AI is cool, but why do I feel like a failure?
Impostor syndrome comes and goes, but we don’t share it enough
I just published an article. Shouldn’t I be happy? Or excited? Instead I’m plagued by the productivity hydra: complete one task and two more come to take its place. The backlog is always growing, the to-do list always waiting, the ideas always flowing and stagnating and the shame always hovering, waiting to strike whenever I miss a meal or it’s just a bit too rainy outside or I just get a bit bored for whatever reason.
This article is not about AI.
I know I’m not an AI expert. I just started taking this stuff seriously a few months ago, and even that isn’t my full-time job. But when I scroll through Medium and read the gazillions of articles also written about AI I feel like I just don’t know a gosh-darned thing again. It turns out this whole “use a supercomputer to answer questions” thing is actually quite complicated.
I feel stupid. I feel like I missed the boat. AI has been developing since 1956, since Ada Lovelace, since antiquity, since humans had imagination… and I picked 2023 to start taking it seriously? How did I miss the signs? I took an AI course in college, I heard about neural networks and their variants for years, heck I even built my own. But I didn’t focus on it. I didn’t turn it into my life passion and squeeze the field of knowledge dry and dedicate my existence to diagramming and mapping and explaining and writing and creating and experimenting and publishing and innovating and sharing and learning. I missed the boat.
And I’m ashamed. I’m supposed to be smart. Everyone tells me I’m smart (except for my close friends, they always knock me down a peg and I love them for that). They say I can cure cancer and I think that I am not a doctor but they say I could figure it out if I just thought about it a lot. They think it’s a compliment. I know they mean to compliment me. But how do you reject a compliment like that? How do you explain this sense of uselessness, of deception, of impostor syndrome that rattles you to your core and leaves you questioning… maybe I could do it, if I were a fraction as smart as these people thought I was. Maybe if I just applied myself… why haven’t I been trying all these years?
I’ve been wasting my time. After my eight hours of engineering I log off and cook dinner and sometimes I don’t do anything productive until the next day. What a waste that is. Sometimes I even have energy after work. And I use it to play video games! To have fun! I could be curing cancer.
Even this article, dear reader, isn’t a pure expression of my emotions. I’m not confident enough to be that vulnerable with you. I’m writing this for you, not for me, and I feel bad about it. Why can’t I just be? Why can’t I just share and speak freely and be open and not be afraid of failure and stupidity and shame and frustration and pain? Why can’t I be more confident and courageous and strong? Why do I throw a public pity party just as I’m becoming more confident in my writing?
I’ve invited you to this pity party to show you that every writer you’ve ever met is human. I think. If you’ve met a robot or an alien or a really talented dog, please let me know. The rest of us (the ones that aren’t robots or aliens or talented dogs) are just people, living lives and thinking thoughts and having a wide variety of feelings.
I know we’re all told to remember the human and whatnot but it’s not very often the writers actually share their whole humanity with us. And that’s fair — it’s a lot to ask and what the heck have we done to deserve it? But when authors don’t share themselves, we — at least, I — find it really easy to forget that they’re entire people. I see their collections of articles and I read every one and I think “in not a single one of these articles did the author seem to be crying while they wrote this” and I put them on a nice neat pedestal of “people that are really smart” and I decide that they don’t have emotions because emotions are scary and none of their writing shows them crying so clearly they’ve never cried.
I’ve cried.
And I think that’s good because it makes me human. But then I think it’s neutral because what’s so good about being human anyway? But mostly I get sad because then I can’t get onto that nice pedestal of people that are really smart and I think people will see me as weak and silly and not capable of being really smart and I don’t know why I think that but I do.
Recently, however, I remembered that kind of everyone cries at some point. We’re told to remember the human but that phrase in itself is so robotic it really is self-defeating and quite silly. And maybe that’s the point and I’m dumb. But maybe not. Maybe both.
Anyway, I’m quite confident that Cassie Kozyrkov has cried. She’s an excellent writer and I admire her work greatly. She’s also a human (I think). And that means she’s cried. And that’s OK. In fact, it’s actually kind of cool, because it means you can cry and you can be a really smart person. Eric Elliott has probably cried at least twice. Bill Gates? Probably three times at least (because he’s older and older people have had more time to cry). Me personally, I’ve cried a bunch of times so I’m way ahead of Mr. Gates. Pretty cool.
From now on, whenever I get nervous, I’m not going to picture my audience naked. I’ve always thought that was strange advice and it’s made me uncomfortable. Instead, I’ll imagine my role models crying. And I’ll remind myself that that’s a-OK and that’s just what people do sometimes.
Writing doesn’t always magically make things better for me. But this article helped. Don’t worry — I have non-crying emotions too! Like when I first used AI image generation I was like “wow this is really cool” especially when I had it draw Minecraft castles. And sometimes I socialize with friends and I laugh a lot and it’s really just a good time, you should join us when you’re in town. (Please don’t take that seriously I don’t know you.)
Let’s start over.
Hi! I’m Mark. It’s been more than a few minutes since I’ve cried, but I’m definitely a human and I write articles about things that interest me. I’m really into AI right now, but I’m also interested in psychology and what we can do to build a better society. In my free time I build software and do other stuff and sometimes I cry and that’s OK.
Thank you for reading. What do you want to learn next? How can I help?
Here’s a suggestion, it’s the article I just published:
