The life hack paradigm

  Imagine you are playing a computer game, exploring virtual realms and testing your mettle in cooperation or opposition to other players. You are not the best, but you are getting better and you feel that reward system in your brain getting activated and giving you that pleasant buzz, like you are doing something that matters. Suddenly, new players enter the game and they seem indomitable. You can't possibly defeat them: they are faster, incredibly so, they are more accurate, dubiously so, and they seem to have no respect at all for the spirit of the game that you, until just now, enjoyed. They don't want to get better, they want to humiliate you and the other players by just being incredibly better than all with no credible cause other than, yes, they cheat. Somehow they found a way to skirt the rules and thus make them meaningless.

  While this is a scourge that affects all online games, it is also a powerful metaphor about real life. Think about trying to advance in your company, get that job that gives you more money, more prestige and proves to yourself and others that you have become better, a worthy person for that role. Suddenly, a new player arrives, and he is the nephew of the CEO and he gets the job for no credible reason. That is not a game, it's your life. The resentment is real. You can't just change servers or turn off the computer and read a book: this affects you, your family, your loved ones.

  But I will go ever further. Imagine that you are trying to lead a good life, according to the moral principles that were instilled in you by family, culture and your own evolution as a human being. You take care of your children and make efforts to set up their lives so that they have the many and good opportunities. You paid your life insurance, prepared your pension fund and are content that in a decade or so you will finish paying the rates for the house where you plan to retire and live out your golden years. You've taken care of your health, you eat and drink responsibly, you exercise regularly. Suddenly, new players arrive. They have found a way to cheat death. Not only do they have better health, they don't age. They might even get younger and fitter and smarter with no effort at all. Your pension funds implode, because old age becomes irrelevant, the prices skyrocket because there are more people with more money buying stuff and not getting any older and weaker as they go. Your children have no more opportunities, as they can't compete with people that are of the same biological age, but have decades of experience.

  I believe this way of thinking is what instructs most ethical ideas. Life is a game, with rules that are either agreed upon or forced upon the players by the limitations of the environment. Cheating at this game sounds both ideal and amoral. We have a zillion stories warning about the perils of playing god, but in the end they are just a reaction of fear to the mere possibility that someone might find a way to hack life.

  And I agree that it is very dangerous, for the very reasons that game hacking is so annoying: it makes the game irrelevant. If people don't care about life anymore, if they have no limits, then what's the point? It's almost a Nietzschean concept that the worth of life cannot exist in a vacuum, it needs suffering and obstacles to overcome. What would the philosopher believe of someone who becomes better by overcoming hardship only to be completely overshadowed by someone who just ... cheated. What would it mean to live a happy and fulfilling life if you've hacked your brain to feel happy and fulfilled? What would it mean to live a moral life if the ability to disobey rules has been bred out of you?

  Yet, what is the moral ground to not even try, I ask. How can it be moral to conceive of life as just a game? Wouldn't that be meaningless also? I submit that the very possibility of skirting the rules makes them obsolete. I submit that just as talented people are banned from online servers for being too good, talented people are getting sidelined in life by the very same "ethical" way of thinking of life as a static game where people should follow the same rules and achieve the same relative rewards.

  As technology and knowledge and sheer individual power increase, the danger of people playing god is dwarfed by the danger of people killing god inside themselves.

  I see only one solution for this: the expansion of the human race. Only when centralized authority becomes impossible will humanity truly reach its potential. That requires we spread out so far that enforcement can only be local. It will permit us, if you will, to have different servers to play on. Some of them will ban cheaters, some of them will welcome them, and there will be many variations in between. Some of them will try and fail, maybe spectacularly, but some of them will thrive and advance not only the players, but the game itself.