“I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless - it was not a flippant assertion. I think it’s absurd, the idea of seeking meaning in the set of circumstances that happens to exist after 13.8 billion years worth of unguided events. Leave it to humans to think the universe has a purpose for them. However I am no nihilist, I am not even a sinek. I am actually rather romantic, and here’s my idea of romance: you will soon be dead. Life may sometimes seem long and tough and god its tiring; you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad and then you’ll be old and then you’ll be dead. There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence and that is: fill it.
- Tim Minchin
The one thing that drives me nuts about buddhism is the fatal flaw in their idea of the pinnacle of their practice: enlightenment. For those of you who don’t know, enlightenment is like winning the game of buddhism. It’s revered much like Christian designation of making it to heaven, except you get to achieve it while you are alive.
In few works, enlightenment is this state of “oneness” with the world where you seemingly have no opinion on the events around you. Enlightened folks are not attached to anything that they experience. That’s a careful choice of words, attached to. It’s not to say they aren’t emotionally impacted, I reckon an enlightened person would still argue that they feel happiness and sadness, but the difference is that they recognize it as just a fleeting emotional state. This constant, 24/7, “recognizing” is this sort of higher layer of day-to-day experience. In other words you could say they are not phased by anything.
The best example of a person who seems to demonstrate enlightenment is, well, not a person. Best summed up by their famous quote:
“Do or do not, there is no try.”
- Yoda
But you see, fuck that quote, and fuck enlightenment. This idea that you can exist in this state where you seemingly don’t care about anything is absurd. It’s absurd because it’s attempting to turn something that’s a gradient, that being “how hard to try”, into a binary. For example, how much should an enlightened person eat? Im sure when an enlightened person misses breakfast , around lunchtime they would say something like
“I recognize hunger as just a fleeting mental state, and so while I still feel the discomfort of hunger, I don’t associate with it”.
To which I would say: “okay tough guy, if hunger is so god-damn fleeting they why eat anything at all?”
To which they would probably say: “If I do not eat, then I will die.”
To which I would say: “That’s right, so how much are you going to eat then? Just enough to sustain your life? How are you going to figure out how much that is? If I gave you a bowl of rice, and you ate them grain by grain, how will you know when to stop at just the right number that is needed to sustain your life, and not a grain more, all whist remaining disconnected from your hunger?”
They won’t, because they can’t. Their level of hunger is both the motivator and the judge of how much to eat. You can’t just disconnect from your hunger and some fleeting mental state that you are not attached to. You are very much attached to it; if you weren’t, you would die.
Feelings like hunger, or sadness, or loneliness are not something you can just disconnect from. Okay, so with that option out of the way, to what extent should you do something about them?
To what extent should you try?
Well the answer is: exactly as much as you currently do.
In other words, I am not telling you to change anything, i’m just telling you how to think about it differently.
You see human behaviour is really just one big weighted sum leading to action potential. We know this because it’s how the neurons in our brain function, but it also makes a lot of intuitive sense.
An action potential, in its most basic sense, is the idea that a small input can lead to a large output. It’s also the basic idea behind transistors and neural networks.
It’s not hard to understand. Let’s take the example of when you are all cozy and comfy in bed, but you have to pee. In this case, the larger output action is you getting out of bed to go pee. The smaller inputs are the following weighted sum going on in your head:
On one side is how bad you don’t want to wet the bed (wpee) multiplied by how bad you have to pee (xpee). On the other side is how much you enjoy being comfy (wcomfy), multiplied by how comfy you are (xcomfy).
The exact moment when you finally decide to get up to pee, is basically when:
wpee * xpee > wcomfy * xcomfy
Or in simple terms, you decided to get up to pee when the desire to pee was more compelling than the comfy coziness of bed.
Pretty simple right?
This isn’t a joke either, I guarantee you this exact calculation has occurred in your brain. All of human behaviour follows this pattern, most of the time there is just a few more variables involved.
If you are lonely, the decision of whether or not you do something to feel less lonely is how much you don’t enjoy being lonely (wlonely) multiplied by how lonely you are (xlonely) versus how much you enjoy interacting with others (winteraction) multiplied by the effort required to interact with someone (xinteraction).
https://chatgpt.com/share/67df8a89-4150-8013-94c0-e37c328297b1
As I said at the beginning of this book, none of this really matters. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with what I am saying, if it changes your life or not. In the end, you will die, and your opinions on not only this book and everything else wont matter. Maybe you will pass some of those options onto your children (your Biological Project) but then surely after a few generations it too will get lost, or at most worked into some overall cultural view.
Point being that no immortality project is better then any other one, and if you buy into the idea of them at all doesn’t matter to me or anyone else. However I write this in hopes that the book will provide a framework for you to both live your life (pursue your projects) and more importantly, sympathize/understand people who have projects different from yours. Keyword being different; not better, not worse, just different. It’s likely that their primary project(s) are one of your minority projects, and so hopefully you can perform a mental experiment where you expand your feelings on that project and understand where they are coming from.
The immortality project framework is nothing more than a tool in order to help you understand yourself and others better. It’s not a call to action for a cultural movement or a precursor to a cult, it’s simply a way of understanding the world and your place in it.
If you’ve ever come across any Budhist text or teachers, you’ve probably heard something along the lines of “dont try, just be”. It’s a favouite lesson amongst Budhist circles to preach this idea of acceptance with what life throws at you. On the surface its a beautiful idea, one that seems to make sense to some people, but it fucking drives me nuts. Why? Well it all goes back to our earlier disucussion on binary vs gradients. “Trying” is a gradient word, there are different extents to which one can try. To truly not try to do anything would literally mean just laying down and never fucking moving again. Defenders of the lesson would say “well obviously not that, you still have to eat and use the bathroom and such” and BAM, those actions have invalidated the original statement and now the discussion becomes the extent to which we should try, which is no longer easily defined and subject so opinion. How much beyond eating and shitting should we try? At the end of the day, everyone’s respective answers to this question are more easily understood from their actions then anything they could possibly say. (To be expanded upon)
The solution I’ve managed to convince myself is as follows:
Not good, not bad
Not better, not worse
Just is
It means this: you should still try in life, you should continue to pursue the things that make you feel good even if you dont really understand why they make you feel that way, but you should do so without believing in any sort of cosmic order of things. In other words, you might as well try because in the end it doesn’t fucking matter so just do what makes you feel good. If that’s not good enough for you then fine, be depressed and miserable, because that doesn’t fucking matter either. In my mind you might as well join Team Try because its a lot more fun but fuck it, in the end it doesn’t really matter - because nothing actually matters.
You should do the things you want but with the understanding that when something doesn’t go as planned, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a difficult idea to wrap your head around, because up until now you’ve only ever done things because they mattered in some way.