5. The Return
Nostos, Part 5
This is Part 5 of a 5 Part series. You can find Part 1 here.
Once you have seen the Abyss, it can be hard to “go back.” How can you live your normal life in the Valley, now that you know what lies beyond the light of the campfire? The usual answer is just “repress it as hard as you can, pretend it never happened”1, but that’s not what we want.
Repression is just making yourself a sitting duck for the dangers you know are Out There, this is not a way towards Progress.
The Buddhists have their answer. Upon the realization that there is no Home, there is no Ok in this world, their solution is to make themselves not care about this, to accept this, to drift out to the Ocean, or wherever the Currents might take you.
And here they are so, so deeply wrong.
The Buddhists seek to stop being Water altogether, to achieve Nirvana is to cease flowing, to escape the Stream entirely. But this is deep, deep confusion. An artifact of a time before Progress. The problem isn’t that we flow, it’s that we flow without Navigation, without reading the Stars.2
We cannot stop being Water, at least not without forsaking our Birthright.
If you don’t do something, it doesn’t happen. If humans stop flowing, there is no Progress, no hope of reaching the Ocean. We must flow, but we must navigate wisely.
The answer to the Stream being Wild is not to get out and lay down to die.3 It’s to build a ship, take hold of the wheel and turn against the Current, towards the Stars.
Only then can we find the Ocean.
The Daily Practice: Navigation of the Self
So, you return home, you’re back to your daily routine. Everything feels…really quite normal. Maybe it was all a Bad Dream? Can the world really be in such peril? And if so, is it really your responsibility to do something about it?
You shake your head. You don’t want to fall back Asleep. But how?
A concept I do really like from Buddhism (and other spiritual traditions) is the concept of “having a Practice.”
Generally, when you’re on the Path, the first and most important thing one is urged to do is not some crazy big dramatic action or overturn your whole life or whatever, but to establish a Practice. To ensure that you have some habit, some regular time, to dedicate to advancing along the Path. 10 minutes per day is much better than one big chunk once and then forgetting about it.
When confronted with the Falls, with horrors such as extinction risk, I am often asked by people: what should they do?
On one hand, it seems logical they should dedicate everything to preventing such catastrophes, but on the other, that’s a lot to ask. Too much to ask, even.4
My advice is always the same: Don’t overdo it, but don’t do nothing.
Some people are Called by the Mountains, and may dedicate their whole lives to the Fight, but most people cannot and should not. Your primary loyalty should remain to the Valley, to your friends, your family, your obligations back home.
But don’t do nothing.
What you should aim for is to establish a Practice. The way you do this is you select some amount of time per week, could be a full day, could be a couple hours, could be 30 minutes, whatever you can do reliably5 and do that much, and not (much) more, every week.
In that amount of time, put in a true good faith effort to actually work on the problems, to understand the problems, to reflect upon them, to reach out to others, see how you could be helpful and actually do something.
This isn’t easy, especially if you are isolated and don’t have other people to talk to or work with (see also the next section). But luckily thanks to the internet it is easier than ever to find people that share your concerns that you can get to know and cooperate with!
Your Practice should not only include external actions6, but you should also have a component of reflection. Navigation also applies to the individual level, and you need to actually do it, or you will just be pulled along by the Currents.
If you don’t take the time to reflect on your Stars, to consider where you are currently being pulled, and whether that’s where you want to be going, well, then it doesn’t happen, you will not be Navigating.
So take this time.
My recommendation to start is to literally open an empty google doc, start a bullet point list with “GOALS” at the top, and start writing and thinking. What are your goals? What steps would it take to get there? Where are you uncertain, about what you want or about how to get there? How could you resolve those uncertainties, or become more clear? Some people also like pretending they are “interviewing themselves”, to get the thoughts flowing.
Whatever technique you use is up to you. But no matter the method, you should definitely actually write down notes, so you can also reread them later!
Maintaining a Practice is how you stop yourself from “falling back asleep”, from getting so distracted by daily samsaric life that you lose track of the Stars once more.
You must keep your eyes on the Stars. If you lose them for too long, you are Lost. Any progress will depend on this.7
There is a book and more worth that could be written here, but I think it’s valuable to keep it simple for now.
Here is a short list of some of my personal advice for once you are back in the Valley:
Don’t over do it, but don’t do nothing.
Have a weekly Practice where you reflect both on what to Do, and on the Stars.
Actually do things in the real world, don’t just think.
Actually think, don’t just do things in the real world.
Make small, non dramatic and endorsable steps rather than dramatic leaps.
Find a Crew.
Don’t be weird.
Don’t be stupid.
If enough people just did these basic things, we’d be on a much better track, maybe even good enough to make it all the way to the Ocean.
The Crew: Navigation Together
Humans are a social creature. We generally never embark on a Journey alone, and you shouldn’t either.
“One unit of humanity” is about ~one adventuring party plus family8, it’s not “one human.”
Humans are social, and their General Intelligence tends to emerge at the group level, not in the individual. A single human alone in the jungle, with no language, no friends, no family, is barely more sentient than any other animal. It requires many humans together to actually exhibit General Intelligence.
In many ways, humans are closer to a hivemind species than they are to solitary predators like tigers, in personality and temperament.9
You are the average of your ten closest contacts, as the saying goes. Coming up with new ideas, culture, art, requires feedback, regular communication with other people, bouncing ideas back and forth, long conversations over food and drink. There are exceptions of course, everyone loves a good story about a lone genius, but often in reality these lone geniuses are not lone at all, or are precisely so noteworthy because they are so rare. Progress happens when many humans cooperate.
The human Soul is not fully localized to within one human body, it is distributed across many people, their tools, their art, their culture, etc. Your Soul is partly in your friends, your family, your teachers, your rivals.10
This has important implications for your life and your Practice. If you want to Sail towards the Ocean, you will want a Crew.
There are many reasons why you will want a Crew.11
For one, it’s fun. Loneliness sucks. You can get more done together. You can cover for each other’s blindspots. And, importantly, you can help each other act and stay on target together.
Human motivation and emotions, unless you are some kind of platonic Zen Master12, are deeply influenced by your Crew. My estimation is the minimum needed to reach “emotional and motivational stability”13 is about 3-5 aligned people working together, a Crew. The Crew can be larger (though not too much larger before it becomes a more loose association), and you can of course be part of many different Crews in different parts of your life.
But in general, tackling problems as monumental as the ones we are discussing without having a Crew to back you up and keep you accountable, is really, really hard. Often, the very first step on the Journey, or even before the Journey can begin, is to assemble your Crew before you head off, or else you will want to pick one up as soon as possible on the way.
Of course, it’s important to not get too attached to a Crew that might actually be bad for you, or might not have the same Destinations in mind for the Journey as you. Humans have a lot of genetic payload that is made to make us glue ourselves as hard as possible to our local band, because historically we couldn’t just “reroll” and find new bandmates out in the wild whenever we wanted, so we had to make things work, even if our bandmates were shitheads.
But we no longer have these restrictions. You should want to find a Crew that works for you, that is aligned with what you truly care about, and that you can get along with for the long Journey ahead.
There is no simple shortcut to finding a Crew, you’ll just have to try many things. Sometimes there are already groups you can join, other times you will have to create your Crew from scratch, or by breaking off from a different, larger group.
And importantly, if you want a Crew that is actually aligned with you, you must know what it is you want to be aligned with! If you don’t know your Stars, you won’t be able to find others looking at the same Constellations. So some clarity about your Values will be essential in helping you find the kind of people you want in your Crew.
But fundamentally, human relationships are hard, and a lot of work. There are no simple universal shortcuts.14
But it’s worth it. It’s how we humans do things: Together.
Having your Crew, and your Practice, will allow you to naturally Actually Do Something. It’s the very core of you Becoming Stronger, so you can join up with the rest of the Fleet, to guide Humanity towards the Good World…
The Long Voyage: Navigation of Humanity
A beautiful thing about human sociality is that it can be wonderfully mutually beneficial. Building your Crew, helping your Crew grow, and also helping others find their Crews, becomes a very net positive thing when you are in service of the Stars.
If you are Sailing towards Human Values, you benefit from other people being Stronger. It’s always beneficial to you for your Crewmates, and even other Crews, to be healthier, stronger, smarter, happier, to have a better read on the Stars, because ultimately that’s where you are all headed.
Very often, those that are confused about the Stars will think things such as “I want to get to the Ocean, and I need Power to get there, so I will get that Power and backstab anyone else that tries to take it.”15 This is extremely negative sum16, because now you might have lots of Crews all aiming for the same goal backstabbing each other over a finite amount of Power up for grabs.
A much, much better approach is to trust in the Stars. If we can all agree we are minimally sailing in the same direction, the question becomes less “how can I empower myself?” and much more “how can I empower EVERYONE to help reach the Stars?” and this will allow everyone to pick strategies that benefit everyone, and reach the Ocean, together.
This is Coordination, and it’s humanity’s superpower.
What is special about humans is that our social capabilities are curiously “fractal”, we can form bands, bands form tribes, tribes form nations, nations form empires, etc. And what we need for this to be beneficial rather than extractive is a minimum set of rules, values and coordination, so it becomes worthwhile for each nation to be in the empire, for each tribe to be in the nation, for each band to be in the tribe.
You should be very wary of people or ideologies that want others to be Weak, that think making others more educated, wise, capable, resourceful might be a Bad Thing. This is extremely suspicious. If you were heading towards the Blazing Star, then the more people Sailing with the more capability, the better!
But if your goal is not the Blazing Star, if you want to steer towards Darkness, well, then you benefit from others being less able to hinder you.
Beware those that want you Weak rather than Empowered. And beware yourself when you hesitate from empowering others in search of the Blazing Star.
Of course, this only applies to empowering people actually in search of the Blazing Star, that are willing to fulfil the basic obligations of Coordination.
That’s how coordination works. There are some basic rules, and as long as you follow them, you’re part of the coalition, and we help each other. Making those basic rules as minimal as possible while firmly excluding destructive defectors, and then enforcing these rules properly, is the core that makes coordination, Law, possible. Without Coordination, Law, Order, there can be no shared Fleet sailing to the Good World.
There are exactly three alignments: Lawful Good, Lawful Evil and Chaotic.
If you have no Law, you cannot be Good, or even Evil, it’s just Chaos. If you have Law, the Law may be Unjust or Evil, but it’s also the only way you can have Good.
This is also why it’s important for you to deeply understand what you are aiming for, and actually Navigate, so that others can coordinate with you as well! If you are Lost, you are of no use to the Fleet.
The Long Voyage extends beyond any single person or lifetime. We must build vessels that outlast their builders. The Stream flows faster than human lives, and the Ocean lies farther than any one Crew can reach.
This is a core aspect of our Navigation: We are not sailing toward a port we’ll see, but continuing a Long Voyage started by ancestors so remote we will never know their names.
This requires a different kind of commitment. Not just to outcomes we’ll witness, but to processes that will continue when we’re gone.
Ideally, each and every one of us should be redundant, the natural shape of Humanity and its Institutions naturally flowing towards the Good World, even if we aren’t there to guide it.
Consider how the great cathedrals were built: Not by individuals who would see their completion, but by guilds that preserved knowledge across centuries. The master stonemason trained apprentices not just in cutting stone, but in reading the Stars that guided the cathedral’s construction. Each generation added their own arches while maintaining the Sacred Geometry that unified the whole.
We need such Guilds for our age. Not literal masons, but communities that preserve the knowledge of Navigation while adapting to new Waters.
The tech companies claim to be building the future, but they optimize for quarterly returns, not centuries. True Coordination means creating structures that can hold course across the Rapids of decades and the Meanders of centuries.
This is why the most important thing you can teach someone isn’t a specific route through the Waters, but how to read the Current and Stars for themselves. Every person you help become a better Navigator doesn’t just add another boat to the Fleet, they become someone who can teach others to Navigate, who spot new Falls before we reach them, who might see Constellations you missed.
A Fleet of Navigators teaching Navigation, each iteration making us collectively better at reading the Waters.
Not a hierarchy commanding from above, but a distributed society sharing knowledge of Currents and Stars. Each Crew sovereign but coordinated, all flowing toward the same distant Light.
The Ocean
But, and this is crucial, the Ocean isn’t a place that exists, waiting for us to find it.
The Ocean is what emerges from countless Meanders, each bend in the Stream creating the destination it flows toward.
We don’t sail TO the Good World, we create it by HOW we Sail.
The Ocean, the Good World, isn’t a place we can fully envision from here, and attempting to do so is fatal. We can’t draw blueprints for utopia any more than a medieval peasant could design a smartphone. What they could do was improve the waterwheel, share that knowledge, raise their children well and create conditions where the next generation could see a little farther. The Ocean emerges from thousands of these iterations, each solving problems we couldn’t have imagined before creating them.
If there is one thing we have learned, from the 20th century and before, it is that gunning straight for utopia is the one 100% surefire way to end in dystopia.
So many thought they could see the whole Path from the beginning, and they reliably only accomplished plunging themselves and everyone around them into a terrible Abyss.
Navigation means accepting that each bend in the Stream teaches us something we needed to know, something we couldn’t have learned without making the Journey. We build the Good World not by implementing a Master Plan, but by getting better at the process of building. Better institutions, better coordination methods, better ways to detect and avoid Falls, better techniques for teaching Navigation itself.
The real Work isn’t reaching a destination, but improving how we travel. Each generation must solve the problems in front of them, while building tools and knowledge the next generation will need for problems we can’t yet see.
The Ocean isn’t a fixed endpoint, it’s what becomes possible when millions of humans get good at iterating together, fixing what’s broken, preserving what works and staying oriented toward the Stars, even when we can’t see exactly where they lead.
The Voyage is never complete, we still must Fight. Not to reach something out there, but to keep creating it, moment by moment, choice by choice, as long as the Stream flows.
The Will to Fight
Without Love, It Cannot Be Seen.
Ultimately, deeply, everything wraps back around to You, and whether you Care.
Fundamentally, if you just don’t Give A Shit, if you don’t care, if you have no Love, if you don’t Believe, none of this matters.
I can teach you all the tricks of navigating the Underworld, of how to fight off the Night, about how to Navigate to the Blazing Star. But at some point, deep in your Soul, it has to bottom out:
Do you care?
Is there anything you care about? Is there anything you love?
If there is, then you too have a Shard of the Blazing Star. I think all but the most broken humans have the Shard, they can Hear The Call.17
I can teach you how to Fight, but I can’t teach you to want to Fight.
There are many things that can dampen your Will To Fight. Trauma, lack of resources, lack of a Crew, lack of Hope. These are Hindrances, which can be overcome or addressed.
But there has to be a Will, somewhere.
Do you have the Will To Fight? Somewhere, deep down, in your most ancient genetics, do you feel the Call? Do you want to leave a better world for your children? For everyone.
Without Love, it cannot be seen. Without something to Love, something to Protect, there is no reason to Fight.
The Fight is long, and those who Stare into the Abyss need ways to remember the Light.
There’s an old warrior’s wisdom here: Fight Hard, Party Hard. When you Fight with everything you’ve got, you must also Rest with everything you’ve got.
You cannot Navigate by Dead Stars. You cannot Fight for a flourishing life while living a withered one. The Crew that sails through the roughest Waters needs the heartiest celebrations when they make port.
Your Crew’s celebrations should match your Crew’s struggles. If you’re asking people to think daily about extinction, they better also find experiences of transcendental Aliveness.
How honest is your commitment to human flourishing if you exempt yourself from it? You cannot lead others to an Ocean you're unwilling to swim in yourself.
Those who Fight for the Good World must regularly taste what they are Fighting For, or the Fight will eat them Hollow.
What are you Fighting For?
If you don’t know, if you just hear the Call, that’s ok too. Some of us are Meant for the Mountains.
And if you don’t hear it, if you don’t have the Will, then please, I ask of you not to Fight, not to go against your lack of Will, I ask only one thing of you:
Don’t get in the way.
It is ok to be a Civilian. In a Good World, everyone could be a Civilian. But the world is not Good. Some of us have to Fight.
If you cannot, or will not, Fight, that’s ok. I, and others like me, Fight so that you don’t have to.18
All I ask, is to not get in the way. Do not make things worse, do not make this harder. Don’t join crazy extremist ideologies. Don’t shit up the commons. Don’t work at AGI companies. Don’t spread FUD and hopelessness. Be grateful to the people who have helped build and defend the life you enjoy.
Enjoy your life, take it easy, the Valley is meant to be enjoyed.
That’s what we’re Fighting For.
6. The Call
When I looked through those archives of my youth, I saw that the Home I felt Hiraeth for never existed. There was no place for me to return to. Things were never Truly Ok, in my personal life, or the wider geopolitical world. We, humanity, are Not Ok.
There is no going back. There is no golden past, there is no time when Everything Was Ok.
No, you don’t understand.
You don’t understand.
Listen to me.
We can’t stay here.
Listen to me.
WE CAN’T STAY HERE!
Our Home, our True Home, where we Belong, it is Out There, across The Ocean. It’s not here. The world we are in is not Good, it is not the Good World. This is not Home. We must make it Home. The Dark Forest is not a Home until we carve the Hearth.
We are On A Timer. The Falls are approaching, and if we do not Navigate, if we just sit idly by…the Wild River will not Take Us Home.
There will be no Home. The Fire will go out, the Hearth will go cold, forever.
The Good World is not here, because it doesn’t exist. We must build it. We must Sail across the Ocean, to find Home, to make this world our Home.
To finally Be Ok.
We cannot stay here. We have to keep going. The Expedition is not yet complete.
-
Gather your equipment, we move at daybreak.19
lol
One could argue that a belief I have that the Buddhists do not is the belief in the Blazing Star.
Which is the direct, actual consequence of not taking Action and building Progress. There is a reason Why science conquered the world, and not Buddhism.
And if you have a policy of dedicating all your resources to the first sufficiently big problem you see, you will find yourself reliably getting fucked.
It’s better to pick a smaller amount of time that you are guaranteed to actually do, rather than a larger amount that will become intimidating and reduce the chances of you actually upholding it.
Though those must be in there, otherwise you’re just navel gazing.
Or at least, on you trusting in a Navigator who you think has a good eye on the Stars. But this is fraught in its own ways, and you can never fully delegate Personal Navigation to someone else, this just leads to cults.
5 adult men, 5 adult women, 10 children and 3-5 old people form the platonic paleolithic human “band”, the default unit of organization of humans throughout almost all of history.
We tend to call people with solitary, predatory mindsets “violent psychopaths” and lock them up in prisons.
This is also one of the reasons why it can hurt so much to lose a friend. Because you have not only lost them, but also the part of yourself only they could bring out in you.
Or a revolving cast of Crewmembers that come and go as time goes by.
or severely mentally ill
without needing to be a Zen Master
There are best practices, though!
“Because obviously I’m the Good Guy, and have Good Intentions, so we can’t trust these other people!”
NOT just “zero sum”
There are exceptions, there are after all just genetic psychopaths. If you are a psychopath, well, maybe we can strike a Deal, or else, well, I guess get ready for a Fight.
“The point of fighting a war is to end it.”
Love this!
Thank you for writing this. You’ve expressed ideas I’ve long wanted to share but never quite found the words for, and you’ve done it far better than I ever could.