i recommend this book that i just read by derek sivers, in the title. the general premise of the book is that the author creates 27 different characters and allows each one 1 single chapter. each character gets to present their argument of how you should live your life, and why you should live your life that way. each character is something like you should live your life for hedonism, or you should live your life for love or family or independence and such. each one of the 27 is supposed to be purposefully exaggerated and hyperbolic so you can pick which ones appeal to you and the ones you currently live by, but also realising the downsides to extremism and allows you to criticise each.

the book is good in a different aspect though, and it is that it illustrates a viewpoint that ive long held but was unable to articulate. if you read the book and you pay close attention to where each one is coming from, they’re fundamentally coming from a place saying that ‘life is limited so we should make the most of the time that we have left’. and so the opinion i’ve held for a long time is that a lot of divergence in our fundamental values and principles is completely based off of the fact that we don’t live forever, so we have to make do with our remaining time. this book is an excellent illustration of how that actually works in practice; specifically in that people will arrive at radically different ways to cope with the problem of a finite life. all of them are kinda technically correct and there really is no correct answer, but, if we lived forever, i personally think we’d see an extreme convergence in our own fundamental beliefs, bc some ideologies become the actually correct answers. the convergence i believe would mainly revolve around 2 things : 1, making sure you continuously stay alive, and 2, making sure your level of optionality stays as high as possible both for you and your loved ones

but for the status quo, because we have this impending ending time frame, theres a bunch of other random shit we optimise for consciously or unconsciously; purely bc we’re aware that it’s ending at some point. i think stuff like that leads to really strange and highly negative second and third order effects that ultimately hurt everybody bc nobody’s willing to cooperate to give up decades of what they want in exchange for somebody else. in a world in which everyone lived forever thatd be fine bc nobody cares—like.. we're gonna be around forever, and if something helps me hundreds of years down the line im ok with it but rn that wont fly…