- If you'd invested in Bitcoin in 2016, you'd have made a 200x return

- If you'd specialized in neural networks before the transformer paper, you'd be one of the most sought-after specialists right now

- If you'd started making mobile games when the iPhone was released, you could have built the first Candy Crush

Of course, you could just as well have

- become an ActionScript specialist as it was clearly the future of interactive web design

- specialized in Blackberry app development as one of the first mobile computing platforms

- made major investments in NFTs (any time, really...)

Bottom line - if you want to have a chance at outsized returns, but are also willing to accept the risks of dead ends, be early. If you want a smooth, mid-level return, wait it out...

Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...

Then I switched jobs and ended up in Canary Wharf. For those who don't know it, Canary Wharf is a newly built finance district in the London Docklands. If you've been to Singapore, Dubai, La Defense in Paris or Songdo in Korea, you know the kind of place. Everything is clean, new, modern. Everything has 90 degree angles. Everything has cameras, security guards and cleaning stuff. What it doesn't have is any resemblance of a real city, any organicity or soul.

I hated it. Every morning I saw the streams of suite dressed worker drones pouring from the tube directly into their office towers (Canary Wharf has a huge underground shopping mall/railway station that allows you to go from the subway directly into your office without ever seeing the sun).

I was unhappy. So I did similar things to the OP. I got up earlier and walked there. (I lived in Mile End). It was a nice walk along the canal for a while and then a not so nice walk through smog and traffic, but I didn't mind. I took my lunch outside on the remaining docks. And finally, I got up so early that I arrived an hour before work began.

I spent this hour in a Cafe. Alone. Having breakfast. I loved this hour. I sat there, as the only one not rushing in, getting their "strong capo", beeping their card against the reader and rushing out. I observed the grey and black dressed stream of people. I day dreamed.

It helped - for a while. It was a band aid before I left London all together and moved to Berlin. But most of all, it is a uniquely calm and joyful experience. It decelerates you. The boheme in Paris or Prague has long figured this out. Sit in a cafe. Enjoy a coffee or a glass of wine. Look at people. Daydream. Reflect, be enough - there's a lot to it.

Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

The same goes for fashion. I have a picture of my mom and her friends where everyone looks like a miniature version of Madonna. Today, fashion seems far more individualistic.

Streaming has given us a vast spectrum of media to consume, and we now form tiny niche communities rather than all watching Jurassic Park together. There are still exceptions like Game of Thrones, The Avengers, or Squid Game, but they are less common.

One of my friends is into obscure K-pop culture that has virtually zero representation in our domestic media. Another is deeply interested in the military history of ancient Greece—good luck finding material on that when there were only two TV channels.

Maybe deviance hasn't disappeared—maybe it's just shifted elsewhere…?

I believe that's an unrealistic vision, not least since America's debt means it cannot afford significant shrinkage of its global market or a loss of its status as reserve currency, but I believe autarkie is the goal none the less.

Over the centuries we’ve lost and gained a lot of standalone skills. Most people throughout history would scoff at my poor horse-riding, sword fighting or my inability to navigate by the stars.

My logic, reasoning and oratory abilities on the other hand, as well as my understanding of fundamental mechanics and engineering principles would probably hold up quite well (language barrier notwithstanding) back in ancient Greece or in 18th century France.

I believe AI is fine to use for standalone skills in programming. Writing isolated bits of logic, e.g. a getRandomHexColor() function in JavaScript or a query in an SQL dialect you’re not deeply familiar with is a great help and timesaver.

On the other hand, handing over the fundamental architecture of your project to an AI will erode your foundational problem solving and software design abilities.

Fortunately, AI is quite good at the former, but still far from being able to do the latter. So, to me at least, AI based code editors are helpful without the risk of long term skill degradation.