Why I'm a Postmodern Cynic
January 1, 2025 · Cynicism · Philosophy
A slow descent into disbelief, fueled by overexposure to ambition, algorithms, and academic absurdity.
We survived another simulation frame. Congratulations?
There’s a specific kind of cynicism that doesn’t come from bitterness, but from observation. Not the loud kind, but the tired, wry smirk you give when someone says, “Let’s disrupt education,” while their entire stack depends on three unpaid interns and an expired AWS credit.
I didn’t start this way. I wanted to build things. I still do. But somewhere between 14 failed startup pitches, a million unread Slack threads, and five AI models trying to summarize each other’s outputs — something cracked.
The Postmodern Part
In the postmodern condition, truth is decentralized. Reality is fragmented. Every system is self-referential.
That’s academia. That’s startup culture. That’s most of what I’ve experienced in the past few years.
One week I’m reading Foucault because a professor wants “theoretical grounding,” the next week I’m hacking LangChain to answer 4th-grade math questions. Somewhere in between, I’m pretending a chatbot has insight while secretly filtering profanity from students’ homework questions.
The seams show. The illusion leaks.
We build systems to solve problems we’ve abstracted so far away from reality that we no longer remember what they were.
The Cynic Part
I don’t distrust people — I distrust incentives.
When someone launches a “revolutionary” product, I don’t ask if it works. I ask: what metric does it optimize? And who benefits from that metric improving?
I’ve seen too many “AI for Good” projects that reroute into “AI for Demo Day.” Too many research posters that cite GPT but mask the fact that no one read the outputs. Too many hackathon winners that never survived the week.
It’s not that I think everything is fake. It’s that I think everyone is pretending not to know it is.
But I’m Still Here
Here’s the twist: I haven’t left. I still code. I still care. I still critique LLM outputs and optimize token pruning strategies at 2am.
So what gives?
Cynicism isn’t the end. It’s a checkpoint. It’s what happens when you stop believing in myths, but still want to make something real.
I’ve stopped pretending this world makes sense. But I haven’t stopped trying to leave behind something that does.
Maybe that’s postmodern. Maybe that’s just human.
Either way — I’m still writing.