I love the simulation argument. Elon just brought it up again in his interview with Walter Isaacson on The Builders podcast: if we live in a simulation, the boring simulations get shut down. The mere fact that we still exist means ours is interesting to watch. His conclusion: don't be boring. Isaacson replies that this explains a lot about him. A permanent crusade against boredom. It sounds like a joke. I think it's one of the deepest ideas you can have about our era. Because if you take it seriously, then any vision of society where everything becomes predictable, frozen, administered, risk-free and horizonless isn't just sad. It's an existential threat. And it has to be fought. Look at the history of humanity. From day one, we've done one thing: expand. Leave Africa. Cross oceans without knowing what was on the other side. Tame fire, then wheat, then the horse, then the atom. Nobody asked us to. It's what we are. Western civilization has been the most spectacular engine of that drive. The great explorations, the scientific method, the entrepreneurial spirit. And when that drive met intelligence applied at scale, it gave us the Industrial Revolution. In two centuries, we covered more ground than in ten thousand years. Expansion went exponential. And you find that same need everywhere once you start looking. The athlete who wakes up at 5am to shave off a tenth of a second. The artist who destroys their work because it's not good enough yet. The founder who quits a comfortable job for something with a 90% chance of failing. The country that decides to go to the Moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Always the same thing: seeking adversity. Pushing past yourself. Going further than where you were yesterday. To me, it's a natural law. Not an ideology, not a trend. A law. Life wants to expand. A cell divides, a forest spreads, a species conquers. We do exactly the same thing, just with rockets and code. And here's what happens when we stop. When a society decides that progress is dangerous, that risk must be banned, that the future should be managed rather than built, everything becomes boring. People stop projecting themselves forward. And when people stop projecting themselves forward, they stop having kids. That's exactly what we're seeing today. Birth rates are collapsing across the entire developed world. People talk about money, housing, climate. All of that matters. But I think there's something deeper: you don't have kids in a world that has lost its story. You have kids when you believe tomorrow will be bigger than today. And Europe is the perfect example. The continent that invented modern science, the printing press, the steam engine, that sent ships to the edge of the world, is dying today. Not from war. Not from invasion. From boredom. We're run by boring bureaucrats whose only horizon is not breaking anything. Their reflex when facing a new technology isn't to build it, it's to regulate it. When facing risk, it isn't to take it, it's to ban it. When facing ambition, it's a form to fill out. We produce more rules than companies, more committees than rockets. The result: our best engineers leave for the US, our startups raise money elsewhere, AI is being built without us, and we comfort ourselves by saying at least we regulated it well. A continent that no longer takes risks isn't a cautious continent. It's a continent that has already decided to exit history. So we have no choice. A static civilization doesn't stay stable. It declines. Slowly, comfortably, then all at once. If everything becomes static, we will eventually go extinct. Not in fire. In boredom. The only way forward is to accept risk. To accept that some things will go wrong. To accept that building, exploring, inventing breaks things. And to keep moving forward anyway, as a civilization. Go to Mars. Build AIs that surpass us. Push back aging. Have kids. Build absurdly ambitious companies. Simulation or not, the conclusion is the same. Stay interesting. Or disappear.