(This is a cross-quick take from https://laneless.substack.com/p/youre-the-only-person-who-can-do) There is one corner of the universe that you are uniquely well equipped to take care of. One patch of subjective experience in the manifold of all things that could ever be that is unusually tractable to you in particular, where your leverage is at its greatest. And that is, of course, with regard to yourself. Every moment of your existence counts as much as anyone’s towards the sum total of everything worthwhile in the universe. You are not merely unusually influential on this trajectory, but there are actions that you and you alone, uniquely in all of existence, are capable of .
We were not built for this. Evolution created us as a means to the end of genetic propagation, never optimizing for fulfillment, enlightenment, or kindness. But in the course of its endless groping through the space of all genetic propagators it stumbled into a recipe for a mind that could choose to care about those things and others, a mind that could adapt faster than evolution could compensate for and take paths evolution alone would never have discovered. A mind that could make the world about something—other minds, and beauty, and love, and discovery, and hope.
But that does not mean that we’re good at it.
The world was not made for us. So generation by generation we have reshaped it more to our liking, and so we live longer, fuller, stranger lives than our ancestors could have conceived. But at the same time we are strangers to our own creation. We are optimized for goals we do not prioritize in an environment that no longer exists. It is less a miracle and more a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and compassion that we’re able to make any of this work at all. And yet we not only survive, we thrive, we lift each other up, eight billion confused, flawed, angry chimps somehow constructing an edifice of kindness and discovery that grows by the year. Yes, we all suck, and yet we’re somehow amazing, the most important and compassionate things in all creation, warts and all.
You’re a human. The race of slavers and enslaved, the warmaker and the hero, the doctor and the drunkard, the smallpox slayers and factory farmers. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to get hurt, and you’re going to hurt people. But if you keep going, if you learn and grow and don’t give up—then, empirically, it pays off in expectation.
So here stand you and I, aliens in a strange land, evolutionary freaks imbued by their creator with the power to escape her clutches, yearning for what we were never supposed to be able to achieve. But that has always been the story of our people—we were not supposed to be able to, and then we did anyway. We care about people we have no genetic investment in, fly faster than any bird, peer across the cosmos into the first moments of creation, wage war on microscopic unliving armies of infectious monsters, and our footprints linger on the lifeless world far above.
We were never supposed to do any of those things, just as we were never supposed to be content, fulfilled, and even joyful. But we can—not by following the paths laid before us, which lead to joy as surely as walking the Savannah leads to the moon, but by understanding ourselves and our world so well that we can create the previously unimaginable conditions that lead to the seemingly impossible outcomes we choose. Happiness and fulfillment were never the defaults—but as a member of the race of impossible-doers, and as the particular impossible-doer with uniquely direct access to the mind and body of yourself, they are not beyond your reach.
(This is a cross-quick take from https://laneless.substack.com/p/youre-the-only-person-who-can-do)
There is one corner of the universe that you are uniquely well equipped to take care of. One patch of subjective experience in the manifold of all things that could ever be that is unusually tractable to you in particular, where your leverage is at its greatest. And that is, of course, with regard to yourself. Every moment of your existence counts as much as anyone’s towards the sum total of everything worthwhile in the universe. You are not merely unusually influential on this trajectory, but there are actions that you and you alone, uniquely in all of existence, are capable of .
We were not built for this. Evolution created us as a means to the end of genetic propagation, never optimizing for fulfillment, enlightenment, or kindness. But in the course of its endless groping through the space of all genetic propagators it stumbled into a recipe for a mind that could choose to care about those things and others, a mind that could adapt faster than evolution could compensate for and take paths evolution alone would never have discovered. A mind that could make the world about something—other minds, and beauty, and love, and discovery, and hope.
But that does not mean that we’re good at it.
The world was not made for us. So generation by generation we have reshaped it more to our liking, and so we live longer, fuller, stranger lives than our ancestors could have conceived. But at the same time we are strangers to our own creation. We are optimized for goals we do not prioritize in an environment that no longer exists. It is less a miracle and more a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and compassion that we’re able to make any of this work at all. And yet we not only survive, we thrive, we lift each other up, eight billion confused, flawed, angry chimps somehow constructing an edifice of kindness and discovery that grows by the year. Yes, we all suck, and yet we’re somehow amazing, the most important and compassionate things in all creation, warts and all.
You’re a human. The race of slavers and enslaved, the warmaker and the hero, the doctor and the drunkard, the smallpox slayers and factory farmers. You’re going to screw up. You’re going to get hurt, and you’re going to hurt people. But if you keep going, if you learn and grow and don’t give up—then, empirically, it pays off in expectation.
So here stand you and I, aliens in a strange land, evolutionary freaks imbued by their creator with the power to escape her clutches, yearning for what we were never supposed to be able to achieve. But that has always been the story of our people—we were not supposed to be able to, and then we did anyway. We care about people we have no genetic investment in, fly faster than any bird, peer across the cosmos into the first moments of creation, wage war on microscopic unliving armies of infectious monsters, and our footprints linger on the lifeless world far above.
We were never supposed to do any of those things, just as we were never supposed to be content, fulfilled, and even joyful. But we can—not by following the paths laid before us, which lead to joy as surely as walking the Savannah leads to the moon, but by understanding ourselves and our world so well that we can create the previously unimaginable conditions that lead to the seemingly impossible outcomes we choose. Happiness and fulfillment were never the defaults—but as a member of the race of impossible-doers, and as the particular impossible-doer with uniquely direct access to the mind and body of yourself, they are not beyond your reach.
You can, at least, choose to try.