It's death
jesseduffield.com
jesseduffield.com
Hopelessness and injustice seem to be the current zeitgeist - at least for anyone who spends a lot of time online. And I get it, there's plenty to be unhappy about.
But my counter-argument is that it's possible to do things in life that you're proud of. And find happiness in the simplest of places. And most people would do better to focus the majority of their attention on those things.
This story says "do yourself a favour and forgive yourself for any failings on your part, you’re only human after all" - which I agree with. But I'd go one step further and add "celebrate your successes" and try to align your life in such a way that you can have successes worthy of celebrating.
It makes me wonder: with everyone seemingly so unhappy, why aren't there more people pursuing alternative lifestyles? Similar to the 60s counterculture. You don't need the whole world to go along with you - just a handful (or less) of likeminded people. Or some people even manage to go it alone.
It seems a lot of people (perhaps a vocal minority?) actually enjoy being upset. Or maybe everyone is going through ups and downs but we just tend to be more vocal when we're upset.
I think the brony and furry community count for some examples. Brony community has been a major counter-culture since its inception and I truly believe it's had a measurable impact on gender norms and some other areas. Many of us see it as something of a lifestyle where it dominates the spaces we primarily engage in etc.
Furry is even bigger and easier to argue as a popular counterculture lifestyle, and growing all the time (record convention attendance every year).
They're also places where some other things like polyamory are more common, and much more LGBT/etc inclusive than average (which is less of a statement now, but they were both far ahead of the curve on that years ago), refreshingly sex-positive (at least the parts of the communities I identify with).
Personally all of those things apply to me and I love being a part of those communities. Brony community has been a hugely important thing in my life since high school and working on game development there was a big jumpstart on experience working in a team/technical experience. Furry I only started exploring more a few years ago but I've made a lot of great friends and met my current partners there too.
Brony's a consistent core of lifetime holdouts like me and a steady trickle of new people at this point, and furry's growing faster all the time - even the little bonfire meetup at a nature preserve I like to go to had a record smashing attendance on opening day this year.
I'd also add that I think the increased self-ID of young people in the LGBTQ community is in and of itself sort of a means to access a sort of alternative lifestyle. Many of these people live somewhat hedonistic, bohemian, artsy lifestyles that disregard traditional notions of success or traditional standards and mores in relationships and love.
Not everyone frames their happiness solely on conditions within their own sphere. Knowledge comes with responsibility.
I'm slowly getting convinced that some political players are spreading this view on purpose. It is an easy way to block people who try to stop the erosion of society.
It also isn't true. You can easily improve the world on a small scale by doing anything positive. On world scale, trying to change things is like buying into a lottery. Most attempts will fail, but the more stakes you have, the bigger the chance of winning.
In my corner of the world, over my life, I saw flemish people, woman, LGBTQ, vegetarians all stand up and demand the rest of the world treat them as equals. They all started tiny and were laughed at for the futility of their dreams. But I speak dutch, woman go to universities, gays are holding hands publicly and getting married, and vegetarian options are normal in restaurants. These causes won, because lots of little nameless people fought for it, even if there are still haters pushing back each of them.
There is still a lot of counterculture in spite of all this - and honestly, it even feels more enticing than it used to. But it also feels more hedonistic and escapist than like a genuine alternative way of living.
Things feel less like the 1980s and more like the 1920s...
The above quote is from a character from one of JRR Tolkien’s books. (Gandalf from Return of the King.)
Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme which was one of the most destructive battles in human history. So I think his views have some weight here.
Bad things have always happened in the world. Despair is a useless emotion that just precludes action that can better the world or even better a single other’s person’s life. For each person belongs to the world and by improving one life you improve the world. This cannot be accomplished through despair but through joy.
If Mahatma Gandhi had lived in despair over the horrible things the British were doing to the Indians, would he have been able to help anyone? It was through joyous resistance that he managed to inspire a movement to defeat them.
Sorry for the cliche quote, but I feel it's relevant. As an atheist, I wouldn't appeal to God, but rather would look within for these things.
Some people decide that sphere is really big, and they go on to be those historical figures. Others define it really big, and wallow in angst, aware and powerless to the suffering. Others still define it too small, and by the end of their life, find regret that they didn't try to help those within reach.
generally land costs
Why don't you believe in the experience after dying ?
It's a scary feeling if you can grasp it. Grasping non-existence from within existence is difficult, I've consciously tried to do it and succeeded a couple of times, but it's fleeting and both times it affected my breathing and heart rate in a similar way to fear or panic or pain.
That being said, you can't just assume that existence is bounded by your living memories. You might as well have been everything instead of nothing prior to being spawned and you just don't remember it.
I was going to raise that, but couldn't find a short enough way to describe it properly. Something like:
Existence beyond what you can actually remember doesn't matter because it's outside any bounds of practical discussion; it should be excluded from consideration. The same way it's impossible to predict anything 'before the big bang' because we only have 'after the big bang' as useful evidence. There is no way to verify any continuity if you can't remember it or if there is no evidence of it. There's no guarantee you can even comprehend what it could be, 'you' as a concept may not even exist and it's unlikely to be relate-able to anything in this living world. Maybe you return to being 0.00001% of the collective consciousness of the universe, or any other crackpot thing anyone wants to suggest. Flying Spaghetti Monster.".
I do personally believe the latter part. I did not mean to suggest the before/after experience was going to look anything like your current one.
Its the difference between:
"I see nothing when I close my eyes" (actually you 'see' darkness over time)
and...
"I see nothing through my elbow" (You really don't see anything through your elbow because the capacity for it just doesn't exist.)
Even our basic perception of time is mediated by the structure of our brains... and without that there's no difference between one second and a trillion^trillion years.
If we do, well it would seem trivially possible for our simulators to provide us with an afterlife if they wished–and we honestly could have no idea what they might wish.
If you claim to know we don't live in a computer simulation, or that if we do, our simulators would be unlikely to grant us an afterlife–how do you know that?
P(we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5
P(there is an afterlife|we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5
Therefore, P(there is an afterlife) >= 0.25 even if we assume P(there is an afterlife|we don't live in a computer simulation) = 0.0 (which is itself highly debatable)
In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.
If you're in a simulation maybe you get reset to a prior state. You wouldn't know, so it doesn't matter. The simulation may run on stolen time slices of a processor, and seconds or minutes may pass in between milliseconds of progress of your simulated world, but it seems continuous to you because the entirety of your experience is within the simulation.
"You" as a coherent entity cannot exist outside the bounds.
If there is an afterlife it is most likely a rebirth of a new entity.
There is no you there is only me.
But this isn’t true - if universe A simulates universe B, there is no requirement that they have the same laws of physics.
If we are living in a computer simulation, then the “real” laws of physics might be radically different from the apparent ones, and we might never know what the “real” laws are
What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.
I would have never found metaphysics in my life, if i didn't have a few unnatural experiences. I would not find the big explanatory gap between experience and matter, which is so obvious to me now. I would still be a materialist while not even knowing I was one, like many here in these comments.
Before I was a materialist like you and I was not afraid of dying, because like you, I thought it's just lights out and I am no more, so I can not suffer. But now I am more afraid od death, because of the unknown that follows.
This is an extraordinary claim, any sources for it? Specially the point about "profound conscious experiences" in "clinically dead people with zero brain activity".
How can you possibly assert you have succeeded at this?
I may just be defining 'grasp' differently to you though.
I enjoyed the abstractness of the story and the disjointedness of the time aspects. I don't disagree with the salience of the point Death made but it kind of felt like an exposition dump in a movie.
Not that I'm a good writer (or reader tbh) but I think focusing more on the first kind of writing and less on the second would have connected more with me.
There's a perfect balance of absurdity and casualness that makes almost perfect sense that you can follow the show, and yet bizarre enough that you stick to know more.
Many coast on just that knowledge and die without the WHY to survive question ever coming up.
But if it does come up for you at some point in life, know that different philosophies have different answers. These days you can find summaries of all of them neatly complied like a restaurant menu thanks to LLMs.
People are very diffefent so you find the philosophy that fits you. Also thanks to all those differences proving one is the best is a waste of time and energy. Different ones are useful for different situations.
Yet he struggled to pass the time. Having the equivalent of billions of [insert favorite currency here], most folks fantasize about the ideal life. We often believe all of our immediate problems go away, free to do whatever we want. Yet, at least in Solomon's case, he seemed to become incredibly fed up with these grand projects and plans of his own devise.
While I certainly wouldn't mind a fraction of that wealth myself, I do recall my college weekends. Free to spend time however I pleased, with my basic needs met and no homework looming, I spent hours playing my favorite video games. And yet, no matter how good they were, I remember how dull and boring they eventually became in only a few hours.
Imagine you'd spend your life creating useful inventions, somehow improving this world, helping others, clean up pollution, etc. Making the lives of people currently alive and all their descendants just a little bit more fun, happy, comfortable or interesting.
Now imagine you'd spend your life doing shitty stuff that spoils the fun and makes life miserable for everyone & those that live after you.
Note that "all their descendants" could be many many billions or even trillions+ humans (if humanity manages to not go extinct 'soon'). That's ignoring other living creatures.
With that in mind, wouldn't it be a small sacrifice to put in a bit of effort to not screw things up for those that come after you?
No need to be a saint. It's about finding a balance between having some fun for yourself, while not spoiling the fun for others - presently alive or in the future.
Religion need not enter this consideration. If it helps/comforts anyone to use as guideline, power to them. But a simple "how would future humans look back on my actions?" does the job.
To my mind there is a Buddhist story hiding in here. The whole idea about an endless black void and that the protagonist considered sitting felt…allegorical? metaphorical?
The end is what drove it home for me. People generally speaking would prefer not to do any internalizing about death whatsoever and will take an endless wandering over the hard work of being human.
[Edit]: Thanks for all the explanations!
> by the time most people wind up here, they’ve got plenty of regrets. Nobody gets it all right. You’re born, and then you go through life making the choices that you think are the best given the information you have at the time, and you don’t always have all the information to make the right choices. Do yourself a favour and forgive yourself for any failings on your part, you’re only human after all
"And then one day you find
Ten years have got behind you
no one told you when to run
you missed the starting gun"
And while it's pretty absurd, in the story, such tiny mistakes having such outsized consequences, the story reminds us that such severe consequences are well within the realm of possibility. People do lose limbs off of little, careless mistakes. Doubly so with all the incredibly concentrated sources of energy we have in the modern world - power tools, automobiles, explosives.
Would one really lose ten years trying to pick out a single Netflix show? No. But could one wake up one day and realize that they'd accomplished nothing of note for a decade, that all their free time was dumped into Netflix shows that weren't even that good?
So, what do you do with all that? Memento Mori, I guess.
Other accomplishments of note might be: a single conversation that helped someone change. Little acts that made the world a tiny bit better. Having brought happiness to other people. I like to think that is the meaning of not wasting your time – not just measuring your life's worth with a science/capitalism lens.
When I'm gone, I'll leave nothing "of note" behind. I haven't won any great prizes or set any records. I haven't authored any papers. I haven't invented anything that changed an industry. I haven't cured any diseases. My name won't be on any buildings or monuments. I haven't really left any kind of discernable mark on the world or civilization or even my home town.
It reminded me of those cringe videos CGPGrey put out for COVID.
Few interesting observations
>> Ten years gone for the sake of picking a Netflix show Thats just Netflix. With kids 18 years go by just like that.
>> Nobody gets it all right. You’re born, and then you go through life making the choices that you think are the best given the information
This is said numerous times but can give wrong interpretation. Choices are what make the life. Life and choices are not parallel tracks.