The trope goes, “how do you know if someone is neurodivergent? They’ll tell you.” Yet, if we ever met IRL, there’s only a 0.6% chance that I would have told you I’m autistic because for the remaining 99.4% of my life, I just didn’t know. As it turns out, I’ve been trying to make sense of the world around me with physiology not suited to the majority of it.

Disclaimer of Sorts

David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is widely praised for its insight and depth. It challenges readers to rethink something as everyday as eating lobster. The essay made me stop and think about two important ideas that I thought deserve more attention. First, the assumption that a lobster’s attempt to escape equates to the human concept of suffering and second, the larger reality of the food chain and circle of life.

I wanted to build a playlist around a specific vibe but couldn’t quite name it. Songs like Kurt Vile’s “Check Baby” and Mark Lanegan’s “Hit the City” captured a laid-back and unhurried aesthetic. Not slacker enough to be lazy but not energetic enough to be gym playlist material either. Just effortlessly cool. Searching by genre or artist for similar songs wasn’t cutting it. The usual categories returned were too broad and thus too vague. So I decided to use AI to help me find every song in my 2,500+ track library that matched this idea of an aesthetic.