Mastodawn

Kyle Hughes Feb 7

I experienced most of the existential crises that everyone is going through now a few years ago when I saw this trajectory. Besides the life-threatening “what labor will be available to me above minimum wage as my body breaks down,” the other one I have not gotten over is that I don’t think I have lived up to my potential and I’m not sure I will have the opportunity to. Boy, I worked hard, but how much harder could I have worked if I knew I needed to outrun this? Shit.
https://toot.cafe/@nolan/116030386189055424

Nolan Lawson (@[email protected])

New post: "We mourn our craft" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/ No comment on this one.

Toot Café

Kyle Hughes Feb 7

Why did I ever care about work-life balance when I was 28? If I knew that at age 40 I would be competing with 18-year old boys in the mines then I would’ve lit myself on fire (figuratively). I would have smoked this thing down to the ashes. I just wanted to do great work my whole life and I don’t know if I honored that.

Kyle Hughes Feb 7

So that’s what I’m doing now. I am burning this thing to the ground. I am going as fast as I can, I am playing my whole hand, I am pulling everything out of my bag. My track record on life decisions is not great so I am not confident I have the judgement to pull it off, but if I don’t it won’t be because I left anything on the field. It’ll be because there isn’t a field anymore.

Kyle Hughes Feb 7

I think it is not healthy for me to be in a place where people one-to-two decades my senior collectively pivot to, “well, at least I’m going to be retiring soon.” The explicit goal of all of these companies is to automate all economically-valuable labor. If you can’t get out before they do then, barring a painful revolution, that will just be it for everyone: permanent socioeconomic stasis. I’ll be happy for you when I’m down in the mines.

@kyle do you think folks en masse will settle for socioeconomic stasis? If there’s nobody to buy the products and services they sell at that scale, then their businesses will fail, too.

I reckon there’s a re-balancing in our future.

Kyle Hughes Feb 8

@tonyarnold That depends on how dark you want to get. The state has a monopoly on violence. I stopped talking about this publicly a couple years ago.

In that world no one would have potential; everyone would be a strain on scarce resources. We could have a fake market economy supported by strict population control, or we could transition to a post-market economy where the means of production are permanently out of reach and poverty naturally reduces the population and competition for resources.

Kyle Hughes Feb 8

@tonyarnold Elon Musk and Sam Altman both explicitly want to create enough robots to bootstrap their own production. At that point, markets will just have been a millennia-long fundraising exercise and breeding program.

Tony Arnold Feb 8

@kyle or we transition to a post-financial system like what we saw in ST: TNG.

I feel like systems at this scale are self balancing, when “humans” like Musk and Altman aren’t in the picture (although to be fair, they’re just the surface of that monster).

Orrrr we work out that there is in fact a limit to the skills these things have (and there will be, by their very nature) and we’ll burn another decade working around that wall before hitting the next one.

Kyle Hughes Feb 8

@tonyarnold Fingers crossed!

I appreciate you seriously engaging with me.

Tony Arnold Feb 8

@kyle you're doing a huge amount of theorising based on what you've seen and your experiences.

I don't think you're right about all of it — especially the darker parts — but curiosity is the key, right?

Tony Arnold Feb 8

@kyle feel free to treat this as a rhetorical question, but do you have friends, peers, etc outside of social media that you're talking with about this topic? You should!

By definition, all social media is a curated bubble — it's important to sanity check things with IRL folks.

Kyle Hughes Feb 8

@tonyarnold Yes.

In the post that you originally replied to, I am specifically talking about my social media sphere: for whatever reason, it is predominantly software-related people one-to-three decades older than me.

The mentals of my demographic in the U.S. IRL are bleak. My group chats of software-related people are made up of either: independently wealthy from startup success; assured they are in their last job and holding on for dear life (✋🏻); laid off for 12+ months and doing gig work.

Tony Arnold Feb 8

@kyle that does sound bleak.

Do you have friends who aren't in tech? People who don't give a shit about any of the AI derived fuckery that's going on?

I try to spend time with folks who aren't in this at all, and it doesn't silence the existential dread, but it sure quietens it.

Kyle Hughes Feb 8

@tonyarnold Yes. Everyone else I know is poor. My family is poor. I’m the first and only person in my extended family to go to college.

Georg Tuparev Feb 9

@kyle @tonyarnold

You’ve never been in Africa, S/E Asia, S. America. There the definition of “poor” is very different.

Kyle Hughes Feb 9

@tuparev @tonyarnold Sure, but my grandmother doesn’t have any teeth and was working at 85-years old. I don’t know that this is a particularly productive direction to take the conversation.