Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.
(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)
Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?
In my case, I think the near future is probably going to be really fucking sick. AGI. Full immersion VR. Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy. Immortality in one form or another. The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand
As far as I'm concerned, there's no other period in time I'd rather have been born, and even as someone who is rather depressed and gritting his teeth to pull through more days a year than he'd like, especially when so much of my hopes and dreams have been sabotaged by circumstances outside my control, I still have so much to look forward to that even at my lowest I have no real desire to "skip forward to the end". They'll cure my depression and ADHD sooner rather than later. And even if I get paperclipped, we're far too close to the end of an era for me to bear missing out on that closure.
At any rate, the human body and mind was designed to keep trucking through far worse. Most depressed and unhappy people don't kill themselves. Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill. It is what it is, but will probably get better.
I think most of that tech-optimism you lay out is unfounded to the extreme (except the VR bit, but that's just more escapism). If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century. Aging and lifespan has been so deeply ingrained into us by countless evolutionary trade-offs to a degree that pretty much any "life-extension" project is almost certainly doomed to failure, let alone "immortality." "Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy." Not with chemical rockets, are we doing that any time soon. We're not going to figure out the brain well enough to cure depression or ADHD. There will be no "singularity," no "end of an era," not even the "closure" of "paperclippingm," just slow civilizational decay.
I've been doing that for ~20 years now. It's never getting better.
Have you seen Claude 3? It's going around answering PHD-level questions in a bunch of different fields. https://twitter.com/idavidrein/status/1764675668175094169
Five years ago we had none of this. The whole field of chatbots was a joke: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6rEkKWXCcR4
If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable, how can you possibly say 'it's not happening this century'? You think you can predict 75 years into the future?
What "capable"? LLMs are a meaningless parlor trick — of little significance, and not any kind of step towards "general intelligence." "The whole field of chatbots" is a pointless distraction.
Not with that attitude. I mean, even if you regard the entire field and its weird inbred offshoots as parlor tricks of little significance (the former I would agree with, the latter I find highly debatable even now, for one it vastly simplifies routine code writing in mine and my colleagues' experience) - aren't you at least a little interested in how the current "AI" develops, even it its current state? In the workings of quite literally alien "minds" whose "thought processes", though giving similar outputs, in no other way resemble our own? In the curious fact that almost all recent developments happened by an arcane scientific method known as "just throw more compute at it lmao"? I don't mean to impose my hobby horse on you but I legitimately think this shit is fascinating, anyone who dismisses it out of hand is very much missing out, and I'm massively curious about future developments - and I say this as a man who hasn't picked up a new hobby since he put his hands on his shiny new keyboard when he turned 12 years old.
More generally, you sound like a
typicalintelligent man who outgrew his playground and realized existence is a fucking scam, which I think is a fairly common problem (not to downplay its impact, I think many mottizens can empathize, me among them) and you've been given good suggestions downthread. Personally, being the rube I am, I just ducked right back into the playground upon reaching a similar burnout and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc. It's not exactly healthy and it does ring hollow sometimes, not gonna lie, but at least I'm no longer paralyzed by the sheer emptiness of the human condition and canruminatefocus on the actual problems I have.This is the same conclusion that I've reached. I went from: "I should be a productive member of society and study something that will bring positive value and progress to the world", to: "Astrophysics and anime are good enough for me, even if my betters thinks that I'm a man-child, who cares?"
Except, I don't have an "astrophysics and anime." There is no joy in life. What reason do I have to keep suffering it — because suffering is all there is — if not for some higher goal or purpose?
I understand and I do not have an answer. There have been times in which even my interests were not enough and I would have written the exact same words as you. These feelings are always there, underneath my conscious brain, I will probably bever be a "normal" person and if stretched, I would probably take my own life, I am just "lucky" enough that my despair is fluctuating so I can seem glimpses of hope. As for higher purpose, I gave up on that: I tried religion, meditation, therapy, becoming a workaholic... Nothing is satisfying in a fundamental way. I just concentrate on my daily action because the future fills me with horror and contempkating it it has not been a productive endeavour. I keep living as if everyday will be as banal and worthless as the this one, using my copes until they last. Try some cope, maybe you will find some solace in the scam that is existence, it is not guaranteed though.
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