I really enjoyed @zhengdongwang's 2025 letter, and it's had me thinking about progress, ambition, and worth. In it, he compelling suggests that progress will not slow, that the bending arc of compute-driven ascent to unimaginable intelligence climbs ever steeper. This progress may not be determined, but our ingenuity and collective efforts keep things marching, based on all available data. Many deep in AI land acknowledge this as obvious. The rest of the world has no real idea yet. I guess I'm somewhere in the middle, and for whatever reason, Zhengdong's description of things made me feel it a bit more. So where are we headed? DeepMind talks about a post-AGI world, and readiness for it. It creeps quietly and not so quietly, but it comes. And whether or not the timeline is one year or ten, it will arrive, in a very real way, gradually, and then suddenly. He references @tylercowen's "moving history." COVID was a reminder that sometimes my problems are indeed small, and of how jolting it is when something really happens. And I forget again. What does one do with this realization? What does readiness mean? For many this is about frenzied efforts to climb up, out of the muck, to safety and leverage and possible control. Out of the under-class. For others, smarter than me, it means collective, global, technological or structural readiness, preparing us to actually work with these new minds, or whatever we will call them. Aligning them, or ourselves. For many, readiness is moot. There is nothing worth preparing, for those efforts will be futile in their small-scope understanding of what is coming. Perhaps we all fall into that group. And then there is personal readiness, in a metaphysical, or spiritual, or sanity-defending sense, just to be able to enter into whatever is next with a disposition of resilience. They say humans are remarkably good at adapting to change, even if we hate it. Well, we're about to find out. Who am I? What do I want? What am I worth? What am I good for? Am I needed at all? What can I be? You could ask those questions now, I suppose. Many people don't bother. And maybe those questions don't matter like we think they do. Is the world and history better modeled by our individual smallness or by the bigness of a small number of us? The great (wo)men? Will we have any left? We will we have far more of them? Is it still worth trying to dent the universe? Will our fingerprints be noticed when much stronger forces are involved? Will we radically expand our ambitions or redefine them to fit our newly realized insignificance? I suspect we will each soon be forced to reckon what we really care about. Global senses of meaning, in the secular sense, may soon fade. Local meaning may be all we have. Maybe the painful lesson of modernity is that local meaning was all we could ever hope to have, or at the very least, all we need. Philosophy might just be finding something worth working on. Or someone worth loving. Better yet, someone totally unworthy of love, like you and me. What is worth working on? This, maybe. A poem. A song. A puzzle. A program. A podcast. A letter. A gift. The little thing you are trying to get right. An attempt at understanding and explanation, even if in vain. Something hard. Something soft. A nice pair of pants. A chair for reading. Something delicious. A story told in a new way. Or a story told in a totally not new, but your way. A conversation, a chorus, a raucous laughter, together. Perhaps that is enough?