Space L Clottey

Four Scope Expansions

Scope is everything. If you have no scope, you have no means for discerning the important. In small scope the trivial is all encompassing, and with a larger scope only the truly relevant still shines.

Scope is also useful for your own emotions, choosing the correct kindling upon which to send your aspirations flaming upward.

So let us zoom out in four different directions, and truly orient ourselves in this bizarre reality.

Space

There’s lots of world out there.

The universe we occupy is unimaginably grand. Laughably so, insanely so.

Take a peak an unfiltered night sky and you’ll see it endlessly spiral away from us, everything so vastly spread out and so massively huge.

A human standing upon the face of the earth is unseeable, yet the collective power of many billion will light up the planet…

… to a point.

Zoom out far enough and it’s still a speck.

One day we may very well surround a star and harness it for power, we may very well attach rockets to our very spawn point and rocket through the cosmos; but what will undoubtedly never change is our home’s vast, vast nature.

If you ever feel like not sticking around much longer, recall you’ve been born to a time when humans are just about stirring into awakeness, just about ready to stand up from the chair and sprawl out into infinity. Remember that there really are worlds. Actual, real worlds, surfaces, planets, out there, now.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that, in the same way you could try to imagine a random spot in the Saraha? Knowing you haven’t been there, but knowing that there is something there?

Now imagine that, but multiplied by everything.

There’s so very much to explore, so very far to explore, such a massive, massive playground this is. The longer you stick around, the more likely you’ll get to see it with your own eyes.

But whether or not you see it it’s still there. It’s all there, now.

Isn’t that marvellous?

Death

You don’t regenerate, ever.

If you’re like me, shielded from a personal death thus far, then you may still be waiting on the utter fragility of your being to settle in.

What did it for me was seeing a brain. This brain.

Realising properly and truly that I will end was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life, and knowing finally and properly that every thought, every tiniest glimmer of an idea, every facet and crevice of my personality stem from physical connections between neurons that actually exist in the real, physical world, all implemented on the disgusting mushy ball that’s really here in the physical world, broke me.

How comforting it must be, to believe yourself immaterial.

The idea that you will end, and that it will come on a day not distant but a day that feels as today as today, will spur you not to waste time. You only have about 50,000 days, I’m guessing, and each day spent is a day gone.

In general, the total immutability of time’s arrow is freeing, but leads to the biggest rush imaginable: the rush to get your life together before the abrupt cut off of total annihilation.

There’s an unknown chance that this so feared death may not come to pass. There’s an unknown chance it will be fixed before you or I die, by a human or by an AI. There’s a chance you and I’s stories will stretch out into eternity, and we may be able to nudge that chance through work, if we so wish.

But there is nothing lost in not being careless in your time. Drop your obligations. Care about the rush of death if and because you want to, not because you feel you must. When you feel it proper, the actions will flow far more naturally.

Solipsism

Reality belongs to you.

The idea that there is nothing really going on outside your head is probably not true.

I mean, it is, but probably not.

You get it.

Nevertheless, the insight and knowledge that there may very well be nothing except you is freeing, because it highlights how important you are. How this is all about you.

If you knew for certain that when you die there’ll be, without a doubt, red letters screaming Game Over, then you’d take off the headset and reorient yourself for a couple seconds then go back to your old life, how would you live this one? (Assuming you couldn’t die early.)

You’d do whatever you wanted, and you’d do your best to be happy.

Knowing no one else is really real, that there is no god orienting your existence has one major effect: it puts you as the ultimate authority.

No one else can really tell you what to do, because they don’t exist.

There can be punishments and rewards, out there in reality, and you would still abide by laws because it’d still be possible for them to put you in prison and you don’t want that, but there are no shoulds.

Shoulds are the voice of society nagging away in your head, and it’s a horrible way to be — it’s like being held hostage by yourself.

Sonder

This is not about you.

Other people actually exist.

That’s right.

They actually have worlds that are truly as detailed as your own, each walking around with problems they never thought they’d have to deal with, stressors and stressees, wants and hopes, ectectra.

Also, they feel. They feel so very much. A drop of suffering hurts just as much in reality whether it’s your mother by your bedside or an anonymous John Doe in Madagascar.

Meaning…

The light to important work is unabashedly illuminated.

Not because it has a way of coming back to you, not because it feels good, but because it really exists, out there, in the real world, just as much as your own emotions exist. Just as intensely.

They matter equal.

This is grounding, because this gives your life purpose.

If you’re worried this is a set of obligations, drop them. Let it not be chains, but wings: the realisation there is truly, inarguably important work to be done.

Space, death, solipsism, sonder.

Space, death, solipsism, sonder.

Space, death, solipsism, sonder.

Space, death, solipsism, sonder.

There’s lots of world out there, you don’t regenerate, reality belongs to you, and yet this is not about you.

Space L Clottey