Before We Go Live by Stephen Flavall

Author:Stephen Flavall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781739285913
Publisher: Spender Books
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Turn the computer off. Save electricity; save the environment.

Run Folding@home, a nonprofit computing project which would use my computer processing power to simulate folding proteins and help discover medical advances. Help others.

Mine Bitcoin. Make money for myself.

I was okay with picking option three for a little while. It was fun and new, and learning about the experience seemed valuable. In two weeks or so, I mined four Bitcoin at ~$20-30 each, and then got bored and felt like I wasn’t achieving anything with real value and uninstalled the mining software. Tracking the price increases was more stressful than seemed worthwhile, so I sold them all at ~$800. It was good for my mental health—I loathed the part of my brain which was constantly wondering how much money they were worth, and the experience contributed heavily to my just hating money and investment in general. There are so many other things my brain needs to think about, and there are only a few years left, one way or another.39 Wasting a second of my time on the price of Bitcoin seemed inexcusable, and the simple solution was not to have any.

This was slightly after my active time playing online poker, which had felt much the same. I felt like I could go travel and work on myself, or spend time making teaching content and offering one-on-one poker coaching, or study the game and learn more about it, or—the least appealing option—I could actually play poker, which basically did nothing other than making me money. At times, I was in the mood to play poker and had fun doing it, but it always became harder and harder compared to the other options whenever I had more than enough in my savings account to live on for a couple of years.

I think there are two major beliefs I hold which differentiate me from many strategy gamers. These are my best explanations for why I’ve tried to build an online community around charity while someone else might join a company trying to capitalize on the expansion of cryptocurrency, or work as a data scientist for a large corporation, or build a pyramid scheme with themselves at the top, or spend their life trying to maximize their own power and manipulate others.

The first belief I hold is pretty simple: I think that we live in a boom-and-bust society, and we are near the end of the largest boom we’ve ever had, which is about to consequentially be followed by the largest bust we’ve ever had.

When I have conversations with strategy gamers about this, some agree, but many express incredulity in incredibly logical and intelligent ways. They use the word “Malthusian.” A lot of the logic they turn to is flawed, though. They claim that there’s no evidence that human societies can go extinct, ignoring that many isolated human populations have gone extinct, and we have studied the ways that it has happened to them. Mostly they’ve run out of resources they require to survive, or

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