Introduction
Overview
You will die with regret. The reason is you will not ask the right questions.
What is the meaning of this all? Why do we do anything? Why do we work in the jobs we do? What defines us as humans? What path should we take in life? Is the world a constant state of what it should be, or are we far from the truth?
We have many questions and no answers. Humans have long, yet short lives and few ever question what the purpose of it is. We can not live correctly if we don’t know why we are here. This is important not only so that we move in the right direction and interact with the world in the right way daily, but also because our experiences and actions define our end. People don’t care about the little things, we just want it to have meaning. But we don’t define meaning until it's too late.
What would be the result if you played a board game without an understanding of the rules and how to win? Not only would it be an empty experience, but you would wander aimlessly throughout. Humans should not live their lives this way.
People should take more time to explore what their values and end goals are. In the following essays, I will attempt to do so on a fundamental level. This is an inherently personal thing, but maybe my experiences will be a proxy of others’.
The following essays (this being the second) will look at life in first principles. They will attempt to answer what life is, which direction we should live it, how we find that direction, and what that means for me.
This Essay
In the previous essay, we established that humans are hardwired to expand and grow. We will dive deeper into this theme in this essay. The modus operandi for humans accomplishing this is now much more logical and we have yet to adapt to our world. Maybe we are just moths flying to the light of life, but maybe we can understand ourselves more deeply.
The following text will explore what striving is and how we determine our values and meaning. What is our will, does it choose us, or do we have a say in this?
I don’t have the time to edit and make this good, so you’re going to have to deal with it.
1. Striving
Humans need resistance.
Greek mythology brought us Sisyphus, which perhaps best captures the human condition. “Left by fate with no other options, Sisyphus revolts in the only way he can—by accepting his absurd situation, joyfully shouldering his burden and making his ascent once again.”
His fate can only be considered tragic because he understands it and has no hope for reprieve. At the same time, the lucidity he achieves with this understanding also places him above his fate. Albert Camus, who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, writes, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
So maybe even if through exploration of purpose, we find no end, perhaps the recognition of this can actually be an overcoming in itself. Man will find a way.
But what resistance should we endure/what game do we play? Should we choose it?
Fast forward to other Philosophers’ takes that I have an attempted grasp of and Nietzche diverges from Schopenhauer’s ascetic ideal of denying our nature. Around the same time, Dostoevsky offers an open-ended but more embracing alternative of creating our own rules to play this game.
Nietzche’s seems to be the most natural, but Dostoevsky offers more color to an otherwise black-and-white-feeling philosophy.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">After finishing, a summary of Nietzche’s “Genealogy of Morals”<br><br>What some consider to be his magnum opus. <a href="
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We used religion as a plug before
Nietzche had his worries. He saw that in the past, we covered the meaningless with religion. The argument goes as follows:
Base assumption: man, like any other animal, has no purpose. The moral systems we’ve been fed have been created by those with power to keep power. The village leader of 10 people says “No! Bad!” because a particular action erodes the glue of the system (and his power over it). Rules become laws to direct people into social conformity that is beneficial for the system. Systems live and die based on their ability to maintain order. Those that live on, pass on their genetic code in the form of morals.
It is insufficient to simply recognize this lack of purpose, it is actually harmful. Nihilism unguided leads to man being lost in his world, and then to suicidal tendencies. He suffers from the void of his own meaning. The problem is the end. Why does man suffer? He will not suffer aimlessly, there must be a meaning. In fact, man invites suffering and often runs towards it. Of this era, Dostoevsky also writes, “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.”
Asceticism and religion provided man with a double-barreled solution to the void.
First, pegging meaning to an eternal salvation not visible in this world and attainable only after this life. Daily suffering is promised to be a temporary hurdle for infinite bliss. Man submits.
Second, providing man the framework for him to purposefully suffer worldly suffering for the aforementioned salvation through doctrine and scripture on how to live the good life. A “how-to” manual. It is a cheap trick. You must accept this infinite power you cannot comprehend. Suffering in this world is prescribed for infinite bliss in the afterlife. Or hell if you fall out of line! Man is backed into a corner to accept.
Nietzche closes this loop with insisting that rather than feel guilt for morals created arbitrarily, man should let his instincts take hold in his natural will to power. Not to say be primitive, but to strive, for it is neither ugly nor beautiful but man’s truth. Joy is not a real feeling and not what man seeks. Man seeks an expansion of the self, an overcoming, a will to power. Joy is only the byproduct of seeing his power increase.
Religion is understandable
The date is January 16, 2023, Martin Luther King Day. Walking through Greenwich looking for a coffee shop, I came across Our Lady of Pompeii church. I am catholic but abandoned my faith in my youth. I do admit that the smartest people I know are religious, so I never leave it out of the question. Curiosity dragged me through the cathedral’s wooden doors, and I was welcomed by tall dimly lit ceilings and what may have been the Halo theme song playing over the speakers.
At that moment, I understood. I didn’t believe, but I understood. In an existential period where one is looking for answers, and where answers seem to only open doors to more questions, all of them with substance impossible to handle, like trying to grasp sand and it running right through your fingers or trying to capture the finity of cellular automata.
But in that sublime moment, where you feel like you are seeing both the depths of history and the suffering of man embodied in the cross, accompanied by the kind, accepting, and forgiving vigil, you understand. At some point, man looking for answers becomes the previously described mouse swimming in the jar. The relief comes from submitting to not knowing and giving up the pathetic effort trying to swim. Submitting to the Bible and Christ’s open arms. Something infinitely greater than yourself. Religion provides man with his end.
But I ain’t no bitch. I will never take the blue pill. So I went on looking for answers.
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” “And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” - John 8:32
Back to Nietzche’s will to power: what it implies
Nietzche has a bad stigma, and I don’t think it’s deserved. People unacquainted with Nietzsche’s writings interpret the idea of the “will to power” crudely. But Nietzsche is not thinking only or even primarily of the motivations behind people like Napoleon or Hitler who expressly seek military and political power. In fact, he typically applies the theory subtly. Nietzsche argues that causing pain is generally less valuable than showing kindness and suggests that cruelty, because it is the inferior option, is a sign that one lacks power. I feel the term “influence” makes more sense to me than power in his writings.
Humans are inherently selfish. So when Nietzche says man is doing something for another, in providing value, this is but a hidden conduit to receiving commendation, and is thus selfish. Even donating to feel good is selfish. But then again, selfish is not the right word, it is possible to do something for the self that is beneficial for others. In fact, I’m sure it is just the only way our genetic code can incentivize good behavior–through some neurotransmitter mechanism of action. There’s simply no way to wire the brain for altruism without some sort of reward. It may be possible to rewire the brain to not think this way, but this is man’s natural tendency–to increase influence.
Will to power seen all around us
Anyone striving for anything is exercising their will to power.Groups like effective altruism are funny with this. They want to make a lot of money, so they can use it to do the most good? You want influence. You want to change the world? You want to exert influence on it. I don’t think this influence is always bad for others. It can be good. So one does good and feels good about it. This isn’t a shame for this “good” human behavior. This is the better alternative that Nietzche mentions rather than power through inflicting suffering.
This isn’t even a bad thing. You can want things selfishly that help others. Nietzche just wants us to come to terms with our human condition. Systems of old discouraged selfishness and said it was “bad” to protect each other from greed. It is only seemingly capitalism that offers a societal structure to harness this human will to power. But we should always remember there is no good and bad, only our truth, how we perceive the world’s first principles.
Takeaway-work in a particular direction
Striving, expansion of the self, and self-overcoming are goals that I can live with. I’ve done it all my life, albeit somewhat blindly, and that striving has brought me fulfillment. But I recognize that the striving and competition is always relative. Humans are envious. If you peg your worth to your bank account, it is going to be hard to be happy. It is likely you will never win. But the competition is also fulfilling in a sense. If you are always trying to be a better you, you actually do improve. But why is it that things have been so unclear to me lately? The answer may be very simple.
Fulfillment comes from longer-term joys
There is a sliding scale between Oscar Wilde’s hedonism and Jesus’s asceticism. The difference between indulging in your human pleasures and denying oneself for the sake of self-piousness. Likely something we choose for ourselves; however, people on average feel most fulfilled when they ignore short term pleasures to invest in work or suffering in the aspiration of some longer-term goal. Nietzche, buddhist, and seemingly the majority converge on taking “the middle way”-- a path that is neither extreme nor lax.
Paul Graham says it well.
“Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.”
What to work on?
I used to work hard for the sake of working hard. Now I work to end up with a certain valuable accomplishment. My time is more valuable to me now–probably just an earned luxury. This can be self-overcoming, creating the change I want to see in the world, or any will to power really. You will need to work hard to do this well.
What do we want to accomplish?
This is where it starts getting individualized and personal. Money isn’t really the goal, capitalism does an imperfect job at harnessing human competitiveness. It is an imperfect proxy for value provided. If there are parallel universes where capitalism rewards artisticness, being poorly dressed, or being clumsy, those would be highly idealized traits. We could easily have different values as a society, but that is the unknown for us. As a derivation from this, we can see that people are innately interested in things that expand themselves relative to the societies in which they live, so we know that our interests aren’t always ours (*Insert Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory).
Imagine if we lived in a village of 50 people. This is a heuristic i've started to use as it clears a lot of the complexity of society and is more in line with what we’re developed for. We would likely be interested in things that helped the group, and we would really only know the cultural ideals that the group embraced. We would innovate to develop new tools that would provide higher crop yields, and would develop new warmer clothes. I think that while blurry, the things we do today are an extension of this–at least for me. I am naturally drawn to innovation not for the money’s sake (although it’s of course always at the back of your mind), but because I want to create better things for myself, which is often applicable to others–and so value is conceived.
If someone offered me millions to work on something that brought me no fulfillment, I probably just wouldn’t do it. It’s not worth a wasted life to me, I can’t be bought like that. Many are the same but will only realize it after being offered the check.
Some people are individual
Some people are vain, while others are individual. Wall Street acts as a microcosm of capitalism, vanity, and materialist people working hard to achieve things that they only want because others do. Silicon Valley is a bit of the same, but it is closer towards individualism and creativity, with nerdy founders that don’t even care about the money at times.
I’m thinking particularly of the artist, the creative, the innovator, the Nobel Prize winner who worked in a field that no one cared about, but was of great interest to the scientist for an unknown reason. These independent few often have an outsized impact on society.
There are craftsmen, artisans, and the Eleanor Rigbys that work just to master their craft, “darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there.” Probably on average, these people “achieve” less material wealth in the eyes of society, because they are interested in some thing that provides less value to society. They’re disconnected! Maladapted! However, when that thing ends up being in an area that becomes the internet, bitcoin, CRISPR/Ca9, the Mac, Google, suddenly they don’t look so misguided.
What interests these people - it may not be arbitrary
What is interesting about these things to these people. I have a feeling that it is not some arbitrary feeling, but a subliminal phenomenon that signals something. Often, we are interested in things that provide value to us. When Bill Gates was enthralled with the computer, he was at least partly interested because he saw its potential to change the world. When I look inward, these interests of mine in network states, circular RNA, etc. usually arise because I see massive opportunity to create the world that I want to live in. These areas provide me with some signals of the future.
In this sense, people are somewhat interested in their “truth.”
So you have to pick up on some dim signal that people haven’t identified as a nascent big wave that’s about to change the world, but you also have to be correct about that thing. The problem is that it is highly likely you are going to be wrong, the further along the innovation curve you are (see picture). Innovators are almost always wrong, but when they’re right, they’re well-prepared to take advantage of a massive market opportunity and vice versa for the laggards.
As a society, we are starting to move in the direction of innovators, there’s more things to make, exponential growth! Young people have not adjusted for this change yet and jump into boring old stagnant industries. Tech is growing. I think people would be surprised to learn how much they could accomplish if they dove into a random interest of theirs.
More people should question their truth
So you need to choose what is important to you. If you want to be rewarded monetarily, you will need to attune to create value for the societal machine in which we live. I also notice that this innovation curve just doesn’t interest a lot of people, but it interests me to get in early and bring forth large technological change to society. This is an extension of my ideal to work not for the sake of work, but to make sure my time is best spent to create the most outsized value.
Some people are interested in things for the sake of the thing, but what I’ve noticed is that most people are interested in things mimetically. What’s interesting to me is people usually get what they want if they work for it. But people don’t take the question to think these things through. This framework really isn’t that difficult.
It’s probably a function of continuously moving in the right direction. You will have a blurry outlook. Then you will gain some understanding by mulling over your problems, then determining how to get to the next leg of the step function of success, then working impossibly hard to create value according to it.
Conclusion
Just follow your interests and be the change you want to see in the world, it may lead to more success than all this other predefined career bullshit.
But this is more difficult than this. Sometimes, you actually have to be a part of the system in order to reach your ideal of success and surrounding yourself intentionally with the right people.
CONTINUED….
Why do we like things / truth
In the context of the will to power and mimetic theory, we either like things because they increase our influence or because other people desire them and we fail to question the integrity of this assumption that we naturally assimilate. But I don’t think this answers everything. If people are only interested in things that increase their power, why do people like things that don’t seem to offer society or themselves any benefit? And if people only like things that others desire, then why did I join the chess team in high school?
A lot of times, people are interested in things for the sake of the sake of it. Like crypto, blockchain, soccer, computers, the internet. Often, before it is clear that these things will expand to the enormous things we know today. Sometimes, these solve a genuine problem for the person. Why does circular RNA interest me? It’s not like I have any use for it. Why do we like cool shit? This is creative shit. Shit that isn’t clear has an impact on society. On the other hand, without people working on cool shit, we wouldn’t have bitcoin. We should work on cool shit.
Cool shit seems to stoke my curiosity. Curiosity is a powerful force, one that I think of when I think of play and creativity, exercises we do the most when we’re young. But some people play for their entire lives. Perhaps they don’t let society structure them.
I’m struggling with the symbols and words to use here. I almost think that passions and doing what you love are mischaracterizations of what brings us the most fulfillment. At the moment, I am tinkering with using the word “truth.” It is not clear to me that what people want to work on is some arbitrary thing that they were predestined to gravitate towards. Why do they gravitate towards it? Most of the time, the interest doesn’t amount to anything, but some of the time that interest was some intuitive part of your brain moving you in the correct direction–so maybe you shouldn’t question but just accept it. I assumed it was because this is something that helps them understand the world. It solves some problem in the world that may or may not be determinate. Thinking about this problem as if you were in a village of 150 people, what would interest you? Art and beauty? Engineering a pipeline that improves crop yield? Are they intertwined? Would it depend on the person?
Let’s try first principles thinking, climbing each rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Why do we like certain foods? Probably because our dopamine centers recognize that some tastes can be attributed to certain very important substances like sugar that improve our likelihood of survival and it rewards us for it. Once you start getting a lack of potassium, your body will start liking avocados more. Why do we like people? Well, we don’t like everyone. We don’t like people that detract from our power or assholes. Why do we like certain tools? Because they help us accomplish more and expand our scope, efficiency, and power. But here is where first principles starts to fail me.
Why do we like certain activities? I’m not sure I quite have an answer for why humans may like soccer or drawing. Why do we like certain ideas? Somewhat a weird question in itself. Why do we have more positive ideas towards some other ideas? Ideas of situations or worlds where our power is greater? But what about self-sacrifice and martyrship? We assume that this is a continuation of the trend. These ideas may be our truth? I’m not sure. A funny thought experiment is why we like certain ideas of ideas. And it is somewhat a relief to express ourselves through this truth.
I will revisit this, but I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:
This is actually a surprisingly enlightening answer. I don’t think it paints an entire picture, but it provides some of the scenery.
It isn’t often that art is created in a vacuum. Often, art is a response to the world. The world is a puzzle with unsolved edges that is never fully-solved, but the act of trying is our human condition, and try we do.
Innovation and art is an expanding fractal stain in which human consciousness takes up some space. A cartograph of the universe. Realistically, it is infinitely small, but to us such a broad and abstract thing. It’s quite beautiful. The edges are where things are changing.
Learning
If you imagine starting at the origin, smack dab in the middle of the above picture, it is simply not feasible to map out our current map. So learning is human’s catching up to speed so that they understand the map of what we know today, with the hope of charting new territory one day. On the edge of understanding, where things are blurry, people are solving problems and reducing complexity into abstract frameworks for the next generation to take and run with. The invention of the logic gate was a layer of abstraction necessary for ushering in computation, which was necessary for ushering in the information age, which was necessary for… and so the world moves forward.
Art is the same, it is synthesizing what has been done, questioning what is possible, and raising the bar.
In the below passage from “THE AESTHETICS OF SILENCE”, Susan Sontag frames the historic purpose of art. She describes it as a form of understanding ourselves. It’s seemingly a less tangible version of scientific understanding, but it is still a process of understanding through experimentation and questioning. We know that no animals do “art.” Art is likely some of the highest order processing of the human mind, a new adaptation. Creativity. A different side of the same coin of truth.
Following on the promotion of the arts into "art" comes the leading myth [theory] about art, that
of the "absoluteness" of the artist's activity. In its first, more unreflective version, this
myth considered art as an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to
know itself. (The critical principles generated by this myth were fairly easily arrived at:
some expressions were more complete, more ennobling, more informative, richer than
others.) The later version of the myth posits a more complex, tragic relation of art to
consciousness.
It is this reason that I think we are all playing the same fundamental game of learning, understanding, and raising the bar through whatever modality people resonate with.
Coming from a school with a lot of accounting majors, I’ve noticed that a lot of people prefer to live a life without questioning at all. I’m not sure why some people do and some people do not chase truth. Perhaps it’s genetic and behavioral as most things can be described. But it often comes down to curiosity.
Are they simply other people’s desires?
This is a process of accepting and rejecting ideas. What do you agree with? This is once again the scientific method. Science is objective, and art is “subjective.” I imagine that Philosophy picks up where art leaves off and science picks up where philosophy leaves off.
The wall of coffee tables is closing in on me. I should live in the world for two years and just do things that I think are cool. Break down the wall of coffee tables that have me calculating what I need to do, and simply do what is right. The ubermensch prevails! You need to go back and really question everything you believe in according to your own value system. But what is my value system. It seems the peak value system may just be truth, a trend we are seeing more of in society. Necessary to configure the end first and work out how to get there. The pervasive question that cuts into everything that interests me is “how will I be rewarded for this?” I do not want to end up poor and discarded. I don’t want to be the garbage man. If I was raised in communism, I probably wouldn’t peg my goals to how I will be rewarded monetarily for them. With that said, I prefer this system. But maybe it is a better thing to disconnect from society, and live the life that you think is true. If you solve a problem that you have, others are likely to have the same. Don’t be afraid to be yourself, to ask the question in class, others who aren’t raising their hand have the same one. If people at first don’t agree with you, then take the path less traveled and shine a light so bright that they have no choice but to follow.
The thing that I am very grateful for is my experience with Nephra and Quant. Through founding these organizations, I realized it didn’t seem like work. I know that there are a lot of people out there that found organizations because it’s the cool thing to do, but that’s not why I did it.
If you ask people what they want to do, they will readily reply, “I want to be an entrepreneur.” If they say this, ask them “well, what is your preneur.” People associate the word “entrepreneur" with being rich and famous. People don’t actually want to solve the problems and certainly don’t have the grit to stare failure in the eye for years on end.
Breaking the mold
Break the mold. The only reason you should start a company is to quite literally be the change you want to see in the world. Sometimes it is just some side project that people think is interesting, like Yahoo, Gmail, etc. Often people are just following their truth, doing something they think is cool or merely solving a problem for themselves and it turns out other people have the same problem! This is something I feel like I’ve lost lately. Between learning the correct way to format and subject an email, the world has become hidden behind a wall of coffee tables. Coffee tables that have no real substance. But they are now a part of my psyche and dig their heels into my perception of the world.
This is where Peter Thiel, who has been having an increasing impact on my personal philosophy, comes into play. He was actually a student of Girard at Stanford and has often cited the impact that mimesis has had on his investment framework and the decision to invest in social networks, which seemed to be mimesis at scale. Thiel talks about how all his life he was competitively tracked from high school → Stanford → Law School → Big Law Firm (that everyone on the outside was trying to get in and everyone on the outside was trying to get out). Peter then left after 7 months and began paving his own path. The problem with competition is that it is zero-sum. So we have smart minds working on already solved problems, which I have applied information theory to.
Nuance
Now, I think there may be a bit of a nuance to this. Thiel doesn’t say that he would go on to change anything looking backwards. It’s hard to make that call, he would just tell himself to ask more questions on why he was doing things.
That is also the point in my writing this. I am grateful for where I am and the ride so far. It is true that in our society, the way people view you and your experiences determine others’ impression of you. It is a signal that I went to the University of Illinois that I’m not a total mess-up. With that said, it is not clear that the benefit of my education was in the coursework, but in the exposure to different ideas and geographical density of smart people. It was not worth the sticker price. Thiel also talks about the idea that college may not be a consumption good, it may not be an investment, but it may be an insurance product, which makes the most sense to me as well. Go to college in order to ensure that you do not fall through the cracks of society. It would likely be impossible for me to work in investment banking if I didn’t go to school. This isn’t something I agree with, but it is an artifact of an older world that we have to deal with. College is also a structured way to learn a large body of codified knowledge, but it could be more reasonable to just take Coursera courses.
I think I probably would have figured out a way to be successful if I didn’t go to college, but I can’t be sure. I think that I always saw college and the first year of work as the most important to act as a stamp on your resume that you aren’t a societal reject and as a form of validation.
Mimesis definition
René Girard, a philosopher from Stanford and one of the most influential thinkers of our time, founded mimetic theory. Mimesis refers to human desire, which Girard thought was not linear but the product of a mimetic process in which people imitate models who endow objects with value.
Why we like things summary
I already wrote about why we like things from an intrinsic point as they align with our reward system, but mimesis says something different. Mimesis says that humans don’t question things enough, and rather defer to the herd of people to determine what they want. They are probably correct, right? I will assume they are and work to get what they want. I want to remind myself that the point of this long, wandering passage is not to understand why we like soccer, but why we have any tendencies towards certain things at the odds of other things. This is important for understanding what we choose to peg our will to power to. It is important to consider whether your desires are not your own a la mimetic theory. This may be unhinging at first, until you realize that you can take a step back and rehinge your will to power in an objective “you”, “interest”, “passion”, “or truth.” Surrounding yourself with smart people in an area you believe in and then continuing to work in that area. This is also important because in a world of capitalism, the area you spend your time on may have varying market sizes. If this is truly about your “will to power,” the question must be answered whether you should purposefully have interests in ways that make money.
What drove me in my youth?
Well first, when we were really young, we would play. What is the evolutionary role of play? There is this convention that work and play should be separate. Every one of my interests to date, I can trace back to a play in my youth, no matter how inconsequential it seemed at the time. Play is often associated with meaninglessness, but when I play, it’s usually things that are interesting to me. I’m often learning in it. I’m often being creative. Play seems to be a form of learning. Sure there was soccer, but even that built discipline. It’s how you channel your play.
Sometimes people view play as this sort of thing where your parents go, “you can’t play all day, eventually you need to work.” I’m starting to think this is a crab bucket mentality. Of course some people find ways to play and work simultaneously. Because it is possible, you should, too.
It’s important to recognize that some people may actually fall into spirals of pleasure. Paul Graham puts it this way
“But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.”
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.”
There’s even a term for this. It’s called hedonistic adaptation, and I’m sure it’s not a surprising concept to most. This is an important concept from earlier as well, actually. This is why man does not fear suffering. A man who suffers, just learns to be happy with that level of suffering. Humans overcome. Contrary to what many believe, Nietzche was not a proponent of hedonism. Nor was he a proponent of asceticism, which he saw as self destructive.
Nietzsche instead advocated for a "Dionysian" way of life, in which one embraces their instincts, desires and passions, but in a way that leads to self-overcoming and self-creation, rather than self-destruction and self-denial. He believed that by embracing one's instincts and desires in a healthy and controlled way, one could transcend their current limitations and become a "superman" or "Übermensch."
How to do what you love - Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
In my youth, it’s not clear that I was mimetic, but I think that is just a product of having mental white space and neuroplasticity. Going back to the genealogy of morals here, we live in this world and accept it as it is, and it is hard to imagine that it could be very different, but it could be. It could be so radically different that it is not even possible to imagine as our imagination is subliminally built upon our understanding of the world as it is today. We are virtually all the same person, less minor differences. In our youth, we joined the herd, whether we knew it or not. Even global cultures are likely widely different to others seen throughout history. I’m not sure I agree that there are no instinctual good and evil, because motherly instinct and empathy are likely evolutionary adaptations, but it is clear why Hitler gravitated towards his writings. Naziism arose with surprisingly little questioning of its morality, despite the behavior being antithetical to religious and cultural norms. Sure, some people didn’t know about the horrors, but there are stories of crowds cheering as jews were beaten to death in the streets. Communes and cults of the past show that crazy seeds of ideas can be planted into the masses.
There’s this quote by Ye that I think about a lot, “Simulation: a two-year-old jumps on a coffee table and someone says, ‘That’s a coffee table, don’t jump on that!’ So it went from being something that makes him feel like Superman, he’s got his cape on, to something where he has to think about — this person is like a family member he doesn’t like anyway — he’s two years old, he doesn’t give a shit about a coffee or a table. And he’s starting to like calculate all these things. And by the time you are 40 years old, you’ve got a wall full of coffee tables calculating you into traffic, calculating you into your career choice, calculating you into this house, townhouse that’s not quite as big as the townhouse next [to it], and it just never works. That’s the simulation that I’m talking about. That’s what I mean when I say simulation.”
Artists seem to be the archetype of people who escape this psychological principle of functional fixedness. Refusing to see a hammer as just a hammer, but as first principles. It’s funny that artists see the world similarly to physicists. This is creativity, a chase of mapping out our truth. A psychological test to pry creativity out of a person is to ask them to list as many widely different things in a 20 second time period: a house, sun, love, straw. It’s harder than you would think!
Artists refuse to be bogged down by conventionality. They reject it. They seek the truth in their own way. But again, it is NOT easy to be creative. You are swimming upstream. You are going to be wrong most of the time. Convention is convention for a reason, it’s consensus. But of course the herd can be wrong. Artists will be ignored, rejected, then argued with, then people will submit they’re right. People do not accept change. The natural tendency of man is to reject the artist. Sad thing really. Artists push the edge into the adjacent possible. Society rarely rewards artists, and they often just end up being martyrs. By the way, I’m not reducing artists to the classical sense of a dude throwing paint at a wall. Artists are everywhere. Startup founders are artists. Philosophers are artists. Scientists are artists. Anyone seeking the adjacent possible is an artist. Another example of how these lousy words/symbols we use in the human language do not quite capture these fundamental truths. I’m also not sure that being a successful artist is just some form of creativity, which is highly tied to IQ. Most people don’t think that artists have determination, they assume it’s natural talent.
“The funny thing about determination is that after a while it starts to look like talent” - Paul Graham, a hacker and a painter.
Some artists are still mimetic though. In fact, mimesis seems a necessary exercise in creating art. You need to take various concepts of convention and accept what you deem true, reject what you don’t agree with, synthesize the ingredients into something new which may be better. Humans are rarely breakthrough creative. We think we are, but no one can see the thousands of iterations that went into the singular abstraction that we now know as a lightbulb. I’ve been reading up on Hamming’s journey into computers. It’s a hidden truth that it took hundreds of years of humanity’s greatest minds just to get a machine the size of a building to calculate simple addition, but that is often what it takes to get the ball rolling.
Naval says, “Mercenaries work for money. Missionaries build for others. Artists create for themselves.”
What is your truth?
Truthfully, this wall of coffee tables has started to bog me down lately. It makes sense why this exists. It is a shortcut for how to behave in this world. If you play by the rules, it isn’t risky, you’ll end up fine. Oftentimes, if you step off the beaten path you will actually be punished through small things like not getting into college, then not getting that good job, then not running the big company. To rethink everything that we do on a day to day basis and why we do it is quite paralyzing. It’s so much easier to just go with the flow. So it’s not necessarily correct to go into isolation, and it’s not necessarily right to be one with the herd. What is one to do? I’m starting to think you just need to place yourself in the correct herds. I’m not sure it’s correct to see the world as determinate or indeterminate.
The butterfly effect applies very nicely here. We assume that at any snapshot or state in history, reality is captured in time. But the future increases in entropy and indeterminacy. The farther you go out, the more impossible it is to see what it holds. Finance classes in University told me that the core of portfolio theory is to diversify, because the markets hold systemic risk, the markets are efficient! Bullshit. The older I get, the more I trust myself in having convictions of the world. I keep having this underlying question in the back of my head. Sometimes I am wrong, sometimes I am right. If you can be 51% correct consistently as a portfolio manager, you will make a lot of money. Is the future determinate or indeterminate? It depends on how many data points you have to draw a conclusion.
Okay, here starts some problems. Right now, everyone is buzzing about AI. That means it may not be an area where you will have an outsized impact, because your efforts will be diluted by competition. Software seems to continue to eat the world. But there is some randomness to this. No one could have predicted the insane growth of the internet in the early 90s. Again, humans have a really hard time thinking exponentially. Who could have predicted to study computer sciences so that you can be ready for the wave. The people who were ready for it were just genuinely interested in it. They were artists, they were the innovators, even before the early adopters on the S-curve.
But there is also the question of why bits expanded in the triumph of the internet so much more than the atoms of other areas of innovation. I have my theories. For instance, it’s fucking impossible to start a biotech company in terms of regulation, capital expenditures, and expertise. Software has so much operating leverage that you can fuck up and still ship product.
When I was in high school, my favorite quote was Robert Frost’s “Two paths diverged in the wood. I took the path less traveled and that has made all the difference.” I genuinely believe this is the way to go. But there is the question of specialization and broadness.
And the question of doing both.
And the question of gradually making choices based on intuition.
What even are our interests. Sometimes the young people with ideas are just going to be right. They are at the edges with the ideas. I was always interested in biotech, not PE. I’m very happy to have chosen the path that I did. Think the only times that I believe I’ve made the wrong choice are the times I’ve listened to others. Everyone always says that you need to have a passion for it. It shouldn’t be about the money. It should just be about being the change you want to see in the world and working really hard. You can only connect the dots at the end of your career.
But what if your truth is being a barista. This has always seemed so inconceivable to me. What is my truth and what is the solid core of it. Why are we interested in anything? What is play? We should continue to play. That is the only way.
But it also seems like there’s some merit to continuing to solve harder problems, you can’t bite off more than you can chew. You have to scale your power at a decent pace. But how does one measure this. Hopping onto a rocket ship? Just following your truth?
Often, this is the edges of the fractals stain that we call change and innovation. Where are the smartest and hardest working people? I would guess that this is a surprisingly good predictor of what the next century will hold. Often, someone will say something, and I will accept it as fact. Until I think about it again later when I am alone to realize it’s complete horse shit. But we abide by this wall of coffee tables, it hurts our confidence, too. Kyle theory.
Indeed, I firmly believe the only way to break down this wall of coffee tables is to spend time alone. It forces you to think for yourself. This is a careful balance, sometimes I let my mind wander and it wanders outside the bounds of reality. We need to check ourselves with people around us sometimes so that we know when we are going off in the wrong direction. I think this is how some people lose their mind and become disconnected from reality. If you spend too much time alone, your concept of how you should act and social norms begins to unravel. Being around others is important because it reminds us how to be human.
In the artificial world that is the public education system, things become menacingly mimetic. I remember that in middle school, I got made fun of for the shorts and socks that I wore? But the painful thing about this period is you think that’s what life is. You are in this jail for most of your time and you don’t really know what you’re doing there. You can’t really question it. Your mind is incredibly impressionable. I then thought it was a rule of life that you shouldn’t wear high socks!
And you’re also supposed to be learning things? Why? Noone ever told me why. Except one time that I was told to stay in school by a garbage man or I would become like him. That had a surprising impact on me. Thank you, garbage man.
But when you’re younger, you play for the sake of play. Then that became soccer, which I became competitive in, but it isn’t clear that I was competing out of mimetic desire. It felt intrinsic.
Second semester of high school was the first time I was aware that this was a competition. There was this thing called college and it really mattered which one you went to! I obsessively researched schools like Princeton and what the acceptance criteria was. After I received a C in Honors Geometry first semester and after calculating that this alone almost left me out of the race for a competitive academic program, I was horrified.
From that day on, things changed. I was not going to end up as a garbage man. In this case, it was more clear that I was being mimetic. I never questioned the meaning of life. All that I knew was that GPA, extracurriculars, friends, and the like were all that defined my identity.
But even in times like these, I would learn because I was interested in the material. While my friends just wanted the good grade, I would focus more on the material, even to the detriment of my grades. I definitely didn’t join the chess club because it was the popular thing to do! And most of my time was spent playing chess rather than studying. I caught some of the worst senioritis out of my entire class. I think that I always knew school was a bit artificial. I even had times where I questioned going to college, which is pretty much heresy in middle class white america.
When we are children,
The reason capitalism seems to have held up so well is that it provides uncapped opportunity of people to seek their will to power *in this lifetime*, essentially unleashing human drive. It offers the infinite frontier, which I will touch on more later.
What is my truth? What is my play? I think my truth and what I’m interested in is always to be the change I want to see in the world. We get to caught up in how big the world is. I think you just need to love the world. And want it to be better for human beings. Love. We really do need to submit to our instincts. Love. Bettering the community. Helping others. What is my problem with this. My problem is that it is a selfish thing to want to create value for others, so by creating value for others, I am really bettering myself–-god the absurdity of reality.
Okay, so we are to expand and grow our power. Sure, I can vibe with that. Then the question is what do we choose to be our game. And we are always playing relatively, this creates envy in mimesis. You shouldn’t solve problems too small and you shouldn’t take a bite of an apple too big. Oh and you also shouldn’t even think about this too often. You should submit to your game and only after you level up can you start to think bigger. If you fail, and people do, you just need to be honest with yourself.
So I think you can make marginal decisions as you go throughout life. Like annual checks. Assuming information stays relatively constant, you can always look back to your ledger of accord. Once you have made that decision, you submit to that game. It is now your truth. If the information changes you can change. But your truth is simply a reflection of available information.
The only problem is when you are half-in, half-out.
Okay but the question is you are picking these minibattles in order to strive for something at the end of the tunnel, right? … I almost don’t think you can ever think about the end. Even if you solve aging, then what? If you get rich, then what? It has to be an infinite game. Making a lot of money? I’m actually surprisingly open to this shallow goal. It’s a scoreboard to submit to. But what are the alternatives? Buehler…
You need an internal compass. A scoreboard of some sense in which to peg your decision-making to. Values. A corporate mission/vision statement.