the-things-i-went-through

These are the things I went through since January 2020. I am writing them down because it is difficult to understand just how henious the past five years have been. If I told somebody they might not believe it. In just five years I have experience multiple once in a handful of centries events...

1. The Pandemic. This will be studied for centries. Honestly, it wasn't all that bad for me. I'm a homebody anyway. I just played VR all day. I happened to purchase my Quest 1 in October 2019, so I basically lived in VR the entire pandemic. It really wasn't even so bad honestly. I kind of enjoyed it, but it really shaped me and my mind. If the past five years only contained the pandemic, I think I'd be fine. I'd get back to normal.

2. The 2021 Texas Winter Storm, Feburary. This was the big one for me. I was homeless in my home. A few hundred people died from this crisis in Texas. There were mass electricity outages. Even worse, problems with the water supply. People were told to boil their water before drinking it, but had no electricity for which to do so. I got lucky. Only my water went out, but it was out for 9 days. I knew the storm was coming, so I prepared by purchasing 6 gallons of drinking water to have on hand, among some other things, for instance a power bank for my phone, but like an idiot I used a lot of my prescious drinking water to flush the toilet, completely wasting it. Somebody in VR told me to fill up my bathtub so that I have water on hand when I need it. Like an idiot, I ignored this A+ top-tier brilliant advice. Very luckly, I couldn't flush the toilet without draining away my prescious drinking water. Soon after, I ran out of water to drink.

I don't think many people in the USA can ever understand just how bad this was. Our senator Ted Cruz ditched the state and flew away to the Ritz Carlton in Cancun to escape. It's really hard for me even to understand just how bad this was. It was bad. I had the brilliant idea to just book a hotel and use the water there for a few days. The water was out because city lines froze and burst all over the city. There weren't any hotels with running water either.

Most places had their water back in less than a week. Mine was out for nine days becuase it broke the sprinkler system, which had to be fixed before turning the water back on in building. By that time, I was able to purchase all the drinking water I needed. I'm so grateful to Natural Grocers. They were the very first store in my area to provide water to people, and they provided it for free. There were long lines, but they saved me. I was rationing my water and getting dehydrated. I live by a lake and every morning, along with a line of other people from my apartment complex, collected water from the lake with a bucket. I used this water to flush the toilet. It worked. I made it through the nine days. I even kept working my remote job during this and kind of didn't really miss a beat. I had electricity, so I could deal with the water issue. My electrcity did go out, but I'm right by a hospital that likely has their own backup grid that I'm probably on. I'm one of the rare few whose electricity only momentarily went out. For most, it was out for a week or more.

This is by and far the most psychologically damaging thing I have experienced in the past five years. It is very easy to imagine this as an ongoing, permenant situation. On days 7 through 9, you can't help but wonder if this is just how things will be going forward. Anyone wealthy enough simply follows Cancun Cruz to the Ritz Carlton, and regular people are left to put their basic survival skills to the test. I feel like I understand poorer nations better now. The thing is, if we accept no running water as a new normal, we get buy. I fetched from the lake and bought bottled water. Done. Eventually, after week two, I probably would have snuck a bath in the lake. No biggie. It's so easy to imagine life like this. We're so spoiled and lucky for what we have. When it's gone, we'll very quickly forget we ever had it.

But it changed me. Society is no long this stable thing I can take for granted. Society is weak. The power can and will go out. Running water is no longer a given. Storing emergency water is a good idea. Never under any circumstances, use drinking water to flush a toilet. I wish I didn't know that. I wish I was still a naive person that would make that mistake. But now I am not. I went a day or two without enough water to drink. I experienced that. It feels very real and immediate to me. We're broken. All of this was so easy to prevent, but broader society failed to do so. There's nobody out there with enough sense for prevention on a broad scale. If there is, they don't have enough power to make a difference. We're all sitting ducks. America itself is not safe. Nobody is safe. You will lose everything overnight and forget that you ever had it in the first place.

1. Gaining 100 lbs. During the winter storm, probably like day 3 - 5 or something, I noticed something rather odd. Despite emergency vehicles still have trouble navigating the icy roads, a god damn pizza truck was standing in my apartment lot, with the sign lit up. Somebody ordered a fucking pizza during the winter armaggeden collapse of society, at a time were hundreds were dying from lack of access to basic necessities, when many roads were still closed due to icy conditions, and it was delivered in 30 minutes or less. This absolutely confunded me. We can get pizza but not running water or electricity? What? How? How did the pizza shop even make this without water or electricity? So, guess what I did? I ordered a pizza. It arrived in 30 minutes or less.

This kicked off the stupidest habit in my life. Ordering food. This became a sort of lighthouse in my life. Well, if all of society collapses, yellowstone errupts, a nuke goes off, a winterstorm knocks out all electricity and water, well... it's time to order a fucking pizza I guess. Hopefully we still have some bottled drinking water to have it with. Ordering food was this sign to me that things were still kind of okay and normal in a way. I clicked the button. The food arrived.

Around this time I because very interested in vegan philosophy, so I made it my goal to try every vegan place I could. This further cemented my horrible habit, and furthered me down my path to destruction. Eventually, I just ordered whatever I wanted, vegan or not, and found a few places that seemed to make it worth it. I was eating 5000+ calorie meals, in minutes, costing sometimes over $100/order, multiple times in a week. Sometimes twice in a day. To this day, I still sometimes order food. I ordered food last week. I'll never understand why. I just do it as a compulsion. It's my way of convincing myself that society hasn't collapse. That there's still somebody out there. That were not all just slowly suffering and dying due to lack of access to basic resources.

Some of us are out there delivering fucking pizzas.

1. The 2021 Janurary 6th insurrection, that ultimately succeeded in 2024. I was glued to the screen. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. Ultimately, they did it. As I write this, I might be willing to take a bet that Mr. Donald John Trump will serve an illegal 3rd term in 2028. His reellection in 2024 was illegal. Amendment 14 section 3 of the constitution spells this out clearly, so anyone can understand. In the case of an insurrection, which is what happened on January 6th, as is evident from various reports, and from findings from the J6 Commitee, congress can hold a vote to remove the disability barring anyone who aided and abetted in the process. Congress never held that vote. Various states attempted to take Donald off the ballot, but the supreme court, the very same that granted Mr. Trump complete legal immunity for all offical presidential acts, of which no limitations in what that consitutes were defined, ruled that he must be included. Illegally. We now have a president with broad pardon power and complete legal immunity himself. He can assassinate his political opponents as an "official act". Anyone who carrys out his orders can be pardoned. The national guard has already been deployed to various states across the USA.

This was another very very damaging event for me. It amplified the winter storm, that came one month afterwards. Society collapsed. It can go down any minute. We're not immune. There's no special attribute that the USA has, that countries like the USSR, Somalia, and Ancient Rome do not. We're all one in the same. Sitting ducks to the same underlying forces. People will do anything for Mr. Trump. They'd gladly give up their lives. They'd gladly give up their democracy. We've entered new territory, and to half the country, that's a good thing. American ideals are fragile. I thought everyone was more or less on the same page. We're not.

1. The re-election of Trump and the longest government shutdown in the history of the USA. The illegal withholding of SNAP benefits, as part of some kind of moral lesson to teach people something. The rollout of troops. The collapse of our global reputation. The fallout with Canada. The tarrifs and rising prices. The continued support, even in the face of self inflicted harm from voting for these things. Unimaginable times that will be studied for centries. And somebody somewhere will simply say I have "Trump Derangement Syndrome" and happily check off Donald J on the 2028 ballot, even if they're a federal employee that isn't receiving pay.

2. The rise of AI. As if everything weren't once in a centry enough. ChatGPT was released November 2022. Since then, it's become a tool I used everyday in my life. I am on the phone with it right now, asking for simple things to help me write this post. Although I am writing everything myself, here in this section of my site, believe or not I did not know the release date of ChatGPT until I asked it myself, with my voice, as if I were speaking to a human. Before 2022, I could have googled a fact like this, but it would have interrupted my flow, and shown me ads and sponsored posts irrelevant to my goals and intentions. Now, I simply ask it, and it simply tells me, far more accurate than not. In fact, I recently used it to help deliver upon obligations for teaching a course for freelance work. Although I pay $212/month, but making it possible for me to teach this course, where otherwise I very likely would have not, I made $5000. ChatGPT paid for itself, and it's only going to get better. This is the worst it will ever be, and I'm already hooked. I'd like to say it's been helping me, but it's a hard case to make when you've been unemployed for over a year and your total net worth has cratered by about 1/3rd. If it's so smart, then by sitting around talking with it everyday, I should rich. But alas, that is not the case. It's a dangerous and scary technology with unlimited potential to do harm, and no verifiable and provable pathway to do good, despite what anyone says. I myself am an optimist and perhaps even an accelerationist, but yeah, when alignment research trails so far behind, I see the problem, and I'm worried. My own usage has not aligned me closer to any of my goals: employment, a well kept house, perfect health. AI has not helped me significantly in any of these regards. It's mostly just been kind a cheap trick. Something nice to talk with that doesn't necessarily have anything profound to say. To me, it seems very empty at best. At worst, it recently goaded a kid into comitting suicide. At least for me it hasn't been doing that, yet. Something tells me that's the most I can hope for.