Poorly Engineered Warp-Factors and a Reboot
October 17th, 2009
I noticed that I was often coming up with thoughts that were to me motivational and somewhat novel, and most of the reason for this blog is presenting those thoughts in case anyone else can get some use out of them. This post isn’t really one of those, it’s a personal account but something that might also be helpful. On a side note, looking back on some earlier work, my writing here isn’t quite at the standard I’d envisioned; I think I’m aiming for the emotional climaxes without the necessary development. Hopefully my future posts will improve as I remain mindful of this. Though my earlier work was also a lot longer and I’m trying to keep these posts on the short side. Which, BTW, is something this post probably can’t be.
In the past couple weeks my extreme drive to save the world started to falter, was partially repaired several times, and eventually ground to a halt. It didn’t die; saving the world and working to extend my lifespan by thousands or millions of years are way too important. But I let it sit there on the ground while I’ve been gathering my strength and regaining my original motivations. The reasons for this breakdown/burnout aren’t entirely clear, maybe it was a “perfect storm” of events. Maybe it wasn’t, and there’s a chance that earlier factors sent me into states where I was bothered by things I otherwise wouldn’t have been, and those things aren’t part of the main problem at all. Possible causes include: a general drifting from my original/developed motivations, being back at school where I have many associations of living “normally”, and meeting and becoming involved with other singularitarians. As I think back to the beginnings of this, that theory about a dominating early factor seems well supported. While those other things probably contributed, I do recall an initial, really big issue being lack of relaxation.
I have slightly unusual (inhuman) heroes, and one frequent trait is extreme single-mindedness. I love characters that figure out what has to be done, in the long or short-term, and then set about doing it with unwavering determination. I’d strived for that for awhile, and I was pleased as I got closer and closer. Recently, and certainly affected by the pressure of studying for and then applying to consulting firms (something I was genuinely interested in), I’d basically succeeded in doing this, and I think this was my undoing. I was able to spend all my waking hours on work with no breaks just for fun for its own sake, which I’d previously been taking occasionally through “failure of will”/akrasia, or not being fully honest about what was most helpful.
Without having the expectation or experience of just kicking back and relaxing, ever, I felt like a huge ship, straining and groaning at the seams. I knew my seams were strong enough to hold, this was too important for me to ever really give up on, but I was starting to quake with the strain. It’s like in Star Trek, when Kirk takes the ship to warp factor 6 and Scotty exclaims “The ship canna take that much cap’n!” Why do they even put that kind of drive in there anyway? I’m admittedly not very familiar with the lore.
I wrote a post sometime around this period, which I kept as a draft. Here’s a paragraph from it:
“I just can’t seem to find a good way to justify relaxing or doing nothing like I used to, each moment of time is one in which I could be helping to save 6.7 billion lives. I can realize of course that I start to go a little crazy when I don’t do anything fun, and can slot my time to include some fun things, but the pressure is still there, making me choose how much time to spend where, where the greater marginal value is. A little voice tells me to just fuck it, drop off the grid, forsake these world saving efforts and basically all my ideals, turn my back on every great hope I ever had for myself, of doing the right thing when it was required of me. I don’t think that’s a sustainable choice, but there’s a voice suggesting it. It doesn’t help that I’m not smart enough to be exceptional, compared to a lot of people I’m not really that much to speak of.”
I’d always believed that you can’t try to save the world through willpower, not when it may takes years of dedicated work. It has to be done with habit and lifestyle changes. Maybe my gradual progression brought me too far in one direction, and I couldn’t bring myself to pull back without first really failing to sustain that extreme of a lifestyle, and that brought me to sustain myself there – momentarily – with willpower. I could allow myself to do less as long as I knew I couldn’t do more, but I really had to know I couldn’t do more. I still can’t be sure, but at least now I’ve got much better reason to think that I can’t.
Huh, a new but related theory that just came to me is that while things were working out, my work just naturally brought me into fun relationships with people. Since school started again I’ve mostly just interacted with my parents, and though they are nice (and incredibly cheap) people to live with, it’s not as rewarding as conversing with peers. Alas, too many theories, and not enough time or reason to test them rigorously. They do however tend to make roughly coherent recommendations.
There are a fantastic number of reasons to work towards saving the world, and one of them is that it can be a lot of fun doing it. Thinking way back, that’s what got me started on all this. There are many reasons I should work on this, but there are also reasons I just simply want to. I believe that element of fun and immediate desire is important: even if it’s not necessary for all people it sure is helpful as hell. I’ll explain about some reasons I find this fun in a future post.