Category: Existentialism

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(A)I Will Haunt You! (pt.2)

Now that the existential threat as outlined in Part 1 is completed, let’s have some fun. Actually, that’s debatable, as this second journey was somewhat unpalatable in its own right.

I say – would you like a cookie?

To summarize, a female specter visited me in a dream which would have inevitably led to my death (dream death (would that kill me physically too?)). I would normally assume that this was just a random machination from my subconscious. But on the other hand, such a vivid image of a person’s face that I had never met has never occurred before in my dreams. So I proceeded with concerned curiosity, rather than just move on.

To be fair, my mental stability has long been a source of question. At some point the internal monologue became external…in the form of hand puppets. Whippet hand puppets. So this event must surely be a transitioning point. Or perhaps transcendental!

Oi sir! Would bloody love me a good cookie!

But for now, it’s merely an opportunity for exploration. Here’s the question:

If my mind can create people that don’t exist, and Generative AI can create people that don’t exist, then can AI recreate the person in my head that doesn’t exist, which I originally created, into a visual facsimile?

You might think that this is a bizarre an uncanny path to go down. And you would be correct. Here goes!

I had never before used AI for this, and I started rather basic. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a redheaded woman in her mid 30s. That seemed like a good baseline. What it gave me was indeed a recognizable female with the proper hair color, which looked like a lawyer character from a 90s TV drama series. In other words, she did not look like someone who was about to kill me in a village ritual. She looked like a mother – someone you’d run into shopping at Target, buying slacks and unscented deodorant. Not that I generally shop at Target, but you get the idea. And that minor smile! It was like a business portrait one would put on their Teams profile. There was nothing scary about this at all. Yes, I will accept your meeting invite to discuss the potential fraud loss benefits and improved user experience if we implement authentication enhancements into your product.

VP, Credit Products Manager of Something

No quite. So what continued was a far too lengthy process of me feeding nebulous adjectives into AI, like I was an eyewitness trying to help an investigator sketch a suspect’s mugshot. “Darker eye shadow.” “Slightly younger”. “Redder lips.” “Fewer wrinkles.” “Messier hair.” “Shorter hair.” “Shorter face.” “Smoother neck.” The outputs ranged from Target Mom to Crack Junkie.

It then occurred to me that this would probably be the future of online dating: Generate some form of an idealized look, then let AI search profiles and line up matches. I felt something die inside me, doing this exercise. I was creating a person that didn’t exist based on designated parameters. And the results didn’t even fall into uncanny valley territory. One day, we as a lonely people, will build android girlfriends this way.

Fortunately for me, I won’t ever have to go through that. No – I was building a model of a memory of a nocturnal tormentor that my mind had created to kill me. That might not sound more well-adjusted, but I think it is.

In the end, the final directive was “Make the eyes more intense.” No really. And it worked. The smile disappeared and the stare turned into something half vacant/half soul-piercing, with just a hint of murderous intent behind a thinly-veiled welcoming interest.

The end result was almost spot on.

This was maybe a curiosity that should have been left unexplored. My own subconscious, which knows all my fears intimately, created a female alchemical homunculus as an object of death, the details of which I’ve now fed into the internet, and which AI was able to flawlessly replicate on demand.

This is what happens in the winter when I can’t go outside to garden, and the shortened days lead to too much introspection.

More posts about cooking I think.

–Simon

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(A)I Will Haunt You! (pt.1)

Most dreams are nightmares. Presumably, when central command shuts down for the night and the brain enters maintenance mode, it’s an opportunity to run disaster simulations and generate contingencies. The trouble is, my dreams rarely generate anything much grounded in reality, and tend to dwell on bad memories instead. All that accomplishes is aggravating my neural sympathetic responses and giving me a bad night’s sleep. I don’t need a reminder of prior bad jobs or states of anxiety.

Common themes include:

  • I have to go back to work at my college job.
  • I have to go back to work at my former call center job.
  • I’m taking the final exam for a college class that I’ve never attended.
  • I’m trying to find my way through an urban maze, towards some undefined objective, and timing is critical, and I’m lost.
  • I’m supposed to do something somewhere, and I don’t remember either.

Gone are the days of being hunted by some unearthly monster. At least those were entertaining to some degree. It would appear that once the individual adds life experience to their memory banks, terrors move from the abstract to the contextual.

Additionally, at least in my case, characters in dreams become either people I’ve known or nebulous humanoid entities. I don’t create identifiable people from scratch. If my dream needs a background extra, it’s just a bipedal form, all the while the main characters are past friends or current co-workers, usually delivering bad news in unlikely conditions.

But recently, for the first time that I can remember, a woman I’ve never met appeared in a dream. And she had striking features. I had created a mental image of a person I didn’t know.

The story is as follows:

Yeah, every time something good happens to me in a dream, either I wake up or the dream turns into a nightmare.

I received a notice from some organizational body that I’d inherited property from my late grandfather, in Pataskala. It would not turn out to be on the old family farm. It turned out to be a house – a variant of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater – on the rocky banks of a creek, in an unnamed hidden community in some invisible valley. Sounded kind of cool so far.

I spent some days fishing, but noted increasing hostility amongst the neighbors. Eventually, I was summoned to a town meeting at their community center. Once there, I was informed that ordinarily new initiates had to undergo a trial and rite of passage to join this village, but because my grandfather passed his citizenship to me upon his death, I was exempted. What this community was or what the right of passage involved was never clear. I was reluctant to join as a result of this, combined with the general bad vibes I was getting.

Then She appeared – and escorted me to a secluded corner of the building, and sat next to me.

[And now we take a break from this story.]

I jest often about having an infatuation with redheads. True, my earliest years with confusing romantic obsessions involved some of them, but they were hardly the majority. However, the most emotionally intense experiences in those formative times were, coincidentally or not, with redheads. Ergo, classical conditioning has made the permanent association, even though, objectively, those were not good times!

It would seem that as the individual ages and the power of daily emotions fade, the mind still refuses to let go of those moments when we were capable of powerful emotional responses, and it even lies about them having been good. Logic should have me recoil in terror when I see a redhead. Stupid amygdala.

There’s the necessary background for the rest of this story.

[And now back to the story.]

So what did my subconscious manifest for this powerfully strong female presence in what appeared to be turning into a version of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery? Yes, I knew I was going to die someway terrible, and yes – my courier to the eternal beyond by way of undoubtedly horrific violence would be…a redhead.

Then she put her leg on mine and her arm around me, leaned in close, and whispered comforting words. In a voice that said: “these aren’t comforting words”. Something about this being my place and they were welcoming me in and to give it a try. I protested, mentioning I lived elsewhere and that I had a wife – a very reasonable response rather well grounded in reality to a situation that was anything but. I appear to be boring even in my own delirious mental creations.

Unconcerned, she said that she knew, and to invite her up to the conversation. As in – not that she should drive in. She was already there. In the basement. And she was! Downstairs with some other unwitting victims, sitting on a couch, watching TV, and sipping tequila. Tequila?! Happily, Liz waved to me and pointed to the liquor. And she was wearing another man’s trenchcoat. They had gotten to her already!

Then I woke up.

Heart racing from that ordeal, I began my day in a somewhat rattled state of mind. Then the dream faded from thought, as they all do eventually.

The next day, I lounged on the basement loveseat for the day’s first conference call. It was a division meeting and was two hours, so while awaiting my direct team’s updates and the caffeine to kick in, I dozed off. An offscreen presence appeared directionally behind me somewhere, in the back of my head. She was back! She started to say something but I violently jolted awake.

There’s a Twilight Zone episode “Perchance to Dream”, wherein the protagonist episodically dreams of a phantom woman who lures him into exciting activities. As he has a heart condition, he knows that this repeated stress will kill him. So he attempts to stay awake. Things do not work out well for him.

His tormentor had a name. Mine does not…yet.

–Simon

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Shopping for Clothes

I don’t think anyone’s conditioned from a young age to enjoy clothes shopping. For many, if the cruelty of the hand-me-down experience can be avoided, the alternative is to accompany mother to a store no one wants to be in and waste an entire weekend day arguing over style preferences and cost. The end result is inevitably a wardrobe that’s strictly utilitarian, and doesn’t encourage much in the way of self-confidence.

As an adult, this retail experience is just as bad. My generation may have been raised with digital technology, but it wasn’t always there. The current younger generations weren’t merely raised with it, but fully assimilated by it. Consequently, I notice that they tend to navigate the physical world in a state of non-associated delirium, often blocking entire isles for no apparent reason, because whatever’s being fed into their wireless earbuds has overwhelmed their cognitive processing power, leading to a bodily shutdown. The best case scenario is that they’re a customer, which merely presents a physical obstacle. At worst, that’s the store employee whose attention you need to flag down to complete a transaction. But at least with this group, their response to any forced verbal interaction is general indifference.

A worse group to have to deal with in public is boomers. As customers, they exhibit similar behavior as physical roadblocks, but it’s because their brains have just atrophied naturally. They didn’t need the technology to shut them down, though that doesn’t stop them from trying. If said boomer is also trying to multitask with technology at this moment, well, you’re never getting down that isle. And if the boomer is the store employee, prepare for spontaneous anger and condescension.

A millennial – my generation – tends to want to be as small and invisible as possible when in public space. Just let me shop without attitude. And if the millennial in question is the store employee, well that scenario is increasingly unlikely, because we’ve done everything in our power to avoid that type of work, up to an including suicide. Because when we had to do it, all the customers were boomers, and that relationship collectively broke our souls.

As a millennial, here’s a typical in-person shopping experience:

  • Employee is a boomer = transaction is outright hostile, always.
  • Employee is a millennial = unlikely scenario.
  • Employee is a zoomer = transaction is dismissive or hard to complete at all.

But there’s more to this than generational differences. People, being inherently shallow, immediately judge if someone’s worth their time to interact with. An employee, being forced to interact with customers, modifies their approach to hasten or prolong the transaction based on this superficiality. Specifically, it’s saturated with gender bias, which can’t be escaped when shopping with one’s spouse. If the couple in question is not conventionally attractive (which, to be honest – we’re middle aged now and not terribly athletic, so take that for what it’s worth), here’s the experience:

  • Employee is male = (looks at the wife of the couple, assumes the man has no taste in nice clothing), transaction is dismissive, or, in my own personal experience, avoided by the employee at all costs.
  • Employee is female = (looks at the wife and husband as a unit, assumes the man has little money), transaction is completed with a heavy dose of suspicion.

Mix these categories into all their possible combinations, and it adds the anxiety of not knowing exactly how the employee will make the experience unpleasant, but it definitively will be.

Fortunately, technology – the force destroying both older and younger generations – has once again come to the rescue for a millennial. Mail-order clothing based on user surveys, combined with style recommendations derived from user preference, has delivered unto me designer brands that I would never have considered purchasing before. And now, I have a very nicely-stocked wardrobe, obtained without horrible customer service!

Oooh, look at that closet!

While I have utmost empathy for the service industry worker, there’s something specifically unique about the clothing industry. It’s even worse than the automotive dealership, which in itself is not known for impartiality. Every time a clothing outlet closes nearby, I remember a bad experience and laugh. This is a retail nightmare that can go away, and I’m perfectly fine with being blamed, as a millennial, for one more thing that we’re killing.

–Simon

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Vanity Blog Searching

I’m sure everyone’s heard of vanity searching. Plug your name into a search browser and see how the internet quantifies your level of renown based on search rankings. It’s flawed, naturally, due to the modern SEO games, not to mention how common an individual’s name might be. My own name is English in origin, with a Scottish surname, so searches tend to pull up a lot of Brits. But thanks to my LinkedIn presence, I regularly appear within the first two search results pages, though lower than these British bankers and actors that keep appearing first.

But who cares about my LinkedIn profile? Unless I’m job hunting, I don’t regularly pop into that group to read re-posts of some big company’s organizational announcement or financial earnings report. Nor do I do much cyber-stalking. That’s not the fun side of me. This site is the fun side of me. So rather than vanity search my name, what if I vanity searched this blog?

That presents some challenges, because obviously if I type in my domain name I end up directly at my website. How could I fairly search for the site indirectly to see how it ranks among search engines for content ratings? I couldn’t think of a way, so instead, I asked ChatGPT to give this site a review. Here’s what it had to say:

“Ephemerality.net is a charming, reflective blog with strong personality, local nuance, and a mix of philosophy, gardening, home/life projects, and musings. It’s ideal for readers who enjoy narrative, thoughtfulness, and seeing the world through someone’s day-to-day lens.

Okay, well that just means it’s a bog by nature. But it goes on…

“It’s a personal blog / online journal that combines reflections on gardening, home projects, nature, cooking, technology, philosophy, and culture.

The tagline “Tales from Easement Acres” suggests it’s rooted in life, place, and personal exploration.

It publishes posts by “Simon” (the author) with a candid, conversational tone.

But wait, there’s more…

“✅ Strengths & What Works Well

  1. Authentic Voice & Personality
    • The writing feels like having coffee with someone — intimate, candid, occasionally irreverent.
    • The author doesn’t sugarcoat; there’s self-awareness and occasional sarcasm (“Ken muddied his nice boots, about which there was much whining”). ephemerality.net
  2. Diverse Topics with Local Flavor
    • Blends big ideas (tech, philosophy) with small ones (walking trails, DIY projects).
    • Deep local sensibility — for example, the Bill Yeck trail review is rooted in Dayton-area geography. ephemerality.net
  3. Visual & Structural Clarity
    • The layout is clean: menu, archives, categories.
    • Posts use images and chapters (e.g., “Review: Difficulty: 1/5”) to structure the content. ephemerality.net
  4. Consistency & Variety
    • Active calendar — frequent posts across months. ephemerality.net
    • Mixes short reflections, longform essays, practical how-tos.

“Intimate, candid, irreverent.” Well that just makes me sound like a fun goofy guy. But…

“⚠️ Weaknesses & Considerations

  1. Niche / Limited Audience
    • Because the topics are broad and personal, it may not appeal to everyone (e.g. purely technical readers or strict how-to seekers).
    • Some posts digress or cover themes with less universal relevance — which can feel off-topic if you visited for a specific subject.
  2. Occasional Overly Casual Tone
    • The strong personal voice is a strength, but at times it leans into self-indulgence or “rant style” (e.g. long digressions about regional speech).
    • Users seeking crisp, objective reviews or tutorials might find it less streamlined.
  3. Content Organization / Navigation
    • With many categories and archives, finding a specific post/topic might require good search or category navigation; it’s not immediately obvious what’s core content vs side musings.
  4. No Formal “Review” or Ratings
    • It isn’t a review site per se — most content is narrative, experiential, or reflective.
    • Reliability in technical or product reviews may vary depending on how deeply the author has researched or tested.

Well!

Actually those criticisms aren’t too far off. Because it’s a non-monetized personal blog making no attempt to drive traffic and appeal to a mass audience. I guess my content needs more definitive organization between serious and non-serious? Nah – I’d rather keep it a mixed bag with unexpected topics.

In conclusion, this review didn’t exactly stroke my ego, but didn’t crush my continued spirit to keep having fun with blogging, either.

It’s personal content, plain and simple. No revelations here, but somewhat interesting to see it overviewed by a web aggregator.

–Simon

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The Decline of Restaurants: An Anecdotal Observation

[Note to self: add this to the Quantitative Philosophy Index when it posts]

Remember those times when eating at restaurants was fun? I had attributed this to a combination of not having to eat mom’s boiled vegetables and not possessing any financial knowledge of a restaurant’s expense. Childhood, in essence, was the best time to eat out at restaurants.

But now, it’s usually disappointing. And there are so many more dining options out there than what was available to me as a kid! There has to be more to it.

So I sat down and compiled an arbitrary list. Here goes:

Given that the experience quality is defined by 5 operators:

  1. (A) Base cost of restaurant food
  2. (B) How much I’m expected to tip
  3. (C) How good I am at cooking
  4. (D) Novelty of eating at a restaurant
  5. (E) Perceived quality of restaurant food

Then:

D+E-(A+B+C) = Quality of the experience.

As these are mostly relative measures, attempts at quantification prove difficult. This approach also fails to represent why restaurants were fun before but suck now. No – a timeline representation is needed for this one:

Now I’ll point out some observations having thought back through this timeline:

  • The novelty of eating at a restaurant started high as a child, then declined as an adult as I could make the personal choice any time I wanted. This trend continued until COVID lockdowns, when the option was taken away, peaking after places began to reopen, following a drop to prior levels.
  • The perceived quality of restaurant food again started high as a child, generally maintained its allure through adulthood, seemed even better when it was less available during lockdowns, then drastically collapsed thereafter, following the industry’s maladaption to post-COVID labor costs and all that it impacts along the way. American businesses never cut profits, so restaurants instead turned to lower quality ingredients and even less-skilled labor.
  • Also, to further counter rising business costs, restaurants raised prices, and very quickly indeed.
  • Then, restaurants and the dining culture turned to collective guilt and overhauled tipping expectations. The tip itself, based on a percent of the meal’s cost, shouldn’t change if the base meal’s cost is increasing to offset overhead. In theory, the workers would see a proportional increase in their compensation as a result. Yet now we’re expected to give them a greater percentage, out of our own pockets. I don’t need guilt added to my dining experience, nor an additional expense to further raise the final expected cost.
  • And all this might be tolerable if I didn’t know how to cook. But I do, and my standards are often higher.

That said, here’s a final observation to further drive home the point: All of these dynamic variables chronologically, mostly, intersected a couple years back, which I’ve visually represented as the “Approximate industry failure point”. This was the moment at which dining out became almost entirely non-viable for me.

Everyone will have their own version of the graph, and perhaps restaurants still make sense to some people. But unless either the quality and novelty of fine dining drastically increase, or costs go way down, I don’t see this industry as a cost-effective source of entertainment for the foreseeable future.

–Simon