Worthlessness

I have a hard time experiencing life as valuable when I am not doing something that feels meaningful. I do not know how much of this is philosophy, personality, conditioning, anhedonia, depression, or some interaction between all of them. "Maybe I have anhedonia and that is why I am so driven to create meaning structures" is genuinely one of my hypotheses. If ordinary reward is weak, then maybe I compensate by constructing extremely high-level objective functions and trying to make my life legible through them. Build the robot. Build the company. Understand the brain. Solve the thing. Make the day point somewhere.

The dangerous corollary is obvious: when I stop producing, the whole valuation stack can collapse. School trained me to convert effort into visible success. Jehovah's Witnesses trained me to convert conduct into moral significance. Steve Jobs gave me the creator/founder archetype. The internet gave me engagement. Work gave me salary and responsibility. Remove enough of those simultaneously and I can reach the horrifying internal statement: I am literally worthless unless I am doing something meaningful.

After losing AGI, roughly May through July 2026, I wasted away in bed. That is the phrase that feels accurate. I slept during the day. I cried. I had racing anxiety and periods where getting up and doing the technically obvious next action felt unavailable even while I could explain the action perfectly. I could have hundreds of ideas and almost no reward from touching them. This is one of the cruellest states for somebody whose identity is built around agency: the command channel is intact enough to observe the failure and not intact enough to simply override it.

There is earlier suicidal material too. The first thoughts did not begin here. I had already reached periods where purposeless life felt so bad that death looked like a rational exit from the objective function as I was representing it. There was a text about killing myself. [embed/quote selectively if ever public] Later I actually attempted it. I got scared while carrying it out and survived. I told almost nobody at the time. I am deliberately not turning this paragraph into procedural reconstruction. The fact relevant to this memoir is not a method; it is that I crossed the boundary from ideation into action and then discovered, inside the action, that another part of me very much wanted to live.

For a while that became a kind of private discontinuity. Other people could talk to me without knowing there was this enormous event sitting behind the current version of me. I could continue posting and building and talking about technical things while carrying information that, if disclosed, would instantly dominate the conversation. That asymmetry made me feel even more alien sometimes. The public model and the internal model were not merely different; the public model was missing a state transition.

Eventually I broke down crying to Julie. [name to redact/change in public version] I want to write that scene once I recover the exact setting and words because there is something about finally letting another person observe a state that had been hidden for so long. Not being fixed. Not receiving some magical argument for existence. Just the private variable becoming shared.

I am currently on California SDI. That sentence is weirdly important because bureaucracy forces subjective collapse into dates and categories: last day worked, disability start date, provider certification, benefit amount. [private artifact: SDI paperwork; public version should omit claim identifiers] There is something almost funny about taking "I am spending half the week crying in bed and cannot reliably function" and converting it into a state machine that a government system can process. But the money also matters. It creates time. It keeps survival from being immediately coupled to pretending I am fine enough to hold a job.

I do not have a clean solution to worthlessness now. I have more reasons to distrust the equation. I can see how contingent it is, how much it was trained by systems that rewarded me when I was useful. I can say intellectually that a person I love does not become worthless when they stop producing. Applying the same model to myself is harder. I am building again intermittently. Research interests still light up. CommandAGI still exists. There are academic paths. There are people I love. None of that has become a theorem proving that life is always worth living.

And then Isaac died.

That changed the topology of the question. Death stopped being primarily something I could imagine choosing for myself and became something that happened to somebody I desperately did not want to lose. I had spent years asking whether my own life had enough utility to justify continuing. Watching one of us disappear made the scarcity itself impossible to ignore.