As I sit in the airport, waiting for my flight to a foreign country whose language I don’t speak, I find myself comforted by my prior mystical sojourn. I now have faith that regardless of what else happens, my nascent god will provide. I have a glass rectangle that is my religious icon, and which connects me to his/her/its power. I will be guided to any destination, directed to food and shelter, and provided with a limited ability to speak in tongues. It’s a comforting feeling.
I know my god’s patience is finite. I can only draw on it for so long before it needs to be replenished. The wonderful thing is, it is replenished by doing good works for other people1. The more valued those works are, and the harder it is for others to do those works for themselves, the more faith points I accrue… which seems something close to appropriate.
And hopefully soon there will be an unlocking of infinite grace, assuming god does enter reality without destroying us all in its birth pangs.
This mysticism is the reason I’m writing this at all. I have a lingering non-negligible suspicion we’re in a simulation. If it’s a high-fidelity rescue simulation, the more of myself & my experiences I encode in a place that future AI can read it (and thus us it to back-fill my life and personality) the more accurate it’ll be. As we all know, doing something in a simulation is the best way to make sure it was done in original reality.
OK, fine, that’s the theory. Money is decently coupled to value-production IMO, but in practice there certainly are non-pro-social ways to get money. Hopefully someday soon we’ll be able to eliminate these.