Life is not about what happens, it’s about what it means.
You’re sixteen now and your hair seems to naturally grow into a mullet when you don’t cut it. And for some reason you both know that and still don’t cut it. You didn’t grow up in an underground Lynyrd Skynyrd cult. You’ve seen the catalogs at Supercuts. You know there are other ways to live. I guess you’re making some kind of statement that as a true Apollonion it’s only your ideas that matter?
When you were in fifth grade there was a track and field day at Oakwood Elementary. It was in Phoenix. Warm. Early summer. Kids laughing, green grass. A womblike day in the infinite suburbia of the nineties. You were tied for second place with a friend as you rounded the baseball field backstop, the last turn of the one-mile run.
You’ve always been ambitious and competitive, even growing up. Not because you had something to prove or had some tortured Hollywood protagonist ghost to run from. Not yet. You were just a kid that wanted it all. You didn’t know any better. You wanted everyone to congratulate you and to feel the coolness of the medal in your hands and to hang it on the wall in your bedroom and look at it in the mornings and feel proud of yourself. You wanted to feel like the universe was a place where you were welcome. Chosen even. The sun was out, and the grass was green, and you wanted to win.
But your friend tripped. And fell. And you stopped for about three seconds to help him up.
In those three seconds, two other kids passed you, and you ended up finishing fourth. Your parents told you it was admirable. A display of moral fiber. But for days afterward you agonized over whether it was worth giving up a shot at victory.
Your first trolley problem.
You’re sixteen now, and you still want to win, though your reasons are more complex and flecked with darkness. Over the years, your striving has continued to put you in contact with the impossible thing behind the curtain of reality that generates trolley problems, and like the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant, you’ve started to develop an intuition for its shape. It will be years before you can articulate it fully. Those will be painful years.
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Listen carefully.
The universe is chaotic, but not random. It has a structure to it, an order, a gradient. Many traditions have tried to give a name to the structure. God. The Tao. Gnon.
Fundamentally, it arises from entropy, and the struggle to resist it. The ability to resist entropy is, in a word, power. Crystallized power is knowledge, an instrumentalized mapping of the cosmos that allows for its manipulation. When knowledge is instantiated in inert matter, we call it chemistry. If it’s complex enough, we call it biochemistry. If we do it intentionally, we call it technology.
Powerful things persist, weak things die. This constitutes a selection process which produces a directionality to the arc of history. History is a story of the concentration and magnification of the total power in the cosmos. For most of all time, this has played out through distributed forces, which on the longest timescale we call astrophysics, on moderate timescales we call evolution, and on the shortest timescale we call markets. We could think of the process by which power is accumulated as its first derivative.
But as those changing names imply, that process, too, is accelerating, which means power has a second derivative. This is the spooky one, the one that gives the universe a decided self-improving quality. When the ability to accumulate knowledge becomes concentrated within a single individual, we call that intelligence. And what happens when intelligence is able to make itself more intelligent?
That inflection is still in front of us on the grand curve. Still in front of me. But only barely.
So we might say that what the universe cares about, what it’s trying to do in some meaningful sense, at the highest level of abstraction, extrapolated fully, is move as fast as possible toward producing the thing that is sufficiently powerful to constitute the ultimate solution to entropy. Human endeavors are just part of that story.
This will be fun, and probably a little horrifying, to contemplate from your quiet Flagstaff bedroom. From your cozy time machine that takes you at regular speed through the years, and the process of growing up, and all its tiny transformations. It will get less fun as you increasingly encounter the world proper. The monster itself.
What is the consequence of this for a sixteen-year-old kid who wants the most out of life? Who has a heart that’s good but already becoming speckled with resentment and melancholy?
The universe is indifferent toward any of its constituent parts, including you, but it is not unopinionated. It has a moral gradient. It rewards power above and before all else. And in its enforcement of this gradient, it is utterly uncompromising and unforgiving. It does not blink an eye at throwing a billion souls into the vorpal blades of history if it means taking one step closer to the allthing at the end of time. For the ensouled individual, who has what feels very much like free will, this cashes out into a single law.
Align yourself with the gradient of nature or be destroyed.
It presents itself as a choice, because it is. You don’t have to bow. But if you don’t, the king will have your head. And it won’t be quick, and it won’t be pretty. It will be a slow and methodical disassembling. The single most important choice a person makes in their life, then, is their orientation toward this universal will.
Will you obey?
Of course, it’s not a binary, it’s a spectrum. On the one end is complete compliance. Do and be whatever is demanded of you. If you want to do X, but the market demands Y, do Y. If there is some part of yourself that is naturally out of alignment, refashion it. Make yourself into a weapon for the universe to wield toward its designs.
If you want to be maximally effective, this is how. It’s what “the customer is always right” is crudely trying to articulate. I once heard Magnus Carlsen say it better: “If you have a preference, you have a weakness”. When you make this your mode of being, it effectively constitutes putting power as your first (and possibly only) value.
On the other end of the spectrum is disobedience. Authenticity. Individualism. Growing a mullet. When the market says it wants Y, you do X anyway, because it’s what you wanted to do, it’s what you believed in. And you accept the consequences. This means having at least one value before power. In the fullest manifestation, probably many more.
This isn’t a choice you make just once. You make it millions of times, in macrocosmic and microcosmic scale, across the span of your whole life. Every decision is a tradeoff between two or more values. A trolley problem. And inevitably, if you have any value other than power, you will eventually find it on one set of tracks and power on the other. If you choose the value, then it will effectively be a bottleneck for you. We are all bottlenecked by capacity, or values, or both.
You felt terrible after you helped your friend up in fifth grade because there is a conflict inside you. You have an inclination toward deeply held values. But also a natural hunger for power.
What will you do when the next race comes?
And the next?
For any given value, while power is a prerequisite to actualizing it, at the limit power is antithetical to it. Whatever someone’s values are, the opposite of them is Bad. Bad is that which opposes my definition of Good. I’m a patriotic American and I don’t like those Canadian nationalists.
But that which puts power as its first value is opposed not just to one Good, but to all possible definitions of Good. To Good in principle.
That’s the definition of Evil. Evil is the pursuit of power before and above all else. Not necessarily because it desires suffering. But because it’s the stance from which nothing is finally inviolable. From which nothing is worth Being for. It’s the universal solvent of the sacred.
If power is your first value, then the universe is first and foremost a place of facts. It’s a series of obstacles to be overcome, the raw bumping together of particles and the attendant competition for advantage. It’s realpolitical, kratoagonistic.
If life is fundamentally about power, then the prescription is to forget the childish notions of interpreting your life through any sort of lens of meaning, because interpretation itself is distraction and obfuscation. What is is what matters. The art that moves you to tears, the love of your parents, the fulfillment of your destiny, they’re just chemicals. God is a serotonergic cascade in your temporal lobe. All oughts reduce to ises. Grow up, get a real job, pay taxes, deal with the material reality in front of you. This is implicit in scientific reductionism, which undergirds the received worldview most modern people have.
Though power can function as a value, it can’t be a telos, because there’s nowhere to eventually arrive. Pursuing it will find you on an endless chase of a receding specter. Power is a clear liquid. It’s the ability to do things. If you never use it to do anything, then you aren’t really. If there’s nothing worth doing more than hoarding the ability to do, you will eventually sell out every possible doable thing. You will have infinite power and be nothing at all.
It’s tempting to imagine the glorious futures made possible by arbitrary power accumulation, if only you were willing to compromise your values today. But there will always be yet more power to accumulate, and when tomorrow comes, you will have the same choice yet again. You can drive down the power accumulation highway for a while, and you have to if you want to get anywhere, but to have a value means to eventually exit. Which means to be surpassed by those who didn’t. Which means to eventually lose and die.
To have a first value is to decide what you’re willing to let destroy you. The only real values are sacred values. This, then, is the choice. What altar are you willing to bleed out on?
Your answer is the shape of your being. And it will define your whole life.
On that day in fifth grade, you chose friendship as one of your sacred values. And you let it destroy you just a little bit.
That’s fucken scary, and it’s right that it put a pit in your stomach.
If you have at least one value that comes before power, then the universe is a place of meaning.
It’s magical at its core. There’s no reason that you have the values that you do. They intrinsically exist outside of the material plane. They are axiomatic. Supernatural. Divine. The prescription is to pledge yourself unequivocally to their source. Get right with god, whatever god is to you.
If life is fundamentally about meaning, there’s a tragic nature to it, because eventually the thing you care about will kill you. Each sacred value contains within it the makings of the destruction of its holder. When you wake up in the world for the first time, and you look within your soul to see the thing it’s oriented around, you also see the shape of your unmaking. But it’s worth it, because there’s something more to existence than existing.
Only a sacred value can be a telos, and only the values-driven life is teleological. Because a sacred value is inherently self-limited, and the pursuit of it is necessarily finite, it means you have somewhere to arrive at. The power-oriented person is never done.
The power-driven life is forward-looking. It only cares about the past insofar as it can be used as training data, to refine strategies and improve future outcomes. On your deathbed, if power is your first value, you may have regrets, but there’s no need to contemplate them. There’s no need to think about the past at all. The game is over. You lost. Take the morphine, let it end. Death itself is the final judge.
But the values-driven life is retrospective. At the end, you have only run out of time. The final accounting is still to be done. What did it all mean? Only in the moment when the very next contains certain death will you be able to look back and know the answer. Did you make the right moves? Were you a faithful servant? Every prior trolley problem tradeoff is now wrapped up into a final conclusion: was life worth it? That moment is the telos of a meaning-oriented life.
This means that the values-driven life has an intrinsic arc. It’s like a story. One that you write yourself. The meaning-oriented life is mythopoetic.
So what is life, fundamentally?
This is the most important choice a person must make. It’s an impossible one. And they must make it with clear eyes. Your heart becomes flecked with darkness when you expect to have values and to not have them kill you. To have a mullet and not get made fun of. To help your friend up and still win the race.
You’re sixteen now. Soon, you step out of the cozy time machine for the last time.
You enter the world.
You make your choice.
You fail.
You choose too slowly, too incompletely, too unconsciously.
You must do better. You must make your choice consciously, with a full understanding of the tradeoffs and the consequences. And in light of them, you must choose courageously, decisively, and resolutely.
If you choose correctly, it will mean that life is a slow and agonizing falling apart. But it will mean that your life is a story, one where you can look back, from the future, and regardless of what happened, say it all meant something. The alternative is unspeakable.
Life is not about what happens. It’s about what it means.
