As a function of time and resources, what is the optimal way to reduce suffering and maximize happiness?
You have 1 minute and no money: Try to calm down and distract yourself with music.
You have 1 hour and 1 dollar: Ignore the dollar, just make a playlist of songs you really enjoyed in your life and play it as you dance.
You have 1 day and 50 dollars: Go get yourself some hard drugs.
You have 3 months and 1,000 dollars: Get some gym equipment, establish a workout routine, hangout with friends as much as possible, get laid, go to see movies, go to a beach.
You have 3 years and 3,000 dollars: Learn about Buddhist meditation, get fit, and then focus on achieving the Jhanas states. Stay in them for as long as you can.
You have 10 years and 10,000 dollars: Investigate charities that minimize suffering, or make your own. Fund-raise in order to eliminate suffering in people who have cluster-headaches by giving them access to tryptamine vape-pens, help the spread of pain-killers for people dying in hospitals in third-world countries, etc.
You have 50 years and 10,000,000 dollars: You found a research institute devoted to identifying the biochemical, functional, or behavioral causes of suffering, identify promising large-effect-size genetic modification technologies in order to enable sustainable hedonic-tone enhancement. You build a company that sells permanent hedonic tone amplification. With the money you get rid of factory farming and implement a wild-animal welfare system. Then you get rid of game-theoretical impasses using ultra-bliss technology.
Giving tryptamines to cluster headache patients can have tremendous personal cost/impact. Maybe we should have a conversation about what this actually looks like in practice.
Absolutely! Let’s talk about it!
I’m working on a document precisely about this (and also kidney stones, benzo withdrawal, and chronic pain -> all with solutions I think are very viable within some years). Reach out!
Best!
Somewhere in there near the beginning you need to add “find some magic mushrooms and eat them sparingly”
Quite agree to all of your points. Good stuff.