I'm upstairs in my office writing and my wife is downstairs in the living room watching a show and she thinks that I am working but I am not. I am instead trying to write something, anything at all, so I can feel a connection to myself and the life I am living, instead of what I usually feel, which is some kind of muffled interaction with computers and people who nowadays often resemble computers in terms of the way that i interact with them, git requests and pulls and will you please do that and good afternoon sir and madame. It is not loneliness that I feel when working with my coworkers. It is the malaise that comes with a certain kind of inactivity. It is real social activity where I am free to say what I want instead of just work related things. I desperately want to tell people that I'm doing just the minimum about of bullshit to get through my day doing programming and office work. I would like to stand up and pronounce that this is a terrible use of all of our lives, with some pleading and demanding like you see in the movies. I would like to say that work has become even worse with AI. Do I treat my coworkers like AI agents, or do they do it to me? Who did it first? Did I lead, or follow? These are the things I think about during the day when I work.

Today I put in about four hours of real work and it felt like a lot. A product revamp meeting that I almost fell asleep listening to but I of course had to be on so it was absolutely real work, and I don't think I fell asleep, I was on my bed with my headphones on doing the minimal listening trance thing that I do sometimes, I think I'm like aaragorn in this state, only partially conscious, most of me resting, but a certain part of me listening, aware of what is being said, ready to wake my damn fool self up at any moment if I hear, say, the highly esteeemed P.Salv say something like why don't we ask Jerista that question because he is crazy sometimes and likes to put people on the spot, he reminds me of certain teachers who would call on you randomly which made you have to always be on your toes, careful to not sleep too far into dreamland staring at some girl, or getting too worked up worrying about if your dad would be drunk when he got home or whatever. You had to have some minimal amount of presence and monitoring in such situations if you didn't want to be called out and look like an absolute moron.

And in the age of me practicing silent resistence against my employer, it is important for me to not look like a moron in front of P.Salv, yes indeed. In the age of AI and constant threats, perceieved or real, against my industry or my person or my age or my character – I have learned to be more wary about perception. I want people to see a slow steady grinder who is still doing work even if I do not happen to be on your current stupid project. I have learned to stay slightly visible to most of the important people on the team.

There was a change control meeting where I spoke for one minute about a license application I'm doing next week at some point. Created some new apps for testing purposes, deployed, tested – and figured out how to resolve a longstanding problem with multi factor authentication.

So I was productive but some part of me feels like I wasn't productive enough.

This is one of the curses of remote work. I don't know what other people are working on. I assume that Team India is going crazy working on some fucking project that I am not deeply involved in. I assume this because I know Alpesh, the leader of the gang of insanity, is incapable of working at a speed less than 100% and he has boundary issues. So he's probably working on something and demanding a lot of peoples' time and this is all just more or less invisible to me because I am currently outside of his sphere of activity and influence. I can't see him work, therefore he isn't am. Yes that is an awkward butchering of the Shakespeare. The point being: He is currently nonexistent to me, for all intents and purposes. We are not bumping up against one another. I am not a target.

But it is also a curse of AI. Because of AI, I now always assume I am not doing enough. In the age of Sri reverse engineering ESB with AI and deploying shit out to his test environments in just a few days of work with claude, it seems anything is possible. I am not doing anything remotely that ambitious. I am creating new services and new JIRA items every day largely in an attempt to stay busy and keep taking small steps toward the cluster AB merge project which I could be told, any day now, is suddenly important to complete. I want to be able to answer the question "what are you working on?" at any time, with no notice, just by running a jira query on my name as reporter and owner and sort by date. Because I feel a need to defend myself for some reason.

That some reason is my feeling of lousy self esteem of course. I always feel like I am not doing enough. I always feel like someone is watching and monitoring me even when I am alone.

It struck me this week just how much anxiety I have.

I'm going to try to get through tomorrow without .. you know. I don't have to say it. I'm embarrassed. It shouldn't be a big deal. Either I control it or it controls me.

I have to go to Manchester on Sunday to see my friend run a marathon. I want to have energy for it. I want to put on a good show. It'll be three hours of driving and parking round trip, plus a couple of hours of trying to make conversation with G's family and I'll need something in the tank. Right now my energy is lousy.

I think about making progress with my story and the thought of it fills me with dread. It's shitty and terrible.

That's how I know I'm low energy. Yesterday I was thinking about writing ideas and they often energized me.

I went from a span of loving it to hating it in under twenty four hours.

This is despite watching The Mothman Prophecies which I realized, for real, has a plot and presentation very similar to the book I'm attempting to get off the ground. Unreliable narrator, reader suspects him of being part of the problem or all of the problem toward the end. Horror. People die around him. Supernatural. Sleuthing to figure it out. His wife was dead too. Richard Gere was the lead, Debrah Messing of all people the wife of the lead. Penny and I laughed about this. But as I watched the movie, I noticed the similarities.

Richard's character was missing time. Another character in the movie revealed at one point that Richard was "talking to him" you know requesting this and that and Richard said no I absolutely didn't do that and the other guy said well it absolutely was you. Sounded like you. It was you.

And this is like the conceit I have about the AI agent starting to act on behalf of the main character without the main character knowing it. The AI agent knows how to imitate the voice ffs. It can with just a few leaps of imagination become possible for an AI agent to call real time a human person, deepfake the voice of someone else, and respond to questions in real time. Just about.

Anyway. I'm rambling. This whole entry is an incoherent ramble.

I will write tomorrow. I will run in the morning and after Penny leaves for work I will try to write some. I know I will do this because lately I have been keeping my promises to myself to write when I tell myself I have a reasonable window to write.

Keeping promises to myself is probably a good sign in the middle of what feels like a lot of bad signs about my mental health today.

I wrote today as promised, no matter how bad the writing was and how tired I am.

And I will write tomorrow.

I think I'm just tired.

At any rate, I have off work tomorrow. I could play the legend of zelda ocarina of time remake or i can see if I can write or I could do a little bit of both. Penny does not know I have the day off. Somehow this makes me feel more free to play video games. It has something to do with the idea that if my time is my own, and penny knows it, then I have to be doing something that shows love and affection for her, instead of utterly indulgent activities like writing.

I think I'm done. Writing about writing is its own form of exhaustion and despair.

I cannot do it right now. No matter how many great writing instructors tell me that I should be able to essentially write on demand, I still don't believe them. I believe that they could, sure. But it seems just about impossible for me.