Parv Mahajan

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