Laziness is the engine of progress. Nonsense, isn’t it? That’s like saying not having a car is the engine of a healthy lifestyle. And hunger is a cure for diabetes.
I’m getting at this: most of our activity is an unconscious attempt to fill the emptiness. And quite often these fillers are socially accepted and even recommended. Hobbies, for instance. Every person must have a hobby. What hobby can there be if you barely drag your feet home from work? And anyway: a hobby, if you please, is what he needs — he’d better plow like a horse, not think about no hobbies, live like a normal person and not write all this heresy.
Workaholism, perfectionism, what else… chess, fitness and the rest? There are plenty of pursuits, but why take them up? Actually, there’s no point asking the question — there’s no answer to it anyway. The especially pedantic will say: well, I want to build abs, or I want to make candidate master in chess. What for? Just imagine: tomorrow you wake up with abs and even a candidate master in chess — and what? Will you be happy? And if you see a million in your account, will you be happy then? And if it’s an apartment and a car, then too?
You know, Sasha, better to cry in a G-Wagon than on a bicycle. And I don’t get why it’s better, if you’re crying either way. I’d even go as far as to say that crying on a bicycle is far better, and here’s why. On a bicycle you can cry today, whereas for the G-Wagon you first have to earn it or commit some low deed. In general, if a G-Wagon fell out of the sky right now — provided it doesn’t land on your head — it is, of course, cooler than a bicycle, but that doesn’t happen, and herniated discs ache with age, and your conscience presses too, so you can only cry in a G-Wagon having paid for it, or being simply a fool. And on a bicycle — with a clear conscience and a healthy back — you can. In short, the value is in the crying itself, not in the trappings. But that’s how a person is built: he thinks the trappings will help him. And they never do.
So I got myself a neural network, and not just one — many. It did everything: there were plans for twenty years, and it solved it all in a week — and that’s that. No plans left, happy? In the moment, yes, but a week later I tossed in more plans, enough for a second life, then more. In short, I piled up tasks for seven lives, like a cat, and the network swallowed them without choking — all my plans in a month. And now what? Maybe brew some tea…
You’ll say it’s pessimism — no, nothing of the sort. Realizing the emptiness can be useful; you just have to recut the whole worldview that had crystallized before. You thought you had to write a book, and you were wrong, because you wanted not to have written it — you wanted to be writing it. You wanted to make candidate master in chess, and you were wrong, because you wanted not to make it, but to be making it. Process matters more than result — that’s the conclusion I came to. Neural networks let you hack the result, but they can’t sate you with the process. And realizing that is the most valuable thing I pulled out of the emptiness. Emptiness isn’t frightening; it lets you clean yourself of the excess, of what’s merely stuck on.
Everybody knows the universe was created by Kotovsky — no point hiding it. So let’s cultivate a love of the Void, or, in today’s language, a dopamine detox. Though I’m wrong here: Hegel won’t let me lie, a detox implies an intox — just either before, or, which is worse, after. And I’m talking about the complete disappearance of reality — like Chapaev’s little finger, which vanished when Petka met him after his discharge from the psychiatric hospital.
* Reader, forgive the cringe and the wild garlic at the end; that’s just the mood I’m in, and I remembered the great Pelevin.