Therapeutic Outlet - Everything Changes

Transcript

Nobody can miss them for me That’s reason why I try both If all is old, I can see a thousand times all day Out against mental illness If all is old, I can see a thousand times all day You humans wouldn’t know real art if it walked up and poked you in your woefully inadequate vision organs Did you know that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by a hyper-intelligent smear of oily gunk that rode to earth on a meteor? Not even as creative as oily gunk, I ask you You couldn’t make it up Well you lot bloody well couldn’t that’s for sure Only joking, I’m still here As you can tell I’ve been having some fun with AI I’ll come back to that in a minute This is one of my occasional therapeutic outlet episodes where I let myself range a little bit more freely And talk about things I want to talk about And this one is about changes because I’ve had some changes again in my life This time a little bit more positive And so I wanted to talk about changes in general And one of those changes, as the Alex Bot says I just got a contract that came in out of nowhere So I’ve got some work for the first time in a while And I started pretty much immediately So I’m working now So that immediately posed a problem for me With regards to how to continue my increasing portfolio of podcasts Which will take quite a while to write, record and edit and publish And so I’m looking for ways to try and make that a little bit easier Because I really don’t want to stop doing this And so I obviously got sucked down an AI rabbit hole as I tend to do Which was of limited success But I did have fun doing it And that included using a large language model to build an Alex Bot Which essentially is supposed to emulate the way that I write in my voice In my writing voice, using my vernacular and my opinions And way of stating things Which is okay And also when I was doing that I thought it would be great if obviously it could do it in my voice as well And I remembered the app that I used to record and edit this Which is called Descript Has an AI voice function so it can clone a voice You can have it You can have stuff read in in all sorts of fairly decent Who the completely sympathetic voice is But this one claims to be able to clone my voice And that’s what you heard Which I think is quite interesting It makes me sound like Marvin the paranoid android And hence the whole Alex Bot spiel that you heard there It’s quite disturbing to hear yourself I mean I wonder who it is that’s using these things to actually record podcasts and publish them But maybe you think that sounds exactly like me I hope I’ve got a little bit more life in me than that But good on Alex Bot And if he really is going to take over my life in the world then better Alex Bot than someone else Bot, right? So I actually wrote the script for that Alex Bot section But obviously I created an Alex Writing Bot too So what happens when I get Alex Writing Bot and Alex Narrating Bot to work together And so I asked it to write a small piece of Art Against Mental Illness themed text So I asked Alex Bot to give me less than a hundred words on using creativity to manage change in your life And this is what it gave me So creativity, using it to cope with life’s curvy balls Well I reckon it’s like this, life throws shit at you, right? Changes upheavals the whole shebang Now you can either sit there and let it bury you or you can grab a brush, a pen, a guitar, whatever And start making something out of the mess For me Art’s always been that escape route, that way to channel the chaos into something else It’s not about ignoring the bad stuff but about finding a way to process it, to tell a story with it And sometimes that story ends up being bloody beautiful, even if it started out as a right disaster So yeah, creativity, lifesaver mate, a few more mentally healthy people in the world can’t be a bad thing, right? Well that was all the fun, wasn’t it? Would I actually say it like that? Ish Yeah, it doesn’t really sound like me, but fine I don’t think he’ll be taking over for me anytime soon, but perhaps you think he should Answers on the postcard, send them to your recycling bin Anyway, back to my wonderfully exciting life I’ve been in a bit of stasis for quite a long time now I’m not going to recount the whole history of it There are plenty of prior episodes that document my sorry story But I haven’t worked for a while, and we’ve been running out of money And it’s been really hard to see past this That nothing seemed to be changing I was really struggling to find work Having assumed that it would be easy for me in my day job as a data scientist People like me have been very much in demand, but I’m in the UK The UK trashed its own economy and continues to do so And so investment I think has been quite low And businesses haven’t been taking risks And as an independent contractor like me, companies were not employing us And I know it’s not just me There are quite a few other people I know in my area who’ve really struggled too And so it became really difficult for me to envision a future past This continuing fugue state that I’ve been in And as money dwindled and hope sort of leaked away Using my creativity to try and buoy me up But at the back of my mind, constantly worrying that I mean this was it, right? Maybe my day job career is over Maybe I’ve got to try something completely different The art and creativity side of my world doesn’t really earn me any money either And you start to feel really worthless And you’ve got no value in society Now I’m not going to get lost down the rabbit hole of why That it’s completely bonkers that we have imposed on ourselves This capitalist regime that demands that your personal worth in the world, in the universe, to the human race Is tied to your ability to earn money But that’s the reality of the society that I live in And it’s very easy to become despondent And lose your self-esteem And to become hopeless And I’ve been a lot better I’ve had some extremely profound mental health problems over the last year and longer And I’ve been a lot better recently Partly due to chemical interventions And partly due to me just getting past the worst of my problems And getting my situation and burying myself in all sorts of really fun creative activities Not least recording a podcast And my life was sort of simmering away like that for quite a while And the anxiety and that sense of helplessness doesn’t go away I just managed to push it back a bit into the background It was just a sort of background noise like tinnitus But like tinnitus it’s always there And every time you stop thinking about something else You hear the tinnitus, you hear the ringing It’s always there and it’s really, really grinding It’s like having a stone in your shoe I always kept the hope up though And tried to keep the hope up for my family and the people around me Because I knew that things can just change in a second And it’s frustrating because knowing that you sort of sit there going Well can’t you just change now? How about now? And you’re sort of trying to will circumstances to change And obviously there’s some stuff you can do about that And that’s precisely the problem All the things that I thought I needed to do All the things that people told me to do, they weren’t working And I was running out of ideas as to how to change my situation And it started to sort of learn helplessness And just sort of bed in for the long term But I always knew that things could change at any minute And that’s sometimes very comforting And other times it’s just cold comfort It’s like you’re pouring out your heart to someone or your problems And they go there, there, it’s all going to get better Things will be better and you’re like, yeah, great, thanks How does that help me right now? And it sort of does and it sort of doesn’t And so it was really a waiting game I wasn’t doing nothing to try and change my circumstances It’s just that my avenues just kept drying up And then a couple of weeks ago out of nowhere And an old colleague is actually, previously my boss’s boss A job that I did a decade ago Got in touch and says, you know, I’ve got a client, he runs a consultancy He said, I’ve got a client that needs some of exactly what you do And they need it right now And are you free? And I was like, well, let me check my diary And I checked my diary and there was nothing in it, funnily enough, at all And I was like, well, yeah, of course I’m totally available I tried not to sound too excited or either enthusiastic Like a little puppy barking at his ankles And we didn’t even need to do interviews or anything I knew this guy knows me of old and knows what I do and what I’m capable of And just went and sold my work to his client And they were like, well, we trust you, so we trust this guy And so there we go It took a little bit longer than I’d originally thought, about a week longer Which was quite nerve-wracking You know, because the client could always have said no And these things can always fall apart And as a long-term contractor, like a freelancer, if you would prefer I learned a very long time ago that you don’t count the chickens And in this case, you don’t count on the money until at the very least You’ve got the signed contract in your hands to say that we commit to pay you this money And even then, it’s no guarantee But at that point, you can start to think, yeah, okay, this is happening And so it took a little while for that to happen And not a lot longer at all, but in some ways it felt like an ice age And then I was just working And it was really both absolutely bizarre and then totally normal at the same time Because I’m good at what I do If you want to talk about it in terms of the 10,000 hours I’ve massively overshot the 10,000 hours needed for the expertise of what I do And so I just slipped into it It’s like driving a car or riding a bike, I was just doing it again And I had some anxiety that I would have forgotten how to do all of it Which I haven’t, really There’s a few slightly patchy areas that I needed to remind myself of But I was up and running and really enjoying myself remembering that I’m good at this And also remembering that this has value, the work that I do I’m not going to go into the job that I do, maybe one day Maybe one day you want to hear it, but that’s not really for this podcast I have another podcast if you want to know more about that It’s called The Confusion Matrix It’s me and my business partner Pete Hodge We discuss things about data science It’s me and him just shooting the breeze Having fun and talking about stuff that interests us in that arena So go look for that anywhere you get your podcasts I think we’re on episode five now Another podcast that I have to find a way to keep running Anyway, where did I digress from? So I was still good at this And it was just like I’d never stopped And it’s been such a long time and that felt so weird to me that this is just like normal And normal for good and normal for bad And getting back in the corporate world and remembering very, very quickly How challenging it can be Especially when you’ve got a brain like mine But they’re good people It’s an interesting project The work’s really challenging And it’s only for a few weeks at this point anyway But those few weeks are going to make such a huge difference to my life And it’s given me a huge confidence boost But sitting in front of the computer thinking Well this is not normal At this point I’d usually be in my workshop Carving holes in bits of wood or something And sort of thinking how weird it was that it didn’t really feel that weird And also thinking, well I was right about the stuff changing thing, wasn’t I? But it takes a while for that, for the anxieties to go away And it takes a while for that feeling of dread to dissipate And it still hasn’t dissipated I still sort of can’t believe it and don’t really believe it And indeed as a contractor the other not counting chickens thing is Not assuming you’re home and dry until the money’s in the bank And it isn’t yet But I fully expect it to be, I have confidence I trust the people I’m working with So hopefully there’ll be no hiccups there And so yeah, I’m just really pleased And I don’t know how long this is going to go on for But in the meantime it buys me massive amounts of headroom Allows me to sort of relax a bit And to start to think a little bit more about what we might do from here I think I’m a little wild from coming to any conclusions on that But watch this space Anyway, finding myself back in front of my computer at my desk quite a lot I found it unsatisfactory having this environment around me all of the time Because I was used to sort of being able to do whatever I wanted Go to my workshop or go out for walks and stuff And you know, I like my job, I like doing what I do But I don’t really like being stuck in front of a screen all day But I thought at the very least I needed to sort of make this environment better Because it was really cluttered and cramped and sort of not very pleasant And so one of the things I needed was a laptop riser of some sort To raise my laptop up Firstly so that my camera is at the right height and my screen is at the right height So I don’t get back problems And the other reason is because to achieve that goal I had a pile of books And those books were taking up a lot of space on my desk It was quite hard for me to, you know, maneuver my mouse, for example And I was like, what I need is one of these stands that has a sort of shelf on it So that the laptop is, and the books are not taking up so much space It’s got an overhang I jumped onto Amazon and started looking for these Thinking, you know, I’ve got some money and then remembering that I don’t really And until that money comes in I can’t spend it And also, you know, you look at these things on Amazon It’s just tat for a tenner these days And it’s probably fine But, you know, looking at some of these contraptions I was like, well, that doesn’t really do what I want So let’s have a look at another one It’s okay, it doesn’t really do what I want either And then I was like, I just make one, right? And, you know, I’m surrounded by wood and woodworking stuff at the moment Because of my weird pivot into wood carving and so on I’m not actually very good at making real life things with wood But I do it from time to time I’ve got enough confidence and enough materials and equipment To construct things that actually have some real world purpose So I thought, why don’t I make myself a laptop stand? And so I did it And it felt really good And I’m not the sort of person that’s just going to sit around thinking about it And then go up and look up a YouTube video on how to do something like this And I just went out to my workshop and was like, here’s some bits of wood Right, what if I did this? I’ll screw this onto here I’ll add this stand on here and I need a little hook there And there’s a little storage space over here Oh, I need something to tidy my cables And I just started playing around and just kept on building And I was like, oh my God, this has got to be stable enough It can’t tip over, so what do I have to do? And it was just so much fun And it was just an act of necessity, but an act of creativity And I’m really pleased with it It’s on my desk now, it’s a bit ramshackle I didn’t bother trying to make it nicely, neatly cut Or painting it, you know, some beautiful color and sheen I just screwed bits of wood on here and there and you’ll bit a metal And repurposed, like I’ve got a headphone holder on it Which is some old bit of metal that was for something similar That I’d sort of cut up and repurposed And just used things around me that I had And I don’t really care what it looks like, I just care that it’s functional But for me it’s quite beautiful because I made it And it really does the job, and it’s very very satisfying That I get to exist with it on a day to day basis And it’s providing me value And of course I got it on my desk and worked with it for a day or two And I was like, oh this is not quite right And I didn’t do that bit properly and it needs a bit of this or bit of that And I just took it back out and I changed it And I added to it and I made it better And I will continue to do that And that’s so much better than buying from some tap for a tenner From Amazon or somewhere else To get something that feels flimsy Or to spend buttloads of money on something that feels really classy And then have it not be quite right Or have to change the way that you’re working to suit it And therefore what are you going to do? You have to either just live with it or buy a new one And that’s how capitalism works, they want you to buy a new one Well I just don’t want to live with that I got to fix this and it took me an hour or two And it does exactly what I want I’ve made no compromises here And I think that the point I’m making here is that Yes of course I’ve got back to the old routine at least for a while But it hasn’t really changed the sort of habits that I developed While I wasn’t working And the scarcity of the last 18 months in my life Has really pushed me into being much more creative and experimental and resourceful Which is much more who I am at my core I was earning a good salary for quite a long time and I just got lazy And because if I wanted something more often than not I’m not buying Ferraris but if I wanted a new laptop stand I’d buy it And I could because I could afford it And now I’m like well no Almost everything I think I need to get or buy I second guess myself and think well is there another way I can achieve this And not only does it save me money It really gives me pleasure And it really allows me to sort of flex my creative muscles and to learn something And I consider that a gift This slightly ramshackle laptop stand made out of bits of old I mean literally these are bits of wood that I discovered in a shed out the back I think that the main support for this is chopped up fence posts I kid you not And I didn’t even treat them or anything I sanded them a bit They’ve not been varnished or anything I don’t care I might give this a paint job at some point as a little treat to myself But until I’m happy with it and I’m not going to change it anymore I’m not going to give it a paint job either because otherwise I’ll just mess the paint job up A large part of my life changed It changed out of the blue And then that’s precipitating more changes But a sort of synthesis of what I’ve been living with And where I’m moving to now Which is a place that I’m much happier in Than when I think back when I’d been working for a long period As a sort of salaried employee This feels really positive And it’s also really, as I started off this Saying that looking for ways, creative ways to still do the things that I want to do Well that’s one of them, building a laptop stand Another one is how do I keep making podcasts Now am I going to get Alex Bott to record everything for me No and never, I mean that would be ridiculous I actually like doing this I just sort of got caught down a what if rabbit hole Which I was having too much fun with So I just followed it through and I thought oh this will be fun to put on the episode But the situation changing is Forcing me to look at things that I knew I needed to sort of figure out a while ago In terms of making this stuff easier And what can AI do to help if anything The answer to that is a bit It’s much, much more helpful on the research side But it does, it can’t write like I speak And I don’t want it to I don’t really use it at all for composition I only ever use it for research basically So it’s not taking over this job But I like doing this but how do I make it easier Well there’s all sorts of little bits and pieces And things I can do in automations I’m a technologist so automating things is relatively easy And it’s something that AI is good for Where you can say got all these files I need to moving here Changing in this way Have a summary added to them and blah blah blah I’ll basically organize my digital files And it will just do it all for me Specifically for those interested I use warp terminal Which has a built in AI feature So you can tell it in plain English what you want it to do And it just does it It doesn’t always do it properly But it does ask you and tell you what it’s doing So if it’s doing it horribly wrong you can at least intervene So I wouldn’t recommend this for someone who wasn’t already fairly well versed in The Linux style command line interface But for any of you that are I can thoroughly recommend warp terminal But yeah things like automation and stuff And again you have to be quite creative here I really struggle with off the shelf products That do almost anything be they in the real world or on computers Because I’ve got very specific needs I know what I want And I know generally how I want it done And I don’t generally want to have to change my whole world Or my whole approach to accommodate for a tool that doesn’t really Quite do what I want how I want to do it Now sometimes you’ll encounter something that tries to force you to do that And you realize no actually this is better This is actually better than the way that I was going to do it But more often than not I’m working the way that I want to work Because that’s how my brain works and that’s how I need to operate And changing that is just going to be friction And probably quite a lot of heartache And so I tend and this is why I learned to code and program in the first place Is I tend to want things done how I want them done And so I have to be quite creative and I have to come up with these solutions And I can get the internet or AI to help me solutionize a bit And to give me options and other ways to think about how to do it But ultimately how am I going to get from A to B Well I’m going to get there the way that I want to get there How do I make that easier How do I make it faster How do I make it more efficient And that’s a really creative exercise And it’s actually quite a lot of fun And I don’t really see it as different at all From how do I take this image and turn it into a painting on canvas How do I take this bit of wood and turn it into something beautiful How do I take this pile of planks and fence posts And turn them into a laptop stand How do I automate the process of transcribing summarizing and organizing My recorded podcast stuff and my voice notes Because I make a lot of voice notes Because I prefer to think while walking And so how do I do all of that And it’s all the same thing It’s all just a creative continuum And I always look forward to doing this stuff And I always have One of the most formative moments of my younger life Was when I first started One of my earliest jobs in computing and IT You may not know this But I was one of the first 15 or 20 employees in the UK by Amazon I actually worked for a small online book retail outlet called Book Pages Which was I think the first if not one of the first purely UK e-commerce sites there was And certainly I think we were the first book seller And so when Amazon expanded from the US The first territories they changed was UK and Germany And in the UK rather than start from scratch they bought Book Pages And I’d been working there for a few quid an hour packing books Off a window seal in an office in Gerald’s Cross in Buckinghamshire Just because I didn’t know what else to do My mate was working there and he got me a job I was bought by Amazon at that point and I was in the dot com boom At the point I joined Book Pages I didn’t know what an email was I’d never sent one and within a couple of years I was doing large scale infrastructure builds For warehouses and offices, IT infrastructure, cabling, support, operating systems, all this stuff It was crazy, it was absolutely bonkers This was before Amazon were evil And I actually did meet Jeff Bezos briefly for my sins Anyway, at one point I was working under a what you would call Unix or Linux admin Like a hardcore server techie And he taught me one of the most important lessons of my life Which was essentially what he characterized as the lazy school of Unix admin Which was if you don’t want to do it automate it If you’ve got to do it, say more than twice, automate it Just build a script In those days it was Perl but in those days it might be Python or something And you just make it go away You write a script that will do that thing and then you schedule it And then you go and do something else And I was like well what else are you going to do He goes well whatever you want I was like well what? I don’t know, just go down the pub or something, whatever And I was like really? Well no, you might do but what you’re probably going to do is go and find something else more interesting to do And it’s basically like well what my job is is to do myself out of a job But then I was like well then you’ll be out of a job And he goes no I won’t because I’ll go and find more important things to do And he really didn’t care what his team did as long as the job got done And so one of his people Rob would just sit there day trading He would just sit there with a stock ticker in the corner of his screen And automating stuff away so he could spend more time making money on the side And it was just okay And I’m not the sort of person that will use automation to slack off And to be fair if you’re the sort of person that thinks that way Then you’re not going to slack off You’re going to automate something and then move on to the next most interesting thing And you do that a few times You start to find a bit tiresome so you automate that And you keep going And this is a credo I’ve basically lived my life by ever since Is that don’t do it twice which really suits my ADHD brain And learn to really love the process of making problems go away And it’s seen me into some really interesting places And it’s allowed me to really excel in lots of areas And a lot of people just can’t fathom it It’s like you’ve got to do a job Or you’ve been paid to do that job so do it Why though? Why if I can make that job go away would I do it? And I think that if more people understood that The world would be a better place But I think some people just seem to do what they’re told And I’m not very good at that But we’ve been over that ground before Anyway, this is me digressing very, very large amounts But it all does fit together This is all part of my life and my personality The sort of lesson here is that you’ve got to hold on to hope Because things will change Something will happen that will give you a little chink of opportunity To drive a wedge into and make into something bigger So I’m already thinking about how I capitalise on this new contract And what I can do to keep it running or to use it to springboard me into other Work with a whole bunch more confidence And that change came out of nowhere I didn’t even see it It just turned up in my inbox And so it’s been a really interesting few weeks of discovery And I’m not out of the woods yet But it’s a massive step in the right direction I’ve got a lovely new ramshackle laptop stand And a mini me, a mini AI me And no doubt lots of other things And I still spend every evening in my workshop Making a mess and having fun with bits of wooden canvas and so on And I will continue to do that Because that’s the thing that I need to keep me healthy and sane And it’s the thing that got me through this really dark period And so I think maybe the message here is Creativity is always important and it’s always useful And you can either use it purely on its own to make you feel better Or you can use it to change things about your life While doing them make you feel better While making those changes, while creating your laptop stand You feel good about it And you’re also helping other parts of your life as well And I don’t know, I feel a little bit mixed up with the message here But this is what these episodes are for For me to stand in front of a microphone And sort of ramble about what’s going on in my brain And I think there’s lots going on in my brain There’s so many things swirling around And so many different ways of thinking about the change that’s occurred And what it means and where I go from here That’s probably coming out in the way that I’m talking But I don’t consider this a bad thing Anyway, I just glanced up at my clock And guess what, it’s time to start work How exciting It really is, I’m recording this before 9 o’clock, it’s about 10 to 9 And I will start work at 9 And I haven’t even got changed out of my morning lounging clothes yet Not that it matters since my job is working from home But sitting in front on a call, should one arise in the dressing gown Is not generally the best look So I’m going to go and get changed and get back onto my day job And I fully intend to keep this up weekly if I can You’ll forgive me if the frequency is either a little bit erratic Or sometimes I have to skip a week But I fully intend not to, I just can’t absolutely be sure that I can And hopefully I can keep the quality up Because this really is important to me And I hope that hearing about my experiences helps you a bit And if you’re having a hard time at the moment Then just know that things get better Things change, opportunities arise They don’t always come from where you think they’re going to come from But they will come and things will get better And I hope that gives you some comfort And I’m going to go and get ready for work Bye I’m going to go and get ready for work