Unveiling The Infinite Self: Immortalizing Self-Actualization

“What does your day look like if you live forever?" Immortality is not the end goal, but a side effect of prioritizing our health and passion for life. Thoughts from the first week of Vitalia.

Is self-actualization necessary for Longevity?

Living forever is not the end goal, but a side effect of prioritizing our vitality and well-being. First off, what is “longevity”? Is it simply living healthier for longer? In a world where the pursuit of immortality collides with the depths of human consciousness, a captivating question arises:  “What does your day look like if you live forever?" (if this question is the linchpin, tell me exactly what you mean by “do” in this quote, be more specific) The answer This inquiry is the linchpin for understanding the necessity of self-actualization for longevity. 

I had the privilege of interviewing MIDABI, an installation artist and my Vitalia housemate, whose workshop on "Preparing the Immortal Mind for Longevity", on top of all the other convos at Vitalia, sparked this week’s intro to my dev update delving into insights at the intersection of self-actualization and longevity.

Why do some of the leading countries in the world have the highest and fastest growing suicide rates in the world? Many people would kill to live in the USA, Japan, or South Korea and access the wealth, luxuries, social freedoms, and entertainment that abound in these places, and yet citizens there are killing themselves instead. 

Whats fascinating is that many of the top increasing suicide rates correlate to countries with the highest GDP per capita in their region, or even the entire world. Despair does not equal poverty and vice versa. Life expectancy in USA is going down despite being the wealthiest country in the world. Viktor Frankl discusses a “will to meaning”. The most abundant or depraved existence is always interpreted in the context of the one experiencing it. One can have everything but without a reason to live, it means nothing. 

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a classic framework for how human needs evolve over time based on where they are in life. It starts with the biological needs at the base and the spiritual needs at the top. We need to maintain physiological health to survive but we need social relations and higher purpose to be compelled to live in the first place. 

Study after study has shown that healthy social relationships increase happiness, life expectancy, and our perception of health and happiness. Blue Zones research identified “purpose” as 1 of 9 key components to living >100 years old with “knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy”. What causes these correlations? Partially because humans are hardwired to be social creatures and lack of social relations affects us physically, mentally, and emotionally. Part of it is that being of use to others and helping them is validating that we are wanted, needed, and have a purpose to fulfill.

Self-transcendence is the ideal state for self and society, because you are not only maximizing your own potential and the potential of those around you, thereby filling out the edges and middle tiers of the pyramid simultaneously. Self-actualization is the first step by incepting the mindset of having a better self, that you strive to become, and then doing the daily actions to get there. One doesn’t choose to spend more money on organic vs junk food because that’s what the pyramid says. You do it because you want to be at peak performance and improving your base is in service of that. Without self-actualization you get the rising obesity and suicide rates we see around the world in dejected societies coping, but not fighting, the void of purposelessness.

Self-actualization leads to longevity. Longevity gives you the time to fully actualize and move into self-transcendence. Longevity then becomes worthwhile through self-transcendence.

Longevity gives you the time, patience, openness, and wisdom to provide support and advice to others. We want more people to self-actualize so that they can become the best people they can be. When we live as long as possible in this state of growth and excellence, civilization-wide results compound and people + society grow exponentially. This is further catalyzed and multiplied with people in a state of self-transcendence since you’re actualizing multiple people at once, not only yourself. If people can have healthy active lives to the age of 120 instead of just 60, that's an extra 60 years (double the time!) to accelerate the development of human civilization. This perspective challenges the popular narcissistic narrative around immortality by emphasizing its potential to fuel collective growth and excellence, rather than serving as a mere extension of individual life - precisely the shift in thought that self-transcendence brings.

So in conclusion to maximize longevity we need:

1. A purpose to live - Jump up in the morning to actualize a goal or vision for the future.

2. A system to develop - Facilitate finding and creating knowledge, quantified self, and meta-learning.

3. A community to connect - Turn self-actualizers into self-transcenders by sharing lessons and supporting each other's journeys

Jinni Game Updates

• Learning from Vitalia Community

  • Pitch at Vitalia. First time doing a public pitch to a crowd about the game, god responses from everyone. Got 6 new wait-list signups from the QR code on a slide. 3 android users came up and said they would beta test at Vitalia

  • Learning a lot from Vitalia people about how they track their health (manually, wearables, services), what biomarkers they think are important, how they analyze data, what problems they have with the quantified self process, how they design experiments, why they even do all this stuff. 

• OAuth cryptographic state added to requests and verified on callbacks to protect users and servers.

• 10 total waitlist signups since publishing the form last month. No marketing/sales just my attempt at being an extrovert and chatting with people about the project.

• Added rolling egg animation as a placeholder until avatar AI divination tech is ready. Planning on working on them end of Jan/early Feb at Vitalia to present at AI week, build at hackathon, and get done by end of February before Vitalia ends. 

• Added telemetry and observability to backend for easier debugging. Still not great, barely functional, but at least it's something to view usage metrics, errors, etc.

• Submitted app to google store last Saturday as a beta/test release so people can submit feedback inside the app. Waiting for approval still. Was approved to access health data last month so figured app would be approved faster

• Wrote types and data validation for backend. Tried to write tests but had a fucking bitch of a time even getting types working with clojure.spec and running tests didnt work either. Guess we’re going YOLO on the backend for now. Would feel a lot better with them but I feel confident without them giving how clean and simple the code is.

Next steps

• Finalizing Github integration on frontend and backend

• Installing expo-update so i can push updates to beta testers without them needing to redownload. (especially important while not in app store which makes update process more streamlined)

• Adding more information to Game Integrations database with user research at Vitalia like integration priority, UX flows for integrating that work best for people already doing heavy quantified self, abilities/widget ideas and UX research,

• Starting divination development next week. Probably going to have a python microservice that I call out to to leverage langchain and AI community. Mostly to make it easier to do RAG using our graph database and compose the pipeline of prompts for text + image services. 

• Ask designers about setting up a UX research framework. Want to be more methodical about it, not just taking notes then building. I’m more interested in growth experiment framework but basic user research is the first growth experiment I need to do like “who wants to use this?”, “why?”, “what problem does it solve?” etc. I’m building the game for myself so these have initial answers but not for a broader audience yet.