[Epistemic status: uh, don’t worry about it.]
One of the questions I don’t get asked very much (to be fair, I don’t get asked many questions at all) is “Orion, why do you care?” This is unintuitive to me. The rigor demanded of many other claims is much lower. If someone advocates a particular political position or value judgement, they’re asked to explain why. If someone unilaterally decides to instantiate new being, or to maintain their own existence, there is no criticism. Our default, psychologically, is life— though biologically, psychically, death and entropy are what lies backstage.
I understand why the defaults are the way they are. Physics works the way it does, for now, and society’s incentivized mechanisms are focused towards self-sustaining.
PART ONE: I WANT TO LIVE FOREVER
I wrote some variant of this in my college essays, I’m pretty sure; I applied to a fellowship with this tenet as part of my essays: I’m transfixed by technology because of what it allows us to do. Let me look it up, actually:
“…a leverage source for continued existence and maximally reduced suffering of the human species”
Yeah, sounds about right.
Y’know, why die when you don’t have to? Y’know, I kind of think there’s a chance we won’t have to; y’know, when we solve the one biggest problem.
I want to see the futures in the science fiction books that don’t exist yet. I want my brain mapped and frozen; I want to be a robot; I want my own Dyson sphere; I want to see the present as a bad dream. I want to forget the present entirely.
I want to listen to the best music a galaxy can assemble; I want to float through nebulae; I want to rewrite myself from the ground up; I want to not have to eat and drink and shit and sleep. I want my processing power to be perfect; I want to never have to talk. I want to sweep my fingers through planets and ripple them like ponds.
I want to have my friends reach their full potential; I want us to choose from ten thousand visions of what we could be and to live them all at once. I don’t want virtual reality; I want virtual reality. Billionaires shouldn’t exist; they shouldn’t need to; we won’t need artificial systems to align our incentives. A billion’ll be trivial, anyway, what with inflation, and what with being gods.
I want a pocket dimensions to carry my stuff; I want to fly; I want us to tear down and build up histories that last just as long as we will: forever. I want superpowers; I want not to need them. I want it to be alright. Everyone else can come along, if they want, but that might not make any sense, because we won’t be people anymore. It’s beautiful, and it’s possible. Think about it. See it. Reach out and touch it. Make it happen.
A part of me does believe that. I think it does. But it’s also true that, I wrote the above paragraphs, I was playing some really(?) good air guitar.
Sometimes people ask me what it’s like to live in New York; sure, I can try, but I live there. What is it like to hear what you’re playing along to?
PART TWO: I WANT TO DIE
I don’t get what everybody else sees here. I don’t see it. I can’t.
Fuck.
Probably not a good idea to encourage these impulses, to put pixel to pixel and sketch out what and why I feel, but that’s the beauty of a time-delay. Nobody can stop me, and I can write out what I want, and you don’t have to read it.
I mean, I can do it tomorrow. Have been.
That pretty much works, if your definition of “work” is tantamount to “stay alive.” But I don’t want to stay alive. I don’t care about “alive.” “Alive” has no meaning to me. It has meaning, I’m assuming, to the people around me, though not the structures around me. It’s interesting how that works. That’s not the point, though.
With the usual caveats, —that I don’t know, that my memory is faulty, that most people’s are— I have felt this way for a long time, as best I can tell. I don’t talk to people well; I don’t feel well; I don’t think well. In fourth grade, when asked how long we would want to live, some version of me, expressing-anything-contrarian-through-humor like always, answered “twenty-five.” “Maybe thirty-three, y’know, since that’s when Jesus died.” I probably threw out an “eighteen” somewhere in there, and every number was suggested with the rationale “after that, it gets worse.”
My feelings, here, have changed a little bit. It’s not that it gets worse after some designated point, it just never gets better. It doesn’t improve. That’s the scary thing. I do not fear death. On the margin, though, death hurts more than life. But if I fear pain —which, if I’m honest with myself, I more or less do without qualifiers— death is the correct, defensible option. There are counterarguments. I don’t believe them.
I’ve known COVID-19 was going to be big for about six weeks now. Someone who wanted to live through it would have been preparing; I just don’t see the point. If my friends and family wouldn’t notice, I’d have slapped a neuron-EMP button fifteen or sixteen times now, easy; disease is a convenient way out, though. It seems unfair that there isn’t as it stands. Y’know.
Part of the problem is that I am not angry enough; angry can fix problems on occasion. It’s certainly a powerful motivator for action, when it does anything at all. But sad is nothing. Sad is there. Numb is there. Melancholy is a slump over a dimming computer screen. But I do not regret being more empathetic than I have been; it’s made me better. I like myself more, on the whole, broadly. It is more often that I see myself as praiseworthy instead of disgusting. In these ways, I have improved.
Part of the problem is that I am not quiet. I want to be more quiet. I want to be even better at this. I think it would be possible for me to be happy with food, a bed, coffee, and the Internet. Maybe a pen and paper, some music, and a few books, but you get the picture. First: this is impractical; second: it contains no meaning. I don’t think I would be happy with it very long. But I’d try.
I cannot really work well if anyone else is watching me. I cannot do much of anything if anyone else is watching me; for the significant majority of high school (and, for what it’s worth, other schools,) I was forced to have my desk at home in a semi-common, visible area. This was a source of real negative utility because I could never tell whether I was being watched. I need to block out what I want and let in what I want to do anything approximating the real. The world does not allow for this. Our reality doesn’t guarantee the futures I can dream up.
The world is messy, it is unclean, and it is dirty. There are no hard edges and no fine lines —none that anyone respects, anyway— and I doubt I’d be any better off if there were. I don’t know if I’d be very good at all at navigating the few tightrope-threads I’ve tried to pick out that get anywhere close. A tightrope needs slack to be navigable; I cannot abide slack; we do not fit.
I don’t fit. I really want to fit. Or I really want to want to fit. After a certain point, you can’t really tell the difference.
Links
An article on Robert Caro, describing what it looks like to craft a purportedly inimitable Lyndon B. Johnson tome, is a taste of what I’d expect a textual Jiro Dreams of Sushi to read like.
A profile of a construction maven —the fastest such— is inspiring in its creativity and thoroughness: maybe there’s more we can do, and we’re just not getting it done.
The blogger Scott Alexander, in Who By Very Slow Decay, a short description of just how we die: with a hell of a lot of pain, generally. It’s lyrical. It’s important.
Post-Script: I apologize for the tone of this one and the less-than-hinged nature of some of it; I wrote it out quickly; I didn’t want to lose the feeling. Feel free to unsubscribe, obviously; if this is what you want to read more of, you might want to read this. Either way, I welcome your feedback in whatever form you choose to give it.
Next week, a less frenetic meditation. Hopefully, I’ll see you then. Best wishes.