Fasting, On Being Selfish, Superconductors

Dear reader,

In a ride-share from Montreal to Boston, I met a guy who reminded me of myself, and I didn't like him. I was unphased by this at the time, but it's been nagging me a bit since. Not sure what I should do about it. He was a mildly accomplished, mildly talented young person who works in applied math, as I sort of am, he also thought himself to be open-minded, as I do, but he seemingly hypocritically also thought he knew something the rest of us didn't, as I do. I kind of wanted to *punch him in the face*. I didn't actually dislike him in the grand scheme of things; I'm not a misanthrope—in fact, I think he may become an alley, but I did find his brazen countenance rather obnoxious. It's also worth noting that I was fasting that day and perhaps more irritable than usual.

Speaking of fasting, I completed my first 90-hour fast a few weeks ago and it was *amazing*. The first 48 hours were challenging, but visualizing the waves of hunger as waves of the ocean like those from Hokusai's "The Great Wave" helped me surmount them; everything is in the mind. After 72 hours I was invincible, except for the fact that my muscles stopped working for lack of electrolytes: they were twitching uncontrollably at random times to the point of dysfunction; this may have had something to do with biking over 100 km all around Montreal with all the spare energy I had from the fasting.

I went to the pharmacy and explained my situation. Instead of giving me instruction, the lady at the desk looked at me as though I were some sort of nut job and took note of my symptoms in her little machine, asking me impertinent questions such as what my name and the date of my birth. When we were done, she informed me I had to wait for half an hour before being given any advice. I wanted to tell her that fasting is extremely natural and extremely healthy and that she's killing herself slowly by eating the Standard American Diet (SAD), but I didn't. Nor did I want to wait. So I found exactly what I needed from the internet within minutes. After consuming electrolytes, my muscles returned to normal, and I was left in a very pleasing and alert state of mind. I slept under four hours each night and awoke fresh as a daisy and sharp as a knife at the crack of dawn, excited for the day to come, itching to go to work.

I'm hooked. As soon as I finished, I wanted to do it again!—but the problem is that I'm too thin! So I've resolved to put on weight and muscle as quickly as possible so I can more easily do a 5+ day fast.

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Over the past couple years, I've been flirting with a radical new philosophy of my own design: I call it *Effective Selfishness*. The doctrine is simple: you have to be as selfish as possible in the most effective way possible, apply yourself to selfishness, and use your intellect to its fullest to be as selfish as effectively as possible at all times. Ultimately, you're supposed to realize that in order to be *effectively* selfish you actually end up becoming virtuous because although the knaves of the world (and there are many) are in the business of finding ways of profiting at the expense of others, the spiritually enlightened are in fact the ones that look like they have the most fun.

The central thesis underlying this way of life is that enlightenment doesn't come from trying to be good but from trying to get exactly what you want and eventually realizing, if your selfishness is profound enough, that not only do you not really know what you want—you don't even know who you are! And that what brings you joy is bringing joy to others. However, I haven't yet personally achieved this perfection. I'm currently lurking somewhere in the lower rungs of spiritual attainment, which, in the paradigm of effective selfishness, means I'm scheming ways for trying to get things for myself like obtaining skill, money, health, status, spending time on mountains and with nature, and scratching the itch which is the desire to understand how our universe has evolved over the eons and kalpas while also trying to understand how light propagates through various media such as the intergalactic medium, brain tissue, the skull, our galaxy, the dark ages, in plasma, the atmosphere, the ionosphere, etc.

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As I write, the crack addicts that live in the alleyway behind my house are accusing each other of stealing from each other. What a miserable life. I genuinely want them to have a better existence, for everyone's sake, especially their own, but I have no idea what to do about it. The birds are blissfully unaware of those humans' misery. They've just awoken from their torpor.

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Holy shit! Did we, the humans, just create room-temperature ambient pressure superconductors!? Who cares about AI where's my high-speed ultraconnected levitating railway complex? Oh, wait, I forgot—our *laws* prevent the govournment from building any significant infrastructure anywhere in the US and Europe. That's one advantage the CCP has: scale and the ability (legal and otherwise) to build massive infrastructure projects fast! Have you seen how freaking fast China built its high-speed railway network!?

What else is going to change if this superconductor is for real? Cheaper and more portable MRI scanners. Anything that requires a powerful magnetic field will get much cheaper: Fusion reactors!!! (They need magnets to contain the plasma, at least in Tokamaks). Cheaper physics experiments, no doubt, imply a faster rate of scientific discovery. There's talk of applications in quantum computing.

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Dear reader,

I have much more to talk about with you, including an ornithologist couple my dad told me about as a kid, thoughts on agency and academia, travelling, the possibility of failure, the artist and naturalist Thomas Bewick, and Barbie, but I must make haste. Those will come in the following letter, which will likely be less jittery. This one is a bit jittery because I'm caffeinated and fasting again. It's been about 33 hours since the last meal. It's 5:30 am here in Montreal. Life is good. I'm going for a bike ride.

Wishing all of you well,

-Steve