The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Mohammed Ali As Shannon taught us, information is surprise. From reading, listening, observing, trying, and failing; a lot of my beliefs have been shaken, stirred and thrown out into the gutter . And that’s a good thing! Updating your beliefs when life surprises you is learning; it is advancing a step forward through the fog of reality.
As I inch towards my fourth decade of existence on earth, I thought I’ll write down my biggest belief inversions; Ya know the important discoveries like how Santa Claus isn’t real :( Lets’ go, I’ve broadly bucketed these. Life/the world/systems
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Life has meaning: We’ve evolved from boiling pools of chemicals, and we exist only to propagate our genes. You are to your genes what the mosquito is to malaria . Beyond survival, all purpose and meaning are cooked up. There is grand order and no great story. We are all alone in an indifferent universe. You are not a unique snowflake, your life and death are less than a blink in eternity.
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Life is a meritocracy: Your birth country, gender, genes and parents’ economic strata will determine a lot of your life. No, your destiny isn’t written; but some of our stories are being hastily scribbled on toilet paper . Regardless, you should try your best; it’s amongst the few things you control.
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Pleasure is bad: Don’t watch TV, don’t eat too much, don’t be horny. We’re told to live piously. Pleasure is the most natural impulse. The universe wants you to lust after your partner, bond with them and care for them; it wants you to eat good food, enjoy it and stay healthy . Pleasure is encoded signals about what is good for survival, the demands of piety placed on you are mixture of advice for kids who don’t know better and controlling mechanisms over the naive, gullible, and foolish who see upliftment through someone exercising control over them, because they have poor self-worth . Of course, today we’re hacking our signals with things like refined sugars and porn, separate problem.
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Karma is real: Nope. We want karma to be real. Humans have an inherent sense of attachment and a desire for fairness, it emerged to increase our chances of survival . The Universe hasn’t hired an accountant to tally your goods and bads. Nobody is watching from the heavens, though your neighbours might be. Assholes live till 90 and good people die at 25 . Karma isn’t real. You don’t have to do bad things, but you have to acknowledge the people are going to get away with a lot of shit.
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Life has an inherent moral code: Morality is another intellectual invention; your impulses followed by your culture tells you what is good and bad. The impulse part comes from biological fitness, the culture part we completely invent . And culture is a fluid, ever evolving fairy-tale. We consider promiscuity and homosexuality bad while bonobos happily enact the mother of Woodstock . We look down upon rape, but mother nature has given us the “horrifying” traumatic insemination . It’s a cold indifferent universe with no moral code, what’s allowed is what you can get away with.
To be continued.