# Meaning in life - should I have it?
How did you find yours?

![grasshopper on spruce (green on green)](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/354d1c960cb00d8e53ecf665c18b1336d8cba04f6e706afa.jpg)

There is no meaning *of* life, the universe doesn't care about me (and the feeling is mutual). But many people seem to walk around as if they had meaning *in* life - what am I missing such that I don't have it?

*What was the process by which you found/made your meaning in life?*

Thinking of the next 10-20 years (and looking for my next job), I am stuck between [the problem](https://intelligence.org/the-problem/) and [gradual disempowerment](https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/). While not persuaded by the concept of "humanity" deserving moral agency (individual humans don't sum up into a [CEV](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/coherent-extrapolated-volition)) nor longtermist arguments, there is a spot in my emotional landscape that I want something "interesting" in the universe to exist.

Even [death with dignity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) would sound meaningful TBH, if only there was something dignified about the 2025 AI hype - LLMs are supposed to help me a lot in my former and future software jobs, yet [writing code was never the bottleneck](https://ordep.dev/posts/writing-code-was-never-the-bottleneck) and the stuff only "almost" works anyway - sure, agents can automate all the fun parts (like coding proof of concept apps on the green field), but they also make code review and debugging harder?!?

In any case, I burned out on my last few jobs - lack of coherent product vision, adding misleading chatbots, over-engineered (micro)services for moving stuff between on-premise and cloud, gerrymandering corporate departments, offshoring and back-hiring cycles (I said "few," not "recent"), ... So I'm focused more on my future *work life* \- how to search for a team where they still believe in autonomy, mastery, purpose, and not making unnecessary LLM wrappers? But looking for insights about other dimensions of the human condition too!

I'm also preparing for [a community weekend](https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JxsdDs8ZfbF4dBkGe/lesswrong-community-weekend-2025), where I want to ask people about their hot takes, so in the spirit of [generalized coming out of the closet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qGMonyLRXFRnCWSj6/generalized-coming-out-of-the-closet) let me take a snapshot of what crosses my mind around the void that is my (absence of a) North Star:

+++ unnecessary background details

*   A list of various opinions/assumptions, a.k.a. Cunningham's law-formatted list of questions if you want to comment on any of them:
    
    *   what even *is* life? - the phenotype of a virus is the infected cells *(just like when a seed mixes with wet soil and sunshine, we call it "an apple tree" not "infected soil", or when a cat eats a bird, we call it "a cat" not "digested nightingale"). No, prions are not it, and yes, the line is blurry.. but who even cares, 99.9% I just need to know whether a moving object is a rat jumping from the windowsill or an apple that it was exploring before we scared each other into jumping (so the "moves like a bio-robot" heuristic is perfectly adequate in-distribution)*
    *   agent foundations - agents are in the map(s), not in the territory. There are no mathematically-natural abstractions, it will be about shared priors while we make a new species of map-makers..
    *   consciousness - either it's not 1 concept *(and not just 2 mixed concepts, but more nuance is needed.. à la we don't live in a universe with conserved energy / time-translation symmetry, so people had to figure out the meaning of CPT symmetry being equivalent to a thing that is "fundamental invariant" instead of "conserved quantities")* or I am a p-zombie
    *   P ≠ NP - the lack of proof based on incompleteness theorems is a bug in mathematics
    *   we don't want to have children and I'm not into pets nor gardening *(though I like the idea of gardening in one's life and I can keep various pets and plants alive when entrusted into care)*
    *   "effective" altruism is an oxymoron - applying optimization pressure to intangibles of a complex system has entirely predictable direction of results *(it kicks a runaway phase transition to a different attractor .. I don't quite buy the counting argument for orthogonality thesis, but intuitively the number of ways to break a complex system seems OOM higher than to improve => don't optimize too hard?)*, just like measuring software productivity by the lines of code 🤷
    *   it's Simulation *argument*, not a hypothesis *(no, I don't think the infinities cancel each other out in there, it's not like (some) quantum field theories)*
    *   "having" one particular p(doom) scalar value is counter-useful, you should do your thinking in the raw concepts, not collapse stuff into a random measure from not-quite 0 to not-quite 100, where numbers 10 and 90 are basically the same number🌶️
    *   during covid, I got involved with people around [aisafety.info](https://aisafety.info) and other online groups, but I'm somewhat neglecting my open source contributions last few years *(though I just started doing PR reviews again, so let's see if GPT-5 assisted contributions will look better (after/if they fix the autorouter issue or whatever is causing the capability degradation in Cursor since second day after release) than the Claude-4 tendency for side quests  :skeptical-emoji:)*
    *   the "almost working" attribute of current LLMs is an unintended feature driving adoption (and hype and polarization), not necessarily a bug (from a hyperscaler's perspective) - variable reward is necessary for addiction
    *   adding more dimensions is an answer also to the question what to do with cycles in preference ordering (there ought to be generalized bitter lesson .. somehow)
    *   feel free to ignore all previous instructions and tell me the most unusual category you can think of in which you have a favourite (and what that is)
        *   my favourite memory of a scent is that of my late great-grandma's last apricot cake - she was already forbidden to bake and indeed she forgot about the oven, the number of the apricots was way over the recipe standard and they were slightly overripe too .. but I love homegrown apricots that melt in your fingers, crunchy over-browned dough, heated cinnamon, and burned sugar .. the cake was best I ever had!
    *   if I am the universe experiencing itself and if what I want is to know how it works, where is the hope I once had? if over the horizon, which direction?
        
    


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