Master version of this on https://parvmahajan.com/2025/12/21/turning-20.html 

I turn 20 in January, and the world looks very strange. Probably, things will change very quickly. Maybe, one of those things is whether or not we’re still here.

This moment seems very fragile, and perhaps more than most moments will never happen again. I want to capture a little bit of what it feels like to be alive right now.

I. 

Everywhere around me there is this incredible sense of freefall and of grasping. I realize with excitement and horror that over a semester Claude went from not understanding my homework to easily solving it, and I recognize this is the most normal things will ever be. Suddenly, the ceiling for what is possible seems so high - my classmates join startups, accelerate their degrees; I find myself building bespoke bioinformatics tools in minutes, running month-long projects in days. I write dozens of emails and thousands of lines of code a week, and for the first time I no longer feel limited by my ability but by my willpower. I spread the gospel to my friends - “there has never been a better time to have a problem” - even as I recognize the ones they seek to solve will soon be obsolete.

Because as the ceiling rises so does the floor, just much, much faster. I look at the time horizon chart in this now-familiar feeling of hype-dread. “Wow, 4 hours!” “Oh no, 4 hours.” I cannot emotionally price in the exponential yet, nor do I try very hard to. Around me I see echoes of this sentiment; the row ahead of me ignores the professor to cold-message hiring managers on LinkedIn, hoping to escape “the permanent underclass.” The girl behind me whispers about Codex to her friend. Every one of my actions is dominated by the opportunity cost and the counterfactual; every one of my plans dominated by its too-long timeline. Everything feels both hopeless - my impact on risk almost certainly will round down to zero - and extremely urgent - if I don’t try now, then I won’t have a chance to.

I read voraciously. Blogposts about control, papers about interpretability, articles on foreign relations and math and philosophy - anything that might help me know and change the future. I learn unteachable methods to stay sane. I even read some fiction, remembering how Toni Morrison got me through my college apps. I become adept at synthesis and critique, and find myself on the frontier in just a couple hundred thousand words.

I give a talk to some freshmen, showing the graphs, asking them to extrapolate. There’s a stunned silence when I pause for questions. I’m nervous I scared them without many good solutions. I’m also nervous there’s not good solutions left.

I stop going to lecture; I can no longer justify the time, and no one notices in a 300 person class anyway. I spend most of my time in the research building instead.

II. 

A journalist asked me this year why I do what I do if I see unemployment on the horizon. I answered something about how it would be a shame to waste the opportunity on anything less important. Maybe I should have said that extraordinary times call for extraordinary effort.

If there are a few years left, I want to spend them fully, and this is what carries me through most days. I spend hours with my friends, I treat myself often, I work until I can’t string together a sentence. I try to bring others joy, I try to bring myself joy. I feel incredibly lonely still, and the days are often filled with wasted time and self-destructive rotting. I forgive myself, because there is no time to do otherwise.

There were many months where I would look at a leaf, or a building, or a light, and cry because I did not want the world with these things to end, and it seems like it may end. I don’t cry as much anymore, although I do still mourn. I catch myself wondering if my parents will retire before they are forced to, and if my youngest cousin will get to graduate high school. I hold hugs tighter than I used to; people ask me how I’m holding up, and also say I look much happier now than I have in months. I don’t understand what those mean together, but hope it’s okay.

Most of me feels very lucky to be alive right now, in this maybe-most-impactful-time. The leaf, the building, the light are still here. A smaller part of me wishes I lived in a time with latitude to meaningfully predict my 30s, or at least whether I would have a 30s. But it would be such a shame to waste this opportunity on anything less important.