I've written about my propensity to lapse into a melancholy state periodically, seemingly during the winter months, something I've reported on at length in an article in 3 Quarks Daily (3QD). But no, I hadn't. I slipped into another melancholy phase in September of last year, something you can check easily enough by looking through the monthly entries in the Blog Archive (to the right). You'll see a drop from 137 posts in August to 27 in September, and it goes down from there.
This graphs depicts the change:
The graph also shows me coming out of the melancholy hibernation phase in January, early January in fact.
If this were strictly a matter of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) then both of those dates are too early. In the past I haven't gone into melancholy until December or January, and I've not come out until April or even May. Whatever's going on isn't SAD. That may be a contributing factor, but it's not the whole story. Something else is going on. I argued in that 3QD article that it's my cycles of creativity. I go into mental hibernation (aka melancholy) so I can reorganize and come out with new approaches.
That certainly seems to be what's going on this time. I'm buzzing with new ideas across the range of my projects, my book (Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution), my research with Ramesh Viswanathan on LLMs, my thinking about virtual reading, and my thinking about "Kubla Khan" and Coleridge. Things are popping.
Now, back to the chart. While I'm definitely on the upswing, I don't seem to be back to my previous level of productivity. That's an illusion. I've been spending time on my book, and that work doesn't result in blog posts. So I may or may not return to my previous level of posting. It depends, on this and that. I may, for example, post more material generated by either Claude or ChatGPT. We'll see.
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