(Translated from the Chinese version by ChatGPT.)

Today is May 20th. Meta had layoffs. The company was almost empty, dead silent (I later found out it was because today people could work from home, not because everyone had been laid off). In the morning, because I had to prepare for an interview, a lot of thoughts I had never made it onto the page, and by evening, the various threads in my head had already drifted away.

Over the past few weeks, I have often gone to the 8th floor in Sunnyvale. Every morning, when I arrive at the office around 7 or 8, I see this guy sitting in a corner seat. He always arrives very early and starts working. Today he was there too, just as early as ever. In fact, today, there were only a few people on the entire floor, so that guy who arrived before 8 stood out even more than usual.

A lot of people in the WeChat groups received news in the morning that they had been laid off. They said goodbye to others and then quietly left the group. Some others were reassigned to AAI — I even went and looked up what AAI was. Over the past week, I had been drowning in my own pain and forgot that everyone else has their own pain too. Pain, when it sits on you, tends to get magnified.

After hope was broken again and again, I actually started to be kinder to myself. I used to comfort myself by thinking: once I find a job, everything will be okay. My life will become stable and peaceful, I will have time to learn new things, do what I want to do, and pay attention to my health. So I placed every joy-worthy thing into the bucket of “after I find a job.” I allowed myself to stay in a long-term state of unhappiness, because “it’ll be fine once I find a job.”

But is life really like that? Before my PhD, I also thought everything would be fine once I got admitted. And then? In the six months after I got my PhD admission, I was happy — maybe the happiest stretch of my life. I did not have to worry about the future or the present. But six months later (in the month before the PhD actually started), I became extremely negative, because I knew that happy life was about to end. And sure enough, in the three years that followed, there are almost no happy moments I can clearly recall. Before getting into the PhD, even though I did not have a long uninterrupted stretch of happiness like Feb–Aug of 2023, I could still pick up bits and pieces of happiness from ordinary days. Three years later, after finishing the PhD, I have even lost the ability to find happiness in ordinary days. (Compared to three years ago, my life has objectively gotten better — so why can I no longer feel happy?) The pain I went through during the PhD has permanently changed the way my neural signals travel. (People often use “permanent head damage” as a joke, but for me it is not a joke. I really do feel that certain parts of my brain have been fundamentally altered.) I once watched the movie If Voice Could Remember (the plot itself I really do not recommend), but apart from the plot, as someone who has been depressed almost every winter since coming to the U.S., I could really relate.

(Note: pain and depression are not the same thing. For example, I can be in pain because of many things, but I still know I am not in a state of depression. Pain and happiness/hope can coexist, but depression and happiness/hope cannot coexist at all. Before the PhD, there was also a lot of pain, but it was mixed with a lot of happiness. Now there is more pain or stillness, but no happiness. As long as I am not in a depressive state, I can still see hope. When depressed, it is like falling into an abyss — you do not know when you will come out, it is dark, and you cannot see hope.)

I have drifted off topic. Back to May 20th. I do not know what will happen with AI in the future. In the past, my worry about AI was simply that all the impressive people had moved into this direction, and I do not really like crowded fields. For example, I could have made my career into a hobby, but because there are so many people, I had to follow the wave and compete with everyone else, and the things I used to enjoy stopped being enjoyable. (Two years ago I did not want to work on what was hot at the time, for the same reason. I am too free-spirited, and being pushed by others is exhausting. But later, when there was no other choice, I fully switched to application, and now I have gotten used to it.)

Now, even though I have run into a lot of setbacks in the job search and still have not found a job, I still do not think this is AI’s fault. It is purely because I am not willing to put in the same number of working hours as others in the same field. (Somehow, what I like to do and what I am actually doing are still aligned.) But what about everyone else? People who love CS but do not particularly love AI — they have been forced by this wave to give up what they love and force themselves to adapt.

I have thought about this: life should work like this. First there are basic survival needs. On top of survival needs, we can then talk about higher-level spiritual needs. Before, many people had already met their survival needs, and they were even lucky enough to find something they enjoyed doing — writing code — so their work also satisfied their spiritual needs. Now, because of AI, more and more people are being pushed back down to just meeting basic survival needs, with no room left for spiritual ones. When the cost-effectiveness of a human is lower than that of an AI, in a place that only values efficiency and output, the human gets ruthlessly replaced. But will this behavior really not backfire on those few who hold the power and the wealth? If the bottom of the pyramid disappears, can the top of the pyramid still exist? Or is it that everyone is running toward the top, until the entire pyramid disappears? The fact that we are running toward death from the moment we are born is already a sad enough thing. If, on this journey toward death, we do not even have time to admire the scenery, and everything we do is just to satisfy “survival” — is that really reasonable?