Losing My Edge

But I was there!

A few nights ago, I found myself awake at 2:08am with LCD Soundsystem’s 2002 debut single Losing My Edge stuck in my head. Fully lucid. The lyrics on repeat. The song anthemizes becoming a has-been, yet it launched the career of a 32-year old James Murphy.

Yeah, I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
But I was there!

I knew an alarm would blare just a few hours later at 5am to kick start an early ski day. Yet I couldn’t stop the lyrics running through my mind. So for the next hour or so, I thought about how I was there.

I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.
I played it at CBGB's.
Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.
I've never been wrong.

I’m about to be 28. I read Doing Good Better by William MacAskill when the Centre for Effective Altruism was sending out free copies of the book in 2016. I browsed the Silk Road on the dark web in high school. My reddit account is as old as I was when I discovered the site. I fretted over existential AI risks in college dorm rooms in 2015 and 2016. I was there!

I used to work in the record store.
I had everything before anyone.

But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

I saw Bitcoins selling for $7 a pop. I subscribed to /r/WallStreetBets years before the pandemic. I have a collection of all the best Gwern posts from 2015 to 2020. I listened, in the spring of 2017, to a reading of Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person by Scott Alexander in my college literary and debating society. In an interview for a college scholarship, I said that if I could have dinner with anyone alive, it would be Elon Musk (that was 2014, well before he lost his mind). But I was there. I was there!

I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I'm losing my edge.

To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

I'm losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I’m still discovering great new music. But my intellectual milieu, though the quantity of interesting content coming at me every day via blogs, podcasts, substacks, book recommendations, linkposts, twitter, and forwarded emails from friends it almost overwhelming, it all feels like… it feels like I’m losing my edge.

Perhaps this is getting older. Maybe I’m becoming set in my ways. Plasticity is decreasing. But the people I’m reading and listening to, for the most part, feel established, or that they fit into an existing establishment.

If my media diet was a house party, until recently I felt like I was stumbling into weird conversations and meeting interesting new people in every room I entered. Learning about crypto or Effective Altruism in the 2010s felt like doing some consciousness-expanding drugs for the first time. My understanding of the world changed after every party.

Now, when I arrive at the party, it’s with the knowledge of where all of the cliques and subgroups like to hang out. It feels like an explored space, albeit interesting. Dwarkesh is interviewing everyone who walks through the front door. The abundance liberals, wearing “I’m with Ezra” t-shirts, argue about permitting with centrist Democrats in the living room. A group of Lesswrongers eagerly writes blog posts around the kitchen island. An Effective Altruist is giving way too much conversational space to a Thiel fellow, doing his best to ignore the Democratic Socialist pulling at his sleeve asking about systemic political solutions. The crypto guys are doing whippets in the walk-in closet. Tyler Cowen is roaming, making oblique comments that could be references to anyone or no one at the party, refusing to explain himself. The party is still fun, but it’s… different.

I don’t want to stop growing and changing my mind. I don’t want to stagnate in the cognitive environment that feels comfortable to me. I don’t want to lose my edge.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

---

In early 2024, Vitalik Buterin published a blog post The end of my childhood:

One of the [event organizers] was the 21-year-old Nicole Sun, and a year earlier she had invited me to visit a hacker house in South Korea: a ~30-person gathering where, for the first time that I can recall, I was by a significant margin the oldest person in the room.

When I was as old as those hacker house residents are now, I remember lots of people lavishing me with praise for being one of these fancy young wunderkinds transforming the world like Zuckerberg and so on. I winced at this somewhat, both because I did not enjoy that kind of attention and because I did not understand why people had to translate "wonder kid" into German when it works perfectly fine in English. But watching all of these people go further than I did, younger than I did, made me clearly realize that if that was ever my role, it is no longer. I am now in some different kind of role, and it is time for the next generation to take up the mantle that used to be mine.

When VITALIK BUTERIN is saying that he too is losing his edge to the kids coming up from behind, where do you turn? Who do you read? What do you listen to? What blogs, websites, aggregators do you check?

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.

I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

What are the kids up to these days? Surely it’s not just AI, right? Where are the weird, boundary-pushing conversations happening? What is the new intellectual movement? What is outside of the Overton window of the people who popularized talking about the Overton window?

---

---

---

---

---

---

In case you missed it, the one place I’m not losing my edge is in hosting large, dumb social events. On May 3, 2025, I am hosting a 50k in Boulder, Colorado called Slos: Several Laps of Sanitas. You don’t have to do all of the laps—you don’t have to do any of the laps—and there is a party at the start line/aid station/finish line. See you there!