Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

A random walk may not result in doing anything right, but if you can avoid the fatally wrong you can find yourself having pivoted in ways that keep the game of life continually interesting. Heaven, hell, and tractable lifestyles are dismissed as uninteresting finite game end states; their most likely result is your being replaced with a small script. The last thing you can afford is a view-from-nowhere perspective, for as you navigate Maslow's bottlenecks, it'll be lack of imagination in the face of surplus freedom that'll kill you.

Humans are somewhat unique among living things in their capacity for mourning the loss of things they never had in the first place.

Marriages often function via partners taking turns being the adult. Marriages often fail when one partner always has to be the adult.

In general, you are a clod in that area of life where you are something of a professional. The area of life where you remain in control of your emotions and the situation no matter what the world throws at you. Usually, this ability is worth money or some other reward. You are a snowflake in the area of life that can evoke the most uncontrolled emotions in you, or cause you to freeze up.

Being exactly wrong is actually a useful thing to be. It’s the next best thing to being right. You can get to right by flipping exactly wrong. Flipping somewhat wrong merely makes you somewhat wrong in a new way. To seek meaning is to believe in truth before virtue, virtue before beauty, beauty before creation, creation before victory. This is the honor code of meaning-seeking. If you follow this code perfectly, you will make exactly no money.