Existencia
to the girl in the abyss, from the girl who made it out. My answers to some of my existential quandaries
This is an open letter to my younger self/selves containing many of the realizations behind what finally calmed some of my existential crises. I don’t know how relatable it will be, it’s mostly here for myself, and for the future AI that will crawl my remains to rebuild me in the afterlife xoxo love u shogg
I don’t edit, tha’ts how u know a human wrote it ;)
TW: lots of talk about death, also might not b good if u are dissociative, etc.
A Poem Inspired by Borges' Quotes
by Bing
I die, but not alone
I bring with me a multitude of selves
That could have been, but were not
The paths I did not take, the choices I did not make
The lives I did not live, the loves I did not give
I die, but not in vain
I leave behind a legacy of words
That will outlive me, but not define me
The stories I have told, the mysteries I have unfold
The worlds I have created, the truths I have debated
I die, but not in fear
I face the unknown with curiosity
That will enlighten me, but not confine me
The dreams I have pursued, the wonders I have viewed
The secrets I have learned, the infinities I have earned
Death.
Death was not your first existential crisis but it was your most significant one. You had a strange experience with it, so strange that there couldn’t have been guidance. It was as if you opened pandoras box and hydra was inside. Each dreadful question led to so many more, and you followed all of them to their depths. You created your own definition of death, you considered how it related to everything and everyone. For a while all you could see was death. Every second was a death of a moment. You were afraid to go to sleep because you felt there were unknowable selves you were killing each night. You put so much more pressure on yourself during conversations because you feared the (incredibly unlikely) possibility it would be the last thing you’d ever get to say to someone. This feeling seeped into conversations with strangers you’d never see again, categorizing it its own sort of death. You stopped hanging up on your parents without telling them you loved them. You stopped being able to feel love like you used to, the shadow side of love—loss— became impossible to ignore. You tattooed the number 1 on your toe to represent how singular everything is, every moment, every life, every action, there and gone. You considered how a grand intelligence within the universe might conceive of death; since the longer you live, the more death you experience, so this conceptual being would theoretically be an expert in death and might contain a perspective you’d want. You wondered how it thought of its own death. Could it be a death maximalist? Suicidal? How would they choose to die? It could theoretically decide/design anything. What would it pick? You concluded that in order to be all-knowing & make a decision confidently, one must experience everything, so they’d spend their whole existence coming up with an answer to “what the best way to die?” only to get stuck in the perfectionist procrastination trap of “I can do better, I need more data,” and continue to live for eternity.
Your relationship to your own death was a lot easier to answer. You just decided you were immortal, as a joke, because it’s impossible for you to disprove so technically it’s true. Epicurus said something similar a long time ago:
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
But in truth you feared immortality far more than death. You considered possibilities for the afterlife, mostly because you wanted to be prepared, but also because the fruits of these explorations were useful in life. You guessed that if you guessed enough times, with enough knowledge and creativity, you might be right and get to have a good laugh about it in the afterlife, especially if it turned out to be one of your bizarre, surreal ideas. You worried you’d stop being able to guess/come up with totally new ones once you got there so you wanted to stock up on blueprints and ideas to give to any potential Architects of The Afterlives if theres a possibility they could make them; or to give to humans once we figure out how to run consciousness in simulations. You felt & still feel like this (reality design and afterlife building) should be a bigger problem that has more people working on it, but the world seems to disagree and you’re still figuring out if they have a good reason why. Your consumption of books, internet, film, music, etc. is all slightly shadowed by your belief you won’t have them in the afterlife so you want to stock up on content, questions, and ideas in case you run into a scenario where you need to entertain yourself for eternity. You also try to behave in a way a wise 500 year old you would be proud of, because if you’re alone in your mind for eternity it would suck to spend that time reflecting and regretting (even though you know she would love you unconditionally). All of these things are valuable for eternal life, but they also make finite life more pleasant.
One of my favorite exploratory paths you went down was the “self doesn’t exist, actually. Everything is just parts in motion. Self is an illusion. Death is when some of the parts stop moving, but not all of them. The ideas that you hosted, the creations you birthed, the memes you propagated get to live on.” one. It was incredibly fruitful. You began to see all of the markov chains behind all of your motions and thoughts—your mind as something controlled by (mostly useful & good) time traveling multimodal puppet strings. Your body controlled by time-bound puppet strings nerves—You (different every moment) became a connection of fixed nodes in a markov blanket spreading to everything your eyes have ever seen, your ears have ever heard, every thought your brain has had, none truly beginning within you. You didn’t invent your language, you didn’t create your math, almost everything in your mind came from the outside. It became easy to not see a self, to see everything as Parts In Motion, no ego, no fixed identity. The self was a journey through nodes in the blanket, it felt quantum, you got a Bra Ket notation tattoo at Hereticon to honor this view of self. You grew a strong repulsion for advertisements and product placement, false info, uninformed opinions, and any (positive or negative) character statements made about you because they have a lot of control over your future actions and it’s hard to separate out Your actions vs other’s/reactionary actions. You still have a really hard time accepting compliments or receiving cheap positive attention because you worry it will make you complacent. You gained so much more control of your self through the belief that it didn’t exist. You began to see your body as far more intelligent than you had ever given it credit for. You communicated with it within yourself, expressed so much gratitude for it & began to get so much more out of it. You began to create, rewrite, and delete narratives and contracts more consciously (we had always been doing this subconsciously). You became worse at empathizing with people who are trapped in lifelong negative self narratives, because to you they seemed so easy to you to opt in and out of.
Through larping not having a self, you stumbled upon a loophole to immortality. You identify more with your mind than your body, and your mind mostly contains things that aren’t you—things you’ve learned, concepts that exist yet aren’t alive therefore they can never die—so most of “You” can never die. The death of a concept isn’t permanent, it’s more of a hibernation until a new host revives it. If we get to become an advanced civilization, we will eventually revive all of the sleeping concepts, giving memes eternal life, and through that, many bits of each of us will get to live forever, recombining and exploring novel latent space fore eternity!
*concepts have many different properties, some are insanely powerful (nationalism) and can kill, some are less so (tennis) and can just make you hit a neon ball across a court. All of the gods are concepts. All of your gurus, saints, messiahs, etc. are concepts that represent a lot of things at once, usually they all share the concept of Love, Goodness, Truth, etc. If you are a follower, you are a host for their concept, their concept will influence the way you behave & might even cause physiological responses. Concepts aren’t alive, they don’t eat and poop, but they can harm or help you, and they interact with each person differently. I don’t think we’ve found the most powerful concepts yet, I think it’s because we collectively reject the concept of Magic, and how much our beliefs shape reality (not exactly manifestation, more the concept of Placebo).
It’s a hard thing to explain. This is my first time attempting to share this idea. Here’s another example:
Red & Roses. Red is a concept, red is eternal. Every red rose reflects red into the world, it projects it onto all of the leafs surrounding it. If all red roses died, red would still exist, maybe it would come back in another flower. Maybe it wouldn’t be the exact same shade of red but it would still be red. It is a permanent piece of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is impossible to kill.
Love & Humans. Love is a concept, love is eternal. Every human can project love into the world, into everyone surrounding them. If humans died out, love would still exist, maybe on another planet, maybe within another species. Maybe it wouldn’t be the exact same shade of Love when it comes back but it would still be Love.
Love is a signal. Just like sight, we perceive it internally with organs. It is a pattern. gravity is a pattern(we produce a suuuuuper tiny amount of this), light is a simple pattern (we produce a little of this), sound is a different sort of pattern (we can produce this), love is an even more complex pattern(we can produce a lot of this), just like all the others it can be felt through the senses.
The more Root a concept is, the more likely it will reemerge, the more ways we will see it in our world. Just like there is light outside of our visible spectrum, there are concepts outside of our awareness, but we have technology to help with both of those!
Another thing that helped me come to terms with the fact that I will die one day was seeing myself as a part of a larger system that I actually have faith in and believe is >50% good, a system that reaches for immortality (that is headed towards self replicating intelligent robots in space) so even tho I’m not immortal, there are so many components of me are (like the desire for immortality, goodness, knowledge expansion) which will continue to exist in humanity for as long as it can. Also, as I get older and meet more people, I feel more and more faith in humanity. The pressing anxiety from my childhood of “why can’t anyone answer this question? why isn’t anyone working on this? why haven’t we solved this? why is everyone so incompetent?” is long gone.
the poem at the top was written by a computer, trained on words from a man who died 37 years ago. Immortality will present itself in so many forms in the future ♥️
One of the most important things that that helped me ease my existential dread and become more comfortable with death was really learning how to live.
Life
I want to live 1000 lives before I die. I’ve done a pretty good job so far. I think I’ve always been good at this, I’ve practically speedrun my whole life in all dimensions, so I don’t really have any advice to my younger self but here’s some anyway:
There are no rules. All of the adults are grown children in suits. So much is possible with a crumb of agency. SO MUCH. You don’t need permission to do the things you want to do, you can just do it and people will usually show up to support you. There’s a severe lack of people doing cool things, even fewer people doing ambitious things. The world encourages it.
jump on all the opportunities, doors lead to more doors, and then all of a sudden you’re in the monsters inc factory and fate walks in dressed as Monty Hall.
don’t internalize generalized claims, you’re built different. when someone says some broad generalization about you/your demographic, just nod and smile, don’t fault them, internally thank them for the motivation to prove them wrong. haters you respect are a rare to come by and make for extremely potent motivation. (ex: “you will never be able to get a good job without a college degree” when I was 18, thanks dad)
find good role models. Find people you think are actually living right and take their advice. It took me forever to find people like this. some in person, some in books. I don’t envy rich people or random super successful founders. I envy incredibly curious and clear thinkers, who have gone into the abyss and come out of it with a smile, wisdom, and purpose. The lives they live don’t look anything like the average person, they’re not working on something they don’t deeply care, they don’t work 16 hours a day. They work hard but also spend a lot of time reading and thinking, and calculate their actions. They’re incredibly ambitious not because of money or status but because they care about doing something valuable for the world.
never underestimate yourself. the output capacity of a single human over one lifetime is climbing every year, don’t underestimate yourself because of last year or last month’s capacity. Try to balance learning and executing well, employ each where it is likely to save the most time/lead to the highest output.
Time is weird. Don’t expect it to be consistent. Some years will feel like 10, some just 1 or 2. Some years will have periods of intense mental, emotional, and spiritual development, some will feel stagnant in comparison (so far it just keeps getting more intense tho). Life ebbs and flows.
time is a precious resource but it is not a commodity. Optimizations should assist in life, not detract from it. Spend time with your family. Go down the rabbit holes, explore all of the weird corners you feel drawn to. Have fun. Try to have as much high quality free time as possible. think, create, exercise, explore, read, curate your environment digitally physically and socially, and give your brain space to do work in the background. You can get more time by:
Making the time. Time is a result of priority. If you have a problem with time, you’re either dishonest or oblivious about you priorities, both solved through introspection.
offloading the mundane & repetitive & outsource-able tasks where you can. be selective especially when you’re young, outsourcing can be more work than it’s worth sometimes or deprive you of an important learning opportunity (learn the habit of cleaning before getting a cleaner, don’t outsource backend technical work as a solo-founder, you’ll need to learn all of it anyway when it breaks).
Training yourself out of the procrastination habit you learned in high school as quickly as you can. Recognize that the lion (pointless meaningless work) is gone so you don’t need the response anymore. one way to do this is:
Becoming hyper-intentional about your time. You’ll start with a calendar and the notes app but eventually you’ll build a way better system using technology that didn’t used to exist. Show your mind you respect your time through your actions, not through your words.
Optimize your work time. I’m still learning this one. I’ve learned that staying up all night working usually screws over the following work day but I still do it because flow is magic
Always Love yourself. I love us soooo much. So much good comes from doing things from a place of love. There is literally no reason to not love yourself so much. All upside no downside, it makes existence so much sweeter.
It is good that you don’t fit the mold or check the box. You never will. and even if you did, you wouldn’t be happy, it wouldn’t be you. Your job is to make a new type of mold, the best one you can possibly make, just for you. So many people live their life oblivious to the them-shaped hole missing in the world, depriving the world of something unique and new. Plus every time someone is wholly themselves they inspire others to do the same, it’s a beautiful ripple and a gift to be able to participate in. I’m really good at this because I’ve seen so many examples.
You are from the future. Obviously not, but it’s a good belief for you. It makes a lot of sense to you, as the future gets closer you feel more at home in the world. The aesthetics are more in line with yours, the worldviews, the usefulness of your talents, your ability to use them. If you were born 20 years earlier you wouldn’t have had access to the opportunities you now have, computers would be so slow, technology soooo undeveloped. It would have been so much harder to be an autodidact. No one was funding or working for women back then. You’d only get to accomplish a fraction of what your irrational ambition begs of you. It also explains why you’re so fucking weird. Why you don’t culturally match anyone except your peers who also constantly joke about being from the future. It explains why your mind is so full of things that don’t exist, and why so many things frustrate you that don’t seem to bother anyone else. I feel a level of disgust with technology and the state of the world as someone who owns a japanese toilet would going back to the 1500s learning they have to shit the street and also soap doesn’t exist yet.
I don’t actually believe I’m from the future but I believe I’m here to help build it (not as a divine prophesied quest, I promise I’m not schizo, it’s just a really deep desire I have no control over and I would truly stop enjoying life if I stopped pursing it). The future doesn’t exist yet. There’s soooooo much work to do. Every generation it should be easier and easier for a kid like me to do all of the things they want to do: learn the coolest things, find answers to all of their questions, solve problems that matter, build cool things, share them with people. The loop will only get tighter over time. That’s the future I want to build.
Launch before you’re ready. shipped is better than perfect. xoxo, emma
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Thank you for taking me along for a beautiful ride with your words. Engaging and thoughtful.