Risk is all that matters.

I do not believe that my creative time on Earth is long. Surely, I could stretch out my physical life — I could eat, sleep, excrete, reproduce, all the normal human things. But none of this is especially creative.

I can become like a replaceable cog in the machine — indeed, this is how most of my critics think of me; as another forgettable “degenerate leftist,” another “Thielite transhumanist,” another “subversive Jew.” Sometimes I lost track of which predictable category I fall into, but yes, that is the criticism which I fear the most — being replaceable.

It is easy to be replaceable if you never take risk.

If I had one command, it would be to take risk.

If I had a second command, it would be to train your physical body as if it were a matter of life or death. Not for the girls, not for the boys, but because if you do not take your body to the absolute limit, then you will never experience true life.

however, as various diseases take over my body for which there is no cure (IBS, GERD, dislocation, labral tears, etc), I see risk as the only remaining area of challenge.

I have tried to communicate this indirectly in other articles — the experimenter is supreme, and the dogmatist is mundane. But why? Because the experimenter is willing to fail, while the dogmatist would rather die than fail.

This is why I like Worst Boyfriend — all he does is fail, but because he fails through risk, it is virtuous. This is the only virtue.

Having said this, there are, of course, different levels of risk. There is physical risk, like one might encounter while taking drugs, fucking prostitutes, and playing Russian roulette. At a higher level, there are intellectual risks. The two need not be mutually exclusive.

It became apparent to me, around 2012, that any consensual sexual contact can later be described as rape. Therefore, every sexual act carries with it the risk of rape. This is true from both perspectives: one can live in fear of going to jail, or one can live in fear of “traumatizing women.”

I have nothing against sexual risk, or the risk that one might encounter in any other legally questionable domain. But there are certain risks which are purely performative.

For example, to sign up to fight in Ukraine is a form of Russia roulette — one might call it Ukrainian roulette. One’s success or failure has little to do with inner qualities — drone strikes come down to mere chance. What kind of risk is that?

Intellectual risk weighs reputation rather than physical harm. I have written 700 articles, and this is extremely embarrassing to think about. What if I have been wrong all this time, and I wrote 700 useless pieces of trash? Now I must start over, regretting years of unfortunate mistakes. This is a risk.

One way to avoid the risk is to dogmatically adhere to my own principles and to never question them. But to expose myself to risk means to continually challenge myself.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back to 2012, to do things over again. I would probably get into video-game streaming, and then do politics on the side, but from a much more “abstract” perspective. The daily grind of politics is degrading. Covering every little news story, every little factoid… it gets old.

Anyway, I feel that this simple message is important to convey, but I don’t want to overcomplicate it or drag this on very long. My goal for this year is to publish everything I have ever written in my life. Which includes a 200 page manuscript, 89 drafts, etc.

Not every essay is going to be a banger. But I want to get it all out there. Because someday, my creative juices will dry up, I will become a husk of a man, only useful for mundane tasks.

Until then, I only wish to persuade you to give up the chains of caution, and to embrace risk.

if reincarnation is true, then risk is the escape from samsara (samsara is bad)