(no subject)

[contrarianarchon]

brin_bellway at some point in the fairly-distant past (and also much more recently, but the tabs sat idle in one of my backlogs for a good long time) recommended to me to read The Prepared for advice regarding prepping stuff (which is to the extent of my inexperienced judgement in these matters a pretty good site, but that's not the point of this post), and they mentioned an image of the successful prepper as someone who disappears alone into the woods and survives by themselves with maybe a dog (they mentioned this idea to reject it, to be fair, and I agree with their reasoning from the practicalities) and just .... why would you want that? It seems so ... pointless. A life lived without other people and without a legacy, leaving, at best, a bunch of animal corpses and an empty hut behind you? I can understand the desire to learn those skills to prove you have them or to survive periods of time between [something] and reconnecting with greater civilization, or because you want to work as a trapper or something but to just ... leave into the wilderness and never come back and maybe know that that's because there's nothing to come back to, that just seems ... awful. Intolerable. Maybe if you loved it out there, maybe if that was genuinely your best life living alone in the wilderness, you could extract some utils from that but to just survive? without a plan for rebuilding with others? Without being a part of the great work of civilization? What? How would you like, motivate yourself? How would you achieve goals? I guess you could ... try and terraform a bit of forest into a nicer bit of forest? But mostly you could just ... spend however many years between now and (either old age or bad luck or both) results in your death and then be a corpse that took a few decades longer to go than the rest of the body of work that is our civilization.

(... I think what this says is pointing to the fact that my utility function can be crudely approximated by "[maximize number of interesting things read over lifetime] + [leave a lasting legacy of meaningful change and good things into the world] + [some amount of abiding by regular human imperatives of nice sensations, avoiding pain, socializing, sex drive, etc, to the extent that these things aren't ego-dystonic or instrumental as part of the structure of the infrastructure I find myself in]". That's not actually true but it's instructively false? But I think whatever your utility function, the low-hanging fruit of human mediocrity and the force multiplying powers of human civilization make it really easy to extract massive amounts of utility from relatively little effort unless your goals are very internally oriented?)

Comments

[brin_bellway]

I read a story once...it might have been 1984? Anyway, there was a bit where the guy is faced with his potential imminent death and it hits him that while he's talked a lot of talk about legacy and dying for a glorious cause and all that, and he had *thought* that he believed it, when it comes right down to it--even having been captured and lost all hope of rescue or victory--he would strongly prefer to live for even ten more minutes versus dying this moment.

I think it's something like that. Being a part of something is all well and good, living alone and unremembered in the wilderness *is* far inferior to contributing to the great work of society, but at least you're conscious and that can be valuable in its own right.

[contrarianarchon]

Okay yeah this is def true; in the absence of alternatives I would def prefer to live, even in boring and pointless ways. My confusion is when it's presented as a romantic alternative to living in a community of survivors that has to be overturned as not practical to actually do.