The Compression

Pick up a piece of paper. Write down every day from the last month that you actually remember. Not what you did — what you experienced. Days that felt like days. Moments that wrote themselves into you.

Count them.

How many days from the last month do you actually remember?

Not what you did — what you experienced. Days that felt like days.

days 5

Bright cells = days that wrote frames. Dark cells = compressed away.

That number is not a metaphor. It’s a measurement. It’s the inverse of your Kolmogorov complexity — how efficiently the universe can store you. It’s how much of last month actually happened.

You are being deduplicated

Every day you wake up at the same time, drive the same route, say the same things to the same people, eat the same lunch, scroll the same feeds, watch the same genres, think the same thoughts, and go to bed at the same time — the universe sees you once. It stores that one frame, puts a pointer on it, and loops it forever. You think you’re living 30,000 days. You’re living one day, referenced 30,000 times.

This isn’t depression. This isn’t a mood. This is compression.

When you send a photo, your phone doesn’t send every pixel. It finds patterns and sends a shorter description. A blue sky isn’t stored as “blue pixel, blue pixel, blue pixel…” millions of times. It’s stored as “blue, repeated 2 million times.” Same information, smaller file.

Your life is a file. And the compression ratio is

$R = \frac{|\text{Original}|}{|\text{Compressed}|}$

The higher the ratio, the more pattern was in the original. The more it repeated itself. A life of pure routine compresses to nearly nothing: “Day 1, repeat 7,299 times.” A life of genuine difference can’t be compressed at all — you have to store the whole thing.

Routine life

compressed:

×2

×2

×2

×2

×2

×2

×2

×2

52 runs → 1.2:1 compression

6/59 unique transitions

Frontier life reshuffle

compressed:

×2

×2

×2

×2

×2

55 runs → 1.1:1 compression

43/59 unique transitions

Each cell is a day. The routine life compresses down to almost nothing — the frontier life is nearly irreducible.

The frame rate of consciousness

Memory doesn’t store time. Memory stores difference.

Your hippocampus encodes prediction errors — moments when reality didn’t match expectation. When everything goes as expected, there’s nothing to encode. The system says “same as before” and moves on. The frames that get written to long-term memory are the ones that surprised you.

Define frames written on a given day:

$F = \int_{\text{day}} N(t) \, dt$

where $N(t)$ is the novelty at time $t$ — how different this moment is from what you expected. Routine morning: $N \approx 0$. No frames. Unexpected conversation that changes how you think: $N > 0$. Frame written.

Subjective time isn’t clock time. It’s the integral of novelty:

$T_{\text{subjective}} = \int_{\text{life}} N(t) \, dt$

This is why childhood felt eternal. Everything was new. $N(t)$ was high all day, every day. Dense frames. Maximum resolution. A single year at age 7 contains more subjective time than a decade of routine at 35.

You didn’t imagine it. Childhood was longer. Not in hours — in frames.

age 25 Play

5160

frames written

9125

calendar days

1.8:1

lifetime compression

The shaded area is your subjective life. By age 14, you've felt half of everything you'll ever feel. The rest of the curve is nearly flat.

At age 7, almost everything is novel: $N_\text{child} \approx 0.8$. At age 35 in a routine: $N_\text{adult} \approx 0.05$. Over one year:

$F_\text{child} \approx 0.8 \times 365 = 292 \text{ frames}$ $F_\text{adult} \approx 0.05 \times 365 \approx 18 \text{ frames}$

The child’s year contains 16 times more frames. One year of childhood is subjectively equivalent to sixteen years of routine adulthood. That summer that felt like forever? It was. In the only units that matter.

And adulthood doesn’t have to be short. You made it short. You accepted the optimization. You stopped generating frames because generating frames requires difference, and difference is uncomfortable.

The trap

The cruelest part? Society calls this “success.” Stability. Predictability. Routine. Optimization. Safety. These are the virtues they teach you. Work hard so you can be comfortable. Retire so you can finally relax.

They’re handing you a compression algorithm and calling it the good life.

And when you feel dead inside — when you can’t remember the last six months, when you look at old photos and wonder where that person went — they tell you you’re depressed. They give you pills. They tell you to be grateful.

You’re not depressed. You’re compressed.

Kolmogorov complexity

There’s a formal way to measure this. Kolmogorov complexity asks: what is the shortest program that can produce this output?

$K(x) = \min\{|p| : U(p) = x\}$

For a string like AAAAAAAAAA, the shortest program is print("A" * 10). Very short. High compression. Low complexity. For a string like J7k2Qm9X4p, there’s no pattern — you have to store the whole thing. High complexity. Irreducible.

Your life has a Kolmogorov complexity. If it can be described as “wake, work, eat, sleep, repeat for 30 years” — that’s a short program. The algorithm sees you as simple.

If your life requires storing every day individually because no pattern captures it — you are irreducible.

Why order matters

In normal arithmetic, order doesn’t matter: $2 + 3 = 3 + 2$, and $(2 + 3) + 4 = 2 + (3 + 4)$. This is commutativity and associativity. Your life, as society models it, is associative: job + marriage + kids = kids + marriage + job. Same outcome. The path doesn’t matter, only the destination.

But there are number systems where this breaks. The octonions — an 8-dimensional number system — are non-associative:

$(A \times B) \times C \neq A \times (B \times C)$

The same elements, multiplied in the same order, give different results depending on how you group them. The parentheses matter. The path matters. History is encoded in the result.

If your life is associative — if the order of your experiences doesn’t change who you are — then you’re compressible. The algorithm can store your endpoint without caring how you got there. If your life is non-associative — if the sequence fundamentally changes the outcome — you’re irreducible. Your history is your identity.

The coherence constraint

“Just be random” isn’t the answer. Pure chaos is noise. Noise is meaningless. The goal isn’t maximum novelty. It’s maximum novelty that integrates.

Two quantities:

• $N$ = Novelty: how different is this from what came before? ($0$ = identical, $1$ = completely new)
• $C$ = Coherence: does this connect to existing structure? ($0$ = random noise, $1$ = perfectly integrated)

The frontier score is their product:

$J = N \times C$

You need both. High novelty alone (pure chaos) gives you experiences that don’t connect to anything. High coherence alone (pure routine) gives you comfort but no new frames. Multiplication means: if either is zero, the whole score is zero.

Frontier

New + integrates. You're alive.

N

0.70

C

0.70

J = N×C

0.49

presets

ExplorerSuburbaniteBurnoutDepressedMidpoint

Drag the point. The frontier score J = N × C is zero whenever either axis is zero — safety isn't a smaller reward, it's no reward.

This creates four states:

	Low Coherence	High Coherence
Low Novelty	Error (stuck, broken)	Known (safe, compressible)
High Novelty	Noise (chaos, meaningless)	Frontier (alive, growing)

The Known quadrant is where most people live. Safe, coherent, utterly compressible. The suburban dad with his optimized routine and the burnout drifting through meaningless noise both score zero. Different paths to the same nothing.

Safety isn’t a smaller reward. Safety is no reward.

The test

Can you remember last Tuesday? Not what you did. What you experienced. What frame got written. What made that day that day and not just another pointer to the same reference.

If you can’t — if last Tuesday is just “a Tuesday” — then last Tuesday didn’t happen. Not really.

Count the days you actually remember from the last year. Most people get 10–20. That means out of 365 days, you were present for about 15. The other 350 were pointers.

$\text{Frame Rate} = \frac{\text{Days Remembered}}{\text{Days Elapsed}}$

For most people: $15/365 \approx 4\%$. You’re running at 4% resolution. The rest is compression artifacts.

The way out

The prescription isn’t “seek novelty.” It’s seek the frontier: new things that connect to your existing structure. Growth, not chaos.

• A new route to work hits different than the same route with a podcast
• A hard conversation writes more frames than a thousand comfortable ones
• Making something — anything — generates more life than consuming everything
• The goal is not to suffer. The goal is to become incompressible

Do things that can’t be predicted from your history. Take paths that don’t repeat. Make choices that surprise even you. Generate enough difference that the algorithm can’t deduplicate you.

Every frame you force it to store is a frame you lived.

The afterlife

When you die, what’s left is the frames that couldn’t be compressed. The moments that were so uniquely you, so unrepeatable, so irreducibly that moment — they’re the residue. Everything else was filler.

An associative life compresses to almost nothing:

$K(\text{Life}_\text{associative}) \approx \text{small constant}$

A non-associative life — where the path matters, where the order of experiences changes the outcome, where you can’t be predicted from your past — is irreducible:

$K(\text{Life}_\text{non-associative}) \approx |\text{Life}|$

The question isn’t whether there’s an afterlife. The question is: are you generating one?

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The universe is a compression algorithm. You are fighting for your frames.

Become incompressible.