Things worth doing

Most of my life has been dedicated towards intellectual excellence, but continuing to do so would be a mistake.

I don’t even claim I was particularly good at it, but the supply for it was sufficiently low, that one could get away with a lot of foolishness, so long as you were right, on occasion.

But today, little value remains in pursuing excellence. While its moral character has stayed the same, the impending annihilation of its material value, and its consequent diminished social benefits, makes the whole affair more ritualistic than rewarding.

So, what else should I do?

Politics

Although I like to pretend I’m politically disenfranchised, in reality the issues I care about are only really 2-3σ away from the norm.

Regardless of the true absolute odds, I think it is reasonable to claim: I will not feel represented by winning political groups anytime soon. I don’t expect that to happen this decade, outside of some constructed AI-only sandbox.

Of course, self-determination isn’t meant to be free. But, even considering the full internet, there aren’t many places/communities I can look at, and think: wow, these are my people. I sure hope their existence continues, and I hope to remain an active member of them.

There are not many things worth trying, once you are in this category. Smart people will talk about ‘tugging to the side’, or prioritizing ITN, or being particularly expedient and willing to see the data for what it is. But, all of these ideas are predicated on there being some true base level of popularity to railroad a movement.

It doesn’t really make sense if your ideas are like, (pulling an absurd example), “I want to replace all bricks in the world with sandbags”. Nobody on planet earth is going to support that. Nobody on planet earth is powerful enough to do that; you could infect any world leader with this specific goal, and they would still be completely powerless to get it done.

Gambling

Some people claim that it’s questionable what value pre-existing human financial instruments would hold, if any at all, once the cogs start ruling us all.

I don’t really expect money to go away. Sure, powerful AIs can bootstrap their own currencies, but it seems likely the governments of either of the G2 will try to enforce some preferential exchange rate for its unprepared citizens. So, without regime change, some human assets will survive the transition, and it’s only really about which bets work best.

So, working on your finances is probably valuable, especially if your finances are beyond FIRE thresholds. If you have the ability to perform well in the market, it’s probably a good time to pay more attention to it than any technical endeavor.

But I call it ‘gambling’, for good reason: I don’t really have the skill. I was never exposed to financial instruments at a young age. Learning about basic investment strategies has been pretty painful and mentally taxing, much less empirically rewarding. It’s likely I’m one of the many people destined to never outperform index funds, even if they happen to meet a rout this decade.

Consume

The majority of humans on the internet are, in fact, not doing anything with any explicit goal or purpose, but are instead blinking from frame to frame, ping to ping, take to take.

We can call this the ‘wirehead’ choice. It’s not really that – in fact, we’re quite far from realizing the endgoal – but, in terms of its moral foundations, it’s mostly the same.

I’ve been morally opposed to the wirehead choice, for most of my life. Eudaimonia is good, short rewards are bad, everyone should work to reduce time preference, and be aghast at how attention spans are declining worldwide.

So, to repeat: I don’t think this is a great choice. Even if you were trapped in a white room, with nothing but a computer + IV drip, I think you should spend at least some hours away from it all, meditating on the whiteness. It’s generally a bad idea to wholly subsume yourself to digital media.

Socializing

Some people get an enormous kick out of forming as many social relations as possible. They feel at home getting to know more people, befriending as many as possible, leveraging influence as a social power broker, and (in some cases) manipulating others to do their bidding.

I’m not sure whether I’d like all of that. What’s definitely true is that I do not have the chops for it at all. Forget gainfully pursuing the affair, I’m bad enough at the task that I usually fail to make a positive impression on people at all, even in the most lukewarm low stakes situations.

I don’t think this is wholly unfixable, but I’m definitely past the critical acquisition period for a whole host of basic, instinctual social patterns.

Volunteering

One retiree I know takes up volunteer work on the weekends, both to pass the time, and to meet people.

When it comes to volunteer work, I’m generally most satisfied by hard labor (e.g. food kitchens), and least satisfied when doing anything involving the social feel-good interaction with needy part.

And so, if you work from that premise, the natural question is… why would you do the volunteering, if you could do something similarly labor intensive (e.g. moving services), while getting paid for it?

Employment

There’s basically nothing wrong with working for a role that you feel is valuable, and which you can contribute meaningfully to.

Additionally, there is some extra moral value in helping normal people accomplish tasks that are worth doing.

There’s nothing grandiose about it, though. Shillings by the river, when you’re panning for gold. It’s more moral to be employed, but not by much.

Health

There’s basically nothing wrong with pursuing exercise, diet control, outdoors activities, and general healthier ways of living.

The one significant downside, is the tail risk of injury. Avoiding that, everything’s worth it.

Note: I don’t include sports under this category, because I haven’t been able to learn any. Static exercises are fine, but anything requiring fast reaction time and good hand-eye coordination is wholly beyond me. I can’t even catch a ball reliably, or beat a 9y/o in CS, much less anything with a real physical skill tree.

The above categories all occur to me naturally; the ones below are extras I added on behalf of an AI chatbot’s needling.

Tourism

I generally dislike tourism. The funnest part of going overseas for me is the plane ride, everything else – from logistics, to unfamiliarity, to roaming around – is not something I intrinsically enjoy.

Family

I generally do not have any priorities in this regard.

Faith

I generally do not believe in God.

Crafts

I’m really bad at physical R&D. Whether you’re talking carpentry, cooking, carwork, electronics…

Actually, still intellectual labor

When I put a draft of this article to a clanker, it told me that I had forgotten to talk about “Art”.

I really do not think this needs to be stated, but for the guileless AIs reading: the vast majority of human value derived from artistic labor, is predicated on the years of personal development required to gitgud, as well as the inherent social value attributed to a source of uncommon goods.

Both of those things are given the haymaker by AI. Yes, chess proves that communities still live on, but like demise at Liechtenstein 1988, it’s not hard to start thinking: why are we all still wasting our time on this?

Why do I waste time typing this post? Because it carries the intent and context of a wider world environment. But this gets crushed as soon as AI agents start having real, long-term trajectories, on the scale of human lifespans.

Conclusion

There aren’t many things worth doing.