The more I am using LLM-models for my day job, the more I am looking for poetry in my free time. From creating video games, from playing video games, from reading to writing, from music to movies, I am yearning for something that is not dry and clear. There is reliability and assurance in engineering adjacency1; but without a touch of poetry, it is all dry. It does not rejuvenate me. There is a time and a place for pieces of work that have reliability & function; but during my free time, I don't necessarily want function; I want form. Acting on something that is arguably pointless is the point. This is not to say that I do not want work or engage in productive activities; but the recent emergence of LLMs have taken more of the soul of my day, that I am yearning for things that are oozing with something else other than function.
Poetry does not necessarily mean it is devoid of science or engineering. It just means, that there is no describable function that is behind the said activity, no impetus to make something useful out of it.
Doing things for fun; there was a time when almost everything I did was for fun, but at some point, what I did for fun, I turned into my job; and I never looked for next things that I could do for fun. The longest running hobby for me, is probably photography, I have been doing it for more than two decades, somewhat seriously. But the fun went away when I tried to make it a functional part of my life. Social media, audience, photo projects; they are necessary part of the creative process. But that took the fun out; maybe I got corrupted by the forces of culture too soon. Maybe photographic snobbery got it. Last year I sold almost all my photography equipment, leaving only one camera. Maybe the spirit of Igor Stravinsky will save me,
"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution" - Igor Stravinsky
Time is generally a valuable commodity, I think we all can agree to that, but I also think that for some us, the value of our time have become so low that we want to use whatever precious time we have left; after participating capitalistic rituals, we are to spend it improving, providing, creating, consuming things that have function. There is a money analogy here; if we have plenty it, we spend it on eating out, or buying ourselves nice clothes, we want to afford niceties, we waste money on niceties. But in comparison, we evaluate our time so poorly, that we are not able to spend it on niceties. Whatever little time we have, we are to spend it in necessities, necessities we probably have not questioned enough.
What a good time it would be, if I only could waste time painting a world, drink whiskey and read aloud bad poetry.
- So does my day job. ↩︎