I’d made the default desktop wallpaper just some text that says “try typing man man in the terminal”

I would definitely eat cultured meat as long as it’s not too expensive.

Cómo cara blanca, digo que chinga tu racismo. Es la ruina y la derrota del gente. Juntos, se puede. Divididos, caímos.

That’s terrible! What’s your livelihood?

It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.

Believe me someone will try.

Eventually biology itself will be banned because of how un-controllable it is. All that will be allowed will be silicon components manufactured by a central authority or assembled under centrally-approved code.

Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.

I don’t know if that’s true. I shot myself in the head once and just woke up like nothing had happened. I suspect life might not be as fragile as it appears from the outside.

If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.

And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.

As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.

Wood on slab feels weird because of the lack of flex

Wow it’s actually 1860. I didn’t know they had plastic that far back. I would have guessed 1950.

Turns out your mom works in mysterious ways too

BITCOIN DROPS TO ZERO VALUE

“It’s all so obvious in retrospect” says investor.

I heard there are about 70 Black Lotuses missing. Some people think that’s what the drones over New Jersey are looking for.

Gold was sold that way. As a currency that’s more independent of government control.

People seem to think “bad faith” refers to any kind of rhetorical method other than explicit declaration these days, and that sucks.

Reading your descriptions of what you’re looking for has been a little frustrating. It’s felt as if I’ve needed to read between the lines a little to determine your goals.

It’s not totally opaque, and you’ve done a good job of clarifying. It helps that this is a two-way forum where we can ask you questions. But if I just had to go off of the original post, I would have just had to guess what your goals were.

By extrapolation, if you’ve been publishing in some places already and haven’t been getting much traction, it may be that the clarity of your published works — and therefore the engagement they generate by resonating with the mind of the reader — may be a little lacking.

If I were to provide advice it would be: more detail, even if you think it’s obvious or goes without saying. Less implication and more explicit declaration.

Which brings me to another question I didn’t think of before: Are you wanting to publish stories, news articles, essays, what kind of thing?

A friend in college swore that the most effective way to use adderall was to start work and then once he got into a groove, take it.

Basically to avoid using it as a impetus to get started.

That doesn’t break my spirit. I fucking hate novelty and am perfectly content — thrive even — on repetition.

Also decisions that are avoided are basically the same as an endless stream of decisions in terms of fatigue.

edit: avoided as in delayed. Avoiding them by eliminating them is fine

I wish I could be someone who smokes occasionally. I’m either totally zero, or all day every day.