I have lived on Planet Emptiness for a while. It might be just a few days or a few weeks, but I feel like it's been centuries. On the planet, I don't know what to do, what I want, where to go, or who I am, nor do I have the motivation to find out. It's an equilibrium, and it might also be more truthful than the narrative that we constantly tell ourselves. I'm completely lost, but the default state of being human is lost anyway. I was in an existential crisis without a crisis. It feels like pure enlightenment.
I don't understand myself because everything I have known about myself is no longer true. I don't worry about the future, I'm not anxious about being lost, I am no longer stress about finance, because nothing matters. In fact, there isn’t much sense of self (無我). I can get in meditative state almost immediately when I start. I feel the mere joy of the presence but also see the emptiness. Sometimes, I still cry because of sorrow, but not a lot, but it doesn’t bother me much. When it happens, it's already in the past.
The only two things that are consistent are (1) I don't care about humans somehow. I feel annoyed when my state of being and my thoughts are interrupted by their insignificant drives and values. So I don't talk to anyone.
(2) Nothing excites me anymore, but I observe that Esther still learns and exercises. I don’t know if it is out of habit or for whatever reason, but learning and exercising seem to be instincts at different present moments, though not aggressively.
I don’t know. Maybe I am too close to God to worry about human matters. Because when Esther holds on to nothing, nothing can really hold on to her too.
But yesterday, two weird things happened. First, Esther randomly went to an AI Tool for Thought hackathon because she wanted to continue working on her own project. She met a Korean woman from Princeton, asking me about Minerva. And then she went on and on, rambling all the way from NTU dropout, Anting Liu, and her AI hypothesis. “I want to experiment where I can create a paradigm shift in education through AI. Though I have no idea how to do it. I’m lost. Thanks for listening to my long, long talk.” To be honest, she has no idea if the woman is interested in the conversation; she just cannot stop herself from talking. She feels passionate. She feels?
After the hackathon, she went home, all of a sudden feeling like calling her friend to talk about Planet Emptiness. That’s weird. She hasn’t really talked to any friend for a while. They are too earthly, and she has been disconnected from the human world for a while. But he picked up her call and listened to her. As usual, he was that desperate boy seeking great work. He asked her about my Spanish learning app, and then the same thing happened. Time froze, she went on and on talking about why she is building it even though the wifi is broken from time to time. The app seems to be a simple technical challenge that no one will be impressed by, but she seems to really know what learning problem she is trying to solve. At least, she knows this is a very niche problem that she is interested in.
I started to land on the earth after the call, at least for now. I don’t know. When my poor desperate boy talked, he reminded me of faith. Yes, it might not really matter. Yes, it might still end up being a failure. Yes, I might not know how to do and what to do. But we are still doing it somehow, as humans. He reminded me of who I was. Especially when I observed that time-frozen period, I felt that I might be really on to something that is beyond pleasure and interests. It’s vision, it’s faith, it’s drive, it’s meaning, it’s purpose, it’s passion.
I’m still lost. But as I discovered my ego again, I got myself back for now. Well…also got my stress, desire, anxiety back for now.