The problem with contemporary culture isn't that we're too decadent. We have inherited the surfaces of decadence -- luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display -- but have surrendered the fin de siecle's commitment to pleasure. The result is a culture in which pleasure is subordinated to programs of optimisation and replaced at scale by numbing algorithmic stimulation and promises of instant gratification.
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These attitudes reflect the fantasies of a narrow elite obsessed with human enhancement and -- above all else -- the prolongation of their own survival. The class politics of pleasureless decadence can be roughly summarized as: biohacking and quantified asceticism for the rich, algorithmic stimulation for the rest.

On my last trip to the land I noticed something: Getting into a groove of mindless repetitive work is centering. If you're feeling terrible, it makes you feel pretty good; if you're feeling super-hyped, it makes you feel pretty good. So what happens when an entire society has all mindless repetitive work done by machines? Now, instead of working wood with hand tools, which is meditative, we do it with power tools, which is stressful because you can kill yourself at any moment. It's the same with driving instead of walking.

We have made "progress" according to one narrow equation: more transformation of the world per human attention. In many other ways, machine power is a serious misstep. Of course it consumes more actual energy, which comes from hidden unsustainable sources. Also, more transformation per attention means more stress, and more and bigger mistakes. And finally, without the centering effect of meditative physical work, depressed people stay depressed and fanatical people stay fanatical, all of them pushing us toward apocalypse.

An activity gets translated into something the system can represent. That representation becomes the target of optimization. Over time, the constraints that once kept the process tied to its purpose begin to weaken. The system becomes better at processing the representation while becoming less reliable at producing the outcome. A patient can move cleanly through the billing system without getting better, just as a student can leave with a score that says little about what was learned. What the system can measure begins to stand in for what it was supposed to accomplish.

And three more censored Ask Reddit threads. Questions that are critical of individuals, like "What's the worst thing you've seen a person do in whatever context" are rarely removed, but negativity about the system is predictably smacked down. Reddit is supposedly left wing, but to blame individuals and not the system is flat out authoritarian bias. Removed: What businesses do you think are quietly declining because younger generations aren't interested in them?

Apparently some moderator is protecting fictional bad individuals: Any movies where the villain wins?

And my favorite: What piece of 'obsolete' technology do you refuse to get rid of because it is still vastly superior to its modern replacement? I'm about to go for a walk listening to mp3s on a Sansa Clip player with wired headphones.

The closer we examined that first draft, the more the story's centre seemed absent. The protagonist was active, but lacked interiority. The worldbuilding had colourful details that somehow failed to build consistently. Certain hallmark sentences recurred over and over ("Not X, but Y..."). And the pacing was off, with important story beats given oddly little narrative weight.

Yeah, human writers can do all of those things. I think the most reliable way to tell human writing from AI writing, is that human writing is harder to read.

Related: my novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, has now benefited from a year of polishing. As far as I know only one person has read the whole thing. I've been filling out some underwritten parts, I rearranged part one, and I just fixed a major story error in the Time Pit chapter.

The only things that could be called real were utterly simple beings of psychic activity "endowed with perception and appetite." The other objects, which we call matter, are merely phenomena of these simple perceivers.

Going back to the afterlife, what happens to the monad that's now being you, when it leaves the game? There's a lot of evidence on this subject from near-death experiences. A common objection to NDEs is that those people must not have been really dead, but this is an example of the No true Scotsman fallacy. People have been dead by every clinical definition, including having no brainwaves, sometimes for multiple days, and have come back with reports.

These reports have less in common than you've been told. Not everyone goes down a tunnel to the light, or is greeted by family members. I heard about a guy who was greeted by John Belushi in a bee costume. Some NDEs are so out-there that the person can't even explain them in words. But this Reddit post generalizes from the bulk of reports: What The Afterlife is Like, Based on 100+ Years of Evidence.

Personally I have a variation of Pascal's wager. Pascal was like, "What if the wrathful Christian God is real? I'd better believe in him just in case." I'm thinking, "What if we get to write our own afterlife?" Surely it's not that simple, but what have I got to lose, if I imagine it in detail? This Reddit thread includes my answer from six years ago: If you actually go to a paradise after you die, but the paradise automatically is set up in a way which will be the absolute maximum best and pleasing experience for you, how would your paradise be like?

So, if the afterlife is so great, what are we doing in this dystopia? There are many answers to this question, which I'm not going to get into, but another thing that NDE-ers generally agree on is that suicide is a bad idea. I can make sense of this with the metaphor of walking out of a movie. You might walk out if it's near the end, you're not enjoying it, and you're ready to go home. But you don't want to walk out during the most intense part -- that's why you went to the movie in the first place.