2025-12-10
Disclaimer
The more I go through life the more confused I get. Many of my fundamental questions seem to directly or indirectly centre around love, so I figured I should try framing things from this lens.
The first time I was convinced my life was worth living was when I was 21 years old, and made some amazing friendships. This generally convinced me that having a few good relationships could make life worth living.
I seem increasingly convinced that the other thing that can make my life worth living is meaningful work. Work counts as meaningful to me if it can erase suffering or increase human happiness at scale.
I have realised we are increasingly moving towards a world where material needs (food, water, temperature etc) are solved. Just a 100-1000x in per capita energy use will basically solve all material needs for everyone. (People might then reproduce themselves back to subsistence levels, but let's skip that discussion for now.) What will be left is solving for physical safety and solving for relationships. Therefore if I want meaningful work, I need to understand physical safety or relationships better.
These two are interconnected. A major reason people lack physical safety is because they form groups that organise relationships in incompatible ways, and then try to use violence to force everyone to organise relationships their way. Most traditional religions work like this. Many geopolitical conflicts are deep down religious conflicts.
One nice world that I could aim for, is a world where people have physical safety despite differences in how they organise relationships. Another nice world that I could aim for, is a world where everyone has figured out compatible ways to organise their relationships.
Obtaining physical safety for everyone despite differences in how they organise relationships seems very hard. Democracy and capitalism are our current best bets for how to do this.
Unfortunately we are about to gain the ability to create new minds that are not capable of relationships at all, and these minds are likely to win the games of both democracy and capitalism. Genetically edited humans may lack the neurocircuitry required to love other humans. Artifical superintelligence may lack the code required to care about any beings at all, forget humans. Beings that are not capable of love are not just possible to create, but have an immense advantage at the game.
Even if we manage to coordinate to ban both technologies, this just pushes the buck to the future. Ultimately someone has to figure out either the objectively best way or multiple mutually compatible ways of organising relationships.
I have now outgrown most of the relationships I formed a few years back. This mainly seems to be because our goals in life have diverged, both short-term goals and long-term goals.
Major reasons to have relationships include receiving advice, feeling seen/heard/understood and emotional coregulation. Advice and feeling seen are easier to do when you are both facing similar problems in life. Long-term relationships require iterated game, and hence strongest relationships are between people with shared goals.
This leads to a weird loop. The best form of love is with someone who cares about similar work as you. The best work is projects that allow more love to thrive in the world, beyond just between the two of you. The number one reason love cannot thrive in the world, is that multiple groups have figured out incompatible forms of love in the world, and are engaged in a holy war against each other.
Assume for a moment we got a hypothetical world where material needs (food, water, etc) were solved and physical safety was also solved, but optimal relationships were not solved. I'm genuinely confused what people in such a world would do. Meaingful relationships benefit from meaningful work to be done together. But there is possibly no work left to be done together, that could increase love in the world. You can't indirectly help people by solving material or safety needs, hence the only work you can do is to love people directly in different ways, preferably at scale.
I sometimes feel part of this world. I am basically post-scarcity and post-safety but pre-love. I'm genuinely confused what projects are worthwhile for me to work on, and what relationships are worthwhile for me to enter into. Most available options fall short of my expectations - I seem obsessed to believe that more is possible.
Examples:
a) Don't just assume capitalism will lead to growth, actually go study what growth looks like and which tech leads to growth. Realise that Thiel was right - energy prices have stagnated at $0.10/kWh for almost a century, and most of our economy is bottlenecked by price of energy.
b) Don't just assume someone else will solve AI alignment, actually go study it yourself. Realise that the core problem is the geopolitical arms race, not the technical difficulty of alignment itself.
c) Don't just assume someone else will handle the downsides of capitalism, actually study what those are and whether anything can create sufficiently large downsides. Realise that creating new minds (ASI, HGE etc) are the primary examples.
d) Don't just assume someone else will handle democratic backsliding, actually study it yourself. Realise that democracy will forever swing back and forth. Lock-in of bad values via surveillance is probably not possible unless you build ASI, as humans can coordinate and escape any other type of surveillance. Boxing population just like boxing AI.
The consequence of this heuristic is I should prefer figuring out for myself what optimal love looks like, and not helping construct a world where future people figure it out.
Another heuristic I believe in increasingly strongly is to talk to your customers, and your ideal customer is yourself. If I want to figure out optimal love for all of civilisation, maybe I should first figure out optimal love for myself.
Conclusion - I should get married, and the core thing binding us together should primarily be things that continue to hold true even after a world where material needs and physical safety is solved for everyone.
This does conflict with my current thinking around marriage. Half my criteria in my dating doc are based on criteria that only make sense in a world where physical safety is unsolved. I have listed stuff around "AI risk" or whatever, this basically means solving physical safety for other people. If it got solved, a lot of the stuff in my dating doc no longer makes sense.
Ted Kaczynski was right? It is funny though, that the number one person I respect on this topic is the Unabomber. Namely, how to organise work and relationships in a world where safety and material needs are solved. Atleast he is honest in saying he finds a solved world horrifying, to the point he advocates mass civilian violence to avoid it. I find all the EA answers inadequate, be it Yudkowsky's or Bostrom's or Karnofsky's - they either assume self-replication is the only meaningful work, or confuse physical pleasure with meaningful work and relationships, or assume some future people will figure out what meaningful work looks like.
This is where I am currently stuck. I need to think more.
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