[extropy-chat] playing the long game

[kevin.osborne]

discussion point: helping me out with a little transhumanist
life-choice logic; whether I should start playing "the long game" of
life extension and self-improvement or give way to my tendencies
towards nihilistic debauchery and self-destruction

As yet another year passes, at the ripe old age of 31 I've yet to even
_make_ a new years resolution, let alone _keep_ one.

I hear the Singularity calling, and think about "living long enough to
live forever", and think about the "brave new world" that is
supposedly "just around the corner"... and aether forgive me but I
just can't muster up the enthusiasm.

I know my life choices are killing me; starting from a stark lack of
exercise and regimented brain stimulus and education right through to
my just-past holiday season deluges of group-sex, drug-abuse binges
and wanton criminality and excess.

I see this golden future dawning, with its oh-so-religion-like
promises of living forever in a heaven-from-earth, and the rise and
rise of technology and science and atheism and secular culture
gladdens me like a gadget-freak strolling through Akihabara.

And yet, for today, it brings me no joy. It's not that I foresee it as
a lifeless, colourless dystopia where we're all doped to the gills on
Modafinil and wired to the sockets with nanotech, adrift without
anchor in a sea of our own hubris and inanity; I just look at the road
between here and then with a distaste verging on vomit.

If I exercise actively, read voluminously, eat healthily, study
incessantly and focus without pause on the coming uplift then mayhap
I'll be the froth on the tide able to symbiotically surf into
posthumanity instead of being the shadowy kelpish bottom-dweller I
find myself to be currently.

And yet, I gag. Forgive me, oh immortal ones; for I love my
imperfections so.  While I'm no longer the impetuous child whose
mugshot once-adorned a "60 minutes" wanted piece I'm also a far cry
from being "born-again" into the transhumanist seminary.

I want to contribute; I'm a believer, for what its worth. If my
drug-addled mis-educated brain could finally manage to fire with
effect for a short enough spasm to hack some code or manage some
system for the benefit of the doubt some have almost mistakenly given
me then I'd love to help them out with something more than platitudes.

But even though my genetics are cursed with every killer affliction
and disease there is, I just can't find the wherewithal to halt my
slide towards the early death that has befallen almost all of my
(many) immediate ancestors. I'm the mongrel pup of flawed offspring
from generations of naught consequence; perhaps an ignominious demise
is all that could have ever been foreseen for such a scurrilous cur.

I'm constantly skirting incarceration and hospitalization while
dancing my merry jig of madness, and yet no matter how dark and foul
the long nights it produces I never tire of the taste of humanity it
offers, no matter how bitter; the rich taste of a life-badly-lived is
so rewarding a teat that the dry offering of a bourgeois-behaved
good-citizen living a life-well-lived for the promises of the
after-earth seems like such a soured haggis.

And maybe thats the problem; the current path-to-posthumanity tastes
like the low-fat and carb-free awfulness that so symbolizes all thats
wrong about "better living through chemistry".