Out there on Ribbonfarm, there is a post titled Immortality Begins at 40. This is a review/interpretation of that post.

There are a few things you have to find and replace for the post to make sense:

  • immortality –> fuck you money
  • 40 –> age at which you become immortal
  • culture –> societal expectations
  • meaning –> advice

I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40. People between 40 and Ω (an indeterminate number defined as “really, just way too old”), are primarily employed as meaning-makers for the under-40 set. This is because they are mostly good for nothing else, and on average not valuable enough themselves for society to invest meaning in.

So for people who get fuck you money, they primariy give advice for people who are not there yet. Once they get fuck you money, they stop being productive - and it does not make sense for there to be some advice market for them because they are not going to do anything more.

The only culture designed for people between 40 and Ω is prescription drug ads and unreadably dense literary novels

Usually someone who gets fuck you money is sufficiently old that the targeted advertising shows them prescription drug ads. They have so much free time, they decide to finally read unreadably dense novels like Ulysses by James Joyce. This is the societal expectation present on those who managed to get fuck you money, to spend their time doing something very intellectual.

Between age Ω and ∅, the age at which you die, there is only funerary culture. That second link is to an app for managing your own death called Cake. Why cake? Your guess is as good as mine.

At this stage in your life, the societal expectation is for you to plan for your death. Leave behind a will and so on.

But there’s a plus side. Forty is when immortality begins.


A very general life-stage map across civilizations and eras looks like this:

  • 0 to α: Achieve launch velocity
  • α to 40: Play culture!
  • 40 to Ω: Ah crap, I have to make shit up for others now?
  • Ω to ∅: Let them eat cake

If you’re lucky, the following set of inequalities will hold for you, and you will be able to experience that most precious of all things, a life lived forward in time:

  • 0 < α: you have childhood innocence to lose
  • α < 40: you have enough value that society does culture to you
  • 40 < Ω: there is enough time to take revenge for having had culture done to you
  • Ω < ∅: if you’re lucky, there will be time to rest and observe in peace

Some well-known fucked-up life scripts include:

  • Ω < α: Acting dead
  • α > 40: Peter Pan
  • 40 > 40: Has-been
  • 40 < 40: Burnout
  • ∅ < α: Died tragically and heroically young
  • ∅ < ∅: Painful and unwanted life extension


Not only is all advice transient, it must all be manufactured by somebody. Advice doesn’t just happen. Civilization functions by putting the 40-to-Ω crowd to work, creating advice for the α-to-40 set to follow.

Examples of advice: “kubernetes will fix all of your problems, and becoming a devops engineer is the meaning of life”


The grim truth is not that there is no profoundly satisfying answer. The grim truth is that there is no overwhelming question.

So basically, there is no need to ask anyone for advice, but people do this anyway. Everything is out there on the Internet, and there is no overwhelming question in the first place about what you should be doing. The author calls this meaning because some common rite of passage of the post-rat community is the search for the “meaning of life”.

Redistributing meaning or creating meaning. You’re either an art history major, or you can science the shit out of things. There is no middle.

You give advice on how to become rich by doing some kind of remix of all the advice you have encountered and received, or you create brand new advice on how to become rich by finding some brand new alpha.

This alpha steadily decays as more people find out about this. And hence:

The half-life of a representative basket of meaning is about twenty years, adjusting for purchasing power parity.


You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.

Don’t seek advice, follow the advice.

I was dumb enough in my twenties to try to follow this code perfectly. Fortunately for my solvency, I am not very good at following instructions, and a succession of mid-life crises and crashes ensured my survival.

But it is important that you don’t stop believing in this code too early. That’s a recipe for a fucked-up life. It is also important that you don’t continue believing in this code too long. That’s also a recipe for a fucked-up life.

You must stop believing in this code exactly when you are ready to begin immortality. When your own appetite for meaning is satiated, and you are ready to start making meaning games for others. When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.

Hit the goldilocks zone of how much time to spend assimilating advice from other people, and how much time to follow the advice. The code referes to never ending search for the perfect advice to follow.


And finally, you may choose to seek truth. This is an optional, meaningless, and essentially solitary activity. Something the immortal and free may choose to do, to entertain themselves in the amusement park that is the part of eternity that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

But all of alpha is based on some secret, some hidden truth that not many people know in the Zero To One Peter Thiel sense. Therefore, seeking truth is the best way to become immortal. If you do this you will realize there is no overwhelming question. Everything is clear. You just have to get to work on finding some new truth about the universe.

Basically, regardless of what the meaning of life is, or what your invariant CEV preferences are: to satisfy your preferences, regardless of what the preference is, you have to know what is true and partake in the activity of discovering new truths.

In some way, this is the only meaningful activity by definition, following straight from whatever axiomatic preferences you may have. People who are very good at discovering these truths become immortal, either by getting tenure in academia or getting fuck you money or understanding themselves so well that they have zero confusion about what to do, like some musician. Even understanding yourself is a form of truth-seeking applied to yourself.

The best option is obviously to find out what is true about yourself. What are your axiomatic preferences that remain the same across all realities, seek these truths about yourself - find out what you are independent of society and then take action to satisfy your preferences.

The hard part here is becoming independent of society and getting rid of mimetic desires in some Girardian sense. Who are you if you have no one to imitate? What are your desires if you there is no desires you are copying from someone else?

I think this is what works best to become immortal.