10 Comments

Interesting. You may have a relatively strong hold on your visions of certain futures. For me, I never feel grief about previously-imagined alternate paths. But I do feel grief in the moment when a possible future dies (and then lose the feeling as time progresses) and also have plenty of nostalgia.

Must be some kind of personality spectrum.

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What about for breakups. Do you miss the future you might have had?

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As above: in the moment, definitely yes, but like a year later I'm not comparing my reality to the previously-imagined one ... the brain has a self-protective forgetting ability, it seems.

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This is a beautiful piece.

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What do you connect to about it?

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I think especially the ending of friendships, and the sort of ongoing loss that entails, a future not filled with that person. Grief comes in waves.

But also the notion of reality punching you in the face, and the sickening realisation that you didn’t really understand things at all.

I thought some of the writing was just very beautiful too.

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Thank you. This means a lot. I have a lot of drafts and given this I may share more.

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+1 for both the quality of this writing and as a nudge to share more. I wouldn't normally connect grief from losing a friendship to the SBF or OpenAI events, but the emotional comparison makes sense given how you wrote/explained things!

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> A few days before I wrote this, the board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman

Now I'm confused when you wrote this?

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I wrote this during the OpenAI board crisis and then edited it a little

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