Does a Sunday feel different than a Monday?
It’s an open question.

Probably it does, even when you are unemployed or retired.

That’s weird, since days don’t really exist. They are completely made up.

So why is that? If you can answer that question, you understand how time works—and why days are man-made to help people structure their lives.

Hint: you have to look backward sometimes. And sometimes you have to look forward. If you don’t, you are lost forever.

How Time Works (We Create Time)

You can only experience time when you have two reference points.

So: you work a few days, and then you reflect backward on what you have done. Without reflecting, everything would happen at one point, and there would be no time.

The best way to explain this is the difference between doing and thinking about what you did. When you are doing, time both exists and doesn’t. But when you think about it afterward, it does.

If everything were just doing, then we would be lost forever. There would be no past and no future. You would never know where your house is (you’d have no memory), and you would never know where to go.

The trick is that doing and thinking backward are not the same fundamental movement. In a way, the Big Bang had to start something like this—with two reference points. Or like they say in the Bible: worked for six days and rested the seventh. Without that, there would be no time, and we would spiral, lost in infinity. In my opinion, this is still a phenomenal metaphor.

And for what it’s worth: I’m not talking about clock time, which is completely made up. Without clock time, the sun still goes up and down.

It’s like a Sunday: you travel through energy states from last week. On Monday, you start fresh. This works very well in practice, even considering that days are made up too. You create an artificial “stop” in the week so that everybody can catch up—like I’m doing now.

One of the Holy Grails
There are multiple grails. This is my favorite.

Imagine being me. When I look at some things—let’s say a kid playing the piano—I always get super emotional.

The holy grail, therefore, is how we look at the world.

And the beauty? You and I can look at the exact same thing from a completely different perspective.

I truly get emotional when I see my mom working in the garden. It literally leaves me speechless; for me, that is paradise. You can shave off things you like and don’t like when developing your worldview.

Intelligence works like that too. Sometimes you hear people talk about how a brain works and you’re like, “It’s certainly not that.”

There Are No Computers Better Than Humans at Certain Tasks

Are computers better than humans at chess? Yes and no.
Yes, because they beat humans.
No, because winning—being “the best” at something—is only a very small part of the picture. Being the best is somewhat imaginary. It doesn’t really matter who is the best at something; that was never the point in the first place.

If being the best is the only thing that matters, then why aren’t you watching two supercomputers play chess? You could argue that they’re so good we can’t relate to it. But if I watch Magnus Carlsen play, I also can’t really relate to that. I think I can, but I don’t.

It’s because the point is not watching the best play. We massively overvalue that. It has to be relatable in some way. If I watch the Tour de France, I can relate to that: I see people going 60 km/h and I think, “I can only go 25 for two hours – they are superhumans.”

The problem is that things like chess and cycling are already representations of what we find important. We could have lived in a world without chess and cycling—they are imaginary games. It could just as easily have been two other things.

So if you think in terms of superintelligence, it’s important to add a disclaimer: computers are good at games that could just as easily never have existed. There are no computers that are better than humans at normal life. And they never will be, because they can’t feel emotions, for example.

Superintelligence or AGI sometimes means not doing something. Or not thinking about yourself. Or taking a step back and realizing that all this enthusiasm also caused a lot of environmental problems. There is no real rush. There wasn’t a real problem in the first place.

It’s like work: some people see work as everything they are; others see work as community service. I do my fair share, but not more than that. I value other things too.

In a way, a computer being better at chess is kind of cheating: a computer doesn’t have to spend any energy repositioning its body, moving the pieces by hand, having spectators, being a role model for future generations.

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Balance

I like this system.
An easy way to look at life is as a scale—a scale with energy.

Energy often has a bad reputation (it sounds “spiritual”), but it’s the easiest way to explain it.

When you eat, you eat energy. So the more you eat, the more energy you take in. The point is that you also have to use that energy. So if you eat more, you should move more. That way, you stay in balance.

Most people understand this example: if you eat a lot and use little energy, you gain weight. If you eat little, you take in little energy and can therefore use less energy.

But watching content on social media is also energy. It’s literally energy that goes into you. If you only watch videos on a certain topic, you partly become that topic. You literally carry that energy with you.

So what do you do when you carry a lot of energy you want to get rid of? Write it down or talk to others. That way, you move energy, and it becomes a shared burden—and shared burdens are easier to solve.

This is also why some people shut themselves off from the energy of others: otherwise, it gets too much inside them. But be careful with that: it could mean you end up stuck in your own world with only your own views.

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Where It Goes Wrong

When you swap one energy for another—when you swap emotional distress with food, for instance.
You try to control the energy of emotion with the energy of food.

you end up stuck in your own world with only your own views.

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Why Some Children Have ADHD Because of Their Home Situation

Imagine a child who doesn’t feel safe at home and therefore holds too much energy inside—it builds up. Monday at school becomes a disaster because that’s when the child finally feels safe again.