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Terence Eden’s Blog

I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/im-ok-being-left-behind-thanks/

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.

"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

#AI #crypto #future #technology

I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…

Terence Eden’s Blog

Infrapink (he/his/him)2d ago

A little while ago I gave a presentation on AI at my job, where I explained in detail exactly why it's useless. A manager who has a sentiment similar to yours asked how I would respond to "But we can't be left behind!" I managed to quip "It's perfectly fine to be left behind when everybody else is running towards a cliff".

Steven Heywood 1d ago

@Infrapink @blog
In a similar situation, with a management team that wasn't big on objectives and once told me — in a meeting they called to give me a bollocking on the perceived problems with an important project — that "We don't have any preferred outcomes," my response was that we could waste time, energy and resources running round the jungle meeting dead ends, crocodiles and quicksand or we could wait for one of the many somebodies already thrashing about to find the way to where we want to go, assuming, of course, that we know where we're going.

@blog https://fomocoin.org/

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE 2d ago

@blog WordStar (on CP/M rather than DOS) was a seriously big deal at the time and made an enormous difference. You could type your own documents and didn't have to be frightened of what the typist would say when you went to them with corrections.

Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️2d ago

@TimWardCam @blog

And perhaps the only word processor actually designed for people who knew how to type, AKA touch typists.

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE 2d ago

@the5thColumnist @blog 'Cos nobody else much did any typing in those days.

Cookiefiend 2d ago

@the5thColumnist @TimWardCam @blog I used Quark. It was fast, clean and took up virtually no room on my, ahem, floppy disk.

Ray McCarthy 2d ago

@TimWardCam @blog
Yes, Wordstar & clones were fine on CP/M and DOS.
Google Docs is crap spyware only good for real time collaboration.
After MS Word (which was on the Mac 1st), then the big change was Star Office, then bought by Sun and became Open Office (styles & outline windows you could keep open). Then Oracle bought Sun and Open Office -> Libra Office, and Libre Write arguably better for most since MS 2007 adding the Ribbon.

Sentiment correct, but example wrong.

@blog
Right out of school, I got a job as a VR developer. Just under two years in, I had to leave. They could claim they were using VR to study and practice complex cases, but in reality, most of my work ended up as a novelty, shown post-surgery at talks or conferences.
A few years later, I’m really glad I left. Some things are all hype and no substance and they never change, at least not for the better.

Joyce Park 2d ago

@noomsh @blog My husband worked on the team at MSFT that made the Hololens software. The whole team got laid off a couple years ago. I have a friend who worked on the Meta Quest and after his team got laid off they reformed as a VR game studio. Now they're pivoting again to Steam and mobile.

@troutgirl @blog
And that’s the second reason I’m glad I left VR. Though it would be incredibly naive to think my current job is safe from layoffs :cries-in-still-have-mortgage-to-pay:

FandaSin 2d ago

Lately I'm enjoying JOMO - "Joy of missing out" on so many things.

So anytime anyone tries FOMO on me, I'm "I'll be reading book while you enjoy you [insert your MUST TRY poison of choice]".

Shaun Chamberlin 2d ago

@blog Highly recommend #BrettScott's exceptional piece on this:

https://www.asomo.co/p/tech-doesnt-make-our-lives-easier

Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster

Supposedly technologies like AI and digital payments make our lives easier. In reality convenience is an illusion used to sell us automation-driven acceleration

Altered States of Monetary Consciousness

@blog schrödinger's ai is extremely easy to use and utterly intuitive but also if you dont start using it now now now youll get left behind!

Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️2d ago

Saying you will regret being left behind is an admission it is a Ponzi Scheme where only early adopters benefit and everyone else gets screwed.

This is the only correction I could offer to OP: some people who got in early on crypto wound up loaded, which happens to some people who get in early on Ponzi schemes.

@the5thColumnist @blog

Billy Smith 2d ago

One mentor told me that working in technology means that you are always having to guess which new technology will take off, and which will crash.

Wait till it hits the commodity end of the hype cycle and, while you won't win the lottery, you won't lose as you didn't play. :D

Semitones 2d ago

@blog Also by using them you're a participating in their theft of writers and artists' work so there's that too.

vicarvernon 2d ago

@blog there's a reason the cutting edge of something, say technology, is often called the bleeding edge. It's far too often expensive and hurts.

Nu Modular 2d ago

@blog Here's some sustainable math:

If an opposite doesn't have a minimum Phi/Pi root in a middle range; it's 'brief art'.

Soft money/value has to have long-term rooting in middle Hard metrics, in order to avoid wild swings that lack the mitigating, stabilizing middle - especially when you consider the vast use of money in local~global value systems.

See: Value Theory, Systems Theory, Set Theory

@blog I really dislike the mentality that crypto cemented in the minds of the general public, that if you are simply a FAN of a thing early that it will make you rich.

I think this is a lot of what is behind the AI spam problem as people have had to come to terms with the fact that they do not in fact hold a claudecoin that will reward them for sitting on their ass. That claude sub is actually the reverse, where they are paying for the privilege of feeling like they are early.

The Unrefined Jagoff 2d ago

@blog side note, can I just say how much I love your site design??

Terence Eden 2d ago

@unrefinedjagoff cheers mate, I appreciate it 🙂

This speaks to me, this is my approach to just about anything that's being sold to me, whether the latest thing like crypto or AI, or even more basic stuff like food or clothing or phones

derptron 2d ago

@blog "I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off."

I purposefully choose this option if I can find it.

Maximilien Danton 2d ago

@blog they don't call it the bleeding edge for nothing, especially when your "self driving" car slams into oncoming traffic.

@blog the other part about this for me is... What am I getting left behind in? Partaking in what I'm fairly confident a functioning legal system would consider intellectual property theft? I'll wait until that is ironed out, thanks.

This is a bit of a hyperbolic example, but my mind immediately goes to slavery. Slavery wasn't legal in England when the transatlantic slave trade started... And yet people were partaking in it with no consequences. That never made it good and the law did return.

grrl_aex 2d ago

I get you-- but using bitcoin to crit "early adopters" is, err....kinda a really bad example?

Because..."many years ago"-- in 2010... 500$ bought you 1000 bitcoins. Whole ones. 16 years later those are worth: 70 million. 😬 Tbh that was the *one* train that ended up being worth boarding as it left the station.

Ian Douglas Scott 2d ago

@blog This is what I keep saying. Specifically in relation to developing skills with "AI".

Either:
* The technology rapidly gets better, such that any skills you develop now are just workarounds for issues that it soon won't have.
* The technology stagnates, in which case it probably isn't as important as they're saying.

@blog reasonable logic. Interesting that the cutting edge you chose was a biological agent in your body.