trivialities
a struggle to resolve the conflict between happiness and altruism
This post is also available on Substack.
it feels weird working in a space where people appear to have such a lack of romanticism about their life. i guess this is true of a lot of fields but feels especially weird when we all claim life is so valuable that we want to spend out lives ensuring it for the rest of humanity.
we care about about this so much that we analyze everything and try to make this world as good as it possibly can be and do so in the most effective way we can find. yet, we barely seem to value the life we already do have. we don’t show appreciation for ourselves. we don’t display affection for each other, for each other’s strengths, for each other’s weaknesses, for each other’s quirks. we view them as things to optimize for the greater good. and all of these beautiful imperfections are smoothed out anyways by the global sum we apply to everything for the sake of scope sensitivity.
we chase impact at the expense of ourselves, at the expense of those who love us.
are these beautiful trivialities of humanity supposed to be reserved for everyone else? can we, the people working towards a future in which more happiness exists, not allow ourselves to appreciate the beauty in our own lives?
the society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools
am i the fool or the coward? i’m confident i’m missing something, but i can’t decide what it is.
is it better for the world to end from people being too distracted staring into the eyes of their loved ones to look up? or for the world to be “saved” by those too busy staring up to notice everyone waiting for them to look back?
will a world developed by people who don’t allow themselves such enjoyments really be a world full of happiness and appreciation? are we all just working towards a world based on some notion of happiness that we don’t understand and don’t allow ourselves to genuinely experience and which seemingly might not even exist?
i quickly gave up trying to figure out what the future should look like in order to maximize this happiness. i decided i was content with just working to ensure that the future existed for us at all, as if that was any simpler of a thing.
is this really what i want to spend my life doing? focusing on the 0.07% of worlds in which I am the difference between extinction or not? 99.93% of worlds spent not appreciating the life i’ve been given and none of it mattering, everything working out the same way it would’ve anyways?
i know these aren’t the only two options, but the two parts of me seem completely incapable of agreeing to anything recently. how can i be ok being vulnerable and uncertain while also trying to concretely optimize all other aspects of my life?
is there no space for my spirituality, my love, my wonder in this future i’ve made for myself?
how can i cherish that short instance where our eyes meet if the only record of it is a 15 minute block on my time tracker?
this is my first time free writing and should not necessarily be taken as my true beliefs on the movement. thank you to vincent huang whose writing inspired much reflection.
Feel free to give me any anonymous feedback you may have!