I smoke a sepia-tinted cigarette with you under the pixelated smog of a dying sky. 9:05 pm is the start of my high-frequency mornings, my workday three lines of bad Ritalin and my breaks 7 centimeters in length. Suicide by installments. My woolen worth worsted by every day wasted inside the office, pens clicking and staplers clacking and sinus nodes tick tick ticking until they stall. Just one more year, just one more promotion. Stuck in a for-loop that will someday make me obsolete. This is our problem:

01110011 01110100 01100001 01110010 01110100

Let integer, t, represent time in years

Let variable, c, represent contribution.

Let variable, g, represent a goal.

for ( t = 0 (start of career); c < g (until c reaches g); t++ (every passing year)) {

Work++;

// Family, passion, etc cetera et cetera. That doesn’t get completely hard coded until we get to g.

}

A. The first problem with our problem is discerning c.

Happiness may be one way to gauge c, i.e., aspire to what makes you happy. For me, happiness is a cigarette. Happiness is competition. Happiness is nicotine fighting to bind to cholinergic receptors in my brain to open ionic channels that stimulate the release of dopamine. Hypothesis:  
Smoking makes me happy ⇒ smoking will make for a desired contribution.
 Perhaps this is a false-measure: the sum of all momentary pleasures zeroed by the barbarity of Newton’s Third Law.

Another approach may be to use fulfillment to determine c, i.e., aspire to what makes you fulfilled. I write when I don’t work, fingers cracking until my screen goes white. Hypothesis:
Writing makes me fulfilled ⇒ writing will make for a desired contribution.
 Writing does not

make me happy though, each new piece the same iteration of a program with failing power to compute. One could theorize happiness is incongruous with fulfillment: a system failure, a neural program’s malfunction.

Maybe this is a vacuous truth.

B. The second problem with our problem is discerning g.

You see, g is not an integer, or a number. g is an electron, whose position and momentum is impossible to identify simultaneously. g is an abstract sense of accomplishment that permutes every time it is reached. g is a new condo; a new car; a new house; a new wife. g is a new school, for my kids; a new gun, to hunt with; a new reason, not to cry; a new reason, to feel alive. g is a wave, a force: one with discernable origination and proliferation, but whose path can only be understood backwards. Even though we can point to g and develop models to estimate where g may go, there are limits to our predictive capacities.

g is the end of an infinitely long string.

C. Now, that leads to the third problem with our problem: the problem that this problem here is not mine.

See, I am a program. A falsity. A neurocomputational projection that yells and screams at you, the distant onlooker, whom I address. I am here — dancing in the theatre of your mind and swimming in the subsurface of your psyche — and not. All I do is address you. Because I am you. You are visible to me, despite being invisible to you. I see you. I see your problems. These are your problems, after all. If you hear me, take time to hear yourself too, please. This writing here is my fiction; these lines of code are your life.

01100101 01101110 01100100

My cigarette dies and the sun rises, this is my programmed exit. I hope to give you back some time, sometime. Even if I was a hassle. Even if these are not solutions, or proofs. Even though I am no mathematician, or logician. Even though I am just a businessman: a fiction. Even though these are just conjectures with infinite corollaries.