I used to think politics was where change happened.

In the past 3 years, which happens to coincide with my high school years, I spent afternoons reading Rawls and Nozick. Did internships. Wrote policy briefs that no one read. And even bought a yearly "Washington Post" membership, which I probably ended up using for a few weeks anyway. I thought I was preparing for something important.

The more I learned, the less sense it made. Politics wasn't about solving problems. It was about managing them. Keeping them at just the right temperature. Hot enough to mobilize voters, cool enough to avoid actual solutions.

Every issue had the same structure. Someone identifies a real problem. Then the machinery kicks in. Committees form. Studies get commissioned. The problem gets reframed, subdivided, and assigned to working groups. By the time anything emerges, the original issue has been processed into something unrecognizable. Something safe. Something buried deep under flagrant bureaucracy.

This dive into politics, coinciding with peak political sensitivity on the world power stage, was of some help too. I could find proof for my 17-year-old self's speculations. The pattern was always the same. Take something urgent and make it routine. Take something clear and make it complicated. Take something that demanded action and turn it into a conversation.

We can't really call this incompetence. It was the system working exactly as designed.

The breaking point came during the admissions season. I won't say how or what happened. But I spent the entire autumn/winter in an intellectual panic and paranoia, wondering if the field I was choosing was really mine, and whether or not I belonged in that perfectly imperfect system whose entire purpose is to do what it is not supposed to.

So I exited.

I used to think that I'd not make fast decisions. But I did. I self-taught myself to code instead. Frontend took my summer. And now learning Python. I read everything I could find about AI. Fei-Fei Li's work on computer vision. Mustafa Suleyman on AI for social good. Texts that made actual claims you could test.

In politics, you could spend years debating whether something was possible. In AI and startups, you built it and found out. The feedback could be direct, and progress measurable. When something worked, it worked for everyone who used it.

Not that AI doesn't have its own politics, of course. But at least the code either runs or it doesn't.

I'm diving deeper into startups and AI culture now. Not because I think technology is some silver bullet, but because it's the most accessible way to make an impact. You don't need permission from committee chairs or party officials. You don't need to wait for election cycles. You identify a problem and you solve it.

My parents still ask when I'm going to college. They don't understand how my entire intellectual manifesto changed. But I am as happy as I could be. It is better to take a gap year, change, explore, and develop than worry over my course schedule that I know won't benefit me.

With all the noise in politics lately—the constant outrage cycles, the performative controversies—I'm just fed up. Tired of watching obvious solutions get buried under process and procedure. Tired of people being slow and ignorant to just do things. Tired of hearing the same speeches about change while the fundamentals never shift. And all that crap about "democracy," "freedom," and "justice" being tossed around like they don't carry any weight.

And sometimes I think, Orwell was really an optimist.