I’ve just asked ChatGPT what it thinks I should be doing with the next 20 years of my life. A crucial time period for me, since it takes me up to my mid seventies.
It’s come up with a list of things I don’t currently have time to do, so I evidently need to remind it of my current time constraints – or have a conversation with it about my current choices around work and career.
I do sometimes wonder about those. I need the physicality of my day job to get me fit and increase strength and stamina into old age. But it does take a long time. Wouldn’t I prefer to be working in my own garden or spending more time writing books?
I might prefer this, yes. But left to my own devices, I don’t actually do enough of it. Instead, I gravitate towards computer games and start building virtual worlds that are of no use to this actual one and only satisfy my own impulse to create, without actually creating anything.
At this relatively late stage in my life, I am finally bound to admit, I need the constraints of a hefty working schedule to force my body into the kind of constant action it needs in order to stay healthy, now. Without it, I turn into a human whale in every respect, only emerging from the depths of fantasy for occasional refills of the oxygen of reality when necessary. Getting nowhere. (Though I know of course that whales can get somewhere. Let’s leave the whale analogy at this point.)
There must be a better way of amalgamating the two things: my need to coerce myself into lots of physical action by whatever means are available, and my need to make the best use of these twenty years. I should be asking Chat this specific question. In fact, I should direct Chat to this blog post, to save myself from writing it all out again.