twenty and terrified (in a good way i guess?)

I turn 20 in August, and I’ve been thinking about how absolutely asleep I was six months ago. Not literally asleep(maybe), though I did plenty of that lately. I mean asleep in the sense that I thought I understood the trajectory of things knowing that I am the one in control. I’d write some code, AI would maybe autocomplete a line or two if I was lucky, and that was neat but not, you know, scary. The tools were helpers. More like a autocorrect. Then somewhere between then and now, something shifted, and I didn’t notice until I was already in a different world.

The thing about being insignificant is that it comes in two two pills, and I’m taking both right now. There’s the normal kind of insignificant you feel at 20. You’re one person. The universe is very large. Your world feels small in retrospect. You haven’t done anything important yet. This is the kind of insignificance that’s almost comfortable(almost) ,it takes the pressure off. You have time to figure things out. Then there’s this other pill I’m taking now, which is more like: I’m insignificant and the timeline is compressing. I look at what these models could barely do in March and what they can do now, and I try to do the math on what August looks like, let alone next March. The extrapolation makes my mind go brrrr. Six months ago, I’d spend an afternoon reading something stupid, try to replicate it and then finally figuring it out, feel proud. Now I describe the problem to Claude, get a solution in thirty seconds, and feel… what exactly? Grateful? Obsolete? Both? The ceiling keeps rising, which should be exciting. And it is! It is exciting. I can build things I couldn’t have imagined building before. I’m learning faster than I ever have. But the floor is rising faster, and I can’t tell if I’m climbing or just being lifted, and I definitely can’t tell what happens when I’m not needed to do the climbing anymore.

Feynman is the only person in history who left a mark on me without me ever meeting him. I read his lectures, watched old videos of him explaining things on blackboards, absorbed this way he had of being completely honest about not knowing something while being utterly delighted to figure it out.(at one point I even knew first 50 digits of pi, just to reach the Feynman constant)

I think about how Feynman would use AI. He wouldn’t ask it to solve his problems, he’d use it to check his own solutions, to argue with, to explore the weird edge cases. He’d probably spend hours trying to make it explain something wrong just to understand where the reasoning breaks down. The tool would be in service of his curiosity, not replacing it. Imagine Claude code playing bongo drums with Feynman. I’m not Feynman. But most days I’m oscillating. Twenty minutes of genuine fascination, then an hour of low-grade dread. I’ll be excited about what I can build with all this, then suddenly terrified that I’m building skills for a world that won’t exist by the time I’m good at them. The feeling that I need to speedrun becoming competent before competence itself becomes obsolete. It’s not even different moods on different days. It’s the same day. The same hour. Sometimes the same five minutes.

I haven’t built anything significant in the last month. I’ve mostly been thinking, reading, paralyzed by the sense that whatever I choose to build might be obsolete before I finish it. Maybe that’s the problem. Feynman didn’t ask “what’s my role?” or “what should I optimize for?” He asked “what’s interesting?” And then he’d just go figure it out, not because it was strategic but because not knowing was slop back then. I’m watching my friends sprint in different directions. Some have suddenly accelerated and are moving at 100× the speed they were before. Others are acting like nothing is changing, still optimizing for normal career paths. I’m stuck in the middle, refreshing my timeline, reading shit I don’t understand(like at all), waiting for some clarity that never seems to come.

The tree metaphor people love, “the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is now” well, that doesn’t work anymore. What do you do when you’re not sure if trees matter? When the forest might plant itself? When even the metaphor feels outdated before you finish typing it?

I’m trying to figure out how to be 20 right now. Not the normal kind of 20, where you’re supposed to be figuring out your major and your career and making mistakes that’ll make good stories later. But 20 in 2026, when the timeline for “later” keeps compressing. I don’t have good answers. Most days I just feel small. But I think about Feynman, who looked at everything with this open wonder, who thought the universe was there to be figured out and that figuring it out was the point. Not because it would lead somewhere, but because not knowing was worse than knowing. Six months ago I was asleep. Now I’m awake, even if I’m not sure what to do with that wakefulness yet. I turn 20 in August. By then, who knows what the models will be able to do. Who knows what I’ll be doing with them, or if “doing” will even mean what it means now. But I’ll be here. Paying attention. Trying to figure it out. That has to count for something. Ig.