The Looping List of Simple Pleasures

Every Saturday, I click the "New Post" button on Blogger, and this empty blank page stares at me. And then I start typing these words, filling the void with my thoughts, my ruminations, reflections, and mostly expressing my immense gratitude that I  have access to the internet and possess the mental faculties to read and write. 

And of course, I have blog posts dedicated to the subject of Gratitude. Part of my weekly blogging ritual is deciding what topic to write and to do so, I have to figure out what I have written before, so as to not repeat the same thoughts ad infinitum.  Before plunging into another ode to gratitude, I found that I have expressed almost everything I wanted to say about the subject in these articles: The Grace and Glory of Gratitude, Gratitude for Simple Pleasures and The Quiscent Hum of Happiness. 

I re-read them to find out if my opinion has changed over time. In this particular case, regarding the subject of gratitude, not at all. I could have sat down and written those articles today. But I won't because I have nothing more to add to them. I'll just let the subject of gratitude rest, with a great sense of gratitude having been able to express them.

In some ways, every blogging session of mine is a ritual of gratitude. I'm back, I'm regular, I'm self-examining. And hoping to improve every time.  These days, for some reason, I'm brimming with project ideas. I'm currently executing 4 app projects in parallel. I have no commercial objectives for any of them at this point; they are simply vehicles for me to see how far I could go with AI.  I have ideas for more, and it's only time and energy that's limiting me. 

AI coding agents have made software development fun again. Previously, I would have spent weeks and months hacking a UI into shape. These days, I do that in an afternoon. This has raised the stakes a fair bit; I'm now attempting even more difficult projects. My ambition bar has been raised much higher. 

In an earlier article, Gratitude for Simple Pleasures, I listed the following activities as 'simple pleasures': waking up, reading/writing, walking and sitting. They are still in my list, but I'd like to add a new one now: coding. Coding used to be tedious because modern software has so many dependencies, and each one of them has to be tracked and maintained. The thought of keeping a piece of software working turns me off from building them. But now, I can get my AI agents to do it for me. And I'm filled again with immense gratitude for that.

 My AI agents are my co-workers now; I brainstorm together with them, and they have allowed me to explore domains I had hitherto avoided. While conversing with one of my "researcher' AI agents today, I hit on another idea of building my very own agent that could be customised for my mind experiments. 

My AI researcher now acts like my augmented mind; I use it like a blender of thoughts: I just drop all my intuitions into it, and it attempts to build a coherent picture from them. The good thing is, it always produces something and whatever it produces gives me further insights, which I feed back into my AI blender again, in a fascinating spiral of insight generation. It is an exhilarating process of man-machine symbiosis.

While my interactions with these virtual intelligences have increased manifold, I have also had the opportunity to spend time with friends that I don't get to meet very often. I shall continue to do so in the coming weeks. Maybe I could add this activity to my growing list of 'simple pleasures'.

 I don't have a bucket list to tick off. I don't have plans to travel to exotic places that I've never been to or try extreme activities that will 'change my life'. All I have is just a simple pleasure list to keep on adding to. I will add list-adding activity into the list too--my list has now become a loop of simple pleasures!