Ya I guess I should have been a little more specific. I've learned React and Javascript and most of the domain-specific and functional languages like SQL, Octave/MATLAB, Lisp, Clojure, and mainstream languages from assembly, Python, Lua, Swift, Java, C#, Kotlin, etc over the years. Sometimes I wonder if I'd be better off unlearning what I've already learned, if I could.

I'm actually most fascinated now with simple spreadsheets and getting back to #nocode with stuff like Firebase and Airtable, although I don't believe that anyone has fully solved offline and distributed conflict resolution well enough to give us MS Access and FileMaker for the web. Although CRDTs can do a lot if we're willing to let ACID go, kind of like the eventual consistency fad around 2010. Dunno if I can do that though!

So really what's going on is that I'm not an artisan, I'm not a craftsman or even an engineer anymore (if I ever was, I never got my professional engineering license). I'm more of an architect or researcher. I want to write the building blocks for engines that are used to build other things.

But that ship has sailed. Open source isn't modeled right, since nobody solved funding. So nobody pays for the pure research that I'd like to do, so society misses out on proceeds from that investment in innovation. Banks only loan to match a multiple of collateral which doesn't kick in until someone has on the order of $100,000 saved. And there never was funding for ventures. VC firms vacuumed up all available capital so those trillions of dollars are now concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires and multinational corporations who pick winners and losers in the same role that democratic governments used to perform, except now through gatekeeping. The central challenge is how to get money for runway to get real work done, and that hasn't changed in the 30 years I've been doing this. If anything it's far worse today, with competition increasing an order of magnitude each decade, along with wealth inequality as winners hoard their gains and dodge their taxes.

On top of that, AI has already surpassed my knowledge and experience. It can whip up working code for mainstream frameworks like Laravel and React in seconds, whereas it would take me days just to formulate a plan of action. So the only thing going for me is that I know what not to do, from attending the school of hard knocks. But AI will solve that too within 5-10 years, removing even the minefield so that all programming has guard rails. Every innovation there just withers me, since I started down this course in life with the goal of creating AGI back when that was a joke. It's an all but certainty now, arriving by 2040 but maybe even 2030.

That's a good insight about reincarnation being akin to fatalism, I hadn't considered that. I feel that philosophies have merits that can be ranked under somewhat formal metaphysical conventions, even though they amount to sniff tests. So I find written religious accounts somewhat less believable than personal insights from experience. The most universal truths seem to come from epiphanies that can then be verified against other accounts.

So basically that means that a child's question of "how does my soul control my body?" is every bit as valid as "why don't dogs go to heaven?", except that the child's question is ranked higher because it's universal, whereas heaven is a construct and rules about who gets to go there are dogma.

We live in a mostly western capitalist economic model, with ethics rooted in Abrahamic religions. In other words, we live under dogma. So seeking universal truths is mostly discouraged, as they threaten the status quo and entrenched power structures controlled by dynastic wealth. It also threatens the psyche. The more I learn, the more my mental health suffers with knowledge that can't be shared, either because there are soul-crushing aspects to life that can't be changed (yet), or because I don't want to co-opt someone else's journey. Then people confident in their worldview mock me for trying, the way that hard-right politics mock any attempt to make things better. Because they are optimizing gain within a zero-sum game to find the best Nash equilibrium, while I and others are thinking outside the box at a meta level to change the rules, which again threatens their power. Leftist politics can also succumb to tribalism, so I'm not saying that hard-left or hard-right is best, but that strong attachments block insight and solutions. And unfortunately the people with the strongest attachments control the world right now.

So I guess my belief that we're all one in the consciousness field, destined to live out every perspective so as not to be trapped alone within a singularity as God, is not so different from believing that this is all there is and we're worm food when we die, or that we spend eternity in heaven or hell after this life. Except that I might say the worm food philosophy doesn't pass my personal sniff test, since being here again doesn't seem that much less likely than being here now.

And you're right, fear and love have no direct correlation with wealth or the lack thereof. I might say that the feeling of having enough can be personal or societal though. Someone may feel loving and not see the burden their lifestyle places on those supporting it. And conversely, someone may feel loving and not realize that it's a trauma response from exploitation.

I feel that my soul contract, the dream of my inner child, is to liberate future generations from unnecessary suffering so that they (we in the next life) can more easily self-actualize. Which IMHO is closer to a progressive planned economy with UBI like Star Trek than a libertarian wild west economy like Star Wars. Maybe our attention shifts though, the way that children in developing nations seem happier than children raised with a silver spoon. Maybe my personal journey through suffering has felt rewarding in some way. Like maybe I'd go crazy with anhedonia if all my needs were met.

All that said, what I really seek is peace, since I'm not sure that I've ever really felt at ease in my entire adult life.