THE PENNY PUB
What Is One Thing That You Would Never Consider Giving Up?
I would never give up learning
I’ve been thinking about unusual writing styles lately, through which I can explore new modes of expression that allow me to learn and grow as a writer. I like the first-person present tense mode of writing, both the constraint of staying present consistently and the immediacy it brings to my writing. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now that I’ve been practicing this style for a while on a new children’s book I’m writing in the magical realism genre. Sometimes, the constraint of first-person present tense can be a challenge, like when you want to jump around to different points in time, as we are about to see.
My third-grade teacher passes out the list of books our parents can choose to buy for us, if any, to read at home. She does this once a month. Most kids choose one or maybe a few books. As I read through the list, I think each one seems more interesting than the next, so I check all the boxes and order thirty books. I know that in a few weeks, when my pile arrives, my classmates will be laughing at the kid with the tower of books on his desk again.
Four years later and I still can’t get enough. Seventh grade just ended, and my parents ask me what I’d like to do for the summer. Would I like to go to summer camp? How about a family trip somewhere? “I’d like to go to summer school,” I announce. “I want to take a class in computers, a class in history, and a class in algebra.” And so I spend my summer doing something most kids only do if they have to, with my head stuck in books, learning stuff.
When I finally get to university I’m in heaven because my main job is to learn! In addition to learning about things like insects, rocks, and relativity, I discover the most fascinating thing of all to learn: consciousness. Whence consciousness? Can machines be conscious in principle? Is there anything more amazing and mysterious in the universe than the “brute fact” of our own consciousness?
As the years pass, I grow a beard and a ponytail, but I still can’t stop learning. I’m leading the team building the TED website, and I get to ask their audience a poll question: Would you want to live indefinitely, gaining practical immortality, with the option to terminate at will by aging naturally? As data from over 10,000 TED users flows in, I am shocked to discover that fully 89% would never want to live indefinitely and would prefer to live and die a “natural” human lifespan. I’m shocked because I can’t ever imagine wanting to jump off this ride called life and give up this precious consciousness.
The TED poll results keep turning in my mind. To me, it seems like a kind of suicide actually to choose to die rather than extend your life. I analyze the reasons why people choose death, thinking maybe I’m missing something. More to exorcize this question from my mind than anything else, I write a science fiction novel to get it out of my system, set in California 100 years in the future.
My sci-fi novel delves into the philosophical clash between the Naturals, who embrace the traditional boundaries and lifespan of human life, and the Transcendents, who choose to surpass their physical forms and gain practical immortality if they can keep it. We follow the exhilarating journey of the protagonist, a Transcendent, from the sun-baked streets of Berkeley to the cosmic realms of consciousness, examining the profound moral and existential dilemmas posed by these sorts of questions.
Am I unusually obsessed with learning? Learning and growing is life to me. This is one thing that I would never consider giving up. A perfect morning for me is waking up and learning that half a dozen of my beliefs are wrong before breakfast, to paraphrase Lewis Carroll. Why? This helps me grow and learn even more. I could never give that up.
