I know this is one of the universal human experiences, but I keep getting unpleasantly reminded by the passage of time.
pleasant “recent” memories are already one or two years ago. they feel recent enough that I still stubbornly believe my recollection is accurate, but in reality they’re far enough away from the present day for the sepia tint of nostalgia to creep in and for all the frustrations and sorrows to be forgotten. no wonder it’s so hard for the present to compete with the “recent” past.
I sometimes ask myself when I first met one my “recent” friends, and am startled to realize that I met them 2 or 3 or 4 years ago. “oh yeah, I met him ‘recently’ at that one party FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.”
I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that Iater this year I will have been at openai for 5 years. I first started following ML about 10 years ago, so I will soon have spent more time at openai than I have spent reading openai papers from the outside, and thinking of openai as a far away citadel in a different universe.
I suspect that you may have it worse than average person, because you are intellectual worker and intellectual achievements tend to be unsatisfying, in a sense that when you discover something, you feel “eureka” moment and then you feel like you knew it forever. It’s even worse with intellectual process, because, in my experience, you forget all fruitless branches and backtracking of thought process almost like it was a dream.
I know this is one of the universal human experiences, but I keep getting unpleasantly reminded by the passage of time.
pleasant “recent” memories are already one or two years ago. they feel recent enough that I still stubbornly believe my recollection is accurate, but in reality they’re far enough away from the present day for the sepia tint of nostalgia to creep in and for all the frustrations and sorrows to be forgotten. no wonder it’s so hard for the present to compete with the “recent” past.
I sometimes ask myself when I first met one my “recent” friends, and am startled to realize that I met them 2 or 3 or 4 years ago. “oh yeah, I met him ‘recently’ at that one party FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.”
I still can’t wrap my mind around the fact that Iater this year I will have been at openai for 5 years. I first started following ML about 10 years ago, so I will soon have spent more time at openai than I have spent reading openai papers from the outside, and thinking of openai as a far away citadel in a different universe.
where did all the time go?
I suspect that you may have it worse than average person, because you are intellectual worker and intellectual achievements tend to be unsatisfying, in a sense that when you discover something, you feel “eureka” moment and then you feel like you knew it forever. It’s even worse with intellectual process, because, in my experience, you forget all fruitless branches and backtracking of thought process almost like it was a dream.