Ran Prieur Watch

[ertyu]

I've always thought the drive for more money isn't a drive for money, it's a drive for status. At the uppermost levels of wealth, a marginal dollar doesn't matter. What matters is the differential between your wealth and the wealth of others, because it is in that differential that lies power.

So in that sense, it doesn't matter if you have enough, what matters is how much more do you have than 1. the masses, and 2. your "peers", defined as the people you're in a dick-measuring contest with.

I honestly think that for those at the uppermost levels, most humans aren't really people. Those at the same income level/level of influence are people. "Labor" at large is a dumb mass, a commodity stupid enough to let themselves be exploited -- and if you do not exploit them as efficiently and thoroughly as possible, you are dumb. If the masses let you get away with bribing politicians and flaunting regulations why shouldn't you? It's their fault for letting you get away with it. They deserve it because they accept it. *

* the "they deserve it because they accept it" I heard from the son of a wealthy Chinese factory owner. We "poors" often think that drawing attention to the plight of some disadvantaged group, we're agitating for social justice. To this guy, the plight of these groups was evidence that they deserve being taken advantage of.

[zbigi]

I"ve been reading Tocqueville's "On Democracy in America" recently, where he describes the nascent modern society in (first half of) XIX century US. He too notes a huge preocupation with money that is characteristic to such society, and which was absent from the post-feudal society that preceeed modernity. His take on it is, since people in the US have to be preoccupied with making money in order to make a living and grant themselves some degree of security and comfort, once they finally have good amount of money, perhaps in their thirties and fourties, their perspective is already so flattened that they only care about money and things that can be bought with money. They literally don't see value in things which cannot be bought, or which don't lead to status. He contrasts this to members of aristocracy, who were much more capable of devoting themselves to something more than consumption.

[candide]

Ran writes:

June 14. On a quick loose end from yesterday, both Erik and Matt mention Cory Doctorow's concept of Enshittification. That's an essay from earlier this year where he goes in painful detail through the whole process of how money ruins platforms. Matt summarizes, that it "isn't just the result of extractive capitalism, but a middle-man business model in which tech companies create chokepoints between customers and content creators -- whether the creators are musicians or journalists or advertisers."

I'm still more interested in the psychological angle. Why don't these middlemen retire on their first million and chill out, like I would? Where does the mental state come from, that no matter how much money they have, they're not satisfied? I don't know, but I think the cure is to practice appreciating every moment, and that's something we can all work on.

By the way, Cormac McCarthy has died, and I'm not a fan of his bleak and violent world-view, but wow is he a good stylist. Above [1] is my favorite sentence from his best book.

[1] In this case, below:

"The stars burned with a lidless fixity and they drew nearer in the night until toward dawn he was stumbling among the whinstones of the uttermost ridge to heaven, a barren range of rock so enfolded in that gaudy house that stars lay awash at his feet and migratory spalls of burning matter crossed constantly about him on their chartless reckonings."

-Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy, 1933-202

[candide]

Ran writes:

June 26. On a tangent from last week's subject, I mentioned trying to change my mental state by pretending I'm in a video game. This raises the question: Why do video games feel better than normal life?

I can think of four reasons, and I'll list them in order of increasing difficulty of getting over them.

First is novelty. Getting over novelty is inevitable, and happens with all technologies. Radio was magical when it was new, and now it's mostly boring.

Second is that games have flashier quests. Killing zombies to save the world is more interesting than walking to the store to buy cilantro. But appreciating life's little quests is something we can practice and get better at. And they're usually less stressful.

Third is a denser reward structure. In a game, you're constantly unlocking benefits and upgrades, or at least getting a clear message that you've done something right. How often does this happen in real life? I think this is why people get obsessed with money, because money is a quantitative reward that's at least sort of related to the quality of your actions.

Finally, I don't see any way to get over the fact that games are much easier. How long does it take, in a game, before you understand how stuff works and you feel like you know what you're doing? Minutes for an easy game, and maybe a few weeks for a hard game. In life, even after decades, you're still unlocking new levels of your own incompetence.

This why a good answer to "What is the meaning of life?" is learning. Unlike being happy, learning is something you always have plenty of room to do.

[candide]

Ran writes:

August 11. Normally I ignore personal criticism, but a post on the subreddit compared me to Nietzsche's "last man", and I have to follow the coincidence, because I was already planning to use that quote in another project. "We have invented happiness, say the last men, and blink." It's a trope in sci-fi, future humans made insipid by material comforts.

Of course those characters are based on us. Our upper classes have been made clueless, not by comfort, but by power over others. Our lower classes are apathetic because schools and workplaces are designed to break their spirits. In a world of universal abundance, neither of those things can happen, because even the poorest can say fuck off.

The techno-utopian doctrine, that we either go extinct or colonize space, carefully excludes the most likely timeline. Humans are tough and space is big -- another ten thousand years of trying stuff on Earth is realistic. And if in that time we manage a minimum standard of living that's sufficient for us all to do our own thing, it could serve as a platform for the next level of humanity.

The present age is a Gordon Ramsay cooking show, everyone rushing around on the thin edge between fame and elimination. Imagine a cooking show where a baker could spend a week crafting a dough cathedral. We sit passively watching people who are really good at flashy achievements. Imagine that same level of skill and ambition, fully distributed to a billion subtle obsessions.

I've got multiple obsessions going on right now, and while most of them putter along out of sight, I keep cranking out short playlists. A lot of people use Spotify as a library, where a playlist is every song they can think of in that category. My lists are tested by actual listening, and I'm really happy with my new 93 minute Prog Rock sampler. Also I've overhauled and tightened my favorite songs page, now called songs and playlists, with Spotify on the side bar, and other stuff in the center, including a Not On Spotify playlist, and two top ten lists.

[candide]

Ran writes:

September 4. For Labor Day, a repost from exactly six years ago:

Imagine you live in a world where money is completely disconnected from work. Not only is there an unconditional minimum income, there's also a maximum income -- and they're the same! Corporate executives, sled dog racers, insurance agents, and people who just watch TV all day, all make the same amount of money.

In that world, what would you do with your time?

And how similar is that to what you actually do with your time?

To the extent that those things are the same, you're successful -- even if you're poor. To the extent that they're different, your quality of life is being constrained by cultural assumptions and economic rules that tie activity to money.

You've all seen that political grid, where one axis is social freedom and the other is economic freedom. That's always rubbed me the wrong way, and now I can say why: because it has economic freedom exactly backwards, defining it as the right to trade your labor for money, even if it's something you wouldn't do if not for the money, and then turn around and trade your money for the labor of others, even if they're only doing it for the money. That's not people being free -- it's money being free to control us.

In a value system that puts quality of life first, economic freedom is not freedom of money but freedom from money, and the more disconnected money is from activity, the more free we are.

[candide]

Ran writes:

September 6. Thanks Karthik for sending this video, The Art of Life. It's about Michael Behrens, who is basically the Unabomber's good twin. He was a math genius who took the position vacated by Ted Kaczynski at Berkeley, and later built a house on primitive land. He has lots of cool stuff to say, but don't romanticize his lifestyle too much -- if he got his food in any other way than driving into town, they would have shown it.

It's funny, for someone who talks about the value of doing nothing, he's very good at doing something, or he wouldn't have cleared that land and built that house. In my experience, western Buddhists are naturally busy people who are drawn to Buddhism to keep themselves in balance.

Some people think my values have changed because I no longer write about the critique of civilization or try to live outside it. Those were both spinoffs of my number one value, which has not changed since I was five years old: I love giant blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing. Some people are horrified by the thought that after death, it's just your consciousness floating in the void. I'd be like, free at last!

Seriously, my new favorite thing to do when I'm high, is silent darkness. The ringing in my ears, and the dim shapes on the backs of my eyelids, are so interesting that I keep forgetting to focus on my breathing. When I do, I've noticed a subtle catch in my throat at the top and bottom of every breath, and I've been working on cleaning it up, which is hard because it's halfway buried in involuntary.

I'm not claiming causality, but at the same time that I've been doing this, I've been getting better at being present in each moment. Buddhists talk about "craving", but I didn't really get it until I got down to the micro scale. I was watching soccer and noticed the difference between watching the player kick the ball, and hoping for some result of that kicking.

One of my favorite lyrics, from Camper Van Beethoven's Lulu Land, is "How can you lose when you choose what you feel?" That sounds like a magic power, but again, the key is the micro scale. When something happens, you have a habit of how it's supposed to make you feel, but if you can make yourself small enough in time, you can cut that habit off and do something different.

[candide]

Ran writes:

October 30. Three links about doing nothing. The Joy Of Being A Spiritual Loser is a video about how the modern values of productivity and striving have influenced spiritual practices that are supposed to be about relaxing and letting go.

A blog post, Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom.

And an article about desert island tourism, which sounds like a lot of work and money to get something you could get for free, a quarter mile off the highway in any national forest. People sometimes ask me about Chris McCandless, and while I like the general idea of what he was trying to do, he could have just done it in Montana or something. It was the culture of striving, which he failed to escape, that drove him so deep into Alaska that he couldn't go for help.


On a related subject, I've been thinking about the question: What do Americans boast about? We never boast about being rich, unless it's in the context of boasting about how much poverty we climbed out of. And we don't boast about luck -- if someone says they're lucky, they're being modest, saying their success did not come from being better than other people. I think luck is a real thing that can be cultivated, but when Americans say "I make my own luck," they mean something completely different: that they don't believe in luck so they succeed through hard work.

"Hard work" is the main thing Americans boast about. But who counts as a hard worker? A CEO who does nothing all day but make snap decisions? A fanfic author who puts in a lot of hours for a tiny audience and no money? Surely a full-time janitor is a hard worker. How about someone who spends the same amount of time cleaning stuff, but unobserved and unpaid? What about a chain gang worker, also unpaid, who breaks the biggest rocks? Who's a harder worker, someone who works in a munitions factory, or someone who puts in the same hours building bombs in their garage?

People will answer these questions differently. But I think the general consensus is that "hard work" is a social activity, a performance of obedience to the dominant system.

Another thing Americans boast about is self-discipline, by which they mean internalizing the dominator. "When I was a kid, parents and teachers forced me to do stuff I didn't feel like doing. Now that I'm grown up, I force myself to do stuff I don't feel like doing." I mean, this is a necessary skill to not end up a homeless addict. But I don't think it's something to be proud of, I think it's a tragedy. There are eight million species in the world and only one has this problem, and only recently.

[candide]

Ran writes:

November 8. Monday's post was inspired by a book I just read, Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. Now I'm wondering about the difference between the critique of "modernity" and the critique of "civilization". I don't think we're talking about two different things, but two different semantic strategies for talking about the same thing.

Calling it civilization turns our attention to things that are thousands of years old: cities, money, violent conquest. Anti-civ discussions are often hypothetical and puritanical: What would we have to give up -- or force other people to give up -- in order to save the world?

Calling it modernity turns our attention to cognitive habits that are only a few hundred years old, and invites us to examine and change our own ways of thinking. Morris Berman has written some great books on this subject, starting with The Re-enchantment of the World.

A key quote from Hospicing Modernity: "The end of modernity may not manifest primarily as economic or ecological collapse, but as a global mental health crisis where the structures of modernity within us start to crumble."

I think the crumbling started 250 years ago with Romanticism, which rejected modernity's rationalism, while intensifying its individualism. So we're not looking at one monolithic thing, but an ongoing negotiation among a bunch of things. I don't see the future as a return to the past, or a transcendence to a new level, but a continuing exploration of the landscape of the human potential.

[ertyu]

The mental health crisis isn't because the structures of modernity are crumbling within us, it's because of the degree of intensification of capitalist exploitation.

[zbigi]

The mental health crisis isn't because the structures of modernity are crumbling within us, it's because of the degree of intensification of capitalist exploitation.

Isn't capitalism a corner stone of modernity though? I like how Chomsky argues that in pre-capitalist societies (e.g. feudal ones) people had a right to live - your feudal lord would come to your aid if you were starving - but in capitalism you basically only have a right to fight for survival, and if you fail and starve, that's entirely on you. It might have been one of the reasons why Western Europe saw much more massive famines and peasant rebellions than Eastern Europe - in the West, the peasants were already a part of the capitalist system, paying the rent to the landlord, and the landlord didn't felt like he owed them anything. Whereas, in EE, the system was still largely feudal, with peasant being serfs, which meant the landlord would feel obliged to come to their aid (at least that was the recognized social ideal among the nobles, of course there were many assholes who ignored it).

[Ego]

The mental health crisis isn't because the structures of modernity are crumbling within us, it's because of the degree of intensification of capitalist exploitation.

It seems to me that the recent surge in psychological problems occurred among those who would be considered exploiters on the exploited/exploiter paradigm, rather than the exploited. Largely they are suffering as a result of their isolation from others, the increase of which coincided with the decline of institutions that provided connection. I could be wrong.

[Freedom_2018]

Would not be surprised if mental health issues were correlated with spending time online (especially social media, online forums).

For example, I'd say the ERE2 types would be more 'touched in the head' than the ERE1 types

More information doesn't necessarily lead to more wisdom but often more neuroses.

As far as the exploiter/exploited axis goes: Exploit your mind, don't let it exploit you.

[Freedom_2018]

in the West, the peasants were already a part of the capitalist system, paying the rent to the landlord, and the landlord didn't felt like he owed them anything. Whereas, in EE, the system was still largely feudal, with peasant being serfs, which meant the landlord would feel obliged to come to their aid (at least that was the recognized social ideal among the nobles, of course there were many assholes who ignored it).

If so, even more reason to aim to become your own feudal lord than a serf.

[candide]

Ran writes:

December 21. Posted to the subreddit, a fascinating essay about the occult origins of tech culture. "I'm suggesting that the once-transgressive ideology underpinning the Western esoteric tradition -- that our purpose as humans is to become as close to divine as possible -- has become an implicit assumption of modern life."

This touches on a lot of stuff I've been thinking about. I don't feel smart today, so I'll just say that I think modern technology is totally a manifestation, a giant magic spell, and not only that, it's dark magic, because as the essay points out, it's about bending reality to our will. Reality doesn't like being bent to our will, any more than another person does. We're running out of room to dominate nature, so our culture, which still romanticizes domination, is now turning inward. Millions of people who can't imagine a meaning of life other than seeking power over others, are getting increasingly frustrated, and I expect it to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I tend to avoid bringing any of Ran's woo conjectures here, but I think it fits the discussion that was building up in the thread. And last sentence seems really important for mapping where society is going.

[candide]

Ran writes:

January 1, 2024. For the new year, some predictions. I'm very pessimistic about one category of the near future: events that are covered on the news. Climate disasters are going to get worse -- here's a short video of giant waves in California -- while climate change denial will not get any better.

Wealth inequality will get worse, while the political will to fix wealth inequality will not get better until our whole culture changes how it thinks about money, from "Poverty sucks but you can climb out of it if you're not lazy," to "We have to make poverty fun because we're stuck in it forever."

There will be more and more homeless people, but that will make the world of homelessness better, because more functional people will be pulled into it.

Worst of all, the world is entering a phase of authoritarian politics and military conflict, which will not end until the generations that have not experienced that stuff find out how shitty it is. Here's a depressing Reddit thread (removed because the internet is also getting worse), What would be the ramifications if Ukraine aid is stopped and Russia wins and takes over Ukraine? Basically, if international cooperation fails to keep the peace, every country will build up their military to try to stop invasions, or to do them. This is looking a lot like right before WWI.

Here's where I'm optimistic. If you add up the death tolls of WWI, WWII, and the Spanish flu, it was about seven percent of the world population at that time. Seven percent of the present world population is more than half a billion people. I don't expect that many deaths, because humans are no longer mean enough to do that many murders -- although nuclear war is still possible.

I'm confident that we will neither go extinct, nor colonize space. We're going to be stuck working shit out on Earth for a long time, without cheap resources, and I think when we get used to that, life could get pretty good.

Where I'm most optimistic, in my lifetime, is in the normalization of psychedelics, and the effect of all that tripping on culture. Posted to the subreddit, The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms.

I think western culture bottomed out in the 1700s, in terms of how little of reality we saw as alive. For a while after Descartes, you needed propositional cognition to even exist. Emotions weren't real again until Romanticism. The word "ecology" was not even invented until 1873. I predict that by 2200, the Pope will say that trees are people, as the old religions retool for bottom-up theology, and we rebuild participating consciousness from scratch.

Editor's note: didn't feel like putting in the links today.

[candide]

Ran writes:

January 18. Today's subject, AI, starting with a comment from Matt:

| I saw a Mastodon post recently about why AI generated art should neither be considered
| "AI" nor "art." They said it's obvious that there's no intelligence behind the programs
| when you simply ask it to generate art for which it has no reference points -- that is, no
| database of matching images. It can easily generate fantasy images of dragons and
| elves because those things are popular tropes and plenty of stock images exist for them,
| conveniently labeled. But once you ask it to generate an image of anything without a past,
| then its attempts are crude, unconvincing, and even nightmarish.


Of all the reductionist statements I've seen about AI, the one I've found most useful came from a Hacker News thread about ChatGPT: "It's just a big Mad Lib engine." AI takes words and pictures, and jumbles them up and puts them together in intelligible ways. It's not a way of creating stuff, but a way of exploring and remixing stuff that humans have already done. So it's basically the same thing the internet was already doing, except instead of searching the internet for a whole human-made thing that you're interested in, you can have the AI do a Frankenstein of a million human-made things.

I think chatbots and image bots are not on the verge of a world-changing breakthrough, but already into diminishing returns, and more processing power will only make them do the same thing more smoothly. More generally, following Jerry Mander's book In the Absence of the Sacred (1991), I think the best biological metaphor for human technology is not evolution but inbreeding: We are going deeper and deeper into a world of our own creation. This can lead to insight, and I'm hopeful about therapy bots -- but it can also lead to madness.

If any new technology leads to human transcendence, it will be one that enhances our perception of the living non-human world, and thereby turns our attention outward in a way that was not available to our ancestors.

One more comment from Matt:

| It's also clear what's going on with AI through the repeated use of one term: "content." That
| word has slipped into our vocabulary and become normal, but if you step back, you can see
| it's an oddly capitalist term. It's what AI companies see themselves as providing. Content.
| As if this were something that needs to be continually supplied.

| I've never, as a writer, thought of myself as a "content creator," but I feel as if I'm seeing that
| label be self-applied more and more. For me, the term "content" becomes ridiculous when I
| apply it to older art. Is Pride and Prejudice something called content? Is Picasso's Guernica
| something called content?

| Of course, this is a shift that's occurred before. Probably, Indigenous Americans thought it
| was quite strange that white people just bought knives from a general store -- as if knives
| were interchangeable and their origins unimportant. The further back you go in anthropology,
| the more art is embedded in (is synonymous with) objects of daily use. In my wife's office, she
| has little gnomes on her bookshelf that sit there just for fun. A hundred thousand years ago, if
| someone had three little figurines in their home, they probably had deep spiritual meaning
| and long histories.

[candide]

The links seemed particularly ERE today.

Ran writes:

January 23. Stray links. Goblin mode was the Oxford 2022 word of the year. In the wake of Covid, "it captured the prevailing mood of individuals who rejected the idea of returning to 'normal life', or rebelled against the increasingly unattainable aesthetic standards and unsustainable lifestyles exhibited on social media."

Related, from Ask Old People, an inspiring and sometimes troubling thread about informal work environments. I don't know what happened to make workplaces so universally un-fun, but it's a big part of why no one wants to work anymore.

More doom, What is Wirth's Law? "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

More doom, Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, as capitalism eats itself. The other day I saw a good metaphor for what "late stage capitalism" means. It's like in a game of Monopoly, where it's obvious who's going to win, but you still have to grind through the details of giving them all your money.

And something nice. Sounds of the Forest is a world map where you can click in hundreds of places and hear recordings of the wonderful non-human-made world.

[candide]

Ran writes:

February 5. Continuing from last week, I don't expect my AI game utopia to actually happen. The limiting factor is human boredom, and current games already have more than enough content for most players. What I really want is an environment, real or artificial, that continues to generate the feel of a great game. While AI could do that in theory, humans are now in a rare and strange position, in which we're using loads of resources to make artificial worlds for our eyes and ears and fingers, while our bodies sit cramped and dormant in a physical world that feels increasingly meaningless. We could do full-body VR, but that's just throwing more resources down a path that doesn't come out anywhere.

I don't want to call it a dead end, because we learn stuff from virtual worlds, about how we want the real world to be. Gaming is the closest I get, other than drugs, to feeling at home in a living world. And paradoxically, I feel most present in my body when I pretend I'm testing out a game avatar.

Zooming out to metaphysics, suppose there's something like reincarnation. Given how much fun wild animals are having, why would anyone want to be human? I can think of two reasons. First is the enormous variation in human experience. Being a dolphin is pretty much like being any other dolphin. But as a human, you could be anything from a Roman slave to a Medieval serf to a modern tech worker. I wonder if being a modern human is the many-lives equivalent of going to Disneyland. It's super-crowded, and more annoying than fun, but it's such a peculiar spectacle that everyone has to do it.

The other reason is imagination. Dogs can dream about chasing squirrels, and elephants probably have awesome dreams about elephant-like things. But humans, while fully awake, can go inside our heads and do dog things, or elephant things, or be wizards or space pirates, or do crazy stuff that no one ever thought of until this moment. And through storytelling and later books and now video games, we can share our worlds of imagination with other people. And if there is a more-real world outside this world, then maybe we're learning stuff here, about how we want that world to be.

[candide]

In my recent exchange of emails with Ran, he ended up changing some parts of his "about me" page, which made me realize that was a document worth sharing. Here we go...

Ran writes:

What's new?
February 2024. I've been in Seattle a year and a half and I love it. It's totally worth hearing crazy people shouting, to not have to own a car. I'm working on multiple fiction projects that have a long way to go, and lately I've been enjoying making Spotify playlists, and reading nonfiction about esoteric perception.

How do you say your name?
My first name rhymes with Dan, not Don. Think of the Flock of Seagulls song, not the Kurosawa film. And I pronounce my last name like it rhymes with "free-er," but the French pronunciation is cool too.

Your early writing was more exciting. What happened?
It turns out I don't like being famous. I like being influential, but not as much as I hate attention. Conveniently, actually trying to figure stuff out leads to a smaller and nicer audience than telling exciting stories.

If you've just discovered this site, I recommend reading the blog archives, late to early.

What have you changed your mind about?
I used to see collapse happening for physical reasons, like resources and climate. Now I see it happening for mainly psychological reasons: that the tasks necessary to keep the system going, are drifting too far from what we enjoy doing.

I used to think the future would be either techno-utopia, or techno-dystopia, or postapocalypse. Now I think we're getting all three at once.

I used to think rural homesteading was a good idea. Then I noticed that almost everyone who tried it was unhappy and did too much driving. Here's a nice essay about it by Toby Hemenway, Urban vs Rural Sustainability.

I used to write about "civilization" and "nature". Now I try to be more careful with language. Humans are engaged in the grand project of separating ourselves from all other life. In order to rejoin it, the goal of the human-made world should be to approach the non-human-made world in beauty, endurance, adaptability, elegance, and fun.

I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.

Can you condense your political ideas to under 100 words?
In perfect existence, no self-discipline is necessary, because what needs to be done, and what we feel like doing, are one and the same. That's not realistic for humans, but we can approach utopia through the principle that the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing, and that it's wrong for anyone to be subject to anyone else's will. We have the tools right now for an unconditional basic income paid for by a financial transaction tax, or by depreciating currency.

How about your philosophical ideas?
The only real thing is the incomprehensible universal. Our apparent reality is a user interface, in which even atoms and galaxies are like desktop icons. This interface is correlated with human consciousness, which changes over time. So reality as we know it changes over time, and things that are normal in one age may be impossible in another.

Our primary interface to "God" is the living non-human world, a.k.a. nature. Our secondary interface is imagination.

Who are your favorite philosophers?
Charles Fort, Thaddeus Golas, Owen Barfield, and Lao Tzu. Within the canon, Heraclitus and Spinoza.

What is the meaning of life?
Asking a philosopher "What is the meaning of life?" is like asking a librarian "What is the meaning of book?" Not only does every book have a different meaning, every sentence has a different meaning. The only large scale meaning of life is finding meaning on the small scale.

Everything we do will eventually come to nothing, but that's only a problem for an achievement-based culture, where we're always trying to accomplish something that's supposed to be valuable. If it all comes to nothing, we're free.

No, really, what is the meaning of life?
For you, the meaning of life is to be challenged and learn. For other people, the meaning of life is to remain stupid and continue to challenge you.

Where do you find all the links you post?
Mainly on Hacker News, and a handful of subreddits.

How much weed do you smoke?
I use a Silver Surfer vaporizer, which is extremely efficient, but I've been doing more lately, typically one session in mid-afternoon. Then it wears off enough before bedtime that it doesn't mess with my sleep. Weed gives me creative superpowers, and raises my emotional intelligence to nearly normal. Contrary to the popular cliche, when I'm high I'm a lot more motivated. Being high and not doing creative work is like being up in an airplane and not looking out the window.

What about other drugs?
LSD is my favorite, but I've never had a good source, so I've only done it a few times. Mushrooms are easy to source, but I have a thick head and I've done multiple 5g trips without so much as a hallucination. Instead, I see consensus reality differently. On LSD, nature is heaven and clouds of gnats are angels. On my one great mushroom trip, nature was fairyland and trees were time-stretched aspects of superior beings. My last few shroom trips have been lame, but they still clean the cobwebs from my brain.

What is your favorite long fiction?
In order of when I read them: Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou by Hitoshi Ashinano, Little, Big by John Crowley, A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery. Lately I'm enjoying Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.

What advice would you give your younger self?
Instead of fixating on goals, practice quickly noticing opportunities that are only there for a short time. Also, floss after every meal and rinse your mouth after eating or drinking anything sweet.

...

After that is house-keeping such as contact information, etc.