“All the AI people are super emo-y,” my friend wrote me after a recent METR report came out, “and are both working all the time and also considering just going on a drug bender.” I found myself returning to the word *both.* It is not difficult to imagine the two impulses occupying a single day: the morning spent discussing humanity’s survival as a technical problem that might still yield to sufficient intelligence, coordination, and labor, and the evening spent wondering whether it would be more rational to abandon the work, take fentanyl, and wait to die. What would make these seem like the available alternatives?
The question “Should I start doing fentanyl?” seldom arrives with an explanation of why this particular experience has suddenly become desirable. The pleasure under consideration sounds curiously generic.
It is presented as an implication of doom, as though the drug had been waiting all along at the far end of the argument. Yet there are many ways to spend a shortened life. Why should this one appear so promptly and so strongly in the imagination of people who have otherwise devoted considerable attention to how to spend their time?
I do not hear a clearly articulated desire in the question. I hear someone trying to discover what a person in their position is supposed to desire. There is something touching about this, and something frightening. People who have spent years thinking carefully about what might preserve human life can find themselves borrowing their image of enjoyment from a cartoon: drugs, orgies, reckless expenditure, and the suspension of ordinary pleasures and constraints. The cartoon is recognizable to everyone. Whether it contains anything they want is another matter.
Before deciding how much hedonism a person should pursue, it would help to understand what we have learned to call call hedonism, and how easily our inherited images can conceal our own experience from us.
The Cartoon of Hedonism
Drugs and orgies belong to hedonism; children and work belong to responsibility. Once these categories have been established, a person is expected to choose between them, or arrange some respectable compromise. Yet anyone who has attended a disappointing party, loved their work, or watched a parent delight in a child should suspect that the division is incomplete. An orgy may involve pleasure, affection, curiosity, social anxiety, boredom, work, annoyance, or an attempt to belong. Raising a child may involve frustration, worry, sacrifice and responsibility, but also delight, pride, intimacy, amusement, and a profound desire for the life that parenthood makes possible.
Even these classifications are unstable. When poor people have children, they may be accused of being impulsive and irresponsible; when wealthy people have children, parenthood becomes a noble sacrifice of freedom, or a contribution to the continuation of civilization. The activity remains the same while pleasure and responsibility change places according to the social position of the person being judged. Similar stories surround drugs: the poor fentanyl user is imagined to be making their suffering bearable, the rich cocaine user to be indulging a voracious appetite.
These are different substances with different effects and risks, but the cultural portraits also assign different motives. One person is permitted desperation, the other decadence; the possibility of mixed motives belongs to neither portrait.
These stories about class become still less reliable as people learn how to inhabit these different roles without arousing judgment and suspicion. Once we know how a behavior will be read, we begin to dress it for an audience; eventually, the costume can become difficult to distinguish from the desire.
Someone who has been taught to understand children as the end of pleasure may experience a longing for them as a lapse in ambition. Someone surrounded by people who treat sexual adventure as liberation may interpret their own reluctance as a personal deficiency. We learn the available descriptions of a good life, and then try to discover ourselves inside them. Sometimes the description is so authoritative that we stop noticing the parts of our experience it cannot explain.
The proposed fentanyl bender inherits this confusion. Regular opioid use can produce tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal; illicit fentanyl also carries a serious risk of fatal overdose. Even on its own hedonistic terms, three months of use cannot be understood as one pleasurable instant extended across a season. The experience changes as the body changes. What began as an interesting addition to life may become something required to make ordinary life tolerable. The fantasy illuminates the first night and leaves the twentieth morning in darkness. A person seriously concerned with actual enjoyment would want to know about both, along with the repetition, the effect on other desires, the friendships affected, and whether the experience remains enjoyable as it continues.
Epicurus understood that pleasure required discrimination. In his letter to Menoeceus, he writes that “not all pleasure is worthy of choice, just as all pain is an evil and yet not all pain is to be shunned.” This requires a willingness to discover that something pleasant may make one’s life worse, while something difficult may become part of its happiness.
The complication extends in the other direction. Work may itself be pleasurable. It can offer friendship, intellectual absorption, prestige, a useful identity, and the satisfaction of being needed. There is no reason to assume that a person working on AI safety secretly wishes to be on a beach. The problem may arise precisely because they love the work, the people doing it, and the world it promises to preserve. Much of their happiness has become concentrated in the same place as their fear.
The Proper Way to Be Afraid
Some public writing about Lighthaven has focused on the overlap between AI risk advocacy and sexual experimentation. Part of what interests me in this criticism is the suggestion that conspicuous pleasure casts doubt on sincere concern: if these people believed humanity might be destroyed, wouldn’t they stop having orgies and get to work? There are sensible questions one could ask about any organization—its use of money, the work it supports, its treatment of staff. But the presence of pleasure cannot establish whether a belief is sincere. The suspicion depends upon an additional expectation about how someone who understands the danger ought to feel, and how that feeling ought to appear to others.
The same expectation can govern life inside the community. In some of the circles I am describing, people have coordinated on both a work ethic and a kind of shared unhappiness. They work long hours alongside others working long hours. They discuss frightening evidence with people who are also frightened by it. They neglect ordinary pleasure, and see this neglect reflected back to them as an appropriate response to the seriousness of the situation. Over time, a particular emotional style can begin to seem like evidence that someone understands what is happening in the world.
Usually, this does not require anyone to make the norms explicit. Someone who looks exhausted receives sympathy and recognition; their distress is legible. Someone who appears happy and well rested is harder to interpret. Perhaps they are coping well. Perhaps they have found a way to take the problem seriously without allowing it to occupy every part of consciousness. But perhaps they do not really believe the danger, or lack the moral imagination to feel its consequences. If the group settles on this last explanation, the happy person ceases to count as evidence that another way of living is possible. Meanwhile, the people most troubled by the prevailing way of life see others enduring the same thing. Their unhappiness feels private, but its interpretation is collective.
People outside the circle can then appear distracted, uninformed, negligent, or secretly dissatisfied. Their pleasures seem shallow because they have not confronted the important questions; their commitments seem conventional because they have not examined them. Yet many people have examined their lives and enjoy raising children, practicing a religion, running a business, making art, or doing important work in another field. They would not necessarily prefer another life if given the opportunity. Their happiness is information about what human beings can value. An exhausted community loses access to that information when it admits only two recognizable futures: continuing unhappily in service to something important, or abandoning importance altogether.
The guilty person inside the community and the suspicious observer outside it thus reinforce the same demand. Besides doing useful work, the individual must make their concern visible in the approved form. A person can demonstrate commitment through research, judgment, and results, yet still find that their enjoyment of dinner requires an explanation to their peers and family. Their emotional life has become part of the evidence submitted on behalf of their beliefs.
Permission to Stop
There are reasons people accept this bargain. A shared sense of urgency can sustain difficult work. Belonging to a group with a serious purpose can rescue someone from years of aimlessness. It feels good to understand a problem, acquire skills that matter, and be trusted by people one respects. Even anxiety can contain the reassurance of solidarity: other people see what I see; I am not alone in being afraid. A community does not have to be cynical to develop habits that eventually harm its members. Often the habits persist because they were useful, or because they continue to provide something nobody knows how to replace.
The benefits also make it difficult to tell when devotion has become a way of avoiding other questions. A person may be doing valuable work while postponing a decision about a relationship, a family, or the kind of person they want to become. They may enjoy the status of sacrifice while making real sacrifices. They may be frightened by the future and relieved that fear supplies a reason not to examine the present. None of these mixtures makes the work fraudulent. Human motives have rarely been pure enough for that standard. But a community that interprets every sign of unhappiness as further evidence of moral seriousness gives its members little help in distinguishing among them.
Eventually, someone becomes tired enough to want the whole arrangement to stop. They may still believe the work matters and they may still love their colleagues. The problem is that when it comes to the survival of humanity, their exhaustion is only one person’s exhaustion. There seems to be no permitted scale at which to say, “I cannot keep living like this.” If they stop, someone else must carry the burden, or it will go uncarried. A day away from work acquires consequences no ordinary day can reasonably hold.
But if success is impossible, perhaps the obligation has ended. The same person who could not justify a holiday can suddenly imagine abandoning everything. This is one way to understand the bender fantasy: as an attempt to obtain through hopelessness a freedom they could not obtain through judgment. They have been unable to decide how much responsibility they can bear, so they wait for reality to announce that no responsibility remains.
Other people have encountered versions of this pressure in work whose importance was beyond dispute. Dr. Lorna Breen directed an emergency department during New York’s first COVID surge. After becoming ill herself, she returned to shifts of more than twelve hours before she was ready, treating patients whose lives she could not save. The account published by the American Medical Association records something she told a friend: “I just wanted to help people, and I couldn’t do anything.” She died by suicide in April 2020.
Aaron Swartz died by suicide while facing a federal prosecution that had occupied the final two years of his life. Ian Gibbons, the scientist at Theranos, faced another kind of conflict: his commitment to scientific standards increasingly put him at odds with the institution employing him, while impending legal testimony intensified his distress before his death by suicide. His experience has been examined as a case of moral injury. These were different lives, and their deaths cannot responsibly be explained by a single cause. They do, however, suggest that commitment does not remove the need for care, protection, rest, or help from other people.
There are circumstances in which extraordinary sacrifice is justified. Some work is urgent; sometimes doing what matters costs a person something they will never recover. Responsibility requires an account of what one can affect, what one owes, what one is giving up, and how one will know whether the sacrifice is serving its purpose. The magnitude of a danger makes errors in this judgment more consequential. The people in my friend’s message already had something worth living for. What they seemed to need was a way to remain attached to life during a period when their work looked less likely to succeed. A person can love the world and still need to be reminded that they inhabit it.
There Are Fewer and Fewer of Us
At college reunions, I crash the events for the much older classes. My alma mater runs many reunions at the same time, and so I can go talk to people in their 80s and 90s. They alwayas tell me, “There are fewer and fewer of us.”
Over the course of a life, the people who remember the world as you do begin to disappear. A place continues to exist, yet the people who knew its former meaning are gone. A story becomes harder to tell because explaining why it was funny would require explaining the dead.
We may become the last person who remembers an evening, a friendship, an important historical turning point as it happened. I was really there. The world continues, but parts of it become available only through us, until we too disappear. Human beings have had to discover how to live through this for as long as they have lived together. The prospect of death has produced many philosophies, few of which agree about what should be done before it.
Andrew Marvell puts mortality in the service of desire:
“The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”
Shakespeare finds a different movement in the same knowledge. The approach of loss strengthens love:
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. [Sonnet 73]
Marvell’s speaker presses urgency into an argument for immediate consummation; Shakespeare describes a deepening attachment to what cannot be kept.
The disagreement is part of the inheritance. Reading books, making art, loving people, developing a craft, enjoying food, and caring for the vulnerable were already understood as ways of spending mortal lives. When people called these things good in themselves, they generally understood that this was worth doing even in the face of impending death. Much of literature concerns what remains worth doing when the available time is short and the outcome uncertain. It contains forms of courage that do not depend upon confidence in victory.
Extinction threatens something additional. Personal death ordinarily leaves a world in which other people continue: children grow, books acquire readers, mistakes can be corrected, and projects pass into unfamiliar hands. Human extinction would end that continuation. It changes the prospect for activities whose purpose depends upon a distant human future, and creates reasons for prevention that ordinary mortality does not. The fact that people have always died cannot make the end of humanity an ordinary event.
Yet a high P(doom) still leaves practical questions unanswered. It provides no date, no real insinuations that everyone will die all at once, no account of which interventions remain possible or how much one person can contribute. Even “nothing can be done” may mean that no promising intervention is currently known, that one person has exhausted their useful contribution, or that success seems very unlikely.
A small chance of preventing an enormous harm may justify serious effort; the failure of one career path may justify changing careers. These decisions require judgments the probability alone cannot supply. People who agree about the danger may reasonably disagree about their remaining obligations and opportunities.
Between a probability of catastrophe and a decision about if splurging on dinner this Thursday evening lies almost the whole of ethics, along with a considerable amount of practical knowledge about the person making the decision. A number cannot do that work merely by becoming large.
The Unfinished Garden
Montaigne imagined death finding him at work in his garden: “let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens not being finished.” What moves me in this image is the unfinished garden. Planting anticipates a future; the gardener proceeds without an assurance that he will be present for it. His acceptance of an interruption has not made the work pointless. The image offers a way of inhabiting work without requiring the universe to guarantee the ending.
When I try to describe how I live with these questions, I find it difficult to offer answers that rely too deeply on any specific schedule. Living under uncertain timing has been a persistent part of living as a human. I am trying to get better at noticing what I want, understanding what my desires demand of me both in terms of resources and virtue, and discovering what happens when I act on it. Sometimes I discover that I have neglected something important. Sometimes something I expected to enjoy leaves me cold. The experiment continues because through experience, I become changed.
A desire to escape deserves attention. So does guilt. Rational hedonism would include this willingness to learn about the whole experience of a pleasure, the capacities it develops or erodes, and the people drawn into its consequences. It would leave room for forms of enjoyment that require effort before those joys become accessible, and for the discovery that someone else’s enviable life would make us miserable. There is a particular freedom in realizing that one need not want every pleasure, just as one need not undertake every worthwhile responsibility.
The older people at the reunions have not resolved mortality. They come back anyway. There are fewer of them, but there are still people to meet, stories whose meaning changes with each telling, and familiar faces made unfamiliar by time. The knowledge of loss is present in the gathering. So is the desire to be there.
I do not know how much time we have. I would like us to use some of it to improve the answer. I would also like us to become better at recognizing the lives for whose sake the answer matters: the work someone loves, the child they want, the strange art they make, the people whose company restores their interest in the world. These attachments will not tell us everything we ought to do. They can, however, help us remember whom we are trying to save, and why we would want to remain among them.