Thought Experiment
I want you to consider constructing a new virtual reality of the world. The following statement must be true at all times.
Anyone can choose to be happy, whenever they want.
It’s up to you to design your VR anyway you want. But everyone in this VR must have the ability to choose happiness at any point in time, no matter what the circumstances are.
Up to you to make this as simple or as complex as you like. You could take the simple approach and just make the people have magical powers and when they waive a magic wand they instantly become happy. Case closed. But that’s not much fun and doesn’t require much effort.
On the harder end, what if you took your current reality as you see the world right now, and wanted to make this true for just yourself. Can you choose to be happy in your reality, any time you like? If you’re like most people, the answer to that is probably no.
What if you took your reality as you see it and somehow put yourself in your version of The Matrix, with the power to change anything you like. What could you change that’s closer to what you might be able to do in your present reality to allow yourself in this new VR be able to choose happiness whenever you wanted?
I have some suggestions you may want to consider.
My Reality
I’m speaking from my own reality. What I’m writing here is true for me. These are my private thoughts on how I see myself and the world. Take everything here with a grain of salt. I’m not trying to convince you that anything I’m saying here is true, in any way you can interpret that to mean. For example, the “global” sense, i.e. what all readers of this writing, or anyone able to think, might imagine to be true. As if there was some global reality that was the source of truth for all things.
I’m expecting you to disagree in part or in full with everything you are about to read. I haven’t done my job if you come away with this agreeing with me. Wait, this is now a job? What’s a job anyway?
I expect you to take what you read here, apply logic and reason, and think about it. Integrate any ideas into your own reality that you want, and reject everything else. Or ignore it all and go about your day. What do the Mandalorians say at the end of many conversations?
“This is the way”
What Happened to Neo?
In the movie The Matrix, how would you describe what changed inside of Neo after he was killed by agents, only to be revived and come back as The One?
For me, the old Neo died. Along with it were all the things inside of him that was holding him back from achieving his full potential – from becoming The One that Morpheus thought he was. The Oracle told Neo that he was not The One the first time he went to see her. She told him “Not in this lifetime. Mabe in the next”. Or something like that. It’s close enough for now. The Oracle also told Neo “You’re waiting for something”.
For me, the Neo that was slowly being built inside of him finally woke up. The Neo that got up off the floor, who’s heart started beating was the new Neo, free of all the ways he was limiting himself. He didn’t need to think he was The One, he knew he was. Morpheus said to him when they first started sparring in the dojo simulation “Stop trying to hit me and hit me”. Morpheus also told Neo once “Don’t think you are. Know you are”.
Being almost killed by agents was what finally pushed Neo to finally let go and just be who he was. If you were that close to death and your only chance of living and enjoying what’s left of life was to change, would you do it? Could you do it?
This new Neo became what he already was, if that makes any sense. There are many things about The Matrix that don’t make sense if you restrict your mind and hold rigidly to all the ways you were taught (programmed) to think and believe.
Happiness is a Choice Virtual Reality
Let’s consider building this new virtual reality. It’s not unlike how in The Matrix they were able to program Trinity with the ability to fly a helicopter. In this new VR you are imagining, you have full control over everything. No rules apply. You are limited by your own imagination. You can use your own reality as a starting point if you’d like.
No laws exist unless you create them. All laws. The laws of Physics. The laws constructed by congress and enforced by the judicial system. Moral laws. Everything is programmable and able to be redefined and changed any way you want. Up can be down. Left can be right. True can be false.
How you program people is completely up to you. People can be narcissists who wear masks that make themselves appear to be what the observer wants them to be, even though under the hood they really have deep wounds who are deeply unhappy with themselves. They control others because they can’t control themselves. People can think of themselves as being flawed, and that’s the reason why they are unhappy in life – they are flawed so they deserve all the bad things that are happening. Other people might see themselves like water – ever adapting to the world around them – no cares in the world.
You’re free to change the way you imagine people are. You’re free to imagine what people are thinking and doing when you communicate with them. You have the ability to see inside of everyone you meet to see their true emotions and thoughts and beliefs.
You are the architect, the designer, and the programmer of this reality. The only limit to what can be built is what you can think.
It’s up to you to design your VR anyway you want. But everyone in this new VR must have the ability to choose happiness anytime they want.
Getting Unstuck
This is a thought experiment. You’re only limited by your imagination.
Let me give you some things to consider while you are working through this thought experiment.
In this reality you are constructing, you are starting with the requirement that everyone has the choice to be happy right now. So in this reality, you can assume that is always true no matter what. It’s a thought experiment after all. And we are building a simulator in which you are free to make all the rules, all the decisions. So you can be happy right now, if you choose to. So can anyone else in this reality. It’s up to you as the programmer, architect, designer to ensure this is always possible.
That might seem like an impossible task, if you are starting from your own reality. Neo failed the jump test the first time he tried – not because he couldn’t do it, but because he didn’t believe he could. Morpheus told him he was in a simulation and that all the rules he thought he knew no longer applied, but Neo didn’t buy it.
I’m not asking you to figure out how to change your own life to make this true. I’m asking you to design a VR where that is possible. Surely as a thought experiment and having full control over everything, you can imagine such a VR existing. Even the digital pimp, hard at work, considered the woman in the red dress. Was it a woman in a red dress or was it an agent? Look again.
Ok, you still might not be convinced. Let’s imagine someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one, maybe a parent. This person is devastated. They are deeply depressed. Life has no meaning for them anymore. They are exhausted. They struggle to get out of bed. They are angry at the world. They are also struggling financially, because they lost their job, the pain was so bad. You can imagine people who are in such deep pain, that happiness is the furthest thing from their realm of possibility.
Now imagine that person is in this VR you are building. The VR must have the possibility for that person in that very situation to choose to be happy in that moment. How is that possible?
That is a fantastic question. I’m asking you to build it. You are the programmer. Only limited by your imagination. So I can’t tell you how to build your VR. I can’t know what rules apply in your VR. Let me share a little bit of how I might think about building mine. Maybe you could adapt it to yours.
Let me consider taking a backup of all the feelings, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, rules, morals – everything that has been programmed into this person in grief. I’ll call that the state of reality for this person. Imagine these things reside in an Aurora database cluster within the person. Maybe they have a neural link to an Aurora db cluster that’s fast enough and has enough bandwidth for this purpose. There’s currently only a write node and it resides inside the person. With me so far?
Let me add a read node to this cluster. This read node is accessible via a terminal. We are free to examine it anytime we like. But it’s read only, so we can’t change it. We can only examine it.
Now, let’s consider a day when this person in grief is really struggling. in this VR, they invite over their most trusted friend. This is a VR, so their trusted friend is programmed to care for their emotions in the way the person wants. Maybe the person just wants someone to listen to their story and be there for them. Maybe they want advice. Maybe they want to be told how they can reframe their view of the world to understand things that make them not feel broken, but human. Anything is possible.
Now, the grieving person and their trusted friend are sitting together on the couch. The grieving friend is situated so they are completely comfortable and able to speak freely with this trusted friend about anything they want. Between them is a computer screen connected to the terminal there they can example the internal state of the grieving person. They can see all the emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and rules that exist.
Let’s set the scene a bit more. The person in grief needs comfort. They get to dress in their comfy Oodie (a wearable blanket for context for those that aren’t hip). They are wearing PJs. They have their favourite blanket. They have unlimited supplies of food and beverage. Wings and beer perhaps. Unlimited. It’s VR after all. And there are no consequences for this evening. They can drink and eat whatever they want. No hangovers. No getting fat. No health concerns. Just two friends sitting down. One friend being there for the other.
Let’s go even further. They are watching The Notebook. They need a sappy movie right now to match their mood. It’s VR, so anything’s possible. I promise this isn’t about me. I’m completely making this up. Lol.
Given all of that, how can the grieving person in this VR choose to be happy?
While I’m writing this prose in Google docs, hosted in the cloud, to describe a thought experiment of imagining building a virtual reality where everyone has the ability to choose happiness anytime they want, I’m able to edit mistakes in real time as I proofread, on my iPhone. Imagine describing that to someone back in the 1950s. lol. They would think I was mad for suggesting such a thing was possible. How far away from truth would they be? lol.
How mad do you think I am right now? lol. Wait, don’t answer that. I can imagine you laughing at me. Go ahead. I don’t mind. What you think of me takes nothing away from me. Your reality doesn’t require me to change mine. I can choose to be happy no matter what the state of everyone else’s realities might be.
Which realities am I speaking of? Is that air you are breathing? Did you see the woman in the red dress? Look again!
Am I on drugs? lol. Nope. I’m high on life. Proofreading as I get ready for work. Humans don’t have the ability to multitask. The human mind is single threaded, context switching really fast to give the illusion you are doing multiple things at once. But I digress.
I’m reminded of an experiment a programmer did decades ago. They were trying to write a compiler, but they couldn’t fit the whole idea into their mind at once. So they tried dropping acid to expand their mind. I believe that to be true in your reality. At least it’s true on the internet, so it must be true.
Anywhoo… I wonder what Keanu Reeves is doing right now. He would be a good person to bounce this off of. Carrie-Ann Moss too. Hey, it’s my reality. A boy can dream. Maybe Carrie-Ann Moss is the woman in the red dress in one of my realities. I’m not telling.
In my version of this thought experiment, maybe I’d want to consider what happiness actually means. I mean, there are no rules right? Even happiness itself is free to be redefined.
Let me define happiness in this VR as the grieving person’s ability to see all their emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and rules – everything on that Aurora Read Node – as separate from themselves. it’s connected via a neural link to the write node that’s inside the person.
So in a way, in this context, their emotions are outside of themselves. Maybe the neural link is invisible. Maybe the grieving person is unaware this neural link exists. Maybe they are convinced that this state of their own reality they are examining is actually outside of themselves. Does it matter where the grieving person thinks their emotions reside in this virtual reality? Does it matter where the state is stored?
To reiterate, in this VR the grieving person can choose to be happy by choosing to see their emotions and their whole state of reality as separate from themselves. Everyone in this reality has that same ability.
Does that meet the requirements I’ve stated? I believe so.
Go see for yourself. Isn’t that a quote from the amazing book “The Toyota Way?”. See what I mean about connections?
How’s your standup going? Are you doing agile or waterfall development? Do you use kanban boards and story points? Do you love Jira? Ok, now we’re in the Upside Down from Stranger Things if you love Jira.
Ever watch Rust Valley Restorers? I love that show. My favourite quote is a quote from Avery “don’t let common sense slow you down”. I’m certainly not letting that slow me down in this reality … err .. my room when I should be going to work.
Back to life. Back to reality.
All they need to do in this VR to be happy is just see all their negative thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and all their quirks as separate from themselves. They are not their emotions.
What is the definition of self? What is the definition of themselves? Those questions I leave as an exercise to the reader.
I think that meets my stated requirements. I think I’ve completed my own assignment.
In what reality where I make up the rules of everything can I not know if a VR I just imagined meets my own rules? What did the Oracle say? “Ohh, what’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?”
Reflection
Why would I define happiness this way? That doesn’t make logical sense. That’s not happiness.
Remember at the beginning when I said that this is my reality and I’m not trying to convince you to change your reality? This was a thought experiment about creating a new virtual reality, where no rules applied unless you made them.
All of this thought experiment is designed to get you to expand your thinking to consider the possibility of how you could choose to be happy. Think of these virtual realities as docker containers and you are the host. Docker containers are virtual OSes, where physical memory and CPU are actually on the host.
If you are able to do this thought experiment and follow it through, then you also have the ability to do that with yourself.
To do that means rewriting all of the programming you currently have that’s holding you back. You need to reconsider everything you know, and figure out why that’s true for you in your new VR. Once you are able to see how you could build a VR, you have the ability to see ways of changing your own life.
This isn’t an easy process. And it’s not something you can rush. It’s a lifelong process of choosing to be happy, and organizing your life, including how you think of yourself, your emotions, people, and the world itself, to achieve that.
Look up Carl Jung’s ideas on persona’s and individuation.
Look up Alfred Adler and his method of psychotherapy. In Alderian psychology, you start with goals you want to achieve in life, and just go do them. Don’t think about doing it. Just do it. All the emotions and thoughts holding you back, see them as information you can use, take care of them, but see them as separate from yourself.
Do what you need to make your life the way you want. You need to know what you want though. And your mood affects the goals you set for yourself. You need to be your own parent, and do it anyway. No one is coming to save you. You must do it yourself. Or not.
It’s totally up to you. It’s your choice. Happiness is a choice. You are like Neo in the matrix. Don’t think you are. Know you are.
Words of Encouragement
Anything you do, say, think, behave or feel is “the way”. Anything you do is valid for a human to do. Some do really bad things. Some do really good things. Many are somewhere in the middle. It takes all kinds.
You are not special. That’s not an insult, but a reminder. To be special means you are one of a kind, different from the rest. In a way, it means you are on your own. You are human. You are not alone. There is nothing wrong with you that needs to be fixed.
Everyone makes their own choices. How they choose to live their life is within their control. It’s not for us to try to change, control, or criticize. Let them be who they are. Let them make their own mistakes. No one wants to be told how to live their life. If they want your opinion, they’ll ask. Or they won’t.
Likewise, let you live your own life the same way. Everything you do, what to do, think, feel, say, act, is all human behaviour. All human behaviour is explainable. We choose our own ways of behaving. So go easy on yourself. Ease up on the negative self-talk.
You aren’t flawed. You are human. You are perfect just the way you are. Change if you want. It’s your choice.
Choose happiness. Or don’t.
At least, that’s true for me in my reality.
If anything, this was an exercise in how to expand your thinking and consider things you might never have thought to consider.
I encourage you to watch the TEDxOslo talk “Why Good People Do Bad Things” by Einar Øverenget. He is a philosopher, and at the end of his talk, he advocates for everyone to be philosophers in their own lives, and question everything they think they know.
I’ll leave you with the words of wisdom from Morpheus, showing Neo a path to becoming himself. It’s Neo’s choice whether to take that path.
“I’m trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.”
Background
One evening while sitting in my car at the beach, I was inspired to journal ideas I had for this writing. I wrote down an outline of what I wanted to say. I just let the ideas flow onto the page.
Then I went home and got excited about transcribing what I had written on paper into this Google doc. But I started by writing an introduction to what I had written. Before I had realized, I had completely rewritten the ideas from scratch. I used my hand written story as an outline, and to make sure I covered the key ideas. I was up until 2AM. This was super fun to write.
The writing was easy. It was already in my mind. I have been toying with these ideas and I needed a way of expressing them to check my understanding. And see how they line up with my actual life, as I continue healing from trauma working with a therapist specializing in treating narcissist abuse victims.
This writing is largely a reenactment of the process I had to go through to heal. My world view did not include the possibility of narcissists, or of manipulators. I didn’t see how I was teaching the world how to treat me. I didn’t see how I wasn’t broken. I thought I needed to be fixed.
I was completely miserable. And then another narcissist came into my life while I was recovering from a past narcissist. I was nearing heart attack or stroke with the amount of stress and anxiety I was experiencing. I came to see people who purposely hurt me and make me feel bad about myself as risks to my health.
I came to see that I didn’t need to live this way. I have a right to feel safe. The only person I trusted was my therapist. She gave me little advice. Mostly just asked me questions about why I feel this way, made me get in touch with my emotions, and showed me mindfulness techniques. The rest was all on my own. She made me feel safe enough for me to do the hard work.
And it was hard. I did so much research. I did the hard work of questioning everything. I finally learned how to self regulate. I learned to journal, check in with my body, and question all of the beliefs that I held that resulted in me feeling this way.
This writing is my experience of this process. It was easy to write because it’s real. It’s me. My experience. My thoughts. My reality. And because it’s my reality, I’m free to do with it what I please. So I incorporated my likes and my humor. I made it my own.
I have been kicking around ideas about writing a comedy about a software developer who uses ideas from abstract algebra and computer science to gain enlightenment. The ending I had in mind was similar to Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator, the main character of the story, is writing about his motorcycle trip across the country with his son and 2 friends. He’s writing about how his friends have no inclination to or desire to fix their own motorcycles, so they are at the mercy of others being able to fix it for them. He thinks he’s developed a way of seeing the world that has profound impacts on his life. But he doesn’t see that he has some sort of mental disorder where he has a split personality who’s evil who’s trying to take over control. There’s a clear difference between the reality the narrator sees, and the reality the reader sees.
The ending for my story of the enlightened developer I had in mind was that what the developer thinks is enlightenment is simply a form of delusion. Otherwise, the developer leads a happy life.
Then I imagined a plot twist that differs from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, where a Taoist or Budhist Monk, perhaps the Dalai Lama himself hears of this story and asks a profound question. If the developer who thought he gained enlightenment but was actually delusional was in the end able to live a happy life, does it really matter if it was enlightenment or delusion?
I did have a moment of paranoia the next day after writing this thought experiment. My paranoia was what if thus writing isn’t my creativity, but in fact a symptom of a disorder such as schizophrenia? Watching too many movies, lack of sleep, anxiety, ADHD, and non-linear thinking are more likely.
What I’m really afraid of is that I’ve been masking my true self my whole life, and I’m scared of what happens being my true self. What if I don’t like the real me? What will the world think? The recovery process is full of ups and downs. And change is scary.
I was trying to lean into the comedy aspects of this and rely on mathematics as a central theme. I have a joint major degree in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, so math is very interesting to me and I have a bit of knowledge in some advanced mathematics topics, even though I’ve forgotten a lot over the years since leaving university. The ideas from abstract algebra were what I had in mind. The power of abstraction – of finding the underlying concepts of an idea and extracting them for use in other contexts. I also wanted to apply function programming concepts / mathematical concepts, even computer science concepts of applying transformations to all things.
I was thinking about how a reader of literature could see beyond the words on the page to see deeper meanings. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, how could you extract deeper meaning from what looks like on the surface a teeny bopper movie of 2 lovers who the world won’t let be together, so they commit suicide in protest. How can you read between the lines? How can you see what’s not written?
How would you describe that process in terms of concepts of abstraction or transformation? I’m using those terms in a broad sense, where I’m generalizing abstraction and transformation to be processes that I can define on my own to morph words on a page into layers of deeper meaning.
This brings up for me the idea of finding connections between seemingly unrelated things. I have this happen to me all the time. I can start laughing at something someone says, because my mind pictures something mildly related to the words and what I’m imagining is so inappropriate for the current context that I find it hilarious that I would even think that.
One way of doing this type of connection is to look at the characters in the story as human beings, and have empathy and sympathy for them in their situation. You need to know what it means to be human to do this. Imagine you were in their shoes, and how you might be feeling and thinking. Now generalize that to other people where you can’t know what they are feeling or thinking because all humans are different, and feel and think differently given the same circumstances. That’s what it means to be human. We all have the same mechanisms for generating emotions and thoughts, but life shapes us all differently. What separates narcissists from empaths? What human decency do both types of people deserve? Do you think an empath is better than a narcissist? Is an empath morally superior? Does that give the empath permission to criticize others? We have to see ourselves as having the same sorts of flaws as everyone else, and realize everyone is flawed in their own ways.
Ever watch the documentary about the Trailer Park Boys, called “Hearts of Dartmouth: Life of a Trailer Park Girl”? I find it hilarious. In it, Mike Clattenburg talks about how growing up he used to play pranks on people by changing around common phrases and using them in conversations to see if anyone noticed. For a laugh. As an example, he changed “kill two birds with one stone” with “get two birds stoned at once”. lol. “Water under the bridge” was changed to “water under the fridge”. Those pranks became part of the writing for the character of Ricky, and became known as Rickyisms. I love the TPBs.
I was researching non-linear thinking, and I found this YouTube video Non-Linear Thinking and ADHD. Paula describes this pattern of thought “toddler brain”, and I feel seen. I do feel childish at times at the things I find funny. Paula gives an example of how someone with ADHD cleans. They’ll start cleaning the kitchen, and then suddenly find themselves organizing books in their office.
This reminds me of a typo I made once. Java devs might be familiar with “public static void main”. While pair programming, don’t “accidentally” leave the ”l”. out of “public”. Lmao. Childish I know. Welcome to my little world. What was supposed to be an access modifier became a trip to HR.
Or another idea I had for a Java annotation. Java devs will be familiar with the @Deprecated annotation. Well, with my sense of humor, the word defecate comes to mind when I see the word deprecate.
In Java @Deprecated is an indication that something should no longer be used, perhaps it’s being removed in an upcoming release. Defecate means “to discharge feces from the body”. At the time, I was removing a lot of unused code over a period of months. I was marking things as deprecated a lot, and noticed a lot of them in the codebase. It’s like there were @Deprecated annotations everywhere.
So in a twisted way, @Deprecated annotations for me were a way to remove dead code slowly, over time. Getting rid of the waste. “To discharge feces from the body” is not too far off from my usage of @Deprecated annotations.
Maybe I’m subliminally taking a page out of “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller. The way that letters were redacted. lol. The military, and governments, redact information in some communications to hide sensitive information. They used to do this by blacking out the words they wanted redacted.
Imagine someone in the military who’s sick of redacting letters, and starts devising ways of redacting letters in strange ways just for fun, instead of the way they were supposed to do it. Maybe you’d redact words that start with a specific letter. Or maybe you redact the whole thing except the header and footer. Just to cause chaos.
For fun, I wrote my own @Defecated annotation. What is the catchphrase from the Franks Red Hot commercial? “I put that $#!t on everything”. With that annotation I can @Defecate all over the codebase. Lmao. I find that hilarious. “The inmates are running the asylum” comes to mind for some odd reason. And oddly “Here’s Johnny”. Red rum. Red rum.
I also have in mind ideas from A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe. He thought he was making progress in applying his intelligence to higher order callings that had the potential to save countless lives, but in reality he was schizophrenic and the government agent that was asking him to do this covert work was a hallucination. And it was based on a true story. Being human means that we need to accept that some people aren’t always rational, and some have mental disorders and different ways of thinking about the world that are different from ours. But we still have to see everyone as human and still needing the minimum of human decency.
I also draw on ideas from the movie The Matrix, and from Zen, Buddhism, and Taoism. The awakening that Neo went through is not far from what I think the process to enlightenment looks like. But it leaves out details and ideas someone might need if they wanted to use these ideas in their own lives.
I wanted to use the concept of Virtual Reality targeting developers since I think developers these days understand that concept. It’s what The Matrix is based off of, and programmers should be familiar with this concept, at least in passing. This is purely a thought experiment, so there’s no real deep understanding necessary. I use concepts from AWS since most devs I work with use AWS, and would expect me to understand these tools. So it’s a way for making this science fiction writing somewhat relatable, or even plausible.