Aside from the core point made in the book — which is, briefly, that the indefinite optimistic outlook is unsustainable economically as everybody believes in a better future but no one commits to any specific vision — I find the indefinite optimism even more ruinous culturally and personally.

Within that indefinite framework, the philosophy, politics, and social life in general are very much shaped by the uncertainty. When you’re uncertain, you don’t really get to be optimistic. You start oscillating between expecting good things and fearing bad ones. You start being cautious about everything. You become excessively inclusive. You lean into nonviolent communication practice. You’re meta-hedging.

Or on the opposite, you realize the shortcomings of your present situation and crave the firm ground under your feet. Then, you clutch at the most prominent flagpole promising you a certain future, but that promise too is flawed and not definite. You cheer for the championship of loudness. You root for the non-substance.

You often cannot see the indefiniteness forest for those trees. Whatever ideology is emerging on top of the uncertainty, the substrate remains, and you cannot lie to your soul about it. That substrate is more dangerous than any specific set of beliefs on top of it. Beliefs are concrete, so they can be noticed and changed. The uncertainty is inherent to the world and can only be navigated with a strong vision that you continuously channel forth, shaping the world to your will.

The gap between the permeating uncertainty and our delusional hope for the abstract good is not just a gap but a chasm, sucking our lifeforce and casting abysmal shadows into our hearts. Don’t give in to it. Find your vision, make a glowing Silmaril out of it, and defy the encroaching darkness with its light.

And yet, we ourselves are a source of an even more powerful element, consciousness. We believe in myths, ask questions, invent new beliefs, ask questions again, breathe, love, hate, love again, give birth, fear the unknown, fear the known, learn, teach, play, dance, sing, sculpt, aspire, and ultimately prevail.

May consciousness too reach the farthest corners of the universe.

Looking into the sunset sky, do you want to leave a legacy?

A wise man once taught me a beautiful idea. He said, there are four horizons in every man’s life. One is always about a year or two ahead of you, that is what you aim to achieve soon and what you plan for more or less meticulously. The other one is about a decade away. You will have five or six such foundational steps, maybe seven if you’re extremely lucky. The third horizon is something you are to accomplish by the time your life nears its end.

The last, fourth horizon is for the things you will never witness yourself.

Your legacy.

Discipline is a great thing to have, and sometimes it is all you need to achieve success. When you have a clear plan, employing willpower is much easier. Even if your mind if hazed, just stick to the outline you’ve prepared, and all will be good.

And then, the time will come to reap the harvest.

It also means that some unclenching has occurred. Namely, I just finished a very long and tedious piece of work related to my game, and that released a lot of tension. Even though I still haven’t fully recovered from sickness, I’ve done my first tiny workout today. In other words, everything is going really well.

Oh, there’s another thing you’ll need to maintain your flow. Water. Stay hydrated.

It’s nigh impossible to invent a formal algorithm determining if someone is an adult, yet it is perfectly easy to say if someone isn’t after observing them a bit. People are extremely good at that when they don’t avert their gaze.

There’s not much to say about it, anyway. So, the question.

What can change the nature of a man?

My answer is almost optimistic: anything, but only if there is a burning, or at the very least smoldering desire to change deep in that man’s heart.

Challenge me.

What if people became manifestations of what they do best? In the world of Tyranny, an RPG that I dearly love, the rare people who excel at a particular occupation or skill to the degree that people admire and glorify them—those people become Archons. They embody the craft they’re known for and wield powerful magic associated with it.

They may be lords or beggars, vile outlaws or diligent scientists, they may or may not display conspicuous giftedness, but in the end, they always go through a rapid chain of events that either kills them or brings them one step closer to divinity. Some folks believe that the magic they use is of their own design and making.

People like that exist among us too, and the open secret is that you can become one.

I’ve started doing pushups again today. My nose is still occasionally clogged, a couple of times I’ve had blood roaring in my ears, and there are still bouts of slightly higher temperature than normal—but no fever.

My wife is a bit concerned and tells me that I should rest. But I believe gradually reintroducing exercise is actually healthy and beneficial for my body.

What do you do to get back on your feet faster?

The universe itself conspired for that to change. I had to face danger, not mortal but real enough to evoke sharp fear in me. I had to accept exile, even though it was once something I craved. I had to go through hardship and surpass challenges just to survive and get back to normal life. I am immensely grateful for the chain of events that led me to this moment. It has shaken me just enough. I haven’t just returned to some kind of normal life—I’ve got back my life.

For sure, the key to all that change was war. I used to contemplate war long before those fateful events took place. I used to contemplate it bushido-style, through the lens of Hagakure and The Book of Five Rings and The Art of War. Those are bright books but not without a flaw. They don’t pave everyone’s road to wisdom, that’s for sure. But they helped me withstand the losing mindset at least to some degree back when I was a youngster. And now, they have resurfaced in my life and helped me again. It is much easier to grasp their lessons now that I’m a full-blown adult man.

War. Horrible but inevitable. Just watching people fight in a war teaches you a lot. If you are bad at winning, or ashamed, or wary of it, in the face of death you will cast off your folly and strive for victory.

I haven’t fought in a war. I probably never will. Yet if I learned something in my life, I certainly learned one of its lessons. I am good at winning now. I am not ashamed of it. I am not even wary of the consequences. I win.

When I was a novice computer programmer, long before I took my first job, I used to write all my code in Notepad. I formatted it compulsively, carefully picked the names for variables, checked that no trailing spaces remain, and always ensured there was a blank line at the end of each file. I did all that without a linter too, for a simple reason that I didn’t know that such a thing existed.

Yet the most important thing I did was turn code into a painting. I made sure it looked, read, and was understood as gracefully as possible. Code as a work of art.

Doing that half-editorial half-artistry work was moderately time-consuming but ultimately, it resulted in a codebase that was always clean, readable, and easily manageable. Occasionally, I recovered pieces written a few years prior and I would always quickly understand which part was responsible for what functionality, and how to change it promptly. Much later, after years of praxis, my software engineer’s eye had grown sharp enough to catch at a glance mistakes that would otherwise have taken hours to debug.

Eventually, I got a job. At first, no one said much about my methods. As a newbie, you usually get a tacit permission to be weird with your tools until you feel comfortable and confident. When that period was over, some colleagues started hinting at the idea that such code cleanliness was not mandatory. We had linters at work, which in my opinion wasn’t nearly enough, but they relied fully on them, and their code was often far from my high standards of beauty. I remained stalwart at that point, not conflicting with more experienced teammates but also not dropping my practice of making the code look impeccable.

At some point though, I became mature enough that I had to leave the premises of the code monastery and start communicating with product people. They were much less accepting of my views. It was time spent on vain beautification, in their opinion, and should have been cut to minimum. The actual features are much more important than minimization of the time we spend adding them, they would say, and I started going along with those arguments now and then. The pain I felt when I stopped myself from a half-hour of “redundant” code polishing was mild enough so I acceded to my seniors’ reason. It tingled me just a little bit as an act of self-betrayal.

Years passed, and I got used to neglecting my urge to write beautiful code. I was still more pedantic than all my colleagues, but I basically stopped paying attention to the tapestry of code and what visual and conceptual patterns were woven into it. My code has become a boring production artifact instead of the work of art it should have been. The instantaneous pain was almost unnoticeable but its regularity and inevitability were overbearing, and I was steadily burning out.

At my last few workplaces, I experienced days—sometimes weeks—when I couldn’t deliver anything of value. I simply didn’t want to turn on my PC. When you burn out on a type of creative work, I realized, the joy gets sucked out of all intellectual activity, not just the thing you had agreed to do for you current employer.

Not that much time has passed since I quit the last company I was working with. I’ve started building my gamedev studio, and whenever I’m back to writing code I feel the same compulsion not to enjoy what I’m doing. The false wisdom of aiming for productivity and not code aesthetics is still showing its ugly face. I shoo it away, but it hasn’t died out yet. I can say with such certainty that it is false because each time I disregard the time spent and just make my code beautiful, I end up with more actual work done.

And to think of it, that is yet another case of “aesthetics is upstream of everything.”

When I was thirteen, I became obsessed with the idea of establishing my own magical order. My grandmother’s friends all succumbed to my persistent requests for them to join it, even put their signatures on the membership list. I dreamed big and fantasized about a huge bastion built on the Central Siberian Plateau, dedicated to the four elements and a central force binding them together. The envisioned building comprised a central temple-like dome and four smaller towers connected by skywalks, with the elements dictating all the shapes and colors. That was a place I still think fondly of. Not only pompous and majestic, but also secluded, self-sufficient, and aesthetically pleasing.

I got rather lately into anime so when I watched Howl’s Moving Castle I was around twenty years old. I was excited with the castle beyond any measure. Functionality, decor, the portal door that gives you access to a few different places—everything sang within me when I thought of having… even building such a contraption myself. I was not quite like other guys when it came to fantasy stuff like that. I wasn’t too detached from reality either but my narrative about the world was… rather unusual. I allowed myself to believe that building something like the Moving Castle is possible—even if tremendously difficult—and let’s leave it at that.

When I started working with computers, my prolonged adolescence gradually ceased to maintain my make-believe wizarding worlds. I became a duller man, though never completely unimaginative, and redirected most of my faculties toward the scientific picture of the world. It was useful and educating, but the heart and the joy I had found in the world both mostly went away.

Now, after all the years of using the light too bright to be safe for the soul, I’m coming back again to my roots. I have visions of a hideout—and not only it—but I will remain silent for now! For that one is a foolish wizard who speaks too much of his magic.

The true answer is, we do not know.

Should we then abandon all hopes and forsake our efforts to understand everything? Are we to accept defeat and wonder in the dark forever?

The honorable answer is, of course not.

And yet, it would be wise to respect the unknown.

I once heard about the Truth → Health → Wealth principle on some podcast. That struck me as a great directional foundation. First, you determine what is right and proper and then you stand for it. It’s your moral guiding light, first of all. Specific information about the world falls only somewhat in that category. Its main purpose is to help you eliminate untruths in advance and avoid lying to yourself, keeping your soul whole and your consciousness clean.

Then on top of that you make sure that you’re reasonably healthy. I’m not speaking of anything like Bryan Johnson or Andrew Huberman’s approaches, those are too fringe and extreme. And frankly speaking, I don’t think they are solidly epistemologically sound 100% of the time. When it comes to myself, I can eat chips or drink beers on rare occasions, but I work out a lot and eat healthily the rest of the time. I believe it doesn’t just cancel out.

Finally, when you’re confidently true to yourself and healthy enough, you make sure your financial side of life is in order. I’m not a good advisor here, you’d very likely teach me more about that than I could ever teach you. Instead, I’ll rather add a few things I believe will each increase your defense tenfold.

Number one is “Read many books from different cultures and ages.” While nowadays the overwhelming majority of data that we consume comes from our day-to-day communications on the internet, it sways us heavily away from the mighty anchors and monuments of the culture past. Our conceptual vocabulary becomes shallow, and our emotional references to the olden epochs get rusty. As a result, we become easily swayed by being only within the context that is thoroughly analyzed and manipulated.

The most important piece of advice for survival in base physical reality is getting fit. Long hikes, bouldering, karate, shooting, running, swimming—any of these may turn out to be useful, and all of them will make you much healthier. Learn some new skills as well! For instance, knowing what’s edible and what’s not will greatly increase your chances of survival, but outside of extreme situations it will enrich your connection with the nature. Adds extra grounding to make you more emotionally stable in the face of the hostile information environment, and subtracts some stress points.

The last one from me is, stay alone with your thoughts from time to time. Let the noise settle down, try seeing what hasn’t gone perfectly, and why. Hear what your body tells you, it holds more wisdom than you ever will. Unclench, shrug, and maybe dance a little in the dark. You’ll see more clearly how to further improve your defense.

You start expecting crops of winter only when the coldest days have passed. A lot of work should have been done before, and even more awaits you in the future, but at some point you start seeing the silhouettes on the horizon and you know, yes, this is it, this is the future I’ve always wanted, and I’m steadily moving towards it.

My future outlines three things for me.

The gamedev studio. I’ve talked to people I’d love to work with, and they are excited. I’ve written a lot of good code for the game prototype and will soon start the playtests. There are hard days when I slack and don’t want to do menial refactoring work, but most days are full of thrill. I’m not only making progress with the game but also reclaiming my ability to have joy as a software engineer, something I could have completely lost over the darker, uninspired periods of my career.

The Japanese language. It’s been a dream of mine to learn it since I was 19. I made a few attempts back then but soon abandoned it, having a lot of work studying English and being full-time employed. Now, there’s newly lit fire burning in me. Learning also yields more easily to me, now that I have somewhat mastered one language.

The fit and skilled body. This one is simple. There are quite many things I love doing physically, and the more I do them, the more I love them. Bouldering, juggling, kenjutsu, lifting, running, you name it. Plus, workouts grant me a ton of energy to spend on the first two priorities, gamedev and Japanese.

And so I go, dedicated and determined but at the same time almost carefree and relaxed, into the foreseeable future. Let it be bright for all of us.

Time has stopped. The world around has nearly ceased to exist. The tiny tongues of flame in the campfire have come to an almost complete stillness. You can only hear the soft, barely audible crackle of ice.

There are moments when you know more than you can say. Minutes that must be spent in silence. Hours before the impending change, you can feel that the inflection point is so close but still it’s not quite there. Everything will come in its time but for now, just wait.

Until the ice breaks louder.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'
— Frank Herbert, Dune

As a teenager, I never wanted to “find a girlfriend” or “start dating.” For sure, there were girls I fancied but I never aimed for a relationship with any of them. Which certainly had roots in my upbringing, yadda yadda, but the key fact here is that in the end, I was involved with someone almost all the time. The lack of neediness was the main attracting factor I displayed, never even suspecting that was the case.

When the time came for me to seek employment, it was only hard to find a job when I felt the need to get employed. Whenever I had savings and felt secure, people would reach out to me with great opportunities or even ready-to-go offers. One of my best jobs found me when I was actively avoiding the job market.

When you do not desire something, it will come to you freely. More and more people are coming to realize that simple truth these days.

Rephrasing Frank Herbert, “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's not needed anymore.'”

We cannot predict the days when the capacity for something is lost, and even more obstructed is our view of what’s to come the day after.

Today is such a day for me. A day of minor ruin. I feel like I’m getting sick, my body is sore, my mind hazed, and this tiny text is the only thing I will have created over the course of the day. It feels like I am being penalized for too much progress made the days prior. But it only feels that way. The stern reality is that I’m being penalized for overexerting myself with workouts and for walking in chilly weather while being inappropriately clothed.

Some days, you simply have to endure.

PS. There is a dark looming cloud of things I could say about destruction, lack of capacity, and calamities. Yet it’s too dark and raveled to make sense of it. It will all settle eventually, and there will be clarity, and I will see what it is that I want to say. For now though, I’ll say just one thing. Thank you for reading, and take care.

When I just started my programming career at the age of 22, my first job was very far from ideal. I had to commute for an hour and be there at 9 AM sharp. I often ate my dinner right at my working desk… Gosh, the backend was written in Delphi and that says a lot. A lot. But anyway, I was writing code! No matter what was the purpose of my work—it wasn’t bad, just slightly boring—I was doing actual programming!

When I was a teenager and picked a book to read, I was almost trembling with excitement. I didn’t plan to read a certain number of pages, nor did I have a plan to cover a given subject—I just had that one specific book in my lap and I would read it, intentionally missing my bus stops, skipping lessons at school, and hiding with a flashlight in my bed at night.

Going with my friends on our small adventures thrilled me to the core, and I would spend nights drinking beers just for the fun of it, only to nap for an hour at dawn and then immediately set out on our next quest. That might have often been stupid and reckless, but I felt genuinely happy and hungry for life.

Then something occurred, and I let that something suck the joy out of the things I loved so dearly. I was gradually succumbing to it, year after year. I was optimistic of mind but desperate of spirit. I did work I didn’t want to do, securing the future I didn’t want to live. Then the war happened, and the trajectory of my life took the sharpest turn ever. For that, I am forever grateful to the Norns.

Now, some time after that big calamity, I can clearly see the culprit. Its name starts with an R and ends with an M and has 11 letters in it.

You’ve likely guessed correctly. Rationalism had seeped into my life like a fine poison. Through the tech blogs, popular science videos, and wise-looking books, I was absorbing not only the sophisticated and often useful tooling, not only the methods of reasoning that would make me smarter and more efficient at mundane tasks. I also intoxicated myself with the meekly, cowardly spirit. I got inebriated with the indecisiveness that comes from the notion of never being knowledgeable enough, and therefore never being at full capacity to act.

I spoiled my soul with the fear of death.

Yet everything ends, and my time of twilight has come to an end as well. I am reclaiming my happiness, my vigor, and my mortality. I am becoming once more the man I have always been destined to be.

Today, I stumbled onto a sword-fighting school. And there was joy to that.

What exactly is a gift, then? Rationally, it seems there may not be such a thing. After all, people give gifts to tilt the recipient’s disposition towards themselves—if we do trust rationalists to speak on these matters. Which… we probably shouldn’t?

Alright, even if you don’t intend to get something out of giving a gift, you still will receive it. Words of gratitude, better opinion of you, or just a shift in the mood. For the better if the gift is well-received, or for the worse if it’s not.

So the question stands. Is a completely “pure” gift possible?

And then, an enfilade of follow-ups ensues. How do we define “gift”? What about “pure”? Who is it giving or receiving something? What are subjects and objects?

I don’t have answers to any of those questions.

The fire was huge, and a large area around it was unbelievably hot. I had participated in making a bonfire before but that heat was incomparable. I sprinkled the bushes and greenhouses with water—which felt completely futile. But there was a lot of steam coming off the momentarily wet surfaces so probably it did help after all. A few male neighbors cut the densest trees connecting the adjacent households. All in all, it took about an hour and a quarter for the fire brigade to arrive. Over that time, I got to witness the following events.

First, a filled gas cylinder went off. Thankfully, the hot, burning gas tends to move strictly upwards, so everyone was just startled by the sudden flame pillar which also burned down an old dry pine tree.

Then came the debris. A cast iron sink fell from the sky ten seconds after the explosion, right onto the place for our campfire. Some moments later, plumbing pipes and utensils rained down on the ground, some hitting the forest edge one hundred meters away. A lot of people stood there, idly watching, but no one was hurt—even though a minor injury or two might have been a good lesson for them. Either be helpful or get away from harm’s way!

The last event was difficult to predict. You see, we had expected the gas to be there in the house—everyone had a cylinder—so the explosion was the worst we had feared. Yet no one had thought about a second one. Fortunately, the second one was mostly empty, and that, I think, was what made it wait for so long. But it did explode nevertheless! Precisely at the moment where I got pretty close to the burning house in the rush of midnight heroism.

I got pushed by the blast wave and dragged a few meters. I was extremely lucky, there was only moist grass and dirt all the way behind me. Now, that was a lesson for me: fire is unpredictable. You never know what’s there burning, and what will happen, so be cautious and always double check your decisions. Unless… you know, unless you are blessed by the gods.

As for me, I guess I learned my lesson back then. I didn’t get a strong shock and I’ve always loved fire. I still do act reckless occasionally, even when it involves fire. But I do treat fire with respect. And it reciprocates with warmth.