neonleonb

This is a long rant, so I put the body of it under a cut. But there is a question at the end, and I welcome your input. So feel free to skip to the bottom to read and answer the question.

( Cut for length )

This has worked out for me longer than it might have. As an unusually capable person, letting capability determine my happiness has been generally pleasant. However, it can't really last--as I get older, I'm sure to be less and less able, so I'll have to draw happiness from other things. What other sources of happiness are viable? What drives your sense of well-being?

(I already reject the idea of being happy over my general good fortune, as I think we can all agree that will go sour much more easily than being happy over my abilities--a lost game wouldn't bother me as much, but the law of averages would be against me.)

Damn, life is short.  I'm about halfway through grad school, and the beginning seems lit it was so recently.  My youth is gone!  I have a finite length of time remaining!  When I was a kid, a month was an enormous length of time, but this semester everything has flown by.  And once I'm out of grad school, well, that's about as far into the future as I've ever planned.  Can one have a life after that?  Can I have my own existence, even if I have children?  I'm not sure, and I don't even know if I want to find out.

I guess I have to remind myself that while "Life begins at 40" is obviously a lie, life certainly doesn't end at 40, or 30, or any of the other ages at which I look at people and think, "You're unimaginably old."  Because, frankly, I'm unimaginably old right now.

Or, I could put faith in Kurzweil's upcoming Singularity, the point at which technology changes the world past the point we can predict.  Of course, he goes on to make predictions, and one of them is that human death will be essentially eliminated.  (Vernor Vinge is inclined to agree; by the way, I highly recommend his new book, Rainbow's End.)  I sure hope he's right.  I think that as a Strong AI proponent, I agree that in the long run, death will be more or less eliminated.  I'm just not convinced it'll be in my lifetime.  Still, I'd be glad to be wrong.