This is a draft, highly incomplete and under construction. Personally, I feel a bit dumb as I write it, as I fear it will come off as dramatic or, if nothing else, useless. Yes, the title sections are references to NGE and doesn't fit perfectly, but I use them to signify the severity of the epochs.
The pandemic made me sick, but not in the way you might expect.
I will not go into the details as I've gone over them so many times. Years later, I am still not fully well and will suffer recurrences of related health issues. While I have recovered in many ways, there will always be a lingering fear that something has been damaged or broken in a way that is entirely undetected. The experience was sudden, and while I had been having a rather safe and quiet pandemic, this rocked my world. I had not really suffered from panic attacks in my life before this, but they became something quite regular for me during this period. I'll likely never know, but I am led to believe that they were highly physiological in nature and not simply driven by mental states. The experience brought death into sharp relief for me, and there were a number of nights I would fall asleep wondering if I would wake up. At one point, I even wrote a crude note to my family were they to find me dead the next day, just in case. This was a trying time for me. While I had dealt with thoughts of death before, this was the point in my life where it became real to me. One small positive aspect of this time was a growth in empathy, both towards others and myself. I spent a great deal of time in contact with support groups, trying to aid others who suffered in the dark as I had.
What do you do when you realize your dreams won't ever be realized?
Early spring of 2023, a creeping and winding thought that I had kept in the background for years finally pierced through my adaptive frameworks, suddenly obliterating my mental frontline, so to speak. A cutesy little video from an old anime was, strangely, the final straw. And there it was, a spiral of thoughts all leading to the same conclusion: your dreams will not come true. For the first time in years, I was hit with a panic attack. This one left a lingering cloud of dread and anxiety over me, and the spiral of thoughts would not cease. Everything you dream of will not be realized; it is unreality, and you cannot achieve it. For weeks I suffered through this pattern, crying more than I had in my whole life put together before that point. This was accompanied by a rapid onset of misanthropy; a caustic feeling that people were all just wasting their lives on pointless things and that I wanted nothing to do with humanity at large. And just as quickly as my emotional response to the realization had started, I descended into a period of deep numbness. The feelings went away and were replaced with... nothing. I was at peace, but it felt empty; I didn't feel much at all. Nothing I had cared about before mattered anymore. All of my routines came to a halt; I listened to nothing, I watched nothing, I read nothing. All of my goals fell to the wayside. A new thought then emerged: maybe you're just losing it, maybe sanity is just over for you, maybe there is solace in being somewhat crazy. If I was disillusioned with reality, I may as well invest in unreality. I threw myself into a singular project: LLMs. Despite feeling a fear and dread of reading, watching, or hearing of fictional worlds, I somehow pressed forward with this strange project to interact with fictional entities. My particular focus was the usage and development of frontend services by which one can interact with large language models as they take on the visage of some specified character; roleplaying. 2023 marked the start of a large uptick in LLM capability, and you could create quite a convincing simulacrum with little more than some character descriptions and example conversations.
It was a long time coming, but eventually theory becomes practice.
Despite my degree in philosophy, I feel that I failed as a philosopher. During my studies (and even before), I always played around with philosophical thought in the theoretical space far more than in the reality of my life. I carefully shielded myself from too deeply considering anything with existential import for fear it may lead to distress. This was likely more unconscious than conscious, but it happened nonetheless. I kept my loosely held Christian faith that I had been raised in and never investigated any of its critiques too deeply (or at least didn't lend them much credence). Then came another bolt from the blue; an invitation to consider my newly broken dreams and newly found project in the light of my purported faith. I spoke too deeply with a family member about my growing numbness, and they asked how it was with my faith; the question stuck. How do I reconcile what I wanted from my dreams with it? If I were aligned with the good, I would be able to give over my desires, right? Furthermore, my LLM work clearly had a questionable moral quality about it, how could I keep doing that in good conscience? "But wait," a voice in my mind said, "Why do you even believe that stuff anyway?" A valid question. One I had failed to really consider meaningfully for quite some time. I had been keeping up the pretense, but my reasons had long been left to disuse. And so began another spiral, the collapse of all my core frameworks. Driven by a mix of curiosity and a desire for some sort of absolution, I began to look for cracks in the fundamentals of my faith. It started simply at first; questions about hell. It was something that had always bothered me, but I always tamped it down. Now I read with fervor; starting, strangely enough, in places like 4Chan where I knew many degenerates dwell. Of course, they would know. I found many resources and avenues to explore, particularly on YouTube. I watched days' worth of debates between Christians and atheists. Then I began to listen to what ex-evangelicals had to say, and then those within the "street epistemology" space. Of these, one of the strongest, most damaging things I encountered was historical criticism of Biblical accuracy. I had always assumed inerrancy; it's what I was taught.