Rootkit 5
Rootkit 5 states that 'The meaning of happiness changes as you age.' It is TRUE. It is the fifth statement of the Rootkit Test.
Explanation of answer to Rootkit 5
Quoted from Puzzle One].
This is an important difference between our world and hanyo town. Like I said earlier, once we are born, the happiness clock starts ticking. At first we’re cared for without having to do anything ourselves beyond breathe and sleep, suck and poop. Others do things for us or give us things we want. Very small babies have two main moods: if they’re happy, they smile, and if not they scream, with maybe a couple of seconds of blankness in between. But as we grow, we learn that instead of waiting till we are hungry enough to scream, we can make signs or say words to the superattentive people (doulas and childers) around us when there’s only a little pain in our stomachs, and then they’ll sort it out for us and we can avoid the really bad part. When we start doing this, we’re learning, with our doulas’ help, how to level up from happiness to pleasure. Pleasure involves working towards our own happiness, and as we get older, we discover so many lovely ways to do that.
In the survivarium, when time pushes you to change the mode of your happiness, karma shows you the way. Let me give you an example of how karma works for children. Around the ages of five to seven, kids start learning how to pull red karma by cleaning up after they poop. Red is the colour of physical, mental and spiritual cleanup and correction. Till they’re consistently clean, of course, we have to watch them so we can go clean up after them or help them when they get in difficulties.
The first time they go in the toilet on their own they’re very proud, and most kids will talk constantly to their doula, who’s waiting outside and watching them on her screen, and she can remind them to do it all properly. It’s not creepy for them because they’re used to having someone physically there, watching them: their privacy has increased, not decreased. Once they’ve been getting it right for a while, and they have the red karma threads to show for it, they get to curtain their feed in the bathroom. In other words, no one other than them can watch their feed while they’re in there. If they’re found to have messed up (we check in the beginning), they get shamestickied and the curtain is lifted for a bit, until they’ve pulled the relevant karma to peel their shamesticky. Most kids figure it out after two or three tries.
As we grow older, the actions we do to make ourselves happy become more and more complex, until we’re organising parties in the baths, making better food and clothing, solving karma problems, or devising ways to protect the survivarium. We do all this within our individual pleasuredome, which is the limit of our personal knowledge, skills and endurance. Inside the pleasuredome, everything is fun; outside it, it’s all too hard for us. Your pleasuredome covers and protects your willspace, which is all the places you can reach and touch with your hands and feet. Your willspace is your earth; it’s where the ‘pleasure’ part of the pleasuredome takes effect, where you learn and love and create.
Because we learn like this, we never have to deal with a challenge that we haven’t already imagined ourselves facing, and we play lots of sim games to explore our willspace and grow our pleasuredome. People with a lot of experience (we call them deep karmics) whose pleasuredome includes the thing we’re training to face, will watch us closely to decide how ready we are to face it. Getting to face it is a reward we get for our hard work, not a threat or a punishment. If we slowly build the structure of our happiness like this, then as we get more expert at the things we do, even unpleasant tasks become pleasurable. At the same time, other people are constantly looking to pull karma by making the attainment of happiness easier for us.
For example, when the Nest began, all we had to eat was algal slime and fungi from the vats. Well, that’s what the poorest slags in hanyo town eat anyway, but the difference is, we didn’t have to stay that way. Almost immediately, people started working on making our food better and more tasty. In the twenty three years since we began, we’ve developed hundreds of new foods and tastes, and we are coming up with new ones at the rate of several a week. How has this happened? Well, good food makes people really happy, and they’re willing to push a lot of karma to anyone who will provide it. So some of our best minds, those of us who really thirst for the recognition of karma, they love to design foods.
All of this leads to one result: you get happier as you get older, and you find more and better ways to be happy and produce lots of extra happiness for the people around you. But in hanyo town, the only activities that are admitted as ‘happy-making’ are things that two-year-olds enjoy: breaking things, creating a ruckus, acting out and making other people squeal. Even their less violent fun activities, like fashion, involve running after the latest trend, competing, and punishing their bodies. But these are activities that people only have a fleeting taste for in adolescence, and they lose it pretty quickly as they learn better ways of being happy.
Now you see how wrong it is when the hanyos say that, no matter how old or experienced you are, your happiness should be whatever young people think is fun. Young people aren’t very wise, although they are fun to be around, and everyone knows they like stuff indiscriminately and do stupid things. So why do the hanyos think this state of your soul is the best for you? Because they fear the experience of old people, their capacity to learn and be fearless in the face of things that frightened them before.
To stop you ever becoming fearless, the hanyos teach you to be suspicious of any place in your head where your quest for your own happiness might lead you. If you think it might be fun to slow down and use your mind more, they want you to think, ‘Am I growing old?’ and shrink back from it. That’s why the hanyos love it when you doubt yourself, because that means they have a chance to hack your happiness. Do not believe what they (or their hanyobait) tell you about your own happiness: they know nothing about it.
