I’ve got a relative who is a brilliant and accomplished engineer but also a total wreck of a human being. Shortly before the pandemic started he ended up in a pretty bad way due to overuse of rave drugs. He was (and still is) the physical incarnation of “better living through chemistry” and had a ton of supplements to minimize the negative effects of ecstasy.
Anyway, three years later and it seems like things are better - he’s off the sauce(s) and working again, but he’s also become obsessed with engineering his way out of his dependencies, having reached the conclusion that the rave lifestyle is not something he’s capable of giving up. He’s got wearable devices that are allegedly capable of tracking mood and has recently purchased one of those automatic precision cookers that you can get pre-packaged meal kits for. He’s excited about “using AI” to manage his environment and food intake so that he has more time to “concentrate on his connections,” but from the outside I’m not really seeing the benefit.
I’ll admit, I’m cranky because we had a falling out over the first iteration of this plan a while ago and it doesn’t seem like either of us really have the energy or motivation to mend that bridge, but - all that aside - I’m also wondering how much this is actually a good idea and how much it’s just a mirage. One the one hand, modern life is challenging and the constant bombardment from distractions makes it hard to focus on mental wellbeing and maintain human connections but on the other, it seems like you’re giving up a lot of autonomy and outsourcing your responsibility to take care of yourself to a computer. I enjoy cooking as a hobby and spent a lot of time reading recipes and planning meals for myself and my partner every week, and I’ve also become a pandemic homebody who doesn’t talk to friends much anymore and hasn’t done much socializing with anyone since 2019. Is offloading some of the daily responsibility of living to a machine the way forward? What do y’all think?
Automating away busywork is kind of the dream, isn’t it? If you don’t like cooking, it’s good to have other options. But buying subscriptions from tech companies is never a permanent solution, and after Heartbleed took years to get patched I don’t trust IoT stuff to not be mining crypto six months after purchase.
Kinda sounds like he’s swapping a drug dependency for technology for the same way some people swap it for religion, though.
Kinda sounds like he’s swapping a drug dependency for technology for the same way some people swap it for religion, though.
That’s a good way to put it. In the early stages folks were trying to get him into AA because it worked for other family members, but he (understandably) was resistant due to the religiosity aspect and the relatively low success rates. I guess this is his solution.
can they not focus on their connections by doing the otherwise automated stuff with the people they love?
I can see this kind of thing, to a point. I have a lot of time sunk into managing a linux server that I use to manage all of my music, movies, pictures, etc, so that I can conveniently access my shit on every device. But like, AI enabled cookbots?
Other thank 5htp, what were they taking to manage the serotonin depletion?
Yeah, I guess I’ve already concluded that this new tech push is a bad thing and am working on the acceptance stage. Rest of the fam seems okay because it’s not drugs and seems to be keeping him occupied.
Tryptophan, L-theanine, some plant extracts whose names escape me. He had a pretty big stack.
If I play DA on this, it seems like most of us are pretty crap at managing our food intakes; people overestimate the amount of food they need to eat every day and capitalism’s “CONSOOM” mindset is constantly reinforcing this tendency. Metabolic syndrome is everywhere and the majority of the US is overweight or obese. Having something to make unbiased decisions for you on things that you’re bad at doing seems like a good idea. But there’s also been no shortage of ink spilled over the potential costs related to handing over the keys of the interior kingdom to a piece of software. This is the first time I’m seeing this play out in our otherwise tech-skeptic family and am not sure if I’m overreacting/have overreacted/am wrong to worry whether this is a negative direction for him to be taking.
Yes, he is absolutely cuckoo bonkers, but I still care about him.
seems good
