Missing the trees for the forest

How should you spend your life?

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This is a guest contribution.

It’s a bit of a different style essay than we’re used to posting on Next Play. If you’re looking for our more usual content, then perhaps you’d also like to check out this new list we made of companies hiring or the free Next Play web app which now has a built-in AI-powered talent agent to help you find recommended job opportunities at interesting companies.

We know a lot of people are thinking about what to do with their lives. Maybe you want to start a company. Or build a side project. Or join a hyped up startup. We’re curious if this short story resonates with you, and perhaps makes you reflect on how you’re spending your time.

1.

Last week, Niall read an essay from a blog he sometimes enjoys. The essay was titled Augmented Augmented Reality. The general idea of the piece was that reality is good but augmented reality technology is bad, so we need augmented augmented reality; a kind of technology that helps us connect more deeply with the world around us.

The essay was sparked by a joke-y idea and was not entirely serious. But Niall did not know that, nor did he pick up on it when he read the essay. No, Niall was totally sold.

And so began the path he would walk for the rest of his life.

2.

In college, Niall had always found it hard to pay attention. His professors had talked about scientists and thinkers, but Niall found this interesting only for aesthetic reasons (something he probably would not admit to himself). What Niall was really interested in was making things. That’s what he believed, at least. He had read the stories of the Collison brothers, he had read all of the Paul Graham essays. He wanted to be like those guys.

Stumbling upon the Augmented Augmented Reality essay a decade later proved to finally be the motivation he needed to become a founder himself. He quit his job and moved to New York City, where he knew a few investors. Days and nights became weeks and years. Work consumed most of his time. There was rarely a lack of funding; Niall could sell dirt to a farmer.

But none of the inventions achieved quite what he wanted. This was not for a lack of ideas. There was, for instance, the anti-computer, thousand-dollar machined aluminum that functioned as a fancy journal. There was a black-and-white phone with the functionality of a Blackberry Pearl but the price tag of last year’s iPhone. There was the wristband that would remind you when you spent too much time looking at a screen indoors. There were the anti-AR glasses that blurred distractions (like advertising) and allowed you to swap between focus modes (like nature, people, work, literature, trees, sunshine).

Over the decades Niall became convinced that it was not a device but rather a company that would help truly augment reality for people. One such venture was an outfitter that organized unconventional adventures for people: racing across countries, swimming in jungly old cenotes. Another organized creative contests. Another planned better weddings.

Niall even became a venture capitalist, starting a firm called Willow. Its thesis statement was: We invest in high taste and craft products that deepen our relationship with the world around us.

Closer to the end of his life, Niall—still unsatisfied that he had sufficiently augmented reality—invented a new language. He had read the story Arrival and, inspired by how the alien language altered its users’ perception of time, figured he could design a language that altered its users’ perception of the world around them. Few learned it, though after his death it did pick up a niche following on 4chan for reasons mostly unrelated to his stated goals.

3.

A few times a year, Niall would let go of his projects for a while. He’d organize a big trip with some friends. Or he’d fly out to party for a week on an island. But these didn’t really do it for him. At these parties he would study all the ways people were not enjoying reality as much as they ought to be, and he would think of his projects back home and how they would fix those problems. He would end these weeks itching to get back to his work.

Relationships were difficult, too. It was not always exciting to women when Niall said he wanted to organize details of their relationship into a Notion document they would review weekly. (Which was ridiculous; why would you not want to work hard at improving the relationship?)

He came close to marrying once, but the woman in question was concerned about how much time he spent, from her perspective, living outside of the moment. The few vacations they took couldn’t happen without Niall stressing about restaurant reservations and figuring out how to avoid tourist traps, and his home life was so consumed by his projects (he often worked 7 days a week) that she was concerned about what he’d be like if the two of them had kids. But this was his life’s work, he told her, it mattered more than anything.

She did not marry Niall, and after that he only had short-term girlfriends. It was better that way, he thought, for the girlfriends and for him. Not everyone can buy in on such a grand vision.

4.

Sometimes Niall’s friends, whose number thinned with the decades, would ask why he spent so much of his free time working on these crazy projects. Why the overpriced Kindle? The memory camcorder? The penpal matching software? Why not just have kids and raise them? Why not just buy a boat and go fishing? Buy a bicycle and go into the mountains?

Niall would tell them that the latter options were too lazy. ‘Must it be true that every new technology distract us from life?’ he would ask. ‘Must it be true that all of our fancy new tools strip away some essential part of the process?’ Niall believed that all of the existing technology startups were not inherently bad for Real Life, it was just that they were ineffective and uncreative. Niall would quote philosophers and tech founders about taste, and about thinking for yourself. He wished to be the person who would finally augment reality (for real this time).

And did he? It depends who you ask. Some of the people who used Niall’s products wrote reviews about how the technology changed their lives. But many of those people only used the products for a few years before moving onto the next new fad. A few of the people who learned Niall’s language said it truly helped them better appreciate the world around them, but the extent to which this was LARPing or sarcasm is impossible to say.

Mostly, it would be hard to make a judgement about Niall’s projects because, like him and like most technology humans ever invent, they eventually died. The list of projects on Niall’s personal website is a graveyard. Some of his software projects were open-source, but the recency of pull requests can be measured in decades rather than days. Nobody is talking about his phone, or his anti-computer, or his new language. Mostly, people are just living.

5.

Outside Niall’s window at the home where he spent his final days, there was a small river lined with rocks of many colors: red, blue, emerald, cream. Next to the river there was a lazy willow tree. On windy days it would say things to the wind and the wind would ruffle the tree’s branches in response. One afternoon, in between projects, Niall noticed the tree. He marveled at the beauty and jotted down a new idea: what if there was a piece of software that automatically shut off all your screens and dimmed all your lights when there was something worth seeing outside?

He spent the rest of the evening working on this idea, and did not look up again.

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