remembering that there’s a whole big world out there that continues to spin regardless of the sort of month you’re having. Even or especially on the days of that month when you can’t be bothered to look an inch or two beyond your stupid nose.

Related real talk: Who's not struggling right now? Who's not appending the word "depression" to nouns that used to feel anodyne? And, who's not spending more of the day than they'd prefer fretting about all the things that have been introduced specifically to ruin their particular life?

But, as you've learned, my friend, in this world, we benefit in durable ways from whenever we can find moments of grace. Wherever they are. Because, alas, grace is rarely lurking in a fifth or ninth serving of whatever infosnack fortifies an improbably strong emotion that still begs to be made even more corpulent. And usually more incurious. And that becomes a habit. A very bad habit.

I mean, jeez, we're mad about who parks wrong and we're mad about who's buying problematic chicken sandwiches and we're super mad about who's not ashamed enough about what state they live in. It's a whole situation.

But, when it comes to moments of grace, the paucity of one's particular yield comes not from the lack of those moments existing, because, Jesus, our world is just bursting with little wonders. Here's five to get you started.

Nope. The bummer is that we miss so many great little things because they don't conform to the implastic version of ourselves that we curate in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store some notional version of ourselves that's never existed and never will. And that's purely on us.

And whom do we imagine all these superfluous certainties are impressing? Eventually, you can make up some plausible straw admirer, I suppose. But, the more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who've decided we're obviously misunderstanding the world wrong.

Anyways. Jeez Louise, I'm so proud of you, and I'm so honored that you've shared this with me. You've given me a moment of grace, you big jerk.

And, remember, we're all in this together. 🫡

Title.