On the Loss of Wonder

When I was 10 years old, my grandfather gave me a Commodore VIC-20 that he’d rebuilt after a restaurant had thrown it into a dumpster. It had a slowed-down disk drive from a Commodore 64, the classic tape drive, and that cartridge slot that you could use to either add a few KB (yes, KiloBytes! You can’t even fit a meme into that today) of expansion memory or you could play some Atari-grade games.

He gave me a BASIC programming manual and essentially left me to my own devices. I started writing the samples from the book. Then I got another book, Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer. This book was quite literally life-changing. Everything was new, everything was unknown. Every time I turned a page and read a new paragraph, I could feel my perspective changing and my world view expanding. I was overcome with a sense of wonder.

This sense of wonder continued unabated as I learned some C (also catalyzed by my grandfather) and then Pascal. I made more and more things. I built for the fun of it (this becomes important later) and for the journey. The exploration of the wild frontier was the thing. I got a modem and connected to a literal world of possibility. I taught myself how to run a BBS at home, annoyed my mother when I begged for a private phone line, and continued plowing ahead. The high of learning and growth and the peeling back of the “fog of war” never stopped. I was absolutely addicted to the wonder and awe of it all.

In high school, I discovered that a number of University of Massachusetts facilities had 2400 or even 9600 baud dialups that had no passwords. Using these guest accounts, I got access to the Internet before people even really called it that. I learned how to download NASA images from the Garbo archives at the University of Vaasa, Finland¹.

I wrote my first lines of C code for a multi-user text adventure (MUD). I got players trapped in an elevator in the game because I didn’t know what a race condition was or the dangers of concurrent mutation. Life was absolutely amazing and the drive to get more and more of the wonder of discovery urged me on. I had to learn more, I had to build more, and I’d discovered that I loved teaching other people about what I had learned and built.

A bit later in my career, there was a nearly 10 year stretch where I’d managed to keep the wonder alive. Between building and learning the art of software development for Macs (no iPhone yet! Imagine the horror!) and for Windows and writing tech books on the .NET Framework and others, I aimed the firehose of the universe right at my face and sucked it all in.

Even later in my career (“I’m in my prime!”) I encountered Rust thanks to a good friend. I went down that rabbit hole with a fresh sense of wonder. I learned all the ways in which my previous projects weren’t memory safe or thread safe. I discovered WebAssembly and created a CNCF project for it and co-created a startup built around wasm. Life was filled with wonder again (hey, there’s a word for that, it’s called wonderful!).

And now we enter the part of the holocene epoch where mankind has developed a “why bother?” syndrome, a division of the modern era. This didn’t start with AI nor did it start with code.

Why should anyone bother learning a language when your phone is almost as good as a babel fish or a Dr. Who universal translator? Why would you learn a particular programming language when you know that your AI assistant can spit out code in that language? Why write an email by hand when you can have an assistant create it? Why read official work documents when you can have your AI assistant summarize it?

Why build new products yourself when you can ask an agent to build it for you? This line of questioning gets worse and worse, until ultimately we end up in a pit of apathy and despair, actually thinking it might not be worth it to build a product at all because anyone else can build it.

Democratization of building capabilities that used to separate us from the masses has sapped the joy and wonder from experiences that used to be incredibly fulfilling. So, what do we do about it? Surely if you’re reading this blog post it must mean that I have discovered the magical answer.

Sadly, I have no idea.

I’ve always had a very, very high bar for judging whether something was worth it. Even in the height of my age of wonder, I routinely dismissed things as not worth it, even if they might have given me a wonderful experience.

The first thing I need to acknowledge is that a lot of this mindset is just self-defeatist talk that is entirely my fault. I need to learn how to not hold those opinions and how to reframe the universe in a way that has room for discovery and wonder and awe. I need to re-learn how to pick something and undertake a journey for no other reason than for the journey itself.

Is it worth it? Yes. It may even be worth it more these days than before because now I can go from an idea to a prototype in a staggeringly short period of time. This gives me a huge rush and lets me vet ideas and decide if it’s worth continuing a thing rather than starting a thing.

We didn’t stop walking when cars became ubiquitous. Our motivation for doing it changed. We didn’t stop running, we just do it to stay healthy instead of escaping a charging boar. I still have shelf after shelf of book even though I have the choice to own them in a way that consumes zero space (they can live in a pocket universe called ePub!)

I know that somehow I need to keep the wonder alive. I need to force myself to learn things and build things and explore previously hidden and dark crevices of the Internet and software development and technology in general. I can’t blame the advent of AI for my own lack of exploration. That’s a cop-out and I know it. I need to continue to learn languages and patterns and build things I’ve never built before. I need to incorporate AI into this journey with me. I can’t ignore AI nor can I allow AI to replace my need for wonder and exploration.

I might have to change the motivation and rationalization for taking these journeys now, but I still feel they are essential. Maintaining joy and wonder in learning isn’t just a nice thing to have, it’s what separates a happy and productive me from an apathetic electrolyte-sucking Idiocracy character.

Another potential motivation here is that a lot of programmers are reporting brain rot or brain fog from (over) exposure to AI assistants. The more they spend their time with AI doing the work, the less they find they can concentrate on tasks or even design simple solutions to problems. I’m scared to death of this brain rot.

I haven’t come up with it yet, but I’m trying to come up with a checklist of motivations and criteria for starting these journeys and how to adapt those journeys to the AI-riddled world we live in.

In any case, I think I’m going to go re-read the Unison getting started guide. Just because I can.