The world has gotten much, much richer over the 31 years I’ve been alive, and so have I. My parents, Irish immigrants and perpetual laggards to technology, now not only both have cell phones, they both have smartphones, and they can see the videos I send them a few times a week of our beautiful baby boy 4000 miles away in rauhallinen Finland. I have been able to work at home for over 90% of my post college career, long enough that I can earnestly say I’m starting to get a little sick of being employed as Spooky Action At A Distance Man. I both make more money than I really know what to do with and am disproportionately poor by the standards of virtually everyone I grew up with, mostly by virtue of moving out of the United States. How on Earth did all of this happen? And why do I feel like I am the only person I know who feels this way?
Here is my theory. Things have persistently felt so good to me because, first and foremost, I am militantly content with what I have. I refuse to not be content with what I have without good reason. An ever-enriching world where you are already content with what’s on offer for Day 1 is a blessed experience to have, and wise men from thousands of years ago were able to do it just by hanging out with dogs! Or, if you’re famously greedy, a little pot of cheese.
At first glance this is a paradox. As far back as I care to remember I have perceived this world to be a world of adventure - there are always things to do, challenges to overcome, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to overcome challenges so that you can get to more interesting and difficult challenges. If you tire of progressive overload, you can always pump the brakes on most of them. We can’t quite escape the inexorable scourge of aging yet, not for lack of effort, but we can escape samsara on a tidy budget without literally becoming Siddhartha Gautama, which friends tell me is even better. (Sometimes at length.) And, when you later tire of the tiresomeness, you can just … start taking on challenges again. Provided that you didn’t massively derail your own life in the interim, most people can pick up about where they left off. I have lived through this myself in several stages; I spent years between high school and community college doing nothing more useful than drinking and browsing the Arch Linux wiki. How do I square the two?
To be honest, I think I just reflexively dissolve the paradox. I don’t see any good reason to be discontent because I am being challenged. It’s hard for me to even imagine a universe with conscious beings in it that doesn’t contain any challenges in it. As far as I can tell, agenty creatures like Diogenes and dogs and myself don’t spring fully formed from a vacuum. Our agency/intelligence/whatever is a piece of flint hammered into an arrowhead over the course of millions of years via competitive pressures. Take that pressure away, and I see no reason to think that any momentary forms of intelligence/agency/whatever wouldn’t just fizzle back to random thermal fluctuations.
Indeed any concept of a universe which just happens to have little guys running around without any particular reason to be there sounds downright Edenic to me, as in “strong prior in the existence of a benevolent creator” Edenic. I’m not about to say you can’t look at evolution itself as God’s spiritual signature on our universe, of course, I’m just pointing out things get weird when you try to imagine universes that different from our own.
One could take that and go full negative utilitarian with it and conclude that sounds like a great reason to destroy the universe. I think we would have to be really, really, super-duper sure we were all ethically on the same page before we do that. The short-run costs of destroying the universe are clearly awful; the long-run benefits of destroying the universe are highly uncertain; for destroying the universe to be morally justified, the expected long-run benefits have to substantially exceed its short-run costs.
In the meantime, if the only way we get to beings of moral consideration is via crossing this Rubicon, I’m simply happy to partake. You’re welcome to extend my lifespan by several million years to give me more time to think about it, but consider whether a guy like me would really change my mind about such a thing in the first place.
There I go again! There’s that militant contentment I’m talking about. As always, if you happen to pass through the Nordics, feel free to drop by to split a pot of cheese.
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