My Brilliant Lonesome Runaway Year
On travel, art, and the state of my heart in 2024
2024 has been the strangest year of my life. Not the most meaningful, interesting, or challenging, necessarily—just the strangest. I’ve been rolling around the world uncertain and without obvious direction, always playing the role of mysterious foreigner. ‘My family’s been in South Africa for generations,’ I sometimes say by way of introduction. ‘We came on British boats to cut sugar cane on the east coast.’
I’ve worn the story down to its essentials. ‘Indians have been in the country for over 150 years—longer than living memory—so I don’t have any direct ties to the subcontinent, unlike most British and American Indians,’ I say, twirling my hair. It’s a gift, this backstory; a distinguishing mark. Bringing it up makes me feel like an associate of Patrick Bateman: very chic. But I seem to get cagier when discussion shifts to the present, from ‘where have you come from?’ to ‘what are you doing here?’
I have answers, of course. My background is in law and policy. In April, I left a public interest consulting job to focus on covering AI for TIME Magazine, reinventing myself as a reporter. Since then I’ve been travelling, splitting time between Cape Town, Durban, London, Joburg, and San Francisco, with other stops along the way. It’s been fantastic. It’s a fun and frankly audacious story, glamorous as the glint of the sun on the afternoon sea, and I’m proud that it’s mine. So there’s no obvious reason for me to act so coy when faced with polite and cursory questions.
Yet I often do: presumably because, as I’ve often declared in recent months, while my professional life has never been more exciting, my personal life is something of a dumpster fire. Well, “dumpster fire” is fun to say—appropriately dramatic and sharp enough to register—but it’s not quite right. I’m close with my family and retain most of my friends from eras gone by, and I feel lucky to have struck up meaningful connections almost everywhere I’ve been: platonic, collegial, romantic, and otherwise.
So why the trash talk? It’s felt to me like this year has unfolded in parallel rather than in series: I’ve had several distinct lives—each tied to different people, places, moods, and motifs—that, as I recollect them, seem to sit alongside each other. I see five short lines, yet to intersect, rather than a single one long, straight, and sure. A part of me is always mourning the lives left unlived: both the ones I’m not currently occupying and those I never will. Since I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing, I don’t think about this too much—I’ve monetized my myopia, and am usually happy to lock into the week’s work without looking much further than a month ahead—but with the year now over, and my narrative sense of self obscured by smoke, I think some reflection is in order.
I recently heard the director Richard Linklater explain: ‘there’s kind of a mentality, I think not uncommon to writers and film people, like, this will only be real when I process it through my art form.’ So it is—some confluence of vanity, control, and the inextinguishable need to be known compels me to compile an ordered narrative, accounting for my life’s widening spirals. Recent events have stacked up like a deck of cards, and it’s time to bang them on a table until they align. As I’ve been joking after so much time around tech folk, I must bear my soul at scale.
To this end, I want to share some things that have stood out to me while I’ve been travelling, the art that moved me most, and how I’ve been changed, speaking with people about the possible coming of the machine gods.
This has been a year of ‘good problems’. That I’ve been able to spend it travelling, writing, and learning about the world is an immense privilege. Indeed, I’ve felt so fortunate that to express any dissatisfaction has seemed ungrateful, or in poor taste. I’ve since come around to the view that such suppression is unhealthy and unhelpful, that one can walk a trapeze, acknowledging personal challenges without blowing them out of proportion or losing sight of everything that enables them.
One such ‘good problem’ has been deciding where I want to spend my time—where to put down roots. I am continuously surprised by the extent to which my experience of being a person is influenced by places and other people. While I carry an inextricable essence everywhere I go—I often think about this SNL skit where Adam Sandler, playing a tour guide, says ‘if you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you as before, just in a new place’—my mood shifts the second I step off a plane, seemingly triggered by the air’s first touch. Disembarking in Durban in December I felt sticky and slightly subdued, whereas in April, Milan’s crisp climate seemed to invite possibility.
Of course, climate is just the start: it’s the lifestyle etched in the city that really shapes experience. I’ve lost count of the number of friends from Durban and Joburg who moved to Cape Town and, within six months, got really into nature and hiking. I felt this happen to myself too, after a few years in the Cape. People in Joburg love to proclaim that their ‘pace of life is much faster’ than elsewhere in the country, and for most of them this seems to ring true. Each location I’ve visited is under its own spell, and it usually only takes a few days until I’m under it too.
I seem to have more energy in London, loose in a sprawling metropolis, able to get between almost any two points in less than an hour. I can go to a morning yoga class, spend eight hours in an office, then meet a friend for drinks, and, since everyone around me is in constant motion, this feels natural. In Cape Town, I find it much harder to have such a dense day: by 5pm, I can hear the ocean’s call, and like everyone else in town, more often than not I’m happy to close my laptop, phone a friend, and drive to the beach. At the same time, I find it harder to sit at home most Thursdays in the Cape: I hear the streets calling, especially if I’m staying in the city bowl. But since London is an endless buffet, the overstock of exciting experiences takes the pressure off any particular day—I know there’ll be something just as good tomorrow, which makes it easier to sell myself on a quiet night in.
Then there are the specifics: the people one knows in a given place, and the things one goes there to do. My ties to Joburg wouldn’t be nearly as strong were it not the home of more than a dozen cousins. And my experiences in Berkeley—hours spent in well-equipped offices and wood-panelled living rooms, listening to shape-rotators prophesy the end of the world—were defined by the culture of the AI safety community in whose proximity I worked.
I find I am often defined against the edges of other people, my amorphous essence concretized by what company I keep. In a crowd of musicians, my wordiness stands out; amidst technical researchers, I tend to lose my voice. My desires, motivations, and general disposition all seem to change depending where I am—and with them, my sense of what’s possible.
Some places feel closer to the future than others. In San Francisco, with its billboards shilling every imaginable AI service, driverless cars, and widespread homelessness, I felt like I was witness to a bleeding-edge. I met people whose reputations preceded them, microcelebrities in certain digital corners, and watched adoring fans trying to play it cool. I met cracked 19 year olds, probably smarter than I’ll ever be in terms of raw processing power, and took some consolation in the fact that while they could swim up the ladder of abstraction, debating papers like scripture, camping out in dimensions I could barely comprehend, I did at least seem to know slightly more than them about love (which I think is more / less than ‘a vector embedded in hyperspace’). I felt the AGI, latent in the pauses between zealous speech, as you might sense God’s presence in church music, as a foundational structure upon which the whole edifice stood. In Durban, I parked at home, squinting to make out obscure shapes that suddenly seemed much further away.
All this city-switching has been jarring. Particularly after I’ve spent a few weeks somewhere, leaving induces psychological whiplash. It’s always harder to leave than to arrive, I find, so the feeling usually dissipates once I’ve turned my attention to wherever I land, but I can’t fully wipe the whiteboard, so usually my eyes linger on the traces left behind. I’ve been caught in a pattern of weeks of hyperstimulation—in one week in the Bay Area, I went to an open mic poetry night, a meditation sit, a burlesque show, two raves, an unconference, the climbing gym, Grizzly Peak, drinks with colleagues, and more—followed by weeks of rest, immersed in Elden Ring and rarely leaving home. I’ve lit little bonfires almost everywhere I've been—and though I’m fearful of a life spent cycling through the same experiences in different cities, so far at least, each one has illuminated something different.
I’ve also done a lot of living out of suitcases. Just about the longest time I was in one place was in London, for about ten weeks, during which time I occupied seven different rooms, subletting student rooms and the apartments of friends and strangers. All this has led me to feel like my life is being lived on the run, although what I’m running from remains unclear. I know what I’m running towards, though, at least professionally. For years, I thought about my future in terms of a “golden ticket”: an opportunity that would allow me intellectual freedom and the capacity to travel, while having a positive impact on the world. It took me four years and hundreds of rejections, but I got it eventually. Now, ticket in hand, my next professional mission—to use my skills as a writer and communicator to advance public understanding of advanced AI—is a distant mountain I’m hiking toward.
Personally, the question of where to root down—toward which city to run?—remains unsettled, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, entangled in questions of long-term partnership. I’d like to be based in a big city with a beating heart. I hope to find bountiful live music, like-minded people (though not so like-minded as to be dull), and my wife other friends to decorate the time.
While I think about the gaps a lot, I’m not in a rush to fill them. There is too much important work to be done—a statement which, conveniently, is true, so I don’t have to think too hard about it. For now, it is enough for me to move through the world, copies of loved ones like medals pinned to my chest, safe in my cavernous heart, keeping me company despite ten thousand kilometres’ separation. On occasion, I’ve found myself ambling down strange streets, in Oxford, Venice, Berkeley, a smile stealing across my face, allowing joy to grace me like a gentle breeze, basking in my heart’s flutter, steady as beating wings.
Along with joy I’ve carried loneliness—perhaps ‘lonesomeness’ is closer to the truth—impatience, and a dozen other feelings I can’t quite name. As has been true since I started working, most of my time is spent staring at a screen, regardless of where I find myself. Now and then I raise my head from it, and from the career game I'm playing, sensing that this too shall pass, and that while forces of entropy and decay wait like hyenas in the distance, life is achingly short and infinitely interesting. That helps a bit. I still can’t shake my sense that the world is more beautiful when experienced through the eyes of another, but since the self is constantly changing, more like a river than a dam, I do alright with just myself for company.
I love going to the movies. There’s something sacred about sitting in a dark room with strangers, attention collectively blinkered and focused, absorbing work made with care and skill. One of my favourite parts of travelling is getting to see things on a big screen that I’m unlikely to catch in South Africa. My highlight of the year was Stop Making Sense, a 90 minute recording of the Talking Heads’ 1984 performance, recently restored in 4K. I’ve never previously sat in a cinema where, unprompted, people cheered after every song. By the time David Byrne and co. performed ‘This Must Be the Place’, I was enthralled by an expansive nostalgia—for the past, the present, and unknown multiplicitous futures—that I expect to stay with me the rest of my life. It’s true: ‘home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there.’ I defy you to watch Byrne dance with that lamp without feeling moved.
Another highlight was ‘Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters’, if only because it was a great pleasure to go from ‘who’s Yukio Mishima?’ to ‘Mishima was a queer Japanese fascist literary icon’ in a single afternoon. I love discovering entire movements that had never previously touched my shores; like lifting a rock to find a city underneath. Honorable mentions for Perfect Days, La Chimera, Challengers, Dune: Part Two, Poor Things, and Drama 1882 (which I was lucky to stumble upon at the Venice Biennale’s Egyptian Pavilion).
Musically, I lost count of how many times I listened to Miles Davis’ ‘In a Silent Way’ while busy with work. I was particularly stirred by Jessica Pratt’s hauntingly pretty ‘By Hook or by Crook’ and Bonnie Raith’s warm and wistful ‘Thank You’ (if you like either, listen to Sylvie’s ‘Falls on Me’ to round out the trilogy). I often returned to new albums from Floating Points, Fontaines D.C., Jamie xx, and Clairo, though most of my listening time went to instrumental piano stuff in the vein of Chilly Gonzales and The Vernon Spring.
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about the six books comprising Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea series—exceptional, elemental fantasy, written with love and lucidity—and Stoner by John Williams, a short book about an unassuming early 20th century English professor whose passivity in the face of strife I found alternatively infuriating and compelling. Every year is a good year to love art in all its forms, if you care to seek it out.
This year I have been myself at full volume, indulgent, more embodied than ever, and I have been a distant echo, more memory than flesh. After years of ignoring the fire at my feet in favour of sparks on the horizon, finally I seem to be getting somewhere. 2024 has felt like a year of table-setting and foreshadowing. With AI advancing astonishingly quickly, and widespread multipolar geopolitical tensions, I think it’s already safe to conclude that the decade 2020 - 2030 is set to be much stranger than the one that preceded it.
Since interviewing people became a routine part of my job, I’ve spoken with dozens of influential people about the future. I remain struck by how seriously they take the idea that we are on the cusp of a new era. Among the possibilities of labour market shocks, biological attacks, and the degradation of democracy, it is the fact that we’ve begun to enter a world where all sorts of people—young and old, rich and poor—have deep relationships to digital minds that sticks with me, at least when I think in the short-term.
It is tempting to dismiss speculation about the shape of the future as ‘mere sci-fi’. This may often be true, but it’s worth noticing how much of the world already is. Having seen what I’ve seen and heard what I’ve heard this year, I feel overrun with excitement and potential. Sometimes a warm breeze blows, and there is laughter and family drawn close all around, and for a few moments I feel I am exactly where I ought to be. Then the moment passes, and I disappear back into contingent futures. I’m working on it. I don’t know what waits around the corner, but I feel primed to receive and respond to the world buffering before me. Things are just beginning.