The protagonist of "A Time When No One Knows Again" is a character created based on my experience, but is slightly different from the real me.
The protagonist didn't smoke and didn't like singing, but I smoked, enjoyed drinking, and liked singing.
But if there's a similarity, it would be that I was not someone who cleverly sought out opportunities. Rather than quickly recognizing where good opportunities were and taking action, I lived by doing the work right in front of me.
I lived that way for 10, 20 years.
It seems our generation held onto the expectation that things would get better as time passed for quite a long time.
We thought that even if it's difficult now, things would improve as we built our career, we would establish ourselves if we persevered a little longer, and we would have economic and life comfort as we aged.
Of course, many things have changed.
But if you ask whether my life has changed as much as I vaguely expected, I'm not sure.
The company still had problems, earning more money brought new worries, and time passing didn't automatically make life comfortable.
As I thought about this, my perspective on young people these days also changed slightly.
I used to think, why can't they endure like that, why do they want answers to every problem so quickly.
I similarly saw how people these days are enthusiastic about so-called 'soda' moments. Stories where the wrongdoer is immediately punished, the wronged person is immediately compensated, and problems are clearly resolved without complicated processes.
But now I understand it a little.
We believed time would solve it.
The way today's young generation looks at our generation seems a little different.
When you see successful people in the media, people who bought houses and established themselves, you might feel that our generation lived in much better times.
I also understand why that thought comes up.
But looking at just those results, there were also times that didn't look so good.
We too lived for 10, 20 years believing that even if it's difficult now, it will get better someday.
And after that time passed, I came to realize that waiting doesn't automatically make everything better.
So I've come to understand a little better the idea of prioritizing life now rather than waiting, wanting clear answers rather than vague compromises, and responding much more quickly to what they see as unfair, compared to before.
I'm not saying that's always right.
I'm just saying that I understand it a little better than before.
And what was interesting while writing this article was AI.
It was a tool I mainly used for work, but it wrote articles quite well too.
Of course, I didn't get satisfying writing from the beginning. After reading from beginning to end and fixing parts that differed from my thoughts one by one, it gradually became closer to my own writing.
Rather than AI writing for me, it was more like a partner that organized my thoughts into sentences.
It was also a bit amusing to be writing with AI an article that says no one knows what kind of era will come because of AI.
And although it's not a development article, I posted it on the development blog because I thought it's a story that developers living in these times would relate to.
