once upon a time i had a student named alex, one of the more problematic in my career as a teacher. i taught him in several classes from his first to last semester, which was a year ago. he usually showed up full of enthusiasm for the first couple of classes, then disappeared for weeks or months on end, then desperately tried to get the work done the last week or whatever. bright as hell, albeit the only student i ever saw drinking a beer in class.

he initially did the disciple thing a bit, was all about my books and blog etc. but he went off me because i was way too depressing and pessimistic. he cultivated optimism as a religion and became an aficionado of the ray kurzweil singularity thesis, which i hadn't previously heard of. he spent a few hours in my office trying to persuade me, indeed proving the whole thing mathematically: some moore's law-type argument, mustering all the greatest advances in human history into an accelerating pattern of amazing and inevitable progress. not only were we, in particular he, going to live forever, but when we achieved immortality we'd immediately realize that war and environmental destruction were non-optimal. in other words, if we could make it to 2035, we would be living in heaven. forever. it would be perverse or crazy, he said, to disagree with people as smart and informed as these singularity dudes.

he was disappointed that i just kept rolling my eyes, kept saying i doubt it, and kept saying i am just not the sort of person who can believe something like that, being profoundly disaffected, cynical, etc. i kept telling him that the people who were going to be doing all this were, unfortunately, people, and that it could be expected to be a disaster, whether or not it was immortality. he was extremely disappointed by my irrationality.

the singularity was an argument, in alex's hands, for smoking, drinking, and doing drugs: soon it wouldn't matter what you were doing to yourself. the dickinsonian, unforgivably, does not give causes of death. but i assume alex died of an overdose. of optimism.