# Burning Uptime: When your Sandbox of Empathy is Leaky and also an Hourglass

Epistemic status: idle musings  
 

Some of us  sometimes get so deeply caught up in a thought or understanding of someone else that it's difficult to switch back to our own context and experiences. This is what the mecha animation series Gen:Lock calls "burning uptime" and it is a useful tool for understanding our own emotions and experiences. It might be useful to think of empathy as "simulating" another person's mind. Usually this simulation happens in a sandbox, where the simulated model of the mind of the other is isolated from your own feelings, values, actions. But as the the sandboxed simulation is run for a long time in increasingly elaborate detail, it can become leaky and affect your ability to inhabit your own circumstances.

  
 

GenLock's Concept of Uptime
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This idea came from a conversation I had with some friends about social anxiety, empathy, and theory-of-mind-ing. A Mecha animated series called Gen:Lock inspired a discussion about how empathy can bleed out of sandboxes and how running elaborate simulations of another person's mind can let their needs, wants, values, and behaviors leaking out of its sandbox and affect our own lives.

  
 

Gen:Lock is a mecha anime. The pilots can use a machine to copy their minds into the processor / control unit of a mecha body. This allows them to fight or do work as a mecha. In addition, they can meld their minds with the minds of their teammates, allowing them to work together as one entity.

  
 

Inhabiting the mecha body causes the human mind’s cognitive architecture to slowly diverge from what the body can support, and mind-melding with other people accelerates the divergence. When the divergence reaches a threshold, it becomes dangerous to copy the in-mech mind back to their original body.

  
 

The mind-transfer system tracks “uptime”. Existing in the mecha burns "uptime", and mind-melding with teammates burns uptime even faster. Thinking intensely and experiencing intense emotions also accelrates uptime burn. When uptime runs out the system prevents mind-transfer back to the original body, and the person is permanently stuck being a mech.

  
  
 

Uptime In Real Life
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Most of us aren't pilots in an army mech program, but the concept of burning uptime can help us realize the limits of our empathy and mitigate the effects of over-empathizing to the poin of identity loss. Virtualizing or sandboxing a model of another person's mind for a long time can can lead to shifts in our own identity. One of the ways this can happen is when you empathize with somebody who lives in circumstances that's very different from your own.

  
 

For example, if you were a woman but you spent a lot of time simulating what it's like to be an incel, you might find it difficult to say no to unwanted physical advances - - painful, even, because you have deeply internalized that it is a painful and "wrong" thing to have woman say "no" to your physical advances. This and similar mismatches could make it difficult for you to inhabit your own body and circumstances, because you have been so deeply immersed in the other person's experience that you no longer are able to inhabit your own.

  
 

Similarly, if you are in a situation where you're relatively poor but you constantly think about what it's like to be rich, you might find it difficult to inhabit your own circumstances. Imagine you are a cleaner in Silicon Valley. You explain to your billionaire client that you would deep clean their gigantic garage and detail all their sports cars and charge their tesla. That you know how to operate their automatic trash can that drives itself out to the curb. You find out that the rare herbs in the fridge are spoiling and the caviar is going to have to go.

  
 

Now imagine going back home in your 15 year old toyota corolla, and finding yourself with no motivation to take out your trash, clean the gunk off your floor and throw away the rotten vegetable goop that’s been sitting in your fridge for a week now. It occurs to you that your life sucks in comparison and that your clients would consider a day in your shoes the worst day in their life.

  
 

From this realization, you might get motivation to quit your job and get a better one, and perhaps work up a few rungs in the social ladder to a more tolerable place. Or it may become difficult to inhabit your own life, this might manifest as disdainful comments to your less economically advantaged friends, unwillingness to do the hard work you must do to survive, and running out of budget buying luxurious to get that temporary rush of feeling rich.

  
 

Why is this a good / interesting concept?
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The concept of burning uptime is an interesting tool for understanding our own emotions and experiences. It helps us recognize when we have limited capacity to sandbox an altered state of being, and take steps to preserve our ability to navigate our way back to our natural mode of operation. Our empathy runs in leaky sandboxes, and our understanding of others leaks into affecting our own behaviors. The leakiness makes the sandbox an hourglass. When it runs out, our cognitive architecture is permanently altered. Looking at the sandbox as an hourglass can be a useful reminder to take a step back and look at our own circumstances, rather than getting lost inhabiting another person's reality.