Purpose

Growing up, I wanted to be an Astrophysicist because I thought space was cool. Then I went to college. I studied physics and made friends. I did academic research and talked to a lot of very nice people. This was great for me. I began to form an original, internal understanding of how the world worked. This helped me deconfuse myself on what was important in the world to me, and how I might go about achieving what I wanted to in the world. This was a formative journey for me, so let me try to breifly explain:

As I learned how the world worked, I got more and more confused because the world was really really detailed and weird, the people were weirder still, and nobody had any idea what was going on. Specifically, things like stars at least made some sense as to why they worked that way, if we started from physics. Yeah, gravity binds gas into a proto-star, at some point this gets hot enough to do some nuclear fusion, it starts glowing! Then it runs out of atoms that are small enough to do fusion with, the gravity gets to be too much, and it collapses then explodes and meets a beautiful, violent death. Sure. Humans are much weirder than that, and society, the result of many humans all doing their own thing while sort-of trying to collaborate to do something bigger, is a lot weirder still.

This got me really interested in the foundational questions, the philosophical questions that initially seem to never lead anywhere, like: “why are humans so weird? what’s the meaning of life?”

To my understanding, people operate by trying to contextually satisfy a bunch of different objectives at once. These objectives are sometimes complementary, but often compete with each other enough for it to be a problem.

(Work in Progress)