[ExI] Meaning in life (Was: Who has a vote that counts?)

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Aug 2, 2020, 7:02 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> If truth means unhappiness, then screw truth.
>

Screwing truth almost always means more unhappiness, eventually.

The family that I was born with will eventually die, while (if
cryonics-then-resurrection, be it uploading or biological, works) I will
live on.  I will likely some day make a new family to replace them -
adopted siblings and/or children, or perhaps a wife and biological
children, either way people I do not yet know today and who I will have to
make new memories with.  My earliest experiences will someday be mine
alone, with no surviving people who have shared them.

I have made peace with this.  Already there are people I knew and shared
many experiences with, who have met the end of their tales and did not
choose to (potentially, someday) keep going.  There are others with whom I
shared many experiences (including some who I was quite good friends with
at the time), who probably still live but moved away or otherwise are no
longer in a position to interact with me, and whom I do not expect to
interact with again - not even to hear when they die.  (For example,
basically everyone I went to university with.  My classmates went our
separate ways after graduation.  The reunions I attended grouped different
classes together to the point that I didn't run into any classmates, and
none of the faculty present had been my teachers.)  This is life.

I do not cling to the past.  Sure, I have done quite a lot to be proud of,
but what matters to me is the future I shall help make.  (In one of my
social circles, there is a joke about how often I keep citing certain works
I have made over the past few years.  But I made those works to be useful
in a variety of situations, which situations keep coming up - so I point to
an appropriate work when they do.  The works are essentially literary
tools, endlessly reusable so long as the use case they were made for
remains relevant.)  If I am to inhabit a better tomorrow, I shall have to
help build it.

I have not yet lived even one percent of ten thousand years - and,
arbitrary as that number is, I may live much longer than that, technology
and circumstance willing.

>
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