What you’ve lost isn’t the future, it’s the fantasy.
What remains is a game that we were born losing, where there may be few moves left to make, and where most of us most of the time don’t even have a seat at the table.
However, it is a game with very high variance. It is a game where world shaping things happen regularly due to one person getting lucky (right person, right place, right time, right idea etc).
And one thing I’ve noticed in people who routinely excel at high variance games—e.g. Poker, MTG—is how unaffected they are when they’re down/behind. There is a mindset, in the moment, not of playing to win… but of playing optimally—of making the best move they can in any situation, of playing to maximize their outs no matter how unlikely they may be.
To those for whom the OP’s message strongly resonates: let it. Feel it. Give your grief and fear, sorrow and anger their due. Practice self-care; be kind and compassionate to yourself as you would to another who felt what you are feeling.
One morning you will wake up feeling okay, and you’ll realize you’ve felt okay more often than not lately. Then, should this game still appeal to you, it is time to start playing again :)
And one thing I’ve noticed in people who routinely excel at high variance games—e.g. Poker, MTG—is how unaffected they are when they’re down/behind. There is a mindset, in the moment, not of playing to win… but of playing optimally—of making the best move they can in any situation, of playing to maximize their outs no matter how unlikely they may be.
What you’ve lost isn’t the future, it’s the fantasy.
At least under the common conception of fantasy, this is an extremely strong claim, because you are effectively claiming that the good future in Ben Pace’s head could never have been realized, and I see no reason to conclude this from an epistemic perspective at all, unless you are masssively overconfident (even if you do have reasonably high doom probabilities, this statement is not true.)
More generally, it’s known that it does not always add up to normality, see here:
What is true is already so / It all adds up to normality
What you’ve lost isn’t the future, it’s the fantasy.
What remains is a game that we were born losing, where there may be few moves left to make, and where most of us most of the time don’t even have a seat at the table.
However, it is a game with very high variance.
It is a game where world shaping things happen regularly due to one person getting lucky (right person, right place, right time, right idea etc).
And one thing I’ve noticed in people who routinely excel at high variance games—e.g. Poker, MTG—is how unaffected they are when they’re down/behind.
There is a mindset, in the moment, not of playing to win… but of playing optimally—of making the best move they can in any situation, of playing to maximize their outs no matter how unlikely they may be.
To those for whom the OP’s message strongly resonates: let it. Feel it. Give your grief and fear, sorrow and anger their due. Practice self-care; be kind and compassionate to yourself as you would to another who felt what you are feeling.
One morning you will wake up feeling okay, and you’ll realize you’ve felt okay more often than not lately.
Then, should this game still appeal to you, it is time to start playing again :)
This point would be really helpful for everyone.
That said, I’d dispute this claim here:
At least under the common conception of fantasy, this is an extremely strong claim, because you are effectively claiming that the good future in Ben Pace’s head could never have been realized, and I see no reason to conclude this from an epistemic perspective at all, unless you are masssively overconfident (even if you do have reasonably high doom probabilities, this statement is not true.)
More generally, it’s known that it does not always add up to normality, see here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/74crqQnH8v9JtJcda/egan-s-theorem#oZNLtNAazf3E5bN6X