A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MISSING OUT

February 27th, 2022

 

The restaurant air was filled with laughter. Lucilius gasped for breath, and took the break in conversation to get up from the table for a minute. A last quip was slung his way and he snickered as the table erupted in laughter again. It was a perfect night, Lucilius thought as he walked away, celebrating his company’s success with true friends, reveling in the best that life had to offer. He paused at the bar to ask the bartender where the restroom was when a cold terror filled his body.

“Can I help you?” The barman asked.

 

Lucilius quickly ducked around a corner from the bar and peered back. The barman looked briefly side to side, feeling awkward, but it was past the barman Lucilius was looking. He studied the face of a man at the bar who was smiling, talking with a woman, the two leaning close to one another.

 

Lucilius rolled back against the wall, out of sight and closed his eyes. Was this a dream, he asked himself. But he could remember the details of the day clearly, the narrative pick-up from yesterday. He opened his eyes and checked details all around him, text on a notice board, the light of the room. He snuck a look back around the corner and a certain confused dread settled in. This was real.

 

When he tapped on the man’s shoulder, the woman gasped, and the man, turning and seeing Lucilius jolted, and then laughed.

 

“Geez, give a brother a little warning,” the man said before chuckling.

 

“I didn’t know you had a twin?” The woman said.

 

The doppelgänger before Lucilius looked a little uneasy. “Hey, can’t blame this guy for looking so good. Give me a second darling.”

 

Lucilius followed his own likeness into the back of the restaurant, through the kitchen and into the back alley.  He watched as the man shuffled a pack of cigarettes, lit one and offered to Lucilius. He just shook his head, still in shock about what he was seeing.

 

“Which one are you?”

 

“What?” Lucilius said.

 

His doppelgänger gave him a strange and strained look. “You look confused.”

 

“You could say that.”

 

“You mean to say you’ve never….” The doppelgänger motioned a hand between the two of them. “Seen one of us?”

“Not without a mirror.”

 

“Wow, well, ok.” The doppelgänger looked off into space for a moment and then chuckled.

 

“You know what’s going on? Are we twins?”

 

The guy laughed, “No, no, we’re not twins… well, not like that.” He looked at Lucilius with a mixture of pity and envy. “We’re clones.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yea….”

“That’s impossible, I have a family, parents.”

 

 

“No you don’t, your memory of them was placed there, your timeline -your life- picks up right after the second funeral, just like mine.”

 

The two were quiet for a moment as Lucilius thought about the possibility that this information could be a reality. HIs doppelgänger dragged his cigarette and watched thoughts click together  on Lucilius’ face.

 

“You’re telling me I’m five years old?”

The doppelgänger wagged his head a little. “Four and some months, but yea, pretty much.”

 

“How do you know about all this?”

“Same deal as you, another clone told me.”

“How many are there?”

 

“Oh, just a few, maybe half a dozen.”

“Who’s the original?”

 

The clone was taken aback, surprised. “You know, I’d never thought about the original.  Weird.”

 

Lucilius asked more questions, but the clone didn’t know too much more, only some details about the lives of the other clones he’d met, but from what Lucilius could tell, this clone hadn’t looked into the issue too much and had simply gone on living his life. He asked for the clone’s contact information, but the clone refused, saying it would probably be best if they just steered clear of one another, to try and just forget about it. The clone wouldn’t even tell Lucilius his name.

 

It took several months of research before Lucilius found another clone. Then another popped up. He travelled to meet with each, trying to find out where or what their origin was. One other clone had tried and failed to figure out where they had come from, getting too busy with getting on with life.

 

After nearly a year of searching, Lucilius found himself pressing a buzzer at the entrance of a run down apartment building. No one answered and it turned out the door was still slightly ajar. Lucilius pulled it open and walked down a flight of stairs to the basement units. The dim fluorescent light flickered, the exposed bulbs dark at their ends, the hastily cleaned remnants of a shattered one still embedded in the dirty carpet. Lucilius found the unit he was looking for and knocked on the door, and it moved, never fully closed. Lucilius pushed the door wider into the dark apartment, and he quietly stepped in.The dull drone of a TV wafted in from a different room. The place was a wreck of piled garbage, the smell of rotted food overpowered only by a stench of alcohol.

 

Bathed in the flicker and glow of the TV was another clone. Lucilius stood there, taking in the sad sight - a vision of himself, overweight and lost to an oblivion. A clutter of empty bottles around the couch, and a corresponding film below the lip, a moistened beard.

 

Lucilius nudged the man’s foot with his own. The man did not even stir. Lucilius sighed, and walked into another room, returning a few minutes later with a bucket of water, which he then dumped over the man, who instantly awoke, screaming through a blur of confusion and bleary eyes. When he finally settled and saw Lucilius before him, the man’s face grew sad, his neck growing limp till he was sobbing into his own hands, muttering disconnected words:

 

“…stop haunting me..”

 

Lucilius was confused, and suddenly felt remorse. It only occurred to him now the obvious truth: what terrible things must have happened to him - to anyone - to create the situation he now looked on.

 

Lucilius knelt and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

 

“What do you mean, haunt?”

 

The man’s sobbing slowed, and when he finally looked at Lucilius it was with disdain.

 

“Do you know what it feels like to look at you?”

 

“What do you mean?” Lucilius asked.

 

The man laughed. “Do you envy me?” He said, spreading his flabby, bloated arms, motioning about the wrecked hovel. Lucilius looked around with him. “Imagine what it feels like to look at you, in your nice clothes, your perfect skin, fit as a freaking fiddle, and I bet you’ve built quite a nice life for yourself in the last few years. Imagine what it’s like to know you’re walking around - you and the others..”

 

“You are the original,” Lucilius stated, asking. But the man didn’t acknowledge, only looked off askance, holding in a torrent of emotion.

 

“What happened?” Lucilius asked. “We’re you tested on? Who did this?”

 

“Ha!” The man sneered. “I don’t know if that would add sting or lessen it…. No. The research was mine. All mine. I created all of you from scratch.”

 

“But what happened? Why don’t I remember anything, and how did you end up like this?”

 

The man sighed. “A clone is a perfect copy until the moment it starts to experience life. Then the divergence is absolute. Seems negligible,” the man said, looking at Lucilius with raised eyebrows, before they darkened again and he looked off, “… but it’s profound. So many things like that, subtle and profound. It’s always the smallest things that end up creating the biggest effect…” The man trailed off into silence, an unknown past torturing the man like an invisible vision.

 

“So what happened?”

 

The man looked back at Lucilius, the reverie broken. He grabbed Lucilius’ hands and looked at them like a palm-reader, then grunted.

 

“How’s the company going?” He asked without looking up.

 

“What?”

 

“Your company? How’s it going?”

 

“It’s… going well,” Lucilius said. “I took some time off to find you, but it’s on track to IPO sometime next year we’re thinking.”

 

The man laughed, a faint smile wearing his lips with nostalgic amusement. “That’s good,” he said, shaking his head gently. “That’s good.”

 

“I don’t understand. How did you know that? What happened?”

 

The man sighed again and looking at Lucilius he wore pity in his face as if wondering whether he should continue on or not. But Lucilius had come this far, and the man knew - Lucilius knew himself well enough to know he would not stop.

 

“I created you to handle that company. I couldn’t trust anyone else with that project - bioinformatics is so delicate, sensitive, and if I didn’t do it myself, someone else was going to try it and it could be a catastrophe in the wrong hands. So I created you.”

 

Memory suddenly collapsed in Lucilius’ mind as endless nights from the past few years flickered through his mind when he agonized over correct protocols and an elaborate system to protect the mass amount of bio-data his company held from falling into the wrong hands or the wrong use cases. His eyes grew wide as he looked back at the man who wore his own face.

 

The man was nodding. “I trust you’ve done well. Not just for yourself, but that you’ve carefully thought through it all, to make sure humanity doesn’t get this one wrong.”

 

A snarl of confusion and anger rose in Lucilius. “You couldn’t do it yourself?”

 

The man laughed for a moment. “Think of all the ideas you’ve had through the years. Almost all of the important ones are being carried out. By us.”

 

Lucilius stood, and unconsciously he started wandering around the room, suddenly lost in deep thought. Until a question cleaved his rumination.

 

“Wait. There have to be initial differences,” he said, looking back at the Original.

 

The Original nodded, and sighed. “Ethically ambiguous, but yes. You are missing only one small memory. Every clone but one is missing the same small memory.”

 

Lucilius’ eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”

 

The Original grew weary and nervous. He hadn’t thought this through. But he was in too deep now. He sighed, and then struggled to get up, pushing his knees down as his neglected body struggled. He shuffled to a wall where hung a framed sketch of a woman’s hands. The Original pulled the edge and the armed piece opened like a door, revealing a safe embedded into the wall. The Original spun the nob this way and that, and then cranked the handle and opened the safe. The thing was practically empty, save for a small, crumpled piece of paper. The Original took it and proffered it to Lucilius.

 

Lucilius took it and saw it was a receipt for coffee, until he turned it over. There was a phone number, scrawled, and underneath it, a hastily drawn heart.

 

A smile lifted a side of Lucilius’ face. “Oh yea..” He said, remembering, “..she was so beautifu—”

 

Lucilius looked up at the Original, his eyes narrowing. “I lost this,” he said, holding up the piece of paper.

 

The Original shook his head. “No you didn’t. I made you forget where it was. I literally made you without the memory of where you put it, and of course, I had it for myself.”

 

“But..” Lucilius contemplated it all, trying to fit it together. “Who is she?” Suddenly confused. “What’s she got to do with this?”

 

The Original sighed. “She and I became very close. Very close, and you see the problem is there’s only one of her. Us? Sure, it was worth it.  My ideas are coming to life - our ideas, for the greater good. And you -YOU-  can’t miss what you don’t know you missed out on.”

 

 

Lucilius looked at the piece of paper. “What happens if I dial this number?”

 

“Heh,” The Original laughed. “And what are you going to say? You have any idea how long it’s been, and what’s happened since? You still don’t know how any of this happened..” The Original motioned at himself and the apartment as he said it. “What are you going to do? Try and explain all this? Ruin her life, and the life of the other one?”

 

“The other one?”

 

The Original just looked at Lucilius with a resigned face.

 

“You didn’t…” Lucilius said, shaking his head. “She’s with a clone of us? Of you?”

 

“It was the only way.”

 

“Oh really, how’s that?” Lucilius snapped back.

 

“My work was not done! You were not created, the company you’ve created, and all the other projects that your brothers are carrying out, all of it was at risk with her in the picture!” The Original was practically screaming, the sadness and determination combining like a new toxin. “Setting up all of your different lives, inserting each of you perfectly, flawlessly, do you know how difficult all that was?”

 

“Where are they?”

 

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll drive yourself mad if you find them, if you see her with him. All that matters is that they are having those experiences, that those experiences exist.”

 

How could Lucilius not believe him? Like a person wrecked by a drug warning someone else to never take it. Lucilius looked at the old receipt paper in his hand, and wondered about what he did not know, wondering about what he never experienced. He tried to imagine some kind of far-off happiness, and strained to remember that woman’s face, but it was a useless task. What a strange comfort to know that somewhere out there, a form of himself was happy in a way he could not even fathom. 

 

He looked at the Original who had slumped back down on the couch, his face frozen in memory, of an experience relinquished, the water of his eyes glistening in the low light of the dingy apartment.

 

“Come on,” Lucilius said.

 

The Original looked at him. “What do you mean?”

 

 

“The company is doing just fine. I think I’ve done my part, and it’s time I take care of myself,” Lucilius said. It took a moment for the Original to realize what Lucilius said, and when he looked back at him, Lucilius winked.

 

“Come on, let’s get you out of this dump. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to get your sorry ass back on your feet.

EVOLUTION OF CONCLUSION

February 26th, 2022

 

Is it good to judge an evolving thing? Say for instance, a child, who is learning the ways of the world. Would it be good to lay some sort of conclusive judgement on this kid after they, say… whack their brother in the face for no reason whatsoever? Of course not. Only the most short sighted and callous adult would write the child off as violent. We intuitively understand that children will learn and improve.

 

What’s a bit odd is that people continue to change throughout adulthood, but we ignore this fact. Or, at the least, we don’t give it the same sort of importance that we do when we think of children. It’s true that people, in general seem to be less capable of change as time goes on, but no one really wakes up the same exact person they were on the previous day. We all change a little, even if it’s imperceptible. 

 

Other things that rapidly evolve seem to get the adult-treatment. Most novel forms of technology for example, are tried and regarded as either good or bad, which is again quite odd since innovation can change a piece of technology and improve it. The most basic form of this today is simply the software update. Incredibly, updates are supposed to improve things but a lot of people dread updates because things change and suddenly the tried and true way of using a piece of software seems no longer available. 

 

The idea that things keep static is a convenient falsehood. Cognitively it’s far less taxing to assume the world and the people in it aren’t as dynamic and changing as they actually are. Such dynamism is also out of sync with the static nature of words and the labels we create with them and slap on to different things: that person is a psycho, this app sucks. Well did you see the new update? Did you know that person was grieving and had almost no sleep during the last few days? Our labels for the world have to be constantly updated when new information arises, but this requires the actual information, which might not be available, and it requires a willingness and a desire to make the mental update. Neither of which always happen.

 

Perhaps religions have a concept of a ‘final judgement’ because it’s simply impossible to make a conclusive judgement while things are still in progress. Nuance is hard to catch on the fly while it changes, and the mind constantly yearns for a definitive last word. But the truth is it’s all just laziness. People dread the update of their own mind the same way they dread the new phone update. It’s pure laziness, because all these changes, all these updates, all the effort required to incorporate new information? It’ll lead to a better world, and a better experience - that is, if we’re willing to make the effort.

OUR MODERN REACH

February 24th, 2022

It’s a default feature of human attention to focus on the current negative aspect of reality. Given a picture of 99 smilie faces with one frown face, we will pick out that frown face far faster than if it has been 99 frown faces and one smilie. We are hardwired to be wary, and that it. Our wariness does not discriminate other than hovering up the negative to be dwelled upon. Our wariness takes no heed of the place of such negative material in a larger context. There simply is no larger context when attention is brought to bear on the negative.

 

This does not, and should not delegitimatize anything negative that actually is going on. But there is a useful hierarchy of questions to be asked, in order to refocus attention in the most useful way. Given some negative thing, the first question that should arise, is: do I have any direct influence on this issue or situation? 

 

If the answer is ‘no’, then this is the quick exit from concern. It’s not to imply that we don’t care about the issue, but if agency is limited to a scope that does not include the topic, then any more energy spent fretting over the issue is unnecessary anxiety. Mental health is a virtuous combination of agency and concern. If these two domains don’t have substantial overlap than the human mind is rendered incapacitated, paralyzed, and depressed. Our concern must be primarily on things that we have some degree of influence over.

 

Notice how the “News” delivers to one aspect of human nature, but not the other. The News feeds into our default tendency to root out and focus on the negative. But it does so by drawing from sources that are far beyond our scope of influence. It’s one thing for the president of a country to watch the news. It’s quite another for an average citizen to watch the same news. One person might be able to have influence, the other - not so much.

 

But. Perhaps in the age of social media this isn’t exactly the case any more. Do ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’ and comments on a subject have some sort of effect?

 

Well, maybe. This vast majority of such social-media empowered influence is irrelevant. Most of what happens online actually leads to nothing. But, that being said, it’s still the place where a completely disparate group of people unbound by nationality, location or law can bind together with a cohesive opinion - and given enough people, that opinion can go viral. 

 

In rare circumstances, our sphere of influence extends beyond our personal agency. In normal circumstances, that’s a contradiction, but the internet provides counter-caveats to the usual song-and-dance of human interaction.

 

From a personal perspective, the isolationist policy of ignoring 99% of what is going on in the world is a useful and wise one, allowing for precious attention to be allocated to better regions of influence. But - while rare - the new tools of the last couple decades do offer interesting opportunities to reach out into the world. . .

SALARIED INCENTIVE

February 23rd, 2022

 

For all our gripe and balk when it comes to money, the concept of fungible value is still too conceptual, and in most cases, we just don’t get it. This likely seems absurd: money? We don’t get it? Are you kidding? Money makes the world go round. Sure it does - well sort of. Money as an incentive unto itself is highly conceptual and is always at least once removed in abstraction from a true incentive. Money in of itself is not the incentive, it is merely an avenue for other incentives which are not as difficult to fathom.

 

For most people money is a kind of ethereal chore. We are constantly taking out this garbage without taking the time to understand what’s behind the opal plastic of the bag we carry. Whatever it is, it’s somehow correlated to virtually every other part of life. 

 

Frugality and even greed affect money in inside-out ways. It’s by failing to interact with money we have that we end up saving it. In all other instances with money, we deplete it as a means to the ends of a different incentive. Such as an incentive to feel more relaxed: pay for a massage or a pedicure. And incentive to feel healthier: buy supplements or a fancy wearable for tracking sleep. An incentive to be perceived as wealthy? Buy an expensive car.

 

Money presents this counter-intuitive backfire if we try to apply the concept of an inceptive directly to money itself. The incentive is rarely if ever for the actual money, but for the things that are accessible through the conduit of a certain amount of money. Even the person who diligently and wisely saves and successfully invests does so with the imagined outcome that some day such money will come in very handy for other things. 

 

Upton Sinclair once said: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

 

This quote seems to give a lot of weight to the value of money, and this very sentence should give reason to pause because it sounds a bit funny. A lot of weight to the value of money? A little redundant, no? A salary in this case, and in most cases is a bundled set of other incentives that generally represent a person’s real life: paying for a place to live, the food they eat, the toys their kids play with, the clothes they wear. The incentive to have and provide all of these things runs very deep - and they existed long before we even invented money.

 

But we can have incentives that aren’t related to money. Nationalism, for instance, requires no money, but the ethereal social grist that makes up the fabric of socialism drives untold masses of people to engage in often extreme behavior - war.  This might seem correlated to money in that its conceptual, ethereal - more in the realm of thought than it has to do with the hard tacks of physical reality. But there’s an important difference.

 

Money has no identity. This is essential for its fungible quality to remain in tact. All incentive on the other hand entails a strong component of identity. Salary becomes a conduit and an avenue by which to express and maintain a certain identity - at least for components of that identity that require money. But the incentive structure of a person isn’t limited to what people can buy, thankfully, but also, the strange relationship that exists between incentives and money also means that by default we’re all quite untalented when it comes to building wealth.

NEVER TRUST THE WORDS

February 22nd, 2022

 

Never trust the words someone says. This isn’t to say that trusting someone is a bad idea - but to point out the disconnect between what they mean and what they say. We feel this on a personal level all the time. We have a sense, a notion, a ‘thought’, a feeling, and we endeavor to convey it, but upon hearing the sentences we utter we grit teeth thinking how far from the mark we hit.

 

So why don’t we apply this internal lesson to all that we hear from others. Why isn’t the built-in assumption that what we hear from others is at best just a hazy approximation of what they are trying to convey. But think about this a little more in depth: what exactly is attempting to come across with the sentences and paragraphs of others? Within each of us there is a unique internal environment that fluxes with misremembered pasts, edited constantly by evolving concepts - all of it tweaked by the color of emotion that is flooding the body and mind. 

 

We have far too much faith in the meaning of words. Even though, even with this topic there is so much shift and drift. Truth used to mean something objective, something immutable that we all collaborated to try and approximate. Now the word truth just means ‘strong opinion’, because the word ‘opinion’ lacked the intestinal fortitude of a word as magnificent as “Truth”. So it was co-opted. The medium through which we try to convey our messy shifting internal landscape is itself a messy shifting landscape.

 

The whole endeavor of communication can easily seem hopeless. Better to just keep your mouth shut. And quite honestly, in almost all situations, this is the wiser if not simply easier course of action. But to withdraw completely is a sin unforgivable. Paired with a judicious choice of when and where to inject one’s own faulty speech is the necessary issue of how to listen. Never trust the words, they are but a fuzzy approximation of what someone wishes to say. You have to venture beyond their words, taking the context they create with sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph and extrapolate an entire model of who this person is, where they have come from and what exactly it might be to be that person, right now, in that situation we witness them in. It’s apparently wise to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but can you become a mental model of your friend or your enemy? If you can model the mind of an enemy perfectly then you can predict their next move. And if you can model the mind of a friend, then you can love that individual with a greater sense of compassion than most ever dream of. But with either the adversarial or the friendly, the medium of expression has to be taken with a flexible margin of error, one that can stretch to the shape of an accruing model of the person. A colloquial way of phrasing this is to take a person with a grain of salt. To allow for wiggle-room, to allow for the verbal and behavioral foibles of a person to live comfortably within the concept of who they might be.

 

Never trust the words, not because their intent is to lie, but because the words themselves will always - to some extent - fail the intentions of the one who speaks, just as your words will always fail you to some palpable degree.