Dignity in vanilla reality

Were magic to exist, it wouldn’t be called magic, and if you found yourself wishing magic existed because our reality is too mundane, you wouldn’t even find magic interesting. The price to pay for enjoying reality is admitting that it is attainable, vanilla, default. It’s coming to terms with the fact that there is no “great beyond” wardrobe, mirror or portal which leads to some structure of reality so fundamentally different that you (magically) wouldn’t get bored with that one. This is the sacrifice required of you for Earthbase to become interesting again. (If you haven’t realized this yet, I’d recommend whipping out the litany of Tarksi.1a single minivan lets you experience more thrill-from-speed than literally any human before could’ve possibly experienced. Do we not, then, ride dragons? But alas, if you admitted to having dragons, would you not be pining for a meta-dragon instead?

Assuredly the lesson here is not that one must become some sort of Tibetan monk who so decorrelates his desires with change-in-the-atoms-of-reality that he wouldn’t even flinch in the face of a global pandemic or rogue superintelligent AI. (Because, you see, to wish for reality to be otherwise is a form of wishing for magic; and it is the very act of wishing for magic which is at the root of his pain, and not the specific pain of coughing-up-blood…)

There is a difference between wishing-for-magic and building-the-magic-yourself. If you take tuberculosis in stride, wisely telling everyone that one must accept the mundanity and horror of reality because to wish otherwise is the source of all pain, you may end up doing nothing about the coughing-up-blood part of reality. And surely, wishes-for-magic being equal, the superior reality is one in which humans don’t die from coughing up blood!

So then must humans both restrain from wistfully sighing at the lack of magic in the world (because the world does not, in fact, contain magic) and also *refrain from coughing up their lungs and constructing elaborate arguments for why this is good, actually? Can we fit both the thought “reality is vanilla and you should take solace in it” *and the thought “we should change reality” in the same mind? Surely the superior reality is one in which humans don’t grow bored flying around on their hang-gliders but ALSO design bio-engineered dragons…

Do not wish in isolation

A wish which is not immediately followed by the crinkling sound of a pulled sleeve is not a wish worth making. What time have we, in our finite and distracted lives, to contentedly sigh at things which will never come? What better things have we to do, but make our reality more interesting by ourselves? What good does it do us, to complain about our terrible mystery-bereft world and merely wallow in it?

It’s simply not dignified to lay there, you, a sovereign human being with a thinking brain and time on your hands, and not think of a solution to your problems yourself. The thought “I wish there were dragons” ought to be immediately followed by the thought “perhaps I should go hang-gliding” or the thought “I’m going to found a startup intending to bioengineer dragons”.2way-more-detailed-than-you-think mundane fact of reality, not artificially inflating reality’s merits through e.g. some kind of belief in a Santa Claus isomorph. So while “reality is mundane, vanilla, default” may appear like some kind of heresy, a strike at our world, I mean exactly the opposite. I suspect this way of approaching everything is far healthier and more enjoyable than those who would say, defensively, “but reality is full of magic!” and even occasionally lie to their kids that way.