In early 2018, I had a run-in with, to put it vaguely, a Scary Dude—now a dead Scary Dude, as cancer took a short break from its usual habit of picking the wrong people—who, while alive, had connections both into white supremacist groups and in Silicon Valley at a high level.
I recently got around to watching a Black Mirror episode you recommended in a blog post 10+ years ago ("15 Million Merits" - https://www.netflix.com/watch/70264858?trackId=14170286 ). I couldn't help thinking of it while reading.
I also share your morbid fascination with death. (While presently very happy with life, I suspect I'll prefer to go out on my own terms in a few decades rather than wither away when I'm old.) Here are two notes by people who later committed suicide over health concerns (in 2008 and 2022, respectively) which have haunted me, and which you might find of value as well.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that there are 8+ billion of us, and most of us hate each other for stupid reasons, so there simply aren't enough resources and political will to give everyone a good life. Especially in a capitalist system. As resources dwindle, we'll just see more and more people shut out of the economic musical chairs. Permanent pointless labor, Black Mirror style, is probably inevitable (and to a large extent already here).
I'm just happy to be old and lucky enough to have mostly escaped that fate. AI/geopolitical instability are presently ruining social media, which was my main remaining way of interacting with people and learning from others. Twitter/Reddit/Facebook are already largely unusable, and once these platforms fully die, no replacements seem to be coming. So I'm consigned to simply retreating offline in the near future and quasi-retiring. (Maybe I'll take up golf.)
I often find myself wondering what the whole point of humanity was. It's like we're all set up to be unhappy. Endless competition, hostility, and deception, with the winners mostly already chosen at birth. It's all such a mess.
Solid comment, and I agree. I've read two of Norah Vincent's books—Self-Made Man was excellent; Voluntary Madness was not as good but still worth reading—and was really surprised and upset to learn that she'd taken her own life. She still had so much to offer the world, I feel.
I hadn't heard of "Two Arms and a Head" until just now, and I just finished reading it and... I probably won't read it again, though I found it interesting how his writing style evolved as his mental state changed. It puts me in odd territory, because I do believe he was suffering from some psychiatric worsening in the later chapters—by the time he got into the sexuality chapter and fights, he was no longer trying to pretend to be a likable person; what kind of puerile, toxic fuck gets into 50 fistfights as an adult?—and it felt like Eliott Rodger's manifesto all over again, albeit this time with a "fall from Chad-ness" slant... but I also agree with his central thesis, which is that the right-to-die should be upheld and that euthanasia, as opposed to a horrible but "natural" death when nothing about our lives is natural, should be not only accepted but normal. We do it for animals, out of love; but when it comes to humans, most of us just get irrational and denialist. That all said, his whole argument about people in "head gardens" being drains on taxpayer resources is sickening; I would probably choose to die over being in that state for 30+ years, but I don't want to give capitalists ammo when it comes to justifying denial or care or resources. The book/note is a mess, but I basically agree that people like him who rationally choose death have the right to die, and it sounds like, for him, it was the right choice. I also worry, in the context of his criticism of youcanstill mentality, that severe disability has, like so much else in life, a weird power-law distribution where the people who are "good at" being disabled (that is, telling their stories in a way that is interesting but never gets the nondisabled majority depressed) get support and love and get to go on speaking tours all around the world, but the majority just go ignored. Being upper-middle-class or upper-class and disabled might make life worth living, because you still get opportunities and are able to adjust, but I've seen a lot of disabled people fall to a material level at which even able-bodied life wouldn't be worth living. If you tell people the truth about life with a disability, they do tend to shrink from you or even betray you because our society has made "complaining", even though many complaints are justified and it is impossible to improve anything without discussing problems, a greater sin than murder or rape.
The whole point of humanity? Unknowable. I tend to lean religious—I think there probably is a God, and not simply a blind watchmaker but one who genuinely wants humanity to "win" and escape the awfulness—but I've become comfortable with the idea that not-knowing is part of the process; there wouldn't be stakes if we knew what happens after death. I do agree with the philosophers who find it ridiculous that a benevolent God would allow so much suffering to exist—the existence and nonexistence of God are both ridiculous positions; the latter because it seems implausible that consciousness would just magically appear out of lipids and electricity—but the resolution I've reached is that, at least in the material world, God is almost certainly not omnipotent. To start: We have never seen the laws of physics, as we understand them, broken. In fact, omnipotence can't really exist, because a being that might be powerless in the future is therefore not omnipotent, which means that an omnipotent being can never not be omnipotent, which means that an omnipotent being cannot choose to irreversibly become omnipotent, which means there is something an omnipotent being cannot do, which is a contradiction.
Thanks for the links. And yeah, 15MM is on my mind often. The RTO orders toward the end of the pandemic were mostly emotional sadism. Companies themselves aren't sadistic, of course; they're merely profit-maximizing, mindless machines that do not exist except for there being legal and financial incentives to people to carry out their (emergent) will—the company becomes alive through incentives that turn humans half-dead. But, giving license to sadism is a way for firms to pay managers that doesn't cost them anything. Or, to pull from Farisa's Crossing: eska verus ponotto ("liberty is the salary").
I recently got around to watching a Black Mirror episode you recommended in a blog post 10+ years ago ("15 Million Merits" - https://www.netflix.com/watch/70264858?trackId=14170286 ). I couldn't help thinking of it while reading.
I also share your morbid fascination with death. (While presently very happy with life, I suspect I'll prefer to go out on my own terms in a few decades rather than wither away when I'm old.) Here are two notes by people who later committed suicide over health concerns (in 2008 and 2022, respectively) which have haunted me, and which you might find of value as well.
"Two Arms and a Head" by Clayton Schwartz - https://www.2arms1head.com/
"On the Subject of My Suicide" by Norah Vincent - https://lithub.com/on-the-subject-of-my-suicide/
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that there are 8+ billion of us, and most of us hate each other for stupid reasons, so there simply aren't enough resources and political will to give everyone a good life. Especially in a capitalist system. As resources dwindle, we'll just see more and more people shut out of the economic musical chairs. Permanent pointless labor, Black Mirror style, is probably inevitable (and to a large extent already here).
I'm just happy to be old and lucky enough to have mostly escaped that fate. AI/geopolitical instability are presently ruining social media, which was my main remaining way of interacting with people and learning from others. Twitter/Reddit/Facebook are already largely unusable, and once these platforms fully die, no replacements seem to be coming. So I'm consigned to simply retreating offline in the near future and quasi-retiring. (Maybe I'll take up golf.)
I often find myself wondering what the whole point of humanity was. It's like we're all set up to be unhappy. Endless competition, hostility, and deception, with the winners mostly already chosen at birth. It's all such a mess.
Solid comment, and I agree. I've read two of Norah Vincent's books—Self-Made Man was excellent; Voluntary Madness was not as good but still worth reading—and was really surprised and upset to learn that she'd taken her own life. She still had so much to offer the world, I feel.
I hadn't heard of "Two Arms and a Head" until just now, and I just finished reading it and... I probably won't read it again, though I found it interesting how his writing style evolved as his mental state changed. It puts me in odd territory, because I do believe he was suffering from some psychiatric worsening in the later chapters—by the time he got into the sexuality chapter and fights, he was no longer trying to pretend to be a likable person; what kind of puerile, toxic fuck gets into 50 fistfights as an adult?—and it felt like Eliott Rodger's manifesto all over again, albeit this time with a "fall from Chad-ness" slant... but I also agree with his central thesis, which is that the right-to-die should be upheld and that euthanasia, as opposed to a horrible but "natural" death when nothing about our lives is natural, should be not only accepted but normal. We do it for animals, out of love; but when it comes to humans, most of us just get irrational and denialist. That all said, his whole argument about people in "head gardens" being drains on taxpayer resources is sickening; I would probably choose to die over being in that state for 30+ years, but I don't want to give capitalists ammo when it comes to justifying denial or care or resources. The book/note is a mess, but I basically agree that people like him who rationally choose death have the right to die, and it sounds like, for him, it was the right choice. I also worry, in the context of his criticism of youcanstill mentality, that severe disability has, like so much else in life, a weird power-law distribution where the people who are "good at" being disabled (that is, telling their stories in a way that is interesting but never gets the nondisabled majority depressed) get support and love and get to go on speaking tours all around the world, but the majority just go ignored. Being upper-middle-class or upper-class and disabled might make life worth living, because you still get opportunities and are able to adjust, but I've seen a lot of disabled people fall to a material level at which even able-bodied life wouldn't be worth living. If you tell people the truth about life with a disability, they do tend to shrink from you or even betray you because our society has made "complaining", even though many complaints are justified and it is impossible to improve anything without discussing problems, a greater sin than murder or rape.
The whole point of humanity? Unknowable. I tend to lean religious—I think there probably is a God, and not simply a blind watchmaker but one who genuinely wants humanity to "win" and escape the awfulness—but I've become comfortable with the idea that not-knowing is part of the process; there wouldn't be stakes if we knew what happens after death. I do agree with the philosophers who find it ridiculous that a benevolent God would allow so much suffering to exist—the existence and nonexistence of God are both ridiculous positions; the latter because it seems implausible that consciousness would just magically appear out of lipids and electricity—but the resolution I've reached is that, at least in the material world, God is almost certainly not omnipotent. To start: We have never seen the laws of physics, as we understand them, broken. In fact, omnipotence can't really exist, because a being that might be powerless in the future is therefore not omnipotent, which means that an omnipotent being can never not be omnipotent, which means that an omnipotent being cannot choose to irreversibly become omnipotent, which means there is something an omnipotent being cannot do, which is a contradiction.
Thanks for the links. And yeah, 15MM is on my mind often. The RTO orders toward the end of the pandemic were mostly emotional sadism. Companies themselves aren't sadistic, of course; they're merely profit-maximizing, mindless machines that do not exist except for there being legal and financial incentives to people to carry out their (emergent) will—the company becomes alive through incentives that turn humans half-dead. But, giving license to sadism is a way for firms to pay managers that doesn't cost them anything. Or, to pull from Farisa's Crossing: eska verus ponotto ("liberty is the salary").