How do you top life rules? With a life script, that’s how. Here’s an absolutely minimalist 2-step one. Guaranteed to work for 90% of humanity. Across all neurotypes, astrological signs, preferred pronouns, quadrants of the political compass, and Myers-Briggs types. Tested across multiple scenarios, utopian and dystopian, decentralized and centralized. Constructed to be compatible with blockchain futures, rated to survive Category 5 culture wars, and resilient to climate change. Here it is, in picture form first, ready?
And now in words:
And then you’re in Act 2, which begins at age 42 on average. In a previous post, I argued that immortality begins at 40. Act 2 is about unlocking the immortality levels of the game of life. The essential truth about Act 2, which you must recognize in order to navigate it well, is this: Unless you make a special effort, you are probably not going to get damaged enough in Act 1 to become a key.
So to work this script, you are going to have to undergo some trials. In double-quick time if you’re already pushing 40.
Karma Hammer
The key-and-lock script derives from an older one that used to be much more popular before the invention of the steam engine: first become a hammer, then go look for a nail.
That wasn’t a very good script. It only worked for Real Men (not all of whom were men, or for that matter, real), and not very well for them. They generally discovered, right after they’d yelled “nailed it!” that they themselves were nails for a bigger hammer poised to descend on them, usually at the poetically perfect moment right after they’d done their own nailing.
This was called karma. Every hammer is a nail for some bigger hammer. People mistake karma for a cyclic view of the universe when it is in fact a recursive view of it.
The rest, which included almost all the women, many of the #notallmen, and all the mis-pronouned, were just lucky if they didn’t get nailed. Every hammer is a nail, but every nail is not a hammer. If you’re keeping track here, the hammer that fells the topmost Putin-class human hammers is called the Grand Void. It was voted the top Marvel supervillain in a recent poll.
But we mostly don’t live in hammer-and-nail societies anymore. We live in lock-and-key societies, soon to be blockchain-flavored.
I’m only about a year and a half into being a key, but looking around at what people older than me are doing, it is clear that they mostly don’t have a clue, or are actively regressing. So I’m making up my own Act 2, just like I did for my own Act 1.
The trick to Act 2 is to recognize that Act 1 was mostly about turning into a key. Even if you didn’t realize that at the time, and thought you were doing other things like Pursuing Happiness, Making Money, Finding the One, or Making a Difference. You were actually acquiring the set of cuts and notches required to be a key.
Which is required to become fully human.
Alienation and Humanization
People think of Act 1 as acquiring “experience” but that not quite it.
You see, most experience is useless.
At worst it just uses you up like a tank of gasoline. At best it wears you down like a cobblestone getting polished by a million footfalls. What it doesn’t do is turn you into a key. That’s why it is useless.
In return for getting used up or worn down, you get to bank unremarkably unique memories that make you feel increasingly different from everybody else, even as you actually become more indistinguishable from them, and your life converges with their lives, collapsing into a shared indistinguishability, a black hole of high-proximity deep disconnection. The hell of other people where you are unique, just like everybody else.
This is called alienation. Keydom is the exact opposite of that.
The only life experiences that count towards keydom are ones that make your personal story irreversibly fork away from all others, while (and this is the irony of keydom) teaching you something about how you’re actually like everybody else.
This is usually called self-actualization: discovering the most general of truths about the human conditions through the most individual of experiences. But I like to call it humanization, because the part that’s getting actualized is drawn from your common humanity, not your special freakshow talents.
So like alienation, humanization is defined by irony. Even as you develop an inner capacity for connecting with others, by becoming attuned to similarities rooted in shared humanity, you find yourself separated from others by the process of individually actualizing shared potentialities.
It’s like a butterfly recognizing its kinship with the caterpillar right when it’s crawling out of the pupa, and exclaiming, “hey, we are wonderful little transformer thingies! Anyone can do this” only to find the other caterpillars going, “what’s that fluttery fool talking about, he’s nothing like us.”
With humans though, most stay caterpillars, because they’re too attached to the things that make them unique caterpillars to want to turn into common butterflies.
Here’s a handy pair of definitions laying out the difference.
Alienation is a bunch of kids all getting the same It haircut and hating each other more as a result.
Humanization is a supervillain whispering to a superhero, “we are the same, you and I,” and then getting into the death-struggle anyway.
Superheroes and supervillains are both successful examples of keydom. Key and antikey actually, but let’s talk about failed examples.
Failed Keydom
Keydom isn’t about experiences, it is about notches. And not score-keeping notches, only key-nature notches. If you accrue enough notches (the minimum is 8), you’ll be ready for keydom.
See, life is long, but there’s a catch: the back half of it is defined by constraints so strong, and so depressingly (and expensively) banal, unless you’ve already reshaped yourself into a key shape that fits into it, you’ll basically get jammed and stuck into the keyhole in the door to the rest of your life rather than properly inside it, living it out. So you’ll spend that half wondering what the hell happened.
I mean, look at Stephen Hawking. Health stuff closed in and reduced him to a twitching finger and darting eyes by 30 or so. Fortunately, he’d already ascended to keydom and unlocked his Act 2 levels by then, thanks more to his outlandish trials I suspect, rather than to his freakish genius.
And on the flip side, perfectly healthy people with a lot of wiggle room can fail to turn into keys, and when the constraints close in, they meekly yield, and submit to getting locked out of the rest of their own lives.
So whatever else it unlocks, the main thing unlocked by the key you turn into during Act 1 is your ability to actually inhabit your own life through Act 2.
by Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
And now in words:
First become a key, then go look for a lock.This script picks up where the first-stage parental booster gives up, at around age 21, marking the beginning of Act 1. The becoming-a-key Act 1 phase lasts 3-21 years. Then there is a bit of an intermission of about 2 years, which for most people is a very confusing, unscripted time, like an inter-airport transfer in a strange foreign city with sketchy-looking shuttle buses that you are reluctant to get on, and long queues at the bathroom.
And then you’re in Act 2, which begins at age 42 on average. In a previous post, I argued that immortality begins at 40. Act 2 is about unlocking the immortality levels of the game of life. The essential truth about Act 2, which you must recognize in order to navigate it well, is this: Unless you make a special effort, you are probably not going to get damaged enough in Act 1 to become a key.
So to work this script, you are going to have to undergo some trials. In double-quick time if you’re already pushing 40.
Karma Hammer
The key-and-lock script derives from an older one that used to be much more popular before the invention of the steam engine: first become a hammer, then go look for a nail.
That wasn’t a very good script. It only worked for Real Men (not all of whom were men, or for that matter, real), and not very well for them. They generally discovered, right after they’d yelled “nailed it!” that they themselves were nails for a bigger hammer poised to descend on them, usually at the poetically perfect moment right after they’d done their own nailing.
This was called karma. Every hammer is a nail for some bigger hammer. People mistake karma for a cyclic view of the universe when it is in fact a recursive view of it.
The rest, which included almost all the women, many of the #notallmen, and all the mis-pronouned, were just lucky if they didn’t get nailed. Every hammer is a nail, but every nail is not a hammer. If you’re keeping track here, the hammer that fells the topmost Putin-class human hammers is called the Grand Void. It was voted the top Marvel supervillain in a recent poll.
But we mostly don’t live in hammer-and-nail societies anymore. We live in lock-and-key societies, soon to be blockchain-flavored.
I’m only about a year and a half into being a key, but looking around at what people older than me are doing, it is clear that they mostly don’t have a clue, or are actively regressing. So I’m making up my own Act 2, just like I did for my own Act 1.
The trick to Act 2 is to recognize that Act 1 was mostly about turning into a key. Even if you didn’t realize that at the time, and thought you were doing other things like Pursuing Happiness, Making Money, Finding the One, or Making a Difference. You were actually acquiring the set of cuts and notches required to be a key.
Which is required to become fully human.
Alienation and Humanization
People think of Act 1 as acquiring “experience” but that not quite it.
You see, most experience is useless.
At worst it just uses you up like a tank of gasoline. At best it wears you down like a cobblestone getting polished by a million footfalls. What it doesn’t do is turn you into a key. That’s why it is useless.
In return for getting used up or worn down, you get to bank unremarkably unique memories that make you feel increasingly different from everybody else, even as you actually become more indistinguishable from them, and your life converges with their lives, collapsing into a shared indistinguishability, a black hole of high-proximity deep disconnection. The hell of other people where you are unique, just like everybody else.
This is called alienation. Keydom is the exact opposite of that.
The only life experiences that count towards keydom are ones that make your personal story irreversibly fork away from all others, while (and this is the irony of keydom) teaching you something about how you’re actually like everybody else.
This is usually called self-actualization: discovering the most general of truths about the human conditions through the most individual of experiences. But I like to call it humanization, because the part that’s getting actualized is drawn from your common humanity, not your special freakshow talents.
So like alienation, humanization is defined by irony. Even as you develop an inner capacity for connecting with others, by becoming attuned to similarities rooted in shared humanity, you find yourself separated from others by the process of individually actualizing shared potentialities.
It’s like a butterfly recognizing its kinship with the caterpillar right when it’s crawling out of the pupa, and exclaiming, “hey, we are wonderful little transformer thingies! Anyone can do this” only to find the other caterpillars going, “what’s that fluttery fool talking about, he’s nothing like us.”
With humans though, most stay caterpillars, because they’re too attached to the things that make them unique caterpillars to want to turn into common butterflies.
Here’s a handy pair of definitions laying out the difference.
Alienation is estrangement from others caused by consequential external similarities masking inconsequential inner differences.
Humanization is estrangement from others caused by inconsequential external differences masking consequential inner similarities.You’re alone in both conditions, but lonely only in the first.
Alienation is a bunch of kids all getting the same It haircut and hating each other more as a result.
Humanization is a supervillain whispering to a superhero, “we are the same, you and I,” and then getting into the death-struggle anyway.
Superheroes and supervillains are both successful examples of keydom. Key and antikey actually, but let’s talk about failed examples.
Failed Keydom
Keydom isn’t about experiences, it is about notches. And not score-keeping notches, only key-nature notches. If you accrue enough notches (the minimum is 8), you’ll be ready for keydom.
See, life is long, but there’s a catch: the back half of it is defined by constraints so strong, and so depressingly (and expensively) banal, unless you’ve already reshaped yourself into a key shape that fits into it, you’ll basically get jammed and stuck into the keyhole in the door to the rest of your life rather than properly inside it, living it out. So you’ll spend that half wondering what the hell happened.
I mean, look at Stephen Hawking. Health stuff closed in and reduced him to a twitching finger and darting eyes by 30 or so. Fortunately, he’d already ascended to keydom and unlocked his Act 2 levels by then, thanks more to his outlandish trials I suspect, rather than to his freakish genius.
And on the flip side, perfectly healthy people with a lot of wiggle room can fail to turn into keys, and when the constraints close in, they meekly yield, and submit to getting locked out of the rest of their own lives.
So whatever else it unlocks, the main thing unlocked by the key you turn into during Act 1 is your ability to actually inhabit your own life through Act 2.
by Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
