I find myself wanting to fight with this post. I just spent a lot of effort trying to just do good things and not lotus eat too much, and I’m in a place where I’m on the edge of deciding to just change stories and maybe let mine end the way everyone else’s do—getting old, living well, and then dying despite it all; or perhaps dying young of a doomsday device—if the rest of the transhumanists can’t pick up the slack.
(For those for whom I need to constantly track my need to give signals of continuing effort, I haven’t given up, this isn’t anything we haven’t talked about.)
I don’t know what I want, and to my tired intuition, having just spent a long time trying to save the lotus for later (I say knowing I’m feeling sort of reactive and burned by reading this despite maybe it being intended to avoid making me feel that way), it feels like a call to action to just put the lotus down and work for another 20 years—not that long, says the call to action! - and then you can rest and be comfortable.
And dammit, I want to rest now, I want to just be happy now, I want to be able to think about what kind of open world video game I’d really like to design, I want to learn the parts of social skills that don’t matter professionally, I want to learn how to be really good friends.
And I guess I’ll probably still want to work towards actual success, but it feels like my true values were always the short term ones anyway, and my attempts to think long term were always just trying to get more “short term” rewards later, done through a different brain module than the one that generates motor plans.
I haven’t actually fully given up. I’m still keeping the same grand plans, but they’ve been transformed into a plan that has me doing a lot more making-room-to-lotus-eat. Maybe trying to gain benefit from drives that would be lotus-eating, but not avoiding them very hard. Not trying to work myself as hard as humans can work without losing net productivity.
Anyway, Conor, you’re invited to come hang out at my house, if you’re in berkeley. I have eggnog already, it’s basically my favorite drink, we can have some together.
I resonate strongly with this, and want to do whatever I can to validate/dignify/endorse/support you as you wrestle with this problem. One of the reasons I was hesitant to write the post is that, despite the fact that it’s been a useful handle for me, I didn’t want to lean into the more judgmental side of the concept. For instance, I’ve come around to the belief that no one should ever call someone else’s actions “lotus eating,” because that presumes both that you know exactly what plot that person is trying to stay a part of AND that you know, better than them, what balance keeps them alive and kicking longest.
Too much vibrancy, and your life can become about nothing else, but too little and you can crumple under the weight, choke on the dust, stagger slower and slower until there’s just nowhere you can go, not even back.
I don’t know the answer. If, for instance, we were all 99.95% likely to be doomed in the next five years, I actually don’t know whether it would be better in that case to keep on fighting or to eat all the lotuses. I know that the Luke Skywalkers would keep fighting. But I also know that most of us aren’t that. And in many cases, it’s worse than disastrous to think that you are that and find out you’re wrong. It’s like being handicapped, but not so badly that you can’t rock climb, and discovering the limits of your disability only once you’re dangling from a tiny spur 500 feet up.
I will say that my sense of you leads me to trust you and your judgment. None of us have our heads screwed on completely straight, but I think you’re running processes that will eventually cause you to output the right answers. So if there’s anything actionable in this, for you, it’s … take my reassurance, for whatever it’s worth, that if your systems are outputting “stop trying for a while and just learn what it’s like to be human again” … that’s probably right, and ego te absolvo?
As for “making more room to lotus eat,” I don’t think it is lotus eating, in the case you describe, any more than searching for the perfect gift or running after someone in the rain is lotus eating in a romance. In the thing you describe, you are doing what you’re supposed to do, and those actions aren’t removing you from anything.
Lastly, I can’t take you up on your eggnog offer, as I don’t actually exist, but I did appreciate it, and wished I could say yes.
I find myself wanting to fight with this post. I just spent a lot of effort trying to just do good things and not lotus eat too much, and I’m in a place where I’m on the edge of deciding to just change stories and maybe let mine end the way everyone else’s do—getting old, living well, and then dying despite it all; or perhaps dying young of a doomsday device—if the rest of the transhumanists can’t pick up the slack.
(For those for whom I need to constantly track my need to give signals of continuing effort, I haven’t given up, this isn’t anything we haven’t talked about.)
I don’t know what I want, and to my tired intuition, having just spent a long time trying to save the lotus for later (I say knowing I’m feeling sort of reactive and burned by reading this despite maybe it being intended to avoid making me feel that way), it feels like a call to action to just put the lotus down and work for another 20 years—not that long, says the call to action! - and then you can rest and be comfortable.
And dammit, I want to rest now, I want to just be happy now, I want to be able to think about what kind of open world video game I’d really like to design, I want to learn the parts of social skills that don’t matter professionally, I want to learn how to be really good friends.
And I guess I’ll probably still want to work towards actual success, but it feels like my true values were always the short term ones anyway, and my attempts to think long term were always just trying to get more “short term” rewards later, done through a different brain module than the one that generates motor plans.
I haven’t actually fully given up. I’m still keeping the same grand plans, but they’ve been transformed into a plan that has me doing a lot more making-room-to-lotus-eat. Maybe trying to gain benefit from drives that would be lotus-eating, but not avoiding them very hard. Not trying to work myself as hard as humans can work without losing net productivity.
Anyway, Conor, you’re invited to come hang out at my house, if you’re in berkeley. I have eggnog already, it’s basically my favorite drink, we can have some together.
I resonate strongly with this, and want to do whatever I can to validate/dignify/endorse/support you as you wrestle with this problem. One of the reasons I was hesitant to write the post is that, despite the fact that it’s been a useful handle for me, I didn’t want to lean into the more judgmental side of the concept. For instance, I’ve come around to the belief that no one should ever call someone else’s actions “lotus eating,” because that presumes both that you know exactly what plot that person is trying to stay a part of AND that you know, better than them, what balance keeps them alive and kicking longest.
Too much vibrancy, and your life can become about nothing else, but too little and you can crumple under the weight, choke on the dust, stagger slower and slower until there’s just nowhere you can go, not even back.
I don’t know the answer. If, for instance, we were all 99.95% likely to be doomed in the next five years, I actually don’t know whether it would be better in that case to keep on fighting or to eat all the lotuses. I know that the Luke Skywalkers would keep fighting. But I also know that most of us aren’t that. And in many cases, it’s worse than disastrous to think that you are that and find out you’re wrong. It’s like being handicapped, but not so badly that you can’t rock climb, and discovering the limits of your disability only once you’re dangling from a tiny spur 500 feet up.
I will say that my sense of you leads me to trust you and your judgment. None of us have our heads screwed on completely straight, but I think you’re running processes that will eventually cause you to output the right answers. So if there’s anything actionable in this, for you, it’s … take my reassurance, for whatever it’s worth, that if your systems are outputting “stop trying for a while and just learn what it’s like to be human again” … that’s probably right, and ego te absolvo?
As for “making more room to lotus eat,” I don’t think it is lotus eating, in the case you describe, any more than searching for the perfect gift or running after someone in the rain is lotus eating in a romance. In the thing you describe, you are doing what you’re supposed to do, and those actions aren’t removing you from anything.
Lastly, I can’t take you up on your eggnog offer, as I don’t actually exist, but I did appreciate it, and wished I could say yes.
oh that explains your weird name. seriously basically nobody else has that name
I’m curious who you’re going to turn out to be when you reveal your anonymity
I feel that Nate Soares’s post Rest in Motion is relevant here, and, by extension, my own response to that post.
Your response to it is useful, thank you.