I made an infographic recently, with some AI help, charting 26 years of change. 2000 to now. It looks impressive in that format: neat eras, tidy bullet points, the arc of history laid out like a subway map.
But 2000 wasn't where my timeline starts.
I remember the Challenger breaking apart on live television. I remember the Iran hostage crisis. I was already building websites six years before the dot-com boom, and I watched that company fold when the boom went bust. I remember exactly where I was standing when the towers came down.
History doesn't fit in an infographic. It fits in your body.
Here's what I also know: I'm not tired. I'm not even nostalgic for anything, well, maybe the 80s. What's coming next, the real AGI, the robots, the RNA drugs, the nanobots, SpaceX making orbit "boring", all of it is moving faster than anything humans have ever built before, and I'm genuinely excited to see it all come to life.
Between all of that and the porch, I hike. I walk my dog on dirt trails to look at green things and listen to the critters. I sit out front and "watch the grass grow". Both of these things are true about the same person.
AI will eventually take the coding. The design work. The creative problem-solving I've spent 30 years developing. The web as we know it probably doesn't have as long a runway as people think. The phone in your hand may be one of the last generations of that object. The world of the movie "Her", ambient, invisible, no screen between you and everything else, feels closer than most people are ready to admit.
I've made peace with that, more than peace actually. The porch is already there. The trail is already there. I've been practicing the life I want on the other side without knowing that's what I was doing.
The part I haven't figured out yet is the bridge. Humans still need income until we don't. Dev, legal, medical, science, the number of people required to do those things will drop substantially, and I'm not pretending otherwise. I guess I'm just mentally preparing for what comes after.
Same dirt. Same dog. Same green things. Just need to sort out the math.