But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?

A player's ability to complete their quest is a function of the quest and their own skills, resources, and powers. Quests that are easy for certain players are nearly impossible for others: Olympic runners will regularly run sub-5 minute miles during training, even though this would be an incredibly ambitious goal for most people.

In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game

Quests tend to manifest as an objective we center our lives around. Your quest might be to reach a specific milestone: to become a senator, to publish a book, to make a million dollars. But not all quests have an end state. You might be on a quest to maximize your net worth, or to bench-press more weight than anyone else at the gym. Maybe you’re j

To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just… public.

Try to make something perfect and it will remain imperfect. Do it naturally and it is always perfect. Nature is perfect; effort is imperfect. So whenever you are doing something too much, you are destroying.