Working On A Quirky Graph

Recently I attended a tech conference put on by Lesbians Who Tech. It was something I had participated in the year before, but it was nice to get an invitation. There were several different stages with speakers on all at the same time, as well as expo booths where people could connect with companies regarding jobs and networking where you could connect with career coaches. They had put a lot of effort in and, as always, I was impressed.

There was a heavy emphasis on AI. This isn’t surprising as ChatGPT has recently dropped and every other article is either pointing to AI to be the next revolutionary moment or the precursor to world collapse. While the technology behind AI is impressive, in the end it is coding written to vomit curated content scraped from the internet in a pretty manner. Machine learning can only get you so much, and in the end this is just a super fast search engine condensing the information it has gathered into a palatable format.

Useful? Absolutely. Life changing? Maybe. Just like any search engine it will do exactly what you tell it to do. You have to be the one that has to put guardrails on the search. Otherwise it will perform like any child when given a task. Exactly what you asked for without any regard for anything else around it. It is how one recipe app returned directions in poisonous food, it performed the task, but there were no guardrails on not to make the recipe deadly.

One of the segments I stayed for a bit to ponder spoke about taking time for yourself. The speaker said, “Do you ask yourself, ‘Did I fill my cup today?’” It led me to write down the question and use a super sticky note to affix it to my monitor. It is something I see everyday I’m at work. It often catches my eye when I’m on calls and preoccupied to take a moment and catalogue how my day is going. I can see it when I shut down my computer at the end of the day and am focused on following Louie into the bedroom because he believes it is time to nap.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Thinking about my cup while breaking the fact that housing prices are ridiculous. Never mind that I’m extremely lucky to have a roof over my head and a safe place to lay down with my dog at the end of the day.

I’ve been thinking about my cup while I grouse at myself for forgetting my house key when I take Louie out for a 20 minute walk so we both can soak up the sunshine. And then when we return home I think about that cup when i see the landlord having car trouble but still generous enough to use their keys to open the gate so I don’t have to parkour from the top of my car to my deck to get back inside.

And damn if that stupid cup doesn’t come back up again when I’m ordering food, or getting Louie’s medicine because he’s an old man, or reading a book I was able to get on sale.

I’ve been having difficulty reconciling my needs and wants. I have what I need, and I’m lucky to have what I need. I just don’t know if that cup belongs in the needs category or if it belongs in the want category.

Just because I want a cheesecake doesn’t mean I need one. But would it fill up my cup?