A Friend of mine with similar political inclination keeps telling me I should read it, for the same “know thy enemy” kind of argument.

I just can’t bring myself to it, we all get bombarded enough with that shitty ideology, and have to push it back irl constantly, so I’d love to escape it, a bit, in my downtime.

Totally fair.

We all seem to agree that we kind of don’t really remember it though. It’s at least reassuring that that’s a shared experience.

Yeah I mean, it’s utterly forgettable. I’ve just not had that many book recommendations from friends, but I did really enjoy most of them, so I had to really scratch my head a bit. Best I could find to fit the bill was that.

I’ve read my fair share of shit books all on my own though, like a big boi.

Well I’ll save myself the trouble of being put on some sort of list for reading it then, thanks.

I honestly couldn’t remember any specifics beyond the fact I eyerolled many more times than one should when reading a book.

Something about a boy in a desert, meeting a wise old man who helps him find himself by telling him a few mystical stories…

Don’t think you have. If memory serves me right, it’s about being mindful and focusing on what matters, but wraps it in a ridiculously artificial “spiritual” setting.

This book is to literature what Instagram inspiration quotes are to poetry.

Was that helpful or necessary in the end? Or was is such trite that you could have done without?

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It was a while back, so I can’t remember exactly, but I do remember my friend not doing it any favours by really praising that book. Perhaps I was expecting too much, but by contrast, I found it to be a rather naïve, consensual, and superficial self-help book trying to masquerade as something more profound with a thin veneer of new-age spirituality.

Hope I don’t offend someone who loves it. I don’t feel strongly about it now, it was a while back, so maybe I missed something then. If someone disagrees with me I won’t die on that hill.

My childhood illusions.

I think that it is important to distinguish having the freedom to do anything from the attempt to do everything.

My point being that immortality forces that choice for you. You either start chasing meaning like a hamster in a wheel, or you accept everything losing meaning of things over time and sticking with them. Eternity does not mean “a really really long time”. Eternity means eternity.

Also, it was initially more of an answer to you saying that trying to be one thing was misguided, which I can agree with. As in, in a finite existence, you could be many things, but not because your chase of new meaning becomes random noise.

It reminds me a bit of Groundhog Day: what made Bill Murray happy in the end was finding meaning and contentment in his repeating life, rather than fighting against it.

That’s… Certainly one way to read the film. In groundhog day, what made Bill Murray’s character at peace with his curse was resignation, not meaning. Only then was he able to find the answers he needed to find to give meaning to his life before the curse, at which point he was rewarded for it in the form of lifting the curse and escaping the day.

If after laying it all bare and genuinely connecting with his love interest, the day had repeated itself, would that previous day still had meaning? Would this have been a happy ending?

And also, again, this was a finite slice of it. How long would the peace have lasted? And even if it was indeed meaning, again, for how long?

Groundhog day makes the argument for needing the world to stop around you, to provide you with the time to connect with it, make peace with the fact some things are out of your control, and do the introspection needed to give meaning to your life. Once that is realised, life moves on.

Groundhog day does not make the argument that having all of eternity is great because you get to learn to play the piano.

It’s funny that you quote Groundhog Day because, if you live eternally, I expect it will indeed eventually start to feel like that, that the days are the same, even though they objectively are not. And with eternity, no Andie McDowell at the end of the tunnel…

Finally, you didn’t say anything about the way choices have weight. I don’t expect to convince you, but your original premise being that you don’t get where I am coming from, I hope this at least addresses that.

Fair enough, but either way we arrive at the same conclusion that being immortal does not make choices less weighty.

If you define the weigh of each choice as being the subjective length of time of it’s effect solely, then I would agree. But that is only one way to look at it. The other one, from my initial comment, was that each choice is more “precious” (willfully using a different term here for clarity rather than anything deep) if you only can make finitely many. In that sense, the weight of a single choice is that you know it will rob you of the opportunity of the other ones that you could have made. If you are immortal, you can just also make them later.

Hmm, I think our disagreement here depends what exactly would happen to the human mind over arbitrarily large time scales, because I don’t think that constantly changing is the same thing as inevitably converging towards being nothing at all in particular as you do.

Ok, my “entropy machine” statement was very vague and only moderately clearer in my head. For the sake of the argument, could we assume there is no physical issue with our brains over long periods of time? Say it feels like a healthy 20-30 year old mind forever.

My entropy thing had more to do with what one would do or chose to do. I was thinking about it vaguely in terms of “if someone or something can do everything, it communicates no information about that thing”.

What would be the point of trying to do everything apart from filing the time that you have? Maybe things would have meaning for N years with N very large? Doesn’t matter how large, it’s still nothing. And then you need to keep at it even though it’s lost meaning to you, or try something else, again, with the knowledge this is an inescapable cycle.

This also would have the advantage that it would let us re-experience things as if it were for the first time, so that life never completely loses its novelty.

So that’s starting to be interesting. If we add the forgetting, then you have sort of this sliding window of memories, yeah you address part of my above points. I was going to say that it could lead to being just trapped in sort of a periodic pattern largely, and that that would be meaningless, but I realised that would have been dishonest. First of all because of the unproven assumption, but more importantly because we have been talking about subjective meaning so far rather than objective meaning. So even if true, that would not necessarily render the experience meaningless subjectively.

All I can say is that, if I were given the choice in how to be made eternal, that would have to be part of the deal to soften the blow. Also this is not what I took it to mean so not what I had in mind when commenting. There’s room for arguing about objectives meaning but I feel like even agreeing on whether that’s a thing is a whole other conversation.

(Honestly, you could argue that this is essentially what reincarnation would do anyway,

Damn, I’m going to really sound like a contrarian I am sorry. I disagree with this. There is a fundamental difference to me between reincarnation, which involves death (or indeed, the erasure of the knowledge of your past life) and a discrete jump to another one and a sliding window of perceived memory but with continuous consciousness. I wouldn’t call reincarnation “immortality” in the context of this argument because we have been talking about subjective experience, and subjectively, even assuming reincarnation, you only ever experience one incarnation with no knowledge of prior ones.

Hmm, I reread your comment to try and figure out what you are trying to get at with this but could not figure it out. Could you explain?

Yes but it was more of an additional remark. I was just arguing death made for a meaningful experience. But it’s not the only meaningful experience one can have, so it does not reinforce my initial point.

each choice would last forever, giving it more weight rather than less.

From my finite point of view, each of my choice lasts for my whole life, there is no subjective difference.

Perhaps, but plenty of people get so absorbed in their lives that they don’t do this anyway, even with only finite time available to them.

True, my initial comment should read “can be meaningful” rather than “is meaningful”.

Our identity already changes significantly over time; for example, I am a very different person in many ways than I was a decade ago. Thus, change is an inevitable feature of existence that we already need to embrace even for a finite lifetime.

Put another way, if one is seeking meaning through a lifelong stable identity, then one is looking in the wrong place because there is no such thing.

There is a whole spectrum between “misguidedly trying to be one and only one thing” and being an entropy machine.

This is circular reasoning. If it were possible to be immortal–which is the hypothetical being considered–ageing and dying would no longer be a necessary part of the human experience, so there would need to be a better reason to choose them than “ageing and dying are part of the human experience”.

You mean like the sentences after that?

Because, for instance, choices carry more weight when you can make finitely many of them.

Knowing you only have a limited time forces you to try and realise what’s meaningful to you and what’s not, and to actual act upon it.

If you live forever, have time to learn everything, experience everything… Then do you really? At which point does the amount of different experiences you run after stop painting a coherent picture of one’s life, values and identity, and start looking like noise in a random checklist? Finding meaning in an eternal life would be a sisyphean task.

And also, ageing and dying are part of the human experience. Accepting your own mortality, your own limit in time, when you subjectively feel like you’ve always existed, is a meaningful journey. Becoming immortal robs you of that chance.

Holy shit I want to meet the kind of people who are willingly testing a nightly build of Windows. They sound fucking unhinged.

That’s a damn fine choice.

I was going to try and defend them by saying that given the number of recent layoffs, and the push from the higher-ups, they’re not necessarily vibe coders by choice.

But then I remembered, I don’t give a shit about a company where devs think that rendering characters to a terminal emulator is a PhD-level problem, and that it’s a good idea to use react native in your start menu, to only name two.

I don’t? It sounds like a horrible curse. Part of the reason life is meaningful is that we’re only temporary witnesses of the universe.

Because the rigour and quality of work that is needed to do good software to get to market is insanely higher than the one required for keeping the money machine alive once you are a monopoly. So as you hire more and more to get your hands in as many pies as possible, have fewer and fewer experienced staff to train the new hires, and do questionable hires in leadership positions, the culture invariably shifts to doing less and less effort, or putting effort in the wrong place, and there you have it.

Now in Microsoft’s case, the quality was never that high to begin with (but the scummy practices made up for that), and the pockets are deep aplenty, so I think we are in for quite the shitshow (it can, and it will, get even worse).

Me too! Well, technically, the bank does own vastly more of my house than I do…

Actually I just remembered that, even some 20 years ago (possibly more) in France, we used to describe OP characters in videogames as “craqués”, which could mean “broken” or “cracked”, so I was not weirded out by this one, as the meaning is similar enough.

I wonder how “cracked” came to be and whether this is one of the only contemporary instance where some French slang may have influenced the English one somehow? Probably just a coincidence.