For the win
I wanted to talk to you about the “win” of life.
Let’s take some numbers shall we? This was Saturday and Sunday for me.
· 104,891 steps
· 2 days
· 1 goal.
Idleness.
To have no thoughts surround me other than the step in front of me.
I did this mostly in silence, it was circa 14 hours of walking over 2 days.
There were breaks, yesterday there were many as my body needed relief. But ultimately it was For.The. Win.
A millennial phrase I probably haven’t heard since 17. The equivalent of YOLO.
I’m immensely proud of myself, for these days to be a success I needed suncream, water bottle, antihistamines, wallet, portable charger fully charged, kindle fully charged, phone and phone charger, as well as makeup to keep myself presentable and glasses. If I’d missed any of these things my day would have been surrounding worrying about their absence and how I’d cope.
Why did I walk to Kew Gardens and back on the earliest possible train? For the win.
Why did I stop off at white city/sorbet places? For the win.
Why did I make myself sticky, hot, ugly, tired and achy? For the win.
What is, “the win?” Life.
Life is sticky and hot (my suncream is a serum and is awful, do not recommend, it is like layering your body in petroleum, on a day with 30 degree heat.)
Day 1, I took the earliest train to London, by way of sprinting to the train station. Got to London, snapped at landmarks I have seen my entire adult life like a tourist and walked from Waterloo to Buckingham Palace, from there up to Wellington Arch to Hyde park, to Kensington Park, to high street Kensington, to Hammersmith, White City, Chiswick, Kew bridge then Kew gardens. On my way there just outside Chiswick high street is a housing estate with roses, absolutely fantastic smelling roses. And some people have wisteria too and so I remember walking along and sniffing these roses and then taking pictures of the roses that passed “the sniff test”
I walked around Kew a bit then had my lunch in the temperate house, took a well deserved noon nap, (very restorative) made friends with a lovely 7 month old who sat on a bench with me (well her dad sat, she bounced on his knee and observed me and smiled) then bought some bits at the gift shop, made a beeline for white city, bought some concealer because there was a sale, then walked home, also stopping in Covent Garden for ice cream (queue was too long so I bought strawberries instead)
Went home and slept like a baby… with the lights on.
Day 2. Did the same thing, but no concealer and my sorbet run was successful. But I gave myself 4 hours to go home because I’d taken almost 4 to get there. It was so hot I originally thought about getting a train to Richmond to Waterloo (Richmond is only 20 mins walk) and then thought better of it… For the win.
I left at 2:30pm, by the time I’d gone to the toilet (hotter than the fires of hell) and then strolled to the Victoria gate it was about 2:50pm. I decided I could walk and so I decided to go back to the (Lion gate?) the gate I’d entered in and walk back to Waterloo.
It was hot, my feet hurt at the end of it (restrictive trainers) the straps were annoying me on my bag, but that is life.
It’s a good story to tell, it’s a crazy thing I do and there have been times (not during a heatwave) that I have come home and had a full dance party until 1am around my house, because once you’ve rested an hour or so, you’re back to yourself and can be down for whatever.
I’ve broken 60,000 steps before.
I’ll do it again.
I loved it, that much time with no phone really, in silence, I’m not breathing heavily so its not like I’m panting, worrying about when I should next drink water so I when I need to use the loo, I have access to a clean one.
Thinking (and vastly underestimating the distance from) the next landmark.
Loving this weird little thing called life that bestowed on me such an immense privilege such as a day like this weekend that was just begging to be seized.
The main worry I have was in my team meetings my directors talking about AI.
I am a firm believer that there is, no ethical use of large language models and the constant talk about it is suffocating, I believe AI robs us of what it means to be human.
Writing, art, teaching, we all used to go to humans for these things. People want to be artists, and film editors and writers and if AI robs us of it on a small scale, what do you think is going to happen on a large scale? That Hollywood will be magically immune? Now people lazily say “AI can teach you”
Maybe it can. But learning through human interaction is better for my mental health. I don’t want to use AI. I want to ask a person. Because yes bothering a person is part of my need for connection. Otherwise I don’t speak to another human being all day, I don’t have a partner or children to talk to, I do have a mum. It is why I go into the office, not so I can sit at a desk and not talk to another person, because that’s the fastest way of getting work done. But so I can interact, bounce off people, read facial expressions. Connect.
Writing is the single best thing in my life, from venting in this blog (On God’s internet) to The Devil’s apprentice. I love writing, and AI seeks to steal that from me.
I also don’t believe in shortcuts. “Have AI summarise this thing” It is my job to be in the detail. Are you planning on paying AI my salary? No, then it is illegal to outsource my responsibility to a 3rd party.
Just Friday I had a person come to me with a query that if AI had summarized the email exchanges it would have come to the completely wrong conclusion. Because AI doesn’t have context.
The several meetings and the ages spent on it feels like its being rammed down my throat.
Our finance system is wildly inefficient, but its AI that’s going to be the timesaver, not fixing the finance system. It feels like an abdication of responsibility.
Work isn’t just there to be a wage. Good work promotes good mental health, and cognitive function, and how you do one thing is how you do everything.
The moment you start outsourcing to AI it’s hard to stop, and there is so much more to this beautiful thing called “life” than doing things as fast as possible. Why is child marriage so undesirable if you’re going to get married anyway, you might as well do it at 8 years old? Or 8 months? Or 8 days? Because that’s fastest, right? Why do we ask someone to be 18? If they can start reproducing at 10 or 11 and a new problem for society is advanced maternal age?
One colleague said she used AI to plan an itinerary for her upcoming holiday.
I can almost literally not think of anything worse. It is the worst possible thing I have heard all year.
Using precious drinking water in order to have a computer give you a “paint by numbers holiday experience?” Don’t go. If it were me, I’d go out to the nearest field and put a bullet in my brain as life has nothing more to offer me, I would at that point, have lost my soul.
Holidays are at least 70% my imagination. Italy will be hot, the gelato expensive, and not all the pasta will be homemade, but during my research? Its those “lockdown blue” skies above the “Alto di Patri” and wandering down Rome’s streets with my father’s memory at my side. Seeing things he didn’t and bringing him with me. Rome was 1 week of execution and 6 months planning. And that 6 months planning could have been scaled back to 6 minutes with AI, but it wouldn’t have done the good for my character as doing it “the hard way” I am so much braver than I was before the trip, because I loved my father enough to advocate for him, research for him, take care and plan for him. That is where the love is, and he felt that love, and that is the human experience. If it was just to go and see the Vatican, he could have googled it, but it was to go and see the Vatican, with a daughter who had spent months loving you by planning the trip, asking people for advice on it, taking that advice, reforming it, and taking a chance. My Sainsbury’s senior manager helped me with this trip without knowing it. I left Sainsburys in August 2015, Rome was 2016, my dad didn’t even have cancer when this man gave me the advice to ring up BA and ask for special treatment because they love doing it. I got my dad extra legroom for his 6ft1 frame because of that interaction and many other benefits because I cared enough about the fact that he’d just gone through radiotherapy to ask for maps of the airports so I could find regular seating arrangements. I did it because he’d get tired easily. AI itinerary robs us of so much. For my dad, a man I have loved most in the world, I was bold. I went out of my way to find people who could help me get the best for my father, I connected with people through shared experience. John Trotter will always have a place in my memory because of the advice he gave me pertaining to my honeymoon of my first husband but was actually used for my father’s trip. This audacity was replicated for his 70th birthday trip.
The wonder of life has so much to give us, off the beaten track. Looking at sources that haven’t been raped by AI, digitized, homogenized. I want a life that is different to the person next to me.
When I go to Paris do I need to see the Louvre? How about the Eiffel Tower? How about the artwork on the banks of the Seine that you can only get walking from the Louvre to Notre Dame. Or the micro book stores, the Bouquiniste? These are my memories of Paris. Of wonder, of exploring, doing the bits that “everyone else does” doesn’t interest me, it’s a 3-word answer when someone asks you. “Have you done X?” you get to say “Yes, I have”
But what sticks in our memories? Very different things.
And memories are all we have left.
I don’t fear AI because it could take my job, I fear it because it could take my soul, rob me of the few joys of being human. Not sunshine on my face, but the ability to learn from others, connect with others, have unique thoughts, make up my own mind without being influenced by things I don’t understand. In the post “let it change you” it is in the work I am so diligently committed to, that shapes my character.
Mental gymnastics is more important than ever. The Devil’s apprentice started off as a book report 2 years ago and is vital in me drafting my own narrative, it has done so much for my memory, for my thinking, it has helped me regain something of myself, something no one can take from me. A firm foundation, but it is backed up by skills I use daily in the workplace, one cannot exist without the other, you can’t pick up a 20kg weight if you can’t pick up a 2kg bag of potatoes.
And I need to be able to do that, because I, unlike a lot of people, know what it is like to lose cognitive function, lose yourself, lose your memory. Playing with AI is something dangerous and those who have never experienced those things don’t know how terrifying it is nor how hard it is to get it back.
The mind is a muscle, use it or lose it.
I skimmed through a 1 pager I wrote in 27/03/2022 called “40 year studies” I remember the title because I rarely use numbers in my titles. I thought it was about vaping, it was about social media, and phones, taking a long term view.
“What kind of life do you want to live?” “What are your relationships with things that hurt you?”
The kind of life I want to live doesn’t have AI in it at all. And I should have the right to live that life.
On my random little adventure I found someone with a book I want to read, I wrote down the title whilst they had their hands (and book) behind their back because it looked interesting. The book is “the Lion and the Unicorn, Gladstone to Disraeli” by Richard Aldous. I’d never have come across it if I’d not taken that walk.
So many of my book recommendations have been what I call “book hopping” which is looking at the intensity of someone’s face whilst reading a book and if it looks good, reading it. I read Game of Thrones, just before it got popular this way, ditto “prisoners of Geography” and many others are on the list.
Life is so full of wonder that you simply can’t get from just interacting with a large language model, which is harvesting your prompts for data on you. You are the product.
How can you go into wage negotiations with your boss when you don’t know how to ask them for help with a problem? Like I said, 20kg weight vs 2kg potatoes.
Life is for the little things,
And those little things add up to a beautiful life. So, whilst I spent my weekend overheated, at times overstimulated (around large crowds who aren’t looking where they are going) achy, and with my body ever warning me of my lack of fitness, it was an amazing weekend.
Not because it was perfect, but because it was human. Rest stops in the shade, an unintentional book recommendation, reading my own book in the shade, cold drinks, gelato, enough strawberries for me to consider remortgaging my house for and just an appreciation of the world around me without crippling anxiety. All I really remember is sunshine and the man walking with his hands behind his back with an interesting book in them. That’s how bad my memory is. Anything not written down gets lost. That and the “gelato stops” but when you have vast swathes of your life with blackness, you’ll take a memory of someone walking with their hands behind their back any day. I’d even forgot about the roses on the way to Kew, which I enjoyed more than the ones inside Kew (because I’d had my fill by the time I got to Kew)
A life worth living and a weekend well lived.
And not a large language model in sight, to quote myself in 2022 “my relationship to things that hurt me?” I don’t have one. I don’t consort with the knives in my back they are there without my consent.
But for now, I think I did pretty well this weekend 105,000 steps is more than some people do in a month.
More days like this, where technology “treads lightly” on my life.
For the win.
Grace and courage
Annetta Mother-Smith