3. Being Appreciated

It might be hearing someone laugh at your joke, or being paid a living wage, or getting likes on Instagram. It might be only external, or it might also come from within. Appreciation is almost synonymous with value, and I think this is where most meaning comes from.

 4. Helping People

This might sound the same as appreciation, but it’s not. Indeed, I think your average wastewater-treatment engineer will tell you that you can help a lot of people and not get a ton of thanks for it. But we are empathy machines, and one of the most lasting and true ways of finding meaning is to actually be of service.

 5. Comparison

You know, keeping up with the Joneses. Also, every sport. But it’s more than just comparing ourselves to other people; we also compare our current selves to our past selves, which is why getting better at something makes us feel valuable, even if we’re the only ones who really understand how much we’re improving.

 6. Impacting the World

This one is simple, but so dangerous. If the world is different because you are in it, then you must matter. You must be important if things changed because you exist. But if that’s what you believe, then the bigger the impact, the more you matter, and that can lead to some bad places.

You might think that this list is too long or too short, and who knows, maybe it is. You might think that I missed a big one, like “Belonging.” But I think belonging is just mutual appreciation of shared identity. It’s like a feedback loop of appreciating someone for an identity you share, which makes you appreciate yourself.

Also, these things are never felt in isolation from each other. A schoolteacher gains meaning from:

 1. Seeing the impact they have on their students.

 2. Being part of the story of teaching.

 3. Helping their students.

 4. Being a better teacher this year than they were last year.

 5. Being appreciated for their work (god willing).

And I find that it is much easier to believe in your intrinsic value if you are getting all these other signals that you have value.

I spent weeks working all of this out for a reason. I was mad and I wanted to know why, and now it’s really obvious to me. Compared to my former self, I was just much less. I had gone from being a billionaire back to being just merely well-off. April had taken my identity as her surrogate by existing again. The end of The Thread had dramatically diminished my ability to impact the world. And on top of all of that, I had spent months actually trying to help people, only to abandon that brand the moment something shinier came along.

I was so mad, and I was mad that I was mad.

And it didn’t escape my notice that I was the only person being directly manipulated by both Carl and their brother. On The Thread, One was working constantly to get me addicted to Altus and to get me to tie my identity to it. Carl, meanwhile, was betting that I would be able to overcome that temptation. Or, more likely, they were betting that it wouldn’t matter. And it hadn’t. If it were up to me, I probably wouldn’t have let Miranda break Altus, and that fact tore at me every day.

This whole time, I was also dealing with the same Altus withdrawal that millions of people were dealing with, so, basically, life sucked.

And every day it became clearer and clearer that Altus was never coming back, and every day I got angrier and angrier about it. I didn’t know whether to be mad at my friends for destroying it, at Carl for setting me up to fall in love with it, or at myself for being so easy to manipulate into loving something terrible. Over and over again, every night I kept my mouth shut.

But then, finally, a couple of months after Altus shut down, I couldn’t do it anymore.

Andy: I’m mad. I’ve been mad the whole time. I can’t stop.

April: What?

Andy: About Altus. I miss it. It’s gone. I know you did what you had to do, but I’m still mad.

April: I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that, Andy.

This made me even angrier, but maybe it was the right kind of anger. Maybe the fire couldn’t go out until it burned up its fuel.

Andy: Maybe I just need you to know. I thought we were going to get control of Altus … to do good things with it. Not just destroy it. I don’t know why we got to make this decision for so many people.

April: OK, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m mad that you’re mad because this is something that I don’t know if I did right. But we had to do something. I wish I had your support. But I guess I understand if I don’t.

I didn’t write back for a while and then, finally, a wall of text appeared.

April: The problem with Altus wasn’t how it was run or who was running it, it was that whoever was running it would instantly be too powerful. If someone had to be that powerful, you’d be close to the top of my list. We’re good people, but I don’t even trust us. Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem. We made a choice for a lot of people, but that choice wasn’t just “You can’t have Altus anymore,” it was “One tiny group of people will not be in charge of the future.” We had to do it for Carl reasons, but even without that it was the right thing. I really believe that. Altus was an invasion. They wanted to be the future, I think that was why they were so dangerous. The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.

I read that paragraph several times before I wrote back.

Andy: Did Maya help you write that? Because it’s really good.

April: Fuck you!

April: And yes.

Andy: I’m going to think about this. Thank you for dealing with me.

April: Literally any time.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s very important to have friends who are smarter than you … and who are also kind to you.

I turned to Bex, who was lying on the bed beside me. “Why didn’t you give up on me?”

“Shut up, Andy,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

MIRANDA

So I saved the world, huh? I mean, not just me, but it’s a little hard to feel like a complete phony when humanity would definitely have been doomed without you. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still sometimes feel like a fraud, but it’s nice to have a solid touchstone.

Also, I get to do really cool stuff now.

I went back to Berkeley, where Professor Lundgren had, once again, kept my lab bench in place and available. And there she and I started doing something pretty dangerous and very secret—we took Altus’s source code and tried to use it to figure out how it worked.

What became clear pretty quickly was that no one at Altus had written the code and, indeed, no human had written it. Much of it was completely indecipherable. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t find anything useful.

We were able to determine that the changes Carl made to our brains to allow us to receive and transmit data into their network were observable and permanent. And we were able to determine that even children born after the Dream stopped happening had those changes. What we were not able to find was any trace of the computational system Carl’s brother was, theoretically, still using to observe us.

We knew it was there, but whatever systems Carl used to turn our biosphere into a planetwide computer were too elegant for us to even perceive. You’d almost think it wasn’t there, which I guess is the point.