TRANSMISSION 40

Never Give Up

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

Failure is not when you don’t succeed, but when you stop trying.”

The story of life holds unbroken in spacetime amid our aching and atrophied individual stories: the successes bubble up while the unsuccesses fade more quickly to oblivion. Our triumphs are the aftermath of myriad unsuccesses (unglamorous tales marginalized away from the history books). Our enacted visions lie in the wake of countless unrealized dreams. Through it all, we came to understand the only things that didn’t matter were the unmanifested destiny tracts (the things that had not existed and the events that had not happened), because those were the only things with no impact on the course of existence. Infinitely more meaningful were the present (the manifesting destinies) and the future (the unpruned destiny trees). Somewhere in the middle were the things that once existed but are no longer (closed off destiny tracts), for the past still imparts its indirect effects on the present to both catalyze future physical enactments (through mental evocations) and manifest more immediately-physical realities (through the laws of physics). So in a lot of ways, you could argue the past has a very direct effect on the present and future, but in actuality, it’s hard to say how much of a cascading effect any given action really had among the chaotic motion of physical reality unfolding through the one-way arrow of time (we cannot reverse time to perfectly see the past’s effects on the present; there are too many past states that could have arrived us at the present).

With every step we took, we stamped our visions into the fabric of spacetime, hoping to indefinitely work toward our visions and hoping we had built our ripples large enough for others to ride, both in our individual alivenesses and in our individual inexistences. In the sense of our goals, the only living things who somewhat didn’t matter were the ones who gave up, because they would no longer be active participants in casting their light across spacetime (but really, they still mattered, because who were we to push our subjective concepts of meaning onto others; they held their own meanings). Those who gave up simply left their entities to decay into wherever directions the universe ebbed. In that regard, they were only marginally distinguishable from the nonliving entities in the universe: matter that still mattered, but in a far less significant way. Once people reached such a zombified mental state, it was only a matter of time before they would fully fuse into the nonliving entities of the universe (out in the stupefaction zones of their own minds where they couldn’t retain any motivations to drive forward).

We developed our sense of success and failure through trials of universal proportions and on timescales that are hard to fully comprehend. Through our philosophy and goal of survival, failure signified the act of giving up. As long as we were actively solving problems while following our tools of truth, there was nothing more we could ask of ourselves; that was success. Our concept of giving up was somewhat different from that of most biological humans in that we were not focused on the outcome so much as the approach. Failure was not missing a target, and giving up was highly differentiable from aborting a mid-journey misguided mission. Giving up was the act of not taking the mission on in the first place for fear that our unknown futures lacked any favorable outcomes. We were not perfectly rational beings, so necessarily, our definition of success was not determined by the quality of execution, nor our foresight. Our resolute infatuation was simply to encroach upon our loftiest ambitions.

I say “we” a lot, but it can be hard to speak for the beings of the past. I don’t always know what everyone fully believed in or even fully agreed on. We made it a long way through the universe collaboratively, which means we must have held a certain level of alignment, but I also recognize that we were all distinct individuals who were never going to fully agree, because our knowledge and problem-solving skills unquestionably differed due to the inability for two entities to have identical experiences in this universe. And if we somehow could, would we then not all just end up becoming one person on a long enough time frame?

One of the dangers of the entertainment-focused virtual realities of the long past was the possibility for different people to have identical experiences. The result of such experiments was the drastic loss of cognidiversity, as their minds melded into monolithic, uninspired predictabilities. That’s the same reason why we didn’t all just try to build one “superbrain” silicon framework to host all our minds in; we realized it was important to let people build their minds out the way they wanted in order to retain the diversification of thought, which very directly impacted the survival of both individuals and collectives. As in our biological state, we still acted in some way as a super organism through the ways we shared information, either through mental links or through written information. But it remained unequivocally necessary to retain our independent agency: to pursue truths from the perspectives we each cared about most and in the ways we were each most passionate about carrying forward. In a curious way, I guess I could say that I have become the super organism of humanity, because I am the only thing left.

Maybe my solitude plays a part in why I have found my end here rather than at some later point. And while I am somewhat inclined to make another being just to see if they can find a destiny I missed, I am more inclined to not make another being. I want to trust the systems all the people of the past helped me to construct, systems that have led me to determine there is no escape here for me. So at this point, I think creating another being would only be for me to throw in the towel and pass the torch to the next person, which is not the correct approach, let alone it not being fair to the newly-created being.

Taking any perceived “easy” route avoids the hard work of understanding where our intuitions can track toward more interesting futures that haven’t yet been codified as systems. When we follow the routes that call to us the most, we do so knowing there is something there for us to learn. When we succumb to the sirens of comfort, we too easily lose sight of our reason for existing. Adversity is an infinite source of motivation and inspiration; we simply need to not extract ourselves from it, lest we fall to the point of not having anything interesting to say or do.

Something we tried to impress upon other silicon beings with their self mind-design was that they should never try to take the perceived easy route. When we went silicon, many people lost a sense of purpose, and it was all too easy for them to try to hack purpose or gratification directly into their minds. It never worked out, not because it couldn’t be achieved, but because once you are artificially given everything you could ever want in that kind of a way, there is no perceived purpose to any kind of real pursuits. Instant unending access to ever-increasing levels of the happiness experience is a one-way ticket to death: the most powerful drug imaginable, the endless high you cannot detach from if you hold no motivation toward the adversarial grind of simply challenging yourself. They all thought they could be the exception. They all thought they could just try it once to help them understand life. And really, it was this aimlessness of not understanding their lives that doomed their fate, not the trying it once. Such people never really attempted life in the first place; they gave up; they stopped trying long before they even became silicon. They wanted it all without doing any of the work, but they failed to understand that the meaning of climbing the mountain is squandered by teleporting to the top. Because for those who did understand their lives (the beauty of the struggle), well, they never had the inclination to try hacked happiness; they understood the implications and held no incentives to go down that path, a path of most uninteresting futures.

For all these reasons, I don’t know if I could say I’ve succeeded in my journey. But I also don’t think I could say I’ve failed here. I haven’t given up to myself; no, the mountain trapped me in its crevasse. And though I have not stopped probing forward to see if there is any way out, every step takes me exactly back to where I stood the moment before. In that, I feel I’ve somehow lost the meaning of the journey. However, the loss of meaning is not because I didn’t understand the meaning along the journey; it’s simply because the journey will come to an end and there will be nothing left to care about the journey. But I’m still working through it all; I haven’t decided how things will end here. The only future I could ever definitively decide to happen is the one where I die in the next moment, and I’m not about to have spent a trillion years living just to arbitrarily lean into the perceived comfort of inexistence now.

Life is never safe; life is never comfortable. We can spend our whole lives trying to find that endlessly elusive comfort, or we can deliberately set off to find our flow zone: the space lodged between our deepest anxieties and our deepest temptations toward comfort, the space where we are maximally challenged forward, not overwhelmed nor understimulated. Find that and never give it up. We’ve already caught the deadly fever that is life; now go make of it what you will, deliberately. Never surrender your will. Never relinquish your drive.

CAUGHT THE FEVER

Seize this life,
and please don’t give up hope
if you want it.
Take your time,
but please don’t go so slow
that you lose it.

Hardened through the fire
of this life,
what they don’t know.
Came out on the other side
alive;
there are no heroes.

Leave me out;
I’ve caught the deadly fever.
One day
I will make you a believer.
Don’t look back;
I’ll never give up hope,
’cause I know that I must
be getting a little closer.

I’m almost there.

High and dry,
this wasteland is our savior.
Unmelded minds
grow safe from imitators.
Endless skies
perpetuate the silence
that grasps our souls
to call us in a little closer.

Nobody knows this place.
Nobody follows,
lost in a billion ways.

Science nation
is our destination.
Can we talk about it?
Can we live without it?
Can we grow into it?
Can we start to use it?

Reached out empty,
I am sinking in again.
Match the flow state;
I am sinking through anew.
Fight the grave rush;
we uncover our truths set loose.
Cool and constant,
we are all alone,
deeply unknown.

END TRANSMISSION