The users of #ultimatereward, the people we played in RV Classic, feared the gamebreakers. It’s not because what they did was dangerous – though that was the excuse everyone used, I don’t think that’s the real problem here. I think it was because we needed RV Sburb to stay the way it was.

We didn’t have words for it, then. We just had arguments that circled around and around the problem, because nobody had the wisdom to figure out what was really wrong.

To reduce this to a genre dispute is simplistic. Treating it as an argument about suffering, as Zero does, seems to be closer to the truth.

To me, a world without suffering seems about as comprehensible as a world without protons. I don’t see it as a goal. I don’t see it as possible.

To me it is like a thought experiment, a counterfactual. I can represent such a thing, intellectually. I can even suppose that there would be physics, and possibly life, in such a world. I just don’t think that we’d be able to comprehend, much less communicate with, anything that would arise there.

Jordan Peterson, in Maps of Meaning, argues that consciousness arises in the gulf between “what we have” and “what we want”. Buddhism argues that it is this very gap that is suffering. From these premises, it seems like erasing suffering would require erasing consciousness.

Zero dismissed the Hitherby equivalent of this argument immediately, as the sort of solution that only an AI would find. (Which is to say that he’s arguing that a human would never think of this, much less find it moral.) On the other hand, I just came up with it right there.

(I don’t think that makes me an AI. You can’t be sure, though.)

But let me back up another step.

It’s totally possible that I have to construct a world in which suffering is inevitable, because it is the only way I can make sense of my experiences. If my trauma was unnecessary, then why did it happen? Couldn’t someone have stopped it?

All I know is that nobody ever made it stop.

Now, maybe this is because of an overstretched public infrastructure and the impossibility of proving emotional abuse, but the message I got was this: It’s supposed to happen. This kind of child-raising is something we condone. If you can’t deal with it, that’s your problem and not ours. So I assumed that it was just universal, as children tend to do.

It’s even almost a reasonable conclusion to draw, given the schools I went to (and thus the peer groups I had) as a child. As far as I can tell, the school district’s fame for “high academic expectations” meant “have fun with six hours of homework every night, not counting studying”. Being pushed to one’s limit was just “Asian”. The school counselors spent all their time arranging and rubberstamping scheduling, rather than (say) doing actual counseling. (My disability obviously didn’t help matters, but that’s another story entirely.)

The largest gift that I have been able to wrest out of the muck is this:

I have been handed a purpose in life on a silver platter.

I don’t need to spend twenty years figuring out what my calling is, because my calling is as obvious as the sun. I experienced terrible things. I need to make them not happen to other people.

Unfortunately, when I look up from this platter, I find that it’s only the silver lining of a thundercloud five miles high.

Zero was talking to me earlier about the things I put in my identity. For context, the usual reference for the construct of “identity” and what it does, especially in rationalistspace, is Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small. (While the essay has good descriptive power, its recommendations are dubious. A strategically used identity is probably better.) Assuming you’ve at least skimmed these articles, let’s move on.

One of my identity labels is, evidently, “trauma survivor”. This is both a literal truth and a deliberate strategy. It means that my goals, and the means I am able to use to achieve these goals, are dramatically and irrevocably shaped by my experiences.

This level of trauma cannot be adequately described by the word “wound”. To me, it is more like having once been a bonsai, or a particularly extreme-shaped topiary. I can leaf out all I want from here, but the trunk and the oldest branches will always remain bent into that shape. No amount of recovery time will fix that. If you want a straight trunk, go find someone else.

I won’t pretend that this is a good identity to have, or that it is at all desirable. It is already true, and it is a truth I must acknowledge to understand the shape of my life. My identity is a result, not a cause. The counterfactual of me-without-a-trauma just doesn’t work; removing it makes about as much semantic sense as removing my gender, or removing my neurodivergence.

It would be nice if future generations didn’t have to grow up that way, but that’s not worth holding my breath for.

This is a Homestuck-based blog, so I should probably make a Homestuck reference at some point.

Sometimes, I compare Zero’s experience to that of a prescratch kid. He didn’t experience shit. I keep imagining convoluted, impossible justifications (some requiring time travel) for why I broke and he didn’t.

If my thinking were less carefully laid out, I might have blamed it on him and left it at that.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it isn’t actually anyone’s fault the frog’s cancerous.

The problem is that it’s still our responsibility.