Weird Meetup hell

There is a highly specific, deeply catastrophic brand of psychological torture that occurs when you voluntarily trade two hours of your fleeting, finite existence on this godforsaken planet for the absolute void of a local tech meetup. You go under the tragic, desperate delusion of “networking” or the faint, pathetic promise of lukewarm, corporate-sponsored pizza, only to end up trapped in a room watching a room temperature human being make meaningless, repetitive noises out of their face. It is an experience so aggressively hollow, so violently unstimulating, that your remaining brain cells are forced to execute a mass suicide pact just to escape the monotony.

The Endless Educational Treadmill of the Damned

But let’s not pretend this is an isolated incident. This isn’t a glitch in the system; this is the entire structural blueprint of modern society. We are conditioned for this exact flavor of misery from birth. For eighteen straight years, you are locked in a fluorescent-lit brick box for eight hours a day, forced to stare at an adult who is just blabbing on and on into an uncaring abyss. Nobody is listening. ABSOLUTELY NO ONE IS RETAINING ANYTHING.

I vividly remember sitting in a fourth-grade classroom, staring dead ahead, and actively training my eye muscles to blur my vision just enough so that my teacher would dissolve into a static, beige blob. If nothing was moving, maybe the nightmare would end. That is the true pinnacle of the educational machine: teaching children how to manually induce a state of sensory detachment to survive the crushing weight of institutional boredom.

And what do we actually take away from this multi-year sentence? A literal zero. For six agonizing, consecutive years of my youth, the curriculum was a broken record designed by a sadist:

• Fall Semester: Spanish numbers 1 through 10.
• Spring Semester: French numbers 1 through 10.
• The Next Year: “Welcome back, class! Let’s review Spanish numbers 1 through 10!”

There was no linear progression. No intellectual evolution. Just a cynical, endless treadmill of basic nomenclature designed to burn time like it’s worthless currency for a game nobody asked to play. Society is so breathtakingly, fundamentally stupid, and its capacity to waste human potential on nothingness is its only truly functional feature.

The Cognitive Dissonance of the “Crossword Engineer”

The absolute nadir of this cultural rot crystallized into a horrifying epiphany at this specific tech gathering. Let me begin by saying that there is a very specific, deeply cursed type of European man where if you combine his thick accent, his glaring, unmedicated autism, and a completely dysfunctional PA system, the laws of physics accidentally erase human speech. Those three variables combined mean that no human ear will ever comprehend a single syllable coming out of his mouth. That is the best way I could describe the ‘introductory guy’ who ‘welcomed us’.

I literally turned to the person sitting next to me and asked, “Did you understandany of that?!”*

“No,” they said.

I only know that the guy was welcoming us because of the PowerPoint slides he showed us, which included multiple QR codes. Every time a QR code was shown about half the people in the audience raised their phones and took a picture of it.

Then the main speaker is handed the microphone, and and introduces himself by saying: “I am the lead games engineer at the New York Times.”

And then, without a single hint of self-awareness, his very next sentence is: “We don’t do games engineering at the New York Times. All of our crosswords are made by hand by humans. We do not use AI, and we will never use AI.”

Then why are you standing on a stage, commanding a room’s attention to lecture us on the delicate relationship between AI and crossword puzzles, when you just explicitly confessed that your job title is a linguistic fiction and your employer actively rejects the technology? Are you just doing nothing? Did you wake up, look in the mirror, and think, “Yeah, I’d love to go waste a room full of people’s evening with a hypothetical paradox about a job I don’t perform”?

And the real tragedy is that I am sitting there listening to it. Why? Because my life is an existential vacuum. Because my only alternative is to slink back to my room and scroll through the same tired, heavily filtered, algorithmically sanitized pile of shit internet that I guess plenty of people enjoy. Anything that actually possesses a shred of real-world importance or relevance to my life is going to be aggressively censored by corporate gatekeepers anyway, so what is the point of looking?

And don’t even get me started on the absolute cesspool that is Reddit. Reddit is a monumental, steaming landfill of human trash. I recognized its profound, culture-ruining horror when I was basically still a child, which was actually over twenty years ago. And here we are, two decades later, and instead of the internet collectively burning this digital toxic waste dump to the ground, it has somehow become more popular. Everyone uses it, not just freaks the way it used to be. It used to be: this is a human landfill of the absolute most publicly despised type of person, and now: lots of ‘normal’ people use it. The horror is indescribable. It has seeped into the collective consciousness like a terminal disease. How could society possibly get any more wretched?

Even if you’re actually trying to discuss something nerd-related it’s still horrible. I had the misfortune of going to Reddit because sometimes Anthropic or OpenAI will reset their usage and you can find people whining about these tools sometimes to validate your feelings. And these… what’s another word for cesspool? I already used “human landfill”. There’s a post that says, “Sonnet 4.6 - Am I crazy?” And I already know what this post is going to be. But it’s like a car crash. You want to see it. And the post says:

I guess my question is: what are you all building that requires a model other than Sonnet 4.6? Because I use that model almost exclusively, and its been wonderful.

To be honest, my projects are fairly simple.

It continues on after that. But there’s no point in reading any more. What an absolutely disgusting, vomit-inducing post. There’s a lot of alternate names you could use for Reddit. The one this brings to mind is, “Oh, that never occurred to me.” ThatNeverOccurredToMe.com. Yeah, maybe it’s because your projects are simple, that you don’t need the complex model? Did that ever occur to you? I mean what is there to say about a post like this other than: “Why are you so stupid?”. Why can’t you think before you post something? Of course if I made a Reddit account and posted this completely rational response to something so horrible, my accoutn would be banned or whatever. That is what has happened every time I made a post on Reddit. My account got banned instantly. What a… I just Googled, “What are synonyms of ‘cesspool’ and ‘human landfill’?” and it recommended: dump, hellhole, Gomorrah, dumping ground. Even more… I guess horrifying isn’t the word, it’s more I guess horrible-yet-predictable, is that it has 100+ upvotes.

I open X because… I don’t know maybe I hope it serves me a video of something violent happening, and I get a screenshot with the caption about “Redditors posting their ‘creative ways’ to open over-tightened Soylent bottles effectively destroyed the entire reputation of soy.” And the screenshot is an image that says “Haha! My coworker has this thing called RoboTwist for those hard to open…” That’s the world we’re living in: the word “reputation” applies to things like “soy”. And we need a machine to open the bottle for us because we’re too stupid to do it ourselves.

The Main-Character-Syndrome Q&A Despots

But the talk ending isn’t a reprieve; it’s just the prelude to a new circle of hell. A desperate, sweating swarm of attendees forms around this “crossword engineer who doesn’t engineer crosswords.” I actually wanted to ask a legitimate question, but it’s physically impossible because the floor is instantly hijacked by a couple of absolute main-character-syndrome idiots who refuse to stop shitting out of the faces.

One total moron completely dominates the space, firing off question after question like “Do you think computers will need to be conscious before we achieve AGI?”

I wish the windows were wide open and I could just vault myself out into the night air and splatter onto the cold pavement below, because the physical reality of gravity breaking my bones would be infinitely more merciful than being forced to listen to these high-minded, mouth-breathing tech-fetishists masquerade as philosophers.

Then, the final boss of social oblivion takes the microphone. This guy asks four consecutive, rambling questions, and then has the unmitigated audacity to utter that classic, lying phrase: “Oh, just one more question, because I know other people have questions…” AND THEN HE IMMEDIATELY ASKS A FIFTH ONE.

And what is his groundbreaking, epoch-defining query? “Do you think AI is going to impact creativity? What is the future of AI and creativity?”

Holy shit, dude. That is easily the most derivative, creatively bankrupt question ever conceived by a sentient organism. Do you want to ask him what the meaning of life is next? Did you actually think: What was the most vague, open-ended, time-consuming possible question you could ask? Why don’t you ask him: “What do you think consciousness is?” How about: “Do you think humans are like… computers?” WHY WOULD YOU ASK THAT? If I wanted a bland, automated, copy-paste response to the “future of art,” I could look up a curated video by a top-tier global tech expert on the web. Instead, you are cornering a guy whose sole claim to fame is managing a digital grid of letters that he already admitted he has no hand in actually creating!

And predictable as a clock, the speaker delivers the most pathetic, uninspired non-answer imaginable: “Yeah, I think from now on, arts are gonna be a combination of AI and not AI.” I wonder if he was thinking something like, “Wow, what a dumb question.” Wow. Truly revolutionary. Print it in the textbooks.

And then—the absolute peak of this misery simulation—the guy who promised he was done IMMEDIATELY ASKS YET ANOTHER QUESTION.

It’s hard to not look at these people and think: Can you just die? Can you literally just go home, crawl into your bed, and expire? Because your profound lack of self-awareness is an active blight on humanity, and you have permanently ruined my week.

The Million-Dollar Mic Failure

And let’s talk about this venue. We are standing in a giant, multi-million-dollar architectural marvel. There are literally billions of dollars flowing through this space, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, the fucking PA system doesn’t work! What is it about microphones?!

Fifty percent of the entire time I have spent in my life watching any presentation that involves a microphone has been spent watching someone hold a microphone and go, “Oh, uh, we can’t figure it out… it’s not working… wow, this is so complicated… I guess we forgot to check if the audio works before we gathered hundreds of people here.”

Are you kidding me?! You would think someone in the chain of command would consider “people being able to hear” an important variable! But no. “Technical difficulties.” The combined wealth moving through this building is a billion dollars a day, but plugging a few stupid copper cables into each other is apparently equivalent to splitting the atom. It is too advanced for our caveman brains.

Super Bowl Distractions vs. Epic Games Pizza

The only time society actually figures out audio-visual technology is for things like the Super Bowl, where they pump literal trillions of dollars of production value into a stadium just to make some stupid, meaningless game seem incredibly important. They do it so the population doesn’t collectively revolt and mass-murder the corporate overlords who have enslaved them! Instead, everyone just sits there hypnotized, watching a guy named DeShawn Briggs catch a leather ball and do a little dance in the endzone, convinced this is somehow more important than having a life with actual meaning. “Wow, look at those 3D graphics on the screen! Look at those analysts standing in front of a shiny desk! This must be vital to human history!”

But of course, the actual talk at that Epic Games meetup made me want to die more than anything else has ever made me want to die. Earlier, I said I wanted to jump out a window, but that was a peaceful fantasy compared to this.

This total clown gets up on stage and tries to be funny the entire time. He starts babbling about how he decided to migrate his entire life into Virtual Reality. He’s like, “You can join my VR livestream where I have meticulously recreated my daily life, but in VR!”

And of course the entire aesthetic of his project is that stupid, choppy, low-frame-rate, stop-motion animation style. Did I even need to say that? What is wrong with humanity? Why are people like this?

He goes on and on for an hour, showing the VR version of himself moving around his incredibly boring, pixelated room in stop-motion. It was a literal psychological torture device. I was desperate for an escape so I pulled out my phone and started arguing with an AI during the talk.

• Me to AI: “No one watches this guy. What is he even talking about wrt his ‘community’? His latest YouTube video has like 63 views.”
• AI: “Oh, actually, this creator is quite popular in the niche tech community—”
• Me: “NO HE IS NOT. Literally no one is watching this absolute garbage.”

I had to argue with the AI for five minutes until it finally folded and admitted I was right! But back on stage, this guy is still bragging about his setup. He’s listing all the cameras watching him, all the expensive software trackers he bought, completely oblivious to the vacuum of relevance he exists in.

Eventually there was a Q&A. The only question that would have made any sense is if someone asked: “Why did you do any of this?” Maybe they could have added “What was the fundamental reason why you thought anyone on earth would find this interesting?”

What is it about your own pathetic, mundane life that makes you think, “Yes, people will definitely want to experience my bedroom, but through a choppy, stylized, nightmare-goggle version”? It’s weaponized boredom.

And the gaslighting AI kept trying to defend it! “Oh, there is a whole vibrant community of people who have an interest in VR life-logging.”

I kept assering: “No, there isn’t.” until the AI finally had to sit there and say, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Nobody has any interest in this.”

Why are you lying to me, AI?! Why is society lying to me?! Why is everyone pretending that any of this stupid, tech-bloated, microphone-failing, stop-motion, crossword-puzzle-less garbage matters?! I hate it here!

The Philosophy Fraud and the Defensive Beta

Case in point: I dragged myself out to this “Stoicism” philosophy meetup. The self-important charlatan running the show had apparently authored two entire books on the subject. I knew before I even crossed the threshold that his entire worldview was a flimsy, derivative house of cards that offered zero utility to my life. While he was droning on, treating his own voice like a sacred text, I was on my phone aggressively prompting an AI to dissect the logical fallacies of his specific brand of philosophy.

When the floor opened up, I hit him with the exact core contradiction the AI and I had unraveled. His response? An utterly pathetic, defensive, logically bankrupt non-answer. Like basically the critique of Stoicism was something like isn’t Stoicism basically a way to not engage in trying to fix actual systemic problems with society, and this guy, who wrote two books on the subject, his response was: Well actually many stoics were activists and opposed Nero etc so maybe they did care about inequality. And even I could tell this was a stupid answer because the structural logic of Stoicism itself, not the individual actions of its practitioners, is what makes it ideologically problematic. Or as AI would put it: “The Exception Proves the Rule: Figures like Seneca opposing Nero are the exception that highlights the rule of Stoicism’s inherent tendency towards accommodation.”

So yeah I guess in the span of 2 seconds you can ask the guy who runs the philosophy meetup, who wrote two books about this philosophy, a question which basically point out why his philosohpy sucks, and he can’t answer it. And then you’re just sitting here like: Why am I here? And no one else was really allowed to talk, like it was framed as a ‘discussion’ but the reality is it’s just this dumbass lecturing everyone for like an hour. And then there was a Q&A and I swear to god, the literal first question was a woman asking:

“What is stoicism?”

Kill me. But the intellectual bankruptcy of the host wasn’t even the worst part. I got cornered by this textbook tech-bro attendee. He was a quintessential archetype of tech nerd—deeply butthurt for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, radiating a palpable aura of angry energy. He seemed to hate talking to me and I couldn’t understand what he was saying because he was talking too quietly. Then a girl sat down next to me and the he starts talking to her enthusiastically. She immediately cuts him off by saying:

“I can’t hear you.”

The Baby Shield Gambit and Seedance

The entire evening was cursed from inception. On the literal walk over to the venue, some wealthy tech-elite gentrifaced ghoul rammed his oversized baby stroller directly into me. And instead of apologizing like a functioning member of civil society, this absolute coward leans in and mutters “Excuse you” right into my ear as he brushes past.

What am I even supposed to do in that scenario? Start screaming at a man holding an infant? He knew exactly what he was doing. He was using his own child as a human shield, executing a pathetic, passive-aggressive power trip because he knows nobody wants to traumatize a baby by screaming at its deadbeat father in public. That is the caliber of human being navigating the streets. The whole Stoic meetup was a masterclass in human garbage.

Then I went to a meetup about Seedance, the AI video creation software. It starts out with the guy asking the people to briefly introduce themselves. You might think that this wouldn’t be a disastrous decision, right? Well the first guy talks for over three minutes. Can you even imagine it? There’s a room full of people, the organizer probably just wanted to get a very vague sense of what everybody’s level of understanding is, and instead this guy gives us his entire life story and his entire personal life philosophy. How disgusting. The words “Our brains evolved in a state of nature…” were said as a part of his answer. The question was: “Who are you?” Can you even imagine that? Someone asks you to briefly introduce yourself and you end up saying: “Our brains evolved in a state of nature…”? I mean what an absolute psychological car crash. What does it say about society that something like that could even happen? How unseen, unrealized, un-manifested or whatever are people today that these kind of weird involuntary spasms come out of people, that this absolute cascade of personal information that no one wants just involuntarily erupts out of so many people when they get the opportunity to force other people to learn about them.

One of the guys, the third guy says, “I have PTSD that numbed my body for many years until a few months ago”. So maybe that guy has a mild excuse for his social retardation. But still. The next woman says, “I believe AI can be used for good and bad.” Again, the question was “Who are you?” These people were never asked: What is your entire dissertation on AI, because I’m sure it’s not idiotic. Then the PTSD guy raises his hand and says, “I want to say another thing,” and the host is just like, “No” and aggressively points at the next person. I just cannot express how insane that is that in the process of quickly going around the room asking people who they are you actually not just rant about your PTSD but end up raising your hand because actually you weren’t done sharing this information that no one cares about and you want to add more to your original response. To the question “Let’s go around and introduce ourselves”.

At one point something starts making a really loud beeping sound for a while, like over a minute, and it’s obviously some guy using the FindMy feature on his AirTag or something similar. It’s really loud and annoying and the thing beeping is right next to the speaker. “Wow, this guy is really stupid,” I was thinking. “I mean why doesn’t he turn the beeping off considering it’s pretty obvious where the thing he’s looking for is.” Eventually he walks in front of the speaker and grabs it, and then announces to all of us that he owns the company whose building we are in. Oh, so I guess instead of being a rude idiot, what you did is actually fine.

Later on the guy organizing the group says, “Seedance is a Chinese comapny,” and a Chinese guy in the back stands up and starts talking, not raising his hand, just talking, saying “Quick correction: Seedance is not actually a Chinese company because they have an office in Singapore and an office in the United States.” The organizer is like, “Oh okay, thanks for correcting me, I didn’t know that.” I mean it’s created by ByteDance. The people who make TikTok. It’s a Chinese company, dipshit. I just asked Google, “Is Seedance a Chinese company?” And it said:

Yes, Seedance is a Chinese AI application created by ByteDance, the Beijing-based tech giant that is also the parent company of TikTok.

After about an hour my brain checks out and I’m just sitting there wondering when I should leave and go back home and waste more of my life away staring at my corprate-filtered slop internet algorithm on my slop app of choice: X, Instagram, etc. People keep talking about Seedance on and on. Some guy is asking a technical question and then randomly the Taco Bell ‘gong’ sound effect plays loudly out of a guy’s phone. The guy asking the technical question stops asking his question and there’s just a long pause—no one says anything. Then eventually the guy whose phone had played the sound effect says, “Quiero Taco Bell” and laughs somewhat awkwardly. No one else laughs. The guy who was asking the question continues asking his question.

That’s Meetup. Mentally ill people screaming into the void, pouring out their meaningless life story and their idiotic personal philosophy to strangers who never consented to hearing it. And a few normal people. Ultimately, the tragedy of the modern tech meetup isn’t that the technology is failing; it’s that the human infrastructure is totally spent. We have engineered tools like Seedance that can synthesize entire visual realities from a single line of text, yet the actual biological organisms sitting in the room cannot successfully execute a three-word personal introduction without their psychological gears grinding into a halt. The evening concludes not with a bang of creative inspiration, but with the cold, isolated thud of a Taco Bell sound effect echoing into an empty room. It is a live-action human trainwreck—an agonizing display of social isolation breaking through the skin of professional networking. And the ultimate cosmic joke is that every single person in that room, including me, will leave this broken physical space only to go home, open a laptop, and willingly plunge right back into the digital landfill that made us this way in the first place.