High school put me under a great deal of pressure. At first I was, in a way, going along blindly. I had studied a lot of maths as a child, so I tried to get into university through the mathematics olympiad. I took most of my first and second years off school for it. In the end it failed: I won first prize in my province three times, but never made the provincial team that goes on to the national olympiad.
So I went back to school and faced a heavy workload and heavy pressure from my family. Those were painful months. I fell into self-doubt and disgust with myself, and slowly started looking for a way out. Because of the pain, I turned to philosophy for relief.
I found that the questions I had been writing down on paper, and turning over in my head, had been taken seriously by philosophers long before me. Reading what they wrote, I felt an enormous shock of recognition. Looking back, I misread a lot, and took many things too literally.
Wittgenstein was the first philosopher I met. Then I bought Žižek’s bestseller Event, which became my door to many others. I started reading Heidegger, and from there I read up, down and outwards: more postmodern philosophy, more psychoanalysis, more phenomenology, some history of philosophy, the earlier classical philosophers.
I especially love A Thousand Plateaus. At first I half understood it. But as I dealt with pressure at school, and with being torn apart emotionally, lost and anxious, more and more of the book spoke to me. Deleuze became my favourite philosopher. I read more of his work, and I read the accelerationists.
Then I went to university. As AI developed, accelerationism drew more and more attention, and more and more misreading. I went back and reread it carefully, alongside my research in AI and my own sense of living in this moment, and I kept doing philosophy and bringing it into my work. One of the places it ended up is The Override Gap.