Reader–
I am writing to you from Minnesota, where I am sitting in my first spring. Thirty six years– and now a spring.
I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Mere Being.
This was my first winter. Not just my first winter in Minnesota. The first January somewhere it really snows. I was thinking about this the other day– my earliest memories are from Seattle, then Florida. Seattle gets dark and wet and cold but not cold, and Florida has Florida seasons. Four years in California, another ten in Virginia, which approximates the classic seasons, but in a muted, kind of wilted way. The worst of winter there is what we get in March here. It snows, and then it melts. Mostly the temperatures are in the 40s. I spent one year in New York, the city, which does deliver something like winter but without many of its pleasures – the birds, the ice. Followed, then, by another ten years in California – Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley – which have their own strange seasons, but the weather there is mostly divided by space and not time.
At least on the basis of one year I find I prefer "real" winter to the mid-Atlantic thing that formed the basis of my previous distaste for seasons. In California, people will complain about how there "aren't real seasons" and they "missed them" and my response was always, "I moved here to get away from seasons."
It turns out I'd just never lived winter. Going into it all the way, instead of toeing around the edges. The problem with winter that sticks around the 30s and 40s is that it's wet, and then I'm wet, and snow is sticking the dog and I actually feel cold. When it's a little colder, 10s and 20s, the snow doesn't stick. The dog shakes it off his fluff when he comes back inside. It's just a matter of dressing correctly and I'm comfortable. (Below 0 is harder, because of the effect of air on exposed skin.) And even that isn't as much of a trial as I was led to believe, shuffling multiple coats and sweaters around everywhere, because "layers" mostly just means "a good wool base layer and then a long coat that protects my legs."
All of that is to say is that spring is an entirely different experience after a winter like that, after four months of shoe spikes and slipping, hot water bottles, cold coming through the walls, a view of the shore from the middle of a frozen lake, deciding whether it's Glove Cold or Mitten Cold, boots on the dog, icy trees and 4pm darkness, and absolutely nothing, nothing growing.
Against that white backdrop, I'm noticing everything. Oh! The first daffodil. The first crocus. The first tips of rhubarb. Ditch lilies– I'll have to dig those out soon. The first really nice day. "Oh wow," I said, "Wow," as I stepped out into what would have been an entirely Saturday in Oakland.
The end of meaning in software development
I have been desperate to write. I have been sick – in that mysterious way that's at least partly deconditioning but isn't all reconditioning – and the energy I have had has had to go to StoryTime and client work.
But I have been desperate to write. I think about it all the time. The last couple of weeks I've been getting some energy back and one of the main ways I've noticed is that I'm starting to write again. By the time I sat down to draft this letter properly I had a few hundred words of notes and first draft that I'd written out of pure impulse. "Oh right. This thing that I do."
Part of the problem is that I find myself really uninterested in the things I used to write about– the software stuff. It's changing too fast right now to find any ground to work from, and the discourse around that change is, at the same time, terribly repetitive. There's a strange, overwhelming thing happening in the software world, this AI programming thing, and I'm in it, but I don't want to write about it.
All anyone seems to want to talk about right now is what they think is going to happen a year from now, or what they think should be happening instead, or how terrible AI is, or how they're spending $20,000 in Anthropic tokens their company has asked them to spend, or what it is that the people on their company's token leaderboard are really doing. I'm really, really uninterested in the "making predictions" part of the AI discourse. The vast majority of predictions must be wrong, by nature!
I'm slightly more interested in writing about my own AI usage, but even that is tough, because there's a limit to how interested I am in reading about someone else's complex, bespoke AI workflow. They're so easy to build, relatively speaking, that using someone else's seems pointless. I can get a few ideas, but most of the tools I've tried I've discarded in favor of building my own, and then those I've thrown away in favor of the slow accumulation of the good ideas into Claude Code. The process of experimentation might be interesting to write about, but no point on the journey is particularly interesting in itself – it's all so soap-bubble ephemeral.
Craig Mod wrote, late last month
I’ve been somewhat facetiously, somewhat seriously, somewhat jokingly, been posing a question to everyone I run into these past few months: Don’t you feel like all meaning is being scrubbed from the world? Like the Langoliers are chomping up purpose, chomping up all the things to which we’ve ascribed purpose these past hundred-thousand years? And that nothing matters?
Really, what I’m asking is: Don’t you think our contemporary education system has long needed an overhaul? That our society has long needed to reconfigure itself? That we need to stop ascribing all our meaning and purpose to being a Web Designer, or Coal Miner, or Airplane Engine Factory Foreman, or Accountant, but instead to being A Good Person, Good Parent, Good Friend, Curious Researcher, Poet, Meditator, Facilitator, or any number of other Ways of Being uncoupled from “work” as we’ve defined it since the industrial revolution? Who is safe from the hunger and capabilities of the models? Yoga instructors?
It's worth reading the whole issue, especially if you are interested in getting a handle on what this all looks like outside the world of professional software development.
Craig has built his own, custom accounting system. He's someone I've described as "almost a programmer." Technically capable of writing code, been around software and software developers for a long time, understands the basics, grew up on the early web and HTML, but hasn't ever made a daily practice of writing code. What's happened to programming over the past year has been fantastic for this kind of person.
Anyway– one of the through lines of my writing about software has been: "Trying to get meaning out of work is making us sick. But we can't help it. We want to make things well and we want making things well to matter." And now AI is coming and just shearing that all away.
Will people notice? Will they be able to escape?
How does it feel for Superman to sit in the sun?
He goes up to the antarctic, and maybe not just to be alone.
Our household has been consumed with Marathon, the video game. The best way I can describe it is: It's an FPS crossed with rogue like, with a lot of influence from old school D&D. You go down into a dungeon. Maybe you die. Maybe you come back with treasure. You use the treasure to go back down into a deeper, more dangerous dungeon.
Other players are your biggest problem but also your greatest source of treasure. There's a lot of exchanging information with the people you're playing with. One of the main things you need to do to get better at the game is to learn.
The environments– where is the good treasure? Where are the enemies? Where are the keys to hidden areas?
The behavior of other players– what areas are crowded, because everyone is going there? If I make noise fighting these robot enemies, in this part of the map, will other players kill me while I'm doing it? Or will I be able to clean up the environmental enemies fast enough that I can instead ambush the people who will come to try to kill me?
The strategic flow of the game– Is it correct to leave with my loot now? Or complete more objects first? Why would I fight the "Scorch Warden?" Do I have too much enthusiasm for fighting the Scorch Warden? Or not enough?
The game often trips people up a little at first. It has a lot in common with Dogs in the Vineyard, in the sense that it expects you to behave in certain ways that you have learned in other games, and to punish you for that. The point of the game is not to shoot but to escape. Many of the enemies in Marathon are "noise traps." Annoying, but unremunerative, and the noise you would make fighting them attracts other players to your location. One of the first things you need to learn is to dispatch them quietly.
You do want to fight environmental enemies sometimes, and sometimes you actively want to attract other players to your location. But there's a lot of judgement.
The other big news this month is... the Impulse Labs range! It finally arrived. It is delightful.
I have been sautéing everything I can get my hands on while I get to know it. A lot of our dinners lately have been
- a piece of salmon or chicken breast
- a pan sauce
- just-barely-cooked broccolini or kale
Plus, usually some kind of wet grain from Our Lord the Rice Cooker
(mostly, I am following the instructions from this video)
Its best feature is actually just how fast it boils water. No waiting! For pasta! It's just boiling! Ideal for those of us with a complex relationship with the passage of time. I can handle long periods of waiting (go do something else) and I can wait carefully while inspecting for a state change (caramel, custard) but boiling water takes just the right amount of time for me to wander out of the room while the pot boils over.
Anyway– that's what I've got for ya'll today.
More soon,
Nat