2022 was an odd year for me, and for most I’m sure. I was in grad school. I’d lucked into a class on Marcel Proust and was spending my evenings reading his epic tome, In Search of Lost Time. During the day I worked at a large tech company and spent my work hours thinking about business automation and how AI was changing work. ChatGPT was advancing and driving a larger conversation about what AI can and cannot do and what it would mean for us humans. Proust’s work offered an interesting lens with which to look at the post-pandemic world that was not just emerging from isolation but also grappling with a technological shift unlike any other we’ve seen.
This site, insearchoflosttime.space, started as a class project on Marcel Proust. I built an AI chatbot and some AI-generated art to try his ideas on for size in the present day. His views on technology and his meditations on the nature of art and memory seemed particularly ripe for this type of project. That initial spark is still here, you can explore in “The Madeleine Project” pages on this site. But, while Proust was the catalyst, the scope of the questions I want to deal with on this site has expanded.
What you’ll find here is my own search for lost time. Where Proust asked how to recapture a memory, the concrete lived experience, through sense and art, I am exploring what it means to live in a world increasingly dominated by the artificial. How do we live worthwhile, human lives filled with purpose and pleasure?
I’m in an odd position to ask these questions, which I’ve decided is an advantage. I’ve spent over a decade in tech working in automation and AI. I’ve designed social media campaigns and retargeted ads. I’ve helped build, position, and market the systems that promise to hand people back their time while also consuming much of it. I also hold an MFA in Prose and Poetry, which mostly trained me to distrust anything that arrives too easily. To examine, to notice, to write, re-write, and do it again. Edit until it feels authentic and true. In a way I feel like I’m examining the idea of lost time from a kind of bilingual perspective—accessing vocabulary and a view of the world from both the tech and humanities perspective.
When I say “lost time,” I think of it in a few ways, although the more I examine this notion I may uncover more.
There’s Proust’s kind: memory buried, not gone, waiting for the right sensory key to spring it back open. My worry is more basic: if we keep outsourcing the noticing to our devices, will we even encounter the right key? You can’t taste a madeleine through a feed.
There’s the time lost to friction we’ve engineered away entirely: the errand, the wrong turn, the boring wait that used to leave a memory behind simply because we were forced to be present for it. Smooth that all out and you don’t get more life. You get less residue. A frictionless life is a life with nothing left to remember.
And there’s the time lost to work itself: the hours spent tethered to a screen interacting with an artificial colleague. It is meant to save us time, but the to-do list never seems to get the memo. We didn’t get more time back. We got more time to fill.
I don’t have this figured out. I’m searching, same as Proust was, but I hope you’ll follow along in my search for lost time.