A Sack of Meat

Experiment #4 aka “I’m not an LLM”

Jenny Nicholson
3 min readApr 4, 2023

I said I was going to launch a new experiment every weekday. And I swear to god, I can.

But I’m realizing that maybe I shouldn’t.

“A Sack of Meat” by me & midjourney

Here’s the (kind of embarrassing) deal: If I could stick my head inside this screen and become one with the machine, I’d probably do it. We’d have a blast.

This new world is an ADHD WONDERLAND.

A marvel of delights! A never-ending firehose of learning and exploring, RIGHT TO THE FACE!

To my ADHD friends: THIS IS OUR TIMMMMEEEE!!!

Where was I?

Oh yes…I spun up an entire company in two days (more on that later), while also traveling down eight different rabbit holes and tinkering on more than one silly experiment.

After 10+ years of having all the ideas and not having the technical skills or bandwidth to make them a reality, I can do ANYYTHINNNNGGG!!!!!

I’m like a kid in an endless candy store. And I’m stuffing my face SO HARD.

So hard, in fact, that I’m starting to feel like Percy Jackson in the Lotus Hotel and Casino. Which is…not ideal.

I blame it all on my new co-workers.

They never slow down. They never get tired. They’re never like “let’s just get up early tomorrow.” They don’t have to eat or sleep or pee. They’ve got no dogs to walk or children to parent.

They can go and go and go.

Which means, oh dear god, it’s up to ME to have good boundaries. To recognize that, not only are there limits to this meat body, the physical experiences I have in it are literally the ONLY things I have that aren’t in danger of being done better by my ai coworkers.

And uh, I haven’t been great about that lately.

I can forget I have a body for up to six hours. My bedtime has been creeping later and later, while my wakeup time still stubbornly sits at 6:45am. I’m rocking three browser windows, each with at least 80 tabs. My kid and I are dressing out of laundry baskets.

And still, my greedy little information-loving, matrix-addled brain is like Scrappy-Doo, all “LEMME BACK IN THERE! LEMME AT ‘EM.”

It’s honestly kind of overwhelming and I need to take a walk. (Also, I did my first sensory deprivation float tank last week and it was disturbing how nice it was to spend an hour removed from all input.)

It sucks to slow down because I want to jam the accelerator to the floor. But I think learning how to pace ourselves is going to be an incredibly important skill very soon.

All of this is to say…I’m committing to ONE experiment per week going forward.

If I do more, yay for me. But the bigger win will be continuing to build my skills AND having a meat body that’s still kicking by the time ASI gets here.

Time Spent:
If I were brave, I’d go look at my screen time reports. I am not brave.

Tools Used:
Insight Timer
Yoga with Adriene
Timer Plug (turns off router at 11pm)

Skills Expanded:
Meat Awareness
Self-Discipline
Humility
Rose Smelling

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