I Do Have a Heart

Today was interesting today to say the least.

As I usually do the night before a workout day, I had gathered all my gym clothes and set them in a nice pile so that when my alarm went off, I had everything ready to do. (If you don’t do this, I highly recommend it to keep your motivation alive.)

But this morning I was up before my alarm and with good but scary cause: my heart was palpitating like mad.

It’s pretty rare when this happens so I rode it out in bed for a while hoping it would get better.

It didn’t for hours as you can tell by the chart above. In fact I had to switch to my Wyze watch because all the checking of my heart rate drained the battery on my Series 7 Apple Watch.

By about 9am, the palpitations had subsided but my resting heart rate was still not normal: I’m usually at 55-60 but was measuring 70-80. As of this post, I’m around 60-65 which is still high for me but better than 140 bpm.

And no, I didn’t make it to the gym and will probably take the week off until I know I’m 100% better.

As to why this happened? I’ve read that having them now and then is completely normal or that sometimes they can be caused by stress. That’s when the epiphany hit me.

Stress? Not in my personal life but definitely at work.

The merger continues to unfold with people being let go regularly, and there’s a lot of uncertainty with what the next moves will be. As for me, I recently found out that parts of my job will be handed to AI agents in the very near future. I just hope they don’t want me to train them because that’s not going to happen.

I’ve been spending most of my nights doing job searches and haven’t gotten any bites yet, just rejection letters. That’s no fun.

On top of all that, there’s so much going on around us today that I can’t keep up anymore. Y’all thought the first term was bad? Oh no. This is much worse.

So I think that subconsciously, all of the aforementioned reasons had been swirling around my brain for a bit and this morning it all finally came to a head in the form of crazy palpitations.

In that regard, it was an awful day. But what made it better? AWS (Amazon Web Services) going down for a good portion of it.

Before the alarm went off, Ann had told me that our Alexa unit wasn’t working and because our internet had been going down sporadically a few weeks ago, I chalked it up to that. Then I checked DownDetector and said, “Ohhh, that’s why.”

A ton of services were down or experiencing issues for the day including many of the things we use at work — yes, even their AI platform.

This made me very happy. Why? Knowing that my days may be numbered due to AI and seeing that all it takes is an outage to take it down was vindication for all the things I have been warning people about. It’s being pushed down everyone’s throats right now but a simple outage took that shit out like nobody’s business.

When I found this out, I paused a moment and smiled — and literally shed a few tears of happiness. It was like I felt God’s hand on my shoulder reassuring me that everything I had said about AI had come to fruition, even if nobody wanted to believe me.

So while today started off bad, it ended up being a reasonably good day considering. What made it better was as that with so many tools down due to the AWS outage, we had nothing to do because nobody could access anything.

What could have been a stressful day ended up being one of relaxation at home — and it was exactly what I needed.

Current heart rate: 63 bpm.