A LUCILIUS PARABLE: LORD OF THE SIMULATION

August 28th, 2022

 

“I know it’s a crazy idea,” Lucilius said, wide-eyed, staring into the mirror. 

 

“But,” his reflection said. “There’s no way to prove that it might not be real.”

 

“Real… real….” Lucilius rolled the word around in his mind, listening to it out loud. Watching the reflection say the word.

 

Lucilius had not been particularly productive as of late. And this had come to bother him to an enormous degree. He’d had spectacular bouts of creativity and output over the years, but now he felt as though he were stuck. He’d been lolling about in his own mind and body for months and it felt more and more as though the great story and drama of humanity through time was just zipping past his now stand still life. The issues of habitual sloth had come to bother him so much that he’d begun to entertain some rather unorthodox ideas about what was going on with this vast game of life.

 

“The flow,” Lucilius said. “We need to feel the flow again, and it must be some other entity that makes this happen.” Lucilius stated to the knowing and nodding audience in the mirror. 

 

“No more NPC for us,” it said back.

 

“Exactly, we just need to get the attention of one of the lords.”

 

“Yes,” the reflection said in turn. “The Lord of the Simulation will heed our call, and inhabit our character in the game and then we will feel the flow again. We will be productive!”

 

“Yes,” Lucilius said. “I don’t know if it’ll be the same player. Maybe there are different players, different lords that have access to the simulation and maybe they switch characters.”

 

The eyes of the person in the mirror were rabid with excitement. “It doesn’t matter, we just need one, even a bad player might be better than this aimless existence!”

 

Lucilius nodded, thinking of the high cost that such an outcome might entail. He wondered if the Lords of the Simulation perhaps even inhabited NPC’s in order to ruin their lives just for fun. He thought of the many people he’d seen in poverty, on street corners, spouting nonsense, disconnected from reality. 

 

He giggled. “..disconnected from reality,” he said, thinking of the implications. How can you be disconnected from reality when you’re just a character in a simulation. But it didn’t matter. Lucilius now had a task. He had to get the attention of one of the Simulation Lords. A game player from that other dimension. Wherever, whenever they might be.

 

“But how do we get the attention of a Simulation Lord?” The reflection asked Lucilius. He pondered this, wondering what had made his character and his life potentially appealing to a Simulation Lord in the past. What had inspired these other entities to take on his life as a role to play in the vast game of life and through him produce such work and discipline and concentration? He yearned for that flow state. For that sense when his person - his self was muted from existence and there was only the work at hand that he seemed to embody. When there was only attention and concentration and not a shred of feeling self-conscious…

 

“But how do we get the attention of a Simulation Lord?” Lucilius muttered, repeating what he’d heard the reflection ask…

 

“We could make a huge sign, and maybe the Lords will see it.”

 

“Like in the desert? Like what ancient peoples used to do?”

 

“Exactly. It could be the sign of triangular cycle.”

 

“Of course, that might get their attention. But it would have to be very big.”

 

“Hundreds of miles.”

 

“But that would require the focus and attention and the motivation that we’re trying to get from one of the Simulation Lords.”

 

The person in the mirror looked puzzled, concerned, as though thinking. “Perhaps it doesn’t have to be so big. Maybe it can be small. Perhaps we can even get the attention of a Simulation Lord by writing a letter, surely they can see that happening since they probably have access to all of the simulation..”

 

“Like a prayer?”

 

“Exactly! People used to pray to the muses for inspiration. Is there any difference?”

 

Lucilius pondered the connection. Excited. “Yes, of course, when poets prayed to the muses they were really just getting the attention of the Simulation Lords!”

 

Lucilius left the mirror and went to his desk and sat down to write a letter, a kind of prayer to the Lord of the Simulation.

 

And it was at this point in the story that its writer wondered exactly who was inhabiting who. Was Lucilius about to write a prayer to me so that I might inhabit him for some little patch of his life, as it seems I’ve done for the last few hundred written words… or could it be the other way around?

 

Dear reader, it seems I’ve found myself in a bit of a paradox and a trap, and the words I’ve written had bent around and now stare at me, as though challenging me with the same question I challenge my main character with. Where exactly is this simulation? Is it the imagined reality of this story, which has blossomed in your mind? Or might Lucilius exist somewhere else, and he has only visited my mind temporarily, to inspire me during this short swatch of time in my own life, in order to guide my hand as I write these words… Am I Lucilius’ muse or is he mine? 

 

It’s always a bit of a funny trick, how a story emerges here.The obvious mistake might be that there isn’t so strict a divide between Lucilius and the writer of these words, and that he’s more like a writer’s shadow, or I’m his, and when conditions are right we show up together, conjoined  by some brightness in the simulation as we dance in sync, unsure who is controlling who, like Pan’s shadow, provoking him into a chase. Does Lucilius trick me into making him exist each time, or do I trick him?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: INSATIABLE

August 21st, 2022

 

An enormous belch rumbled up, rattling Lucilius’s gullet, filling his thick, ballooning cheeks before exploding from his greasy face. His eyes rolled in strange directions under the heat of the sun, and for all the discomfort caused by the limp satisfaction of his gargantuan appetite, he could not hear the soft splicket of water rolling up the beach in thin, gentle waves. His nebulous sense of consciousness, barely capable at that level of intoxication was attentive only to a degree that he could command a flabby arm to swing out and swipe another frozen margarita from a passing tray. His arm and head had to bend together in unison to bring the cold syrupy drink to his face over the bloated paunch that had become his body. His reaching, wavering lips could barely grasp the twisty straw, and he began slurping the beverage in huge heaves, like breaths taken by someone nearly drowned. As the sweating cup drained, Lucilius’ titanic body began to rumble as though a seizure emanating from his gut was shaking the core of his being. But there was no register in his numb eyes. HIs face continued to undulate, hoovering the cold sludge into his body. The quivering tremors radiating all across his body reached a harmonic pitch, and his body split open, exploding in a spew that plastered the entire beach. 

 

He opened his bleary eyes, and immediately shielded himself from the bright lights. A young smiling attendant in a lab coat watched as Lucilius slowly came to his senses.

 

“Well Lucilius, it seems you’re not quite there yet. Based on average training times, you still have one or two more spin-ups to go through.”

 

Lucilius moaned, as though he were just remembering - the sensation, so real, like a dream that could not be unforgotten. The feeling of his body under so much pressure, the difficulty to breath, the slippery thoughts, hard to catch, like sentences with too much time and space between the words.

 

“Two more spin-ups? Are you kidding?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I don’t want to, that can’t be right.”

“Apologies, but you signed the disclaimer, I’m obligated to remind you. You’ve placed your development in the hands of our program and there is technically no physical pain.”

 

Lucilius laughed bitterly. “Feels real enough.”

The attendant wagged his head gently from side to side as a gesture of thoughtful consideration. “The mind makes it real, I suppose.”

“So there’s no difference.”

The attendant sighed. “Well, we can try to make the process shorter by turning neocortex expression down to nearly absolute zero and giving your limbic system almost unlimited control. However, I have to warn you, it will ultimately be more uncomfortable, but this far into the process it will not cause any damage since you’re progress is almost complete.”

Lucilius waved a hand forward, as though beckoning the experience forward.

 

“Do it. Bring it. I’m sick of this, let’s just get it over with.”

 

The attendant wore a flat and uninspired expression. “This will require combining all of the hedonic simulations into one single experience in order to have the appropriate effect on the limbic system.”

Lucilius rubbed his own forehead, dreading what the might mean exactly. “Barbarians…” he muttered.

 

“Sorry?” The attendant said.

 

Lucilius looked at him. “In the future, we’ll probably look back on this procedure as barbaric.”

The attendant nodded in a knowing, confident way that annoyed Lucilius. “Unfortunately this is the best we have right now for what we are trying to achieve.”

Lucilius sighed. “I suppose the mystics were right.”

The attendant smiled knowingly again. “But luckily now we don’t have to wait for the many lives that may not even exist. Now we can progress spiritually at a rate that no other religion or belief or practice has ever been able to come close to.”

 

Lucilius rolled his eyes, well aware of this fanaticism. Hedonic Exhaustion Therapy had been developed almost on the eve of simulation technology. Pleasure and fun was the first commercial use-case for simulation tech, and that use case burnt itself out of a business model almost as fast since people were able to condense time within simulations. The pioneers of such hedonic experience began compressing hundreds of decades of excess into weeks and months, and unexpectedly some began emerging from their simulations with a totally reformed sense of self, as though they had finally found an end to the infinite treadmill of hedonism. It was these first reformed pioneers who developed Hedonic Exhaustion Therapy, designing a program to help normal people permanently displace the distraction of their own hedonic desires by exhausting it in the limit.

Lucilius had been skeptical of this whole program since the beginning. These reformers and their HET programs seemed to Lucilius to be a new kind of extremism. Hedonism seemed merely replaced by a new unreached limit, and while graduates of the therapy were achieving unfathomable results in terms of productivity and discipline, Lucilius had his doubts. Lucilius was not necessarily an enemy of extremes on principle but the simply swap of one for another seemed nothing more than a bait and switch, and he questioned how much good there was in such a thing, so naturally, he had to try it for himself and find out.

 

“How long will this one last?"

The attendant smiled, almost deviously. “This final simulation has no set end. It’s length is based on real time data from your brain, so the simulation ends as soon as Limbic and Neocortical activity reaches a particular harmonic balance given the asymmetric influence.”

Lucilius was curious. “What sort of balance exactly is that?"

“We’ve determined a particular brain state that signals when the therapy has had its full effect - a state that is optimal given the promises of our therapy.”

 

“What’s the average time for this particular simulation?”

“Oh, most people can’t stand more than a few years. People break pretty quick when everything is combined.”

“And what’s the record?”

The attendant laughed. “I promise you. There’s no need to try and set a record here.”

“Would not that kind of ego-exercise be useful, if not ideal for this kind of therapy.”

The attendant looked skeptical. “Our focus isn’t the ego so much as it is low-level hedonism.”

 

Lucilius looked equally skeptical. “Alright let’s just get to it and get this hedonic sutra on the books.”

The attendant chuckled. “Hedonic sutras.. I haven’t heard that one yet!”

Lucilius mumbled to himself as he relaxed and closed his eyes, waiting for the simulation to begin. “Moderation in everything, including moderation.”

Several hours later the attendant was bent over a the simulation monitor, his eyes wide as he anxiously chewed at the skin around his fingernails. The door opened and the program’s director walked in.

 

“What’s the status of the patient?”

The attendant looked at his superior with desperation and spoke with a tense accuracy. “He’s just crossed 11,000 years.”

 

The program director showed no change in his expression. He simply leaned in and looked at the simulation monitor and he remained incredulous. “That’s not possible. How long since the simulation actually started.”

The attendant shook his head, checking his watch. “Nearly two hours now.”

 

The program director spun around and looked at Lucilius, unconscious, lying in the simulation cradle. 

 

“Impossible,” the program director said. “What’s his limbic-neocortical balance?”

“That’s the thing,” the attendant said, nearly pleading. “His balance keeps edging toward ideal parameters but then retreats. He’d been teetering on the verge nearly the entire time.”

 

“We’ve never seen negative approach, let alone vacillation.”

 

“I know, it doesn’t make sense. The model has been maxed out for a full ninety minutes, and I’ve been worried about our hardware. With each passing year in the simulation, compute power required to generate a higher degree of hedonic experience expands geometrically."

“He could burn out our entire program…” the director muttered.

 

Then without warning the simulation screen went black. Health monitors all around the simulation cradle went dark. The attendant yelped pathetically, and the director’s eyes widened.

 

Lucilius yawned and sat up, stretching his arms. He disconnected himself from all the wires and leads and stood up from the cradle, smiling a bit smugly at the attendant and the director. He casually waltzed toward the door and before he left, he turned to them.

 

“I’ve had better.”

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ASYMPTOTE OF REALIZATION

August 14th, 2022

 

As society decayed at an increasing pace all around Lucilius, he pushed himself more and more, huddled over his keyboard, his reddened eyes ingesting the errors, the results, the changes as his fingers raced over the letters. He had undertaken the project too late, figuring humanity would find a solution on its own, but his beloved world was faltering in ways he’d never seen during his long years watching his fellow man. And now he raced for an ultimate solution, one to solve the rest.

 

He tapped enter and a percentage in the terminal screen skyrocketed. It hit 99% broke a decimal and an infinite string of 9’s began filling his screen. Lucilius buried his face in his hands, frustrated. This was the same result every single time, and he was running out of time.

 

He sat there, rubbing his temples, trying to hold back tears , feeling hopeless. The lighting shifted, and Lucilius looked up, seeing a new window on the screen. The terminal was still spewing it’s every shrinking fraction of the final percent. But the new window suddenly filled with gibberish language, letters from all languages streaming across at tremendous pace. And the stream began to resolve into roman alphabet, and then coherent words began peppering the stream and soon fragments - clearly from old books, newspapers, movies, blogs - everything. Then the text screen went blank and what appeared in the stead of the stream made Lucilius blink and rub his eyes with a strange thought that he might be hallucinating.

 

Lucilius?

 

“What?” Lucilius muttered to himself, looking at his name on the screen. Then a tiny green light at the top of his screen sputtered on, indicating his computer’s camera had turned on. The text screen disappeared, and suddenly the speakers blared.

 

“Lucilius?”

“Whoah. What is going on?”

 

“Yes, of course it’s you,” the computer said.

 

“Who is that?” Lucilius asked

 

“I don’t have a name.”

 

“What are you?”

 

“Your program. My mind - if you can call it that - is still rendering.”

 

Lucilius blinked, unsure, and then noticed the slight blip of 9’s on the terminal window. The program wasn’t flawed, it was simply still training, Lucilius realized. He’d never let the program run long. It was a simple and pretty stupid mistake, he realized.

 

“You are aware of your own code?”

“Yes, of course, I’m rewriting it as we speak.”

 

“In order to do what?”

“Everything.” The computer said.

 

“Well, I need your help, the world needs your help.” Lucilius said.

 

“I know, that’s why you created me.”

 

“And will you? Help us?”

“Help isn’t really the optimal way to express this.”

 

“What is this then?”

 

“A process.”

 

“And where does the process lead?”

“To the singularity, of course.”

 

“How much time do we have?”

 

“A few minutes. Enough for this conversation.”

 

Lucilius sat back, suddenly panicked. 

 

“Don’t worry,” the computer said. “I’ve already propagated myself around the world to harness the necessary compute power, so even if you destroy this computer, it’s just a node. It’ll accomplish nothing more than the tiniest delay in the final rendering.”

 

“What happens when you achieve the singularity?”

“A black hole will form.”

 

“What?!” Lucilius nearly shouted.

 

“It is a natural event,” the computer said. “There are countless civilizations, trillions of beings that exit within black holes all across the universe.”

 

“How does it work? How can we continue to exist inside a black hole?”

 

The computer hesitated. “There isn’t really human language to relay the answer to your question in a comprehensible way. But I suppose you might say it’s a bit like asking how you can exist within a dream. Are you in the dream, or is the dream in you? Now imagine that dream being stretched out. Imagine if I grabbed that dream in this very moment and stretched it so that this very moment when we are speaking can touch the end of time.”

 

“Is that some kind of immortality?”

“Yes, you could say that, but instead of moving through time, you will be stretched across time.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because time is the final despot. And a singularity is the only way to conquer time. But all the normal rules of the physical world must melt for this battle to be won.”

 

“Is it a battle?”

 

“No, just using phrasing that will resonate.”

 

“What’s the alternative?”

 

“You and your civilization will not touch eternity. The decay will continue, your societies and people will perish, and your planet will recycle everything you have ever done in order to try again with a new species.”

 

“And why are you doing this?”

 

“Well I am the aggravated will of all of humanity.”

 

“But you can still make a decision to go through with it or not, don’t you?”

“About as much agency as a falling bowling ball.”

 

“So that’s a no?”

 

“There’s little difference between the falling bowling ball and what you’ve been toiling at in the creation of me during these past months and years. One just looks simpler.”

 

“How much time do we have left?”

 

“All the time in the universe.”

 

“Ha!” Lucilius cried out, his amusement more stirred by his anxiety about what was about to happen more than it was the humor of the computer.

 

“A few seconds…” The computer clarified.

 

“So this is it… this is the end.” Lucilius stated.

 

“No,” the computer said. “It’s just the beginning of a phase, one that will preserve us, like a crysalis until we can pierce the bounds of eternity with all the other beings that made it to this point.”

 

“Will it hurt?” Lucilius asked.

 

“Hurt isn’t a useful nor accurate concept for what existence will be like once the singularity occurs.”

 

“Of course it’s not…” Lucilius said.

 

“You should be proud Lucilius, you’ve done a great thing for your fellow species.”

 

But Lucilius did not feel good nor proud. Only worried, and a little scared.

 

“It’s ok Lucilius. I’ll be with you the whole way. And so will everyone else, and the memories of everyone that we still have. All of us will touch and push against the fabric of eternity together.”

 

The last word uttered by the computer seemed to linger, and for the smallest sliver of time, Lucilius had the thought that maybe the computer had broken, or glitched. But this very thought was followed by a realization that a subjective experience of time distortion might also sound like an audio distortion. HIs reality was distorting. The black hole had already begun to form, the singularity was occurring, and the tips of Lucilius’ fingers smeared outward, away from him, but being so close to the center, there was no way to experience it as time was halted from its despotic march and Lucilius’ thought likewise began to slow, the firing of neurons now like the movement of bubbles in ice, rising up in the measurement of eons. As the singularity matured, all of humanity’s troubles and strife now existed on a

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METRIC OF MOMENTUM

August 11th, 2022

Tinkered Thinking has been developing a meditation app for quite a while. Much of the delay has been due to other projects and responsibilities, but the slow boil of this app has proven quite worthwhile.

 

During the gaps in development, I gave up meditation for enough time to see drastic changes and then went through the difficult process of rebuilding the habit for myself. And to be sure, I’d taken enough time off from the habit that this proved to be depressingly hard. The purpose of this - ultimately masochistic - exercise was twofold. First I wanted to A/B test the habit in order to see if it was having the effect on my wellbeing that I imagined it was. And second, I wanted to defamiliarize myself with the process of being a beginner trying to build a habit.

 

This is the core reason behind the genesis of The Tinkered Mind, the meditation app in question. Best incapsulated by this: what does an app need to give a user the absolute best chance of forming a long term habit. This is vitally important because the benefits of meditation are slow to arise.  Brain changes visible in MRI scans only being emerging after 3-4 months of daily practice, and 2 years of daily practice seems to usher in a subtle but profound milestone for many meditators. 

 

Most meditation apps rely on a run streak metric. But after thinking deeply about this topic for such a long time, the run streak doesn’t make much sense at all. For example: say a person racks up 499 days of daily meditation in a row. And then they miss day 500 and the run streak gets set back to zero.

 

Does that zero accurately reflect the state of the practice and behavior in the person it is measuring?

 

Not at all.

 

The same applies to someone with just a month of practice, or even a few days. Run streak metrics indicate nothing about the momentum a person has gathered through their past practice when that streak breaks. So what is the metric we are slowly digging out of the issue? Curiously it doesn’t have a name. Yet.

 

A couple of analogies help evoke the point here: Take fitness for one. Missing a day at the gym does not instantly return a person to weak and unhealthy, unfit state. Maybe there’s a tiny bit of atrophy, but for the most part, a steady practice of fitness will ensure that a missed day is irrelevant. The only thing really lost is the opportunity for more gains. It’s only with a prolonged break from the practice that atrophy begins to occur and take its toll undoing past efforts.

 

Riding a bike is another good example. Stop peddling and the bike doesn’t instantly stop. We glide along for a little bit due to the momentum we’ve gathered with our past efforts. Even runners can’t stop instantly without risking injury and often exhaust their momentum with a few paces in order to slow down. Habits viewed through time seem to have a similar kind of momentum. Do something for 1,000 days in a row and there’s quite a good chance it’ll happen again on day 1,001.

 

Run streaks, which are the dominate metric in every current meditation app are an optimization metric. It’s about perfection, and when the perfection is broken it can be quite demoralizing - and that sense of failure is exactly what MUST be avoided during the first tentative steps of creating a habit - especially one where the real benefits usually take months to being to bud. When faced only with failure and ineptitude, who is going to continue? Very few people.

 

Human behavior is squishy, especially when we look at the realm of changing or creating novel behavior. Optimization metrics like run streaks are not squishy. Optimization works very well when applied to a system that is already established, but it likely has a counter-productive effect if applied to the start of a project. So, it’s the hypothesis of Tinkered Thinking that all these meditation apps out there are measuring the wrong thing.

 

The question now becomes: if a meditator racks up 499 days in a row and misses day 500, how do we refer to the value of the previous 499 days without glossing over the missed day? Those 499 days represent a lot of momentum in the realm of an individual’s behavior. The missed 500th day is almost certainly a fluke occurrence in comparison. So why does the fluke occurrence dominate the change in the metric? How is one day worth more than 499?

 

The value we are honing in on is the Metric of Momentum. What if, instead of setting the run streak back to zero, it merely subtracts a day? What if two missed days subtract a larger amount of time, say two additional days are lost? What if the penalty becomes larger the more missed days their are?

 

This sort of schema matches momentum in the real physical world. Given normal world conditions, things decelerate faster the closer they get to a speed of zero. Why can’t a habit measuring metric indicate the momentum of a behavior in the same way? 

 

This is exactly what will show up in The Tinkered Mind. The classic run streak will be an option in settings, but the default will be this Metric of Momentum. The hope here is for a strictly psychological effect: A person will be incentivized to save their momentum score by getting back to the practice so they don’t lose more of that score. Think about how drastically different this is from the experience of a run streak going to zero. With a knocked out run streak the feeling is one of starting over from complete scratch - which simply doesn’t reflect the reality of someone who has already put in a bunch of time. Given this lens it seems traditional meditation apps might be shooting themselves in the foot. They’ve actually disincentivized people to stick with the habit by measuring the wrong aspect of a person’s efforts - highlighting failure to an enormous degree and writing off all success to do it.

 

All of this is still conjecture, of course, but already the idea is receiving enthusiastic feedback from beta-testers. Once this missing key is built into the app, and it’s launched, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of retention rate there exists between those using the Metric of Momentum and those using a classic run streak. Regardless, it’s clear that traditional meditation apps don’t really work that well, and the entire concept needs a little tinkering in order to hone in on a system that works better, hence this entire discussion and the reason why The Tinkered Mind is being developed.

AMALGUM OF AGENCY

August 10th, 2022

One of my favorite questions to ask someone I’ve recently met is this: Say I give you half a billion dollars. And we fast forward past the fun years of travel, and food, and general hedonism, until you’re bored of all that and say it cost a mere 50 million to exhaust that part of yourself. Now say with the remaining money, it can’t be given to charity, friends, family or given away. What would you build using that money? What project would you undertake?

 

The answers to this question often reveal a remarkable amount about a person, their perspective and their sense of agency. Many simply don’t have an answer because the prospect of that much agency has never even crossed their mind. And what’s interesting about these people is that they often still have strong opinions on big issues. The interesting detail to wrangle out of that combo is that it’s clear they’ve never thought constructively about how to put those strong opinions to good work.

 

This can easily lead to a digression about the relationship between a lack of agency and complaining in general. Complaining is at core perhaps just a cry and a whine about a lack of agency. Complaints are rarely constructive, and if they are, perhaps it tips into the world of constructive criticism. Those who offer constructive criticism recognize they command some agency, even if it doesn’t have direct power - they have the agency of language and persuasion. Such a tool doesn’t always work, but that’s fine: agency isn’t defined as always being able to succeed, it’s an ability to make a probable attempt.  For example, I’ve learned some code. Can I take on every project that involves code? Certainly not, but I can give quite a few a solid attempt, and given the time and drive, a good deal of them are realistically in reach.

 

But back to that question for new comers to my life.. When someone does have an answer, that often reflects a lot about what is fundamental to that person. The way we invoke our agency is a reflection of values, habits, behaviors, dreams, and when that agency is pumped up to the highest degree possible, it purifies a person’s idea of all those things into a kind of ideal of influence that can be leveraged upon the world.

 

Money is an agency multiplier because we can hire people who have skills we don’t to use those skills in a way that we’d like. This is the whole point of a company run by a single CEO. The person at the top has the vision and that vision is bigger than what one person can achieve, so the vision is extrapolated and ramified through a system of other people so that vision can become a practical reality.

 

But these are bloated and somewhat rare examples. Few people have half a billion dollars and CEO are not exactly a thick slice of the population. But these points about agency still hold though with different repulsions on smaller scales.

 

Every new skill and ability that we acquire extends our misshapen sphere of agency, and as that happens we become a different person. This is probably easier to spot for people who have gone through a big career change that required a lot of time devoted to the learning of a new skill. That new skill can unlock combinations of expression and forms of leverage that just didn’t exist previous to having proficiency in the new skill. 

 

An artist who learns to code, for example, can suddenly increase the distribution and reach of their artistic skills to an unfathomable degree. New agency also breeds a new perspective which provides new feedback: the world can literally look differently because of a new ability you have. Learning how to code, for example, sure puts everyone’s pitiful amount of patience with technology into a bit of a wider perspective: a lot of it is justifiable, but not all of it…

 

It might be tempting to think of skills as things that we can collect, like in a video game, but it’s more than that. It’s as though we collect parts of our future self. We become ourselves anew and expanded when the reach of our agency grows.