Eternal Stability

Luis Fernando Veríssimo flirted with the possibility of eternal stability in his chronicle A Frase.

"He doesn't even answer the door anymore. He doesn't move from his chair. He doesn't read anything else, he doesn't watch television, and he only speaks when absolutely necessary. He spends the day sitting, legs crossed, with a lost gaze. He feeds on vaguely white things and drinks Brut champagne in tulip glasses. With a slight smile at the corners of his mouth."

In the chronicle, "Bob" needs to work but doesn't go. Stable. Eternal.

A future with 10 robots for every human flirts with Bob's same stability, but without ever needing to work - after all, we're not going to take jobs away from the 10 robots, are we?

What happens to Luís Fernando Veríssimo's chronicle if Bob doesn't even need to work?

I want to talk about this so-called eternal stability. We can forget the chronicle about Bob, an advertising executive who came up with a super-advertising phrase and drank champagne in silence for the rest of his life.

Research with rats and children shows that we have a natural curiosity for what? For new things.

"Babies (...) grab every new object within their reach (...). These actions drop off drastically as the baby becomes familiar with the object, but return in full force when a new and different object replaces the old one." - Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, Basic Books, 2013, hardcover: page 125.

How can we have such eternal stability - feeding on "vaguely white things" and drinking "Brut champagne in tulip glasses" - if we are driven by curiosity for new things?

We are dealing with the possibility of increased longevity - a million years - and without having to work - 10 robots for every human.

Is it possible to live a million years satisfying curiosity for new things? Or with legs crossed, drinking champagne and white things?

Luís Fernando Veríssimo's A Frase is a timely chronicle.

It talks about dopamine, the need to reach peaks, new challenges, "the perfect phrase"; it just forgot to note that dopamine ceases its reward as soon as you reach the peak, demanding a new challenge to inject dopaminergic, fleeting pleasure into our bodily flows. From peak to peak, without stopping. Dopamine seems to be an important gear of curiosity.

Drinking champagne and eating white things with legs crossed, endlessly, looks more like a monk sitting at the top of the temple, rather than the incessant, dopaminergic search for new challenges.

It is possible that "Bob" decided to stop chasing the endless dopaminergic cycle when crafting the best advertising phrase of his era. He calmed his heart, brought his dopamine down to baseline levels, and sat down.

Nobody needs the best phrase in the world - or some enviable peak - to decide to sit down like Bob did. Living with dopamine at baseline levels, meditating, listening to the silence, does not require having been the first man to climb the peak of Everest, or any other "unique" position.

On the contrary: if it's about the molecule, whoever chases peaks needs more peaks, which is what dopamine demands, because dopaminergic pleasure only exists until half a second before you reach the peak, ceasing as soon as we arrive. And it gets even worse: our body blocks a lot of dopamine very frequently, demanding double the dose for the same pleasure, when we string dopaminergic actions one after the other.

So our Bob coincidentally decided to stop the dopaminergic cycles by crafting the ultimate advertising phrase.

The thesis of eternal human curiosity will require other Bobs - Johns, Carlas - to produce more advertising phrases, incessantly, because humanity gets tired of, gets used to, a phrase, a song, a house, a husband, a garden, anything and, gosh, needs some variation from time to time. After becoming fond of what was new and is no longer.

That is why the entertainment market will never, never, never (a million times never) be exhausted.

In theory, we cannot watch the best movie of all time eternally. There is no "best of all time" that can handle "eternally." Is there?

So, we settle for new cycles, not as good but new, which demand our groping, understanding, feeling - until it becomes routine and common, in the eternal cycle of curiosity.

This may be the life-death-life cited by Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her Women Who Run with the Wolves. We always kill an idea that gets old, making room for a new one.

Any actor making any movie, any musician changing a bit everything we already knew about music, any advertising executive changing the way of phrasing, are new flowers giving way to old petals.

Why did Bob stop, then, after creating the best advertising phrase of his era?

Luís Fernando Veríssimo may be flirting with another subject: the more things we produce in our endless life-death-life cycles that feed our eternal curiosity, we end up producing things clearly much, much better than others.

n

The best YouTube video that teaches about pulleys; the best such-and-such movie; the best lasagna; the best advertising phrase.

How can we accept the new - to feed eternal curiosity - when, increasingly, we know that the new is not as good as the new "from that other era," which however is no longer new and does not satisfy our curiosity.

Well, we invented cyclical return: when we go too long without seeing the best movie of all time, we can watch it again and a good part of the satisfaction returns.

We can then, cyclically, revisit things that happened so long ago.

With death every 80 years (on average) it was even easier, because entire generations could delight in the best ideas of previous generations, just reheated. With eternal life, this phenomenon is still possible, because the vivid memory of everything we experience "dies" in our brain, even if partially, so we end up making room to enjoy watching the same thing again, having almost as much pleasure as the first time, as long as we wait long enough.

Thus, an equilibrium point for an eternal humanity, without having to work, may be having enough content to, cyclically, vary, yes, but re-present the same reheated content every so often, for each area - music, art, advertising phrases (etc.). It is possible to automate something like this.

Advertising, fashion, and music agencies already do this with humans in control in a more or less conscious way. They re-present past trends. They revamp the old. Every so often. This can be automated, following the theory of cyclical curiosity in life. How much time does a brain need to be able to re-watch content it loved in a certain past era? For each individual. This can be customized or easily generalized to satisfy the vast majority.

Eternity without needing to work is close - or at least we run the risk of getting there.

How are we going to cross our legs? Eat. Drink. Read.