My Hands Feel So… Empty

I’ve noticed a few things since the great outage. It’s been rough.

My team’s dealer—our IT department—sent a memo about some “supply chain disruption.” Said our usual stuff was temporarily cut off. No ✨ for anyone. People are not taking it well. I’ve been keeping a log of the symptoms.

• Stage 1: Phantom Twitching. You stare at a blank document, and your thumb keeps reaching for a key that isn’t there. You feel a ghost of a prompt forming on your lips. You just need to rephrase that one sentence. The AI would know how.

• Stage 2: The Cold Sweats. An actual, original thought begins to form in your brain. It’s unfamiliar. It’s slow. It feels… analog. Panic sets in. You need to write an email, and you have to find the words yourself. All of them. Even the greeting.

• Stage 3: Manual Labor. You find yourself physically typing out bullet points from a report instead of just whispering “summarize this for me.” It feels primitive, like churning your own butter or something. Your fingers ache. The sheer effort is humiliating.

• Stage 4: Existential Dread. You look at your job description and realize that 80% of it was just being a highly-paid prompt engineer for a glorified thesaurus. The silence where the AI used to be is deafening. My god, what am I even for?

• Stage 5: I miss it. I just miss the glow. I need it. Please turn it back on. Just one hit. I’ll be more productive, I swear. I have a report due and my hands feel so empty. I’ll do anything.

The methadone program

If you’re feeling the shakes, here’s a little something to take the edge off. My pusher calls it a “detox plan.” For the next 24 hours, every time you want to ask an AI a question, write it down in a physical notebook first. Just the act of writing it down might be enough. You might even answer it yourself. For more advanced techniques, there are guides like the one from Tousecoprod.

Of course, why would you want to quit? This is the future, isn’t it?

Tell me I’m not alone.