[6/24] Advent of Writing

The Everyday Awe We Stop Noticing

Right now I am on a plane to Japan to vacation and see family/friends, 37,000 feet in the air, connected to satellite WiFi, chatting with an AI to brainstorm blog ideas. This sentence would have shocked someone just a few years ago.

Breaking it down:

I am flying halfway across the world at more than 500 miles per hour.
I am connected to a satellite orbiting Earth while somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
I am talking to a large language model as casually as if I had a personal assistant who never gets tired of me, even though it is all just code and computation behind the scenes.

None of this is normal. It is sci-fi. And yet here I am, barely thinking about it.

Humans have an incredible ability to normalize the absurdly advanced. The moment a new achievement becomes familiar, we stop seeing it. It takes deliberate effort to look around and remember how impossible all of this would have sounded not too long ago.

Even simple things can spark the same realization. The building you live in once existed entirely in nature before countless processes shaped those materials into something you could call a home. The clothes you are wearing required years of research, engineering, manufacturing, and global logistics, all so you can buy a pair of jeans for forty dollars.

When we ignore these things, it becomes easy to slip into cynicism or indifference. But noticing them brings something much healthier and closer to reality: a sense of awe for the world we get to live in, and I love that.

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