I experience exactly the same!
i’ve been back home for a few days, in the tiny italian town where i grew up. maybe 6,000 people.
yesterday i saw some old school friends i hadn’t seen in years and it was genuinely fascinating how little their lives have changed.
most people here don’t go to university. they finish school and start working right away.
then that’s kind of their life.
wake up, work as an electrician or mechanic, come home, watch football, beer with friends on friday. work all year, save enough money for a week of vacation in august, come back and repeat.
most have basically no idea what AI is. all the things that feel world-changing to me and to the timeline barely enter their lives at all.
when i start talking about AI, self-driving cars, robots, rockets, all the things i’m insanely excited about, they mostly just scoff. completely uninterested.
and i don’t even mean any of this as an insult. a lot of them seem perfectly fine with their lives.
that’s what makes it so strange.
their lives now feel completely foreign to mine, while also being incredibly familiar.
we grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, knew the same people. our families and childhoods weren’t that different.
if i had made a couple different choices when i was 14 or 15, there’s a very real chance that would have been my life too.
sometimes you go home and realize just how many completely different versions of your life were only a few decisions away.