Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?
My wife and I are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It&#x27;s far more important to her than it is to me though.<p>For me a large part of believing in something greater in myself is the hope that I simply won&#x27;t cease to exist when I experience brain death. I pray hoping someone is on the other end at least listening to me, I rationalize life on our planet as some sort of orchestrated miracle, I look to the vastness of space to realize that I am insignificant beyond imagination and that our planet and solar system are also insignificant beyond imagination.<p>I think of my friends and family that have died, and hope that I get to interact with them at some point and try and approximate that right now with things like writing the annual letter to my father and telling him what has been going on in my life since he died 12 days before my 13th birthday which I place on my blog here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;category&#x2F;dad" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryanmercer.com&#x2F;ryansthoughts&#x2F;category&#x2F;dad</a><p>I think of the incredible age of the universe and the tiny blip that is a human&#x27;s lifespan and hope that I am not some sort of chemical accident. That I&#x27;m not a bunch of electrical&#x2F;chemical reactions that believes it is self aware by some fluke.<p>On any given day I&#x27;m 50%+ (sometimes 100%) of the opinion that we likely exist in a simulation which, at least to me, explains why we have such rapid tech advancements, why we have not detected any other sentient species in the universe, why we haven&#x27;t seen any evidence of Kardashev 2+ level building in our galactic back yard, why so many things have be invented&#x2F;discovered within weeks or years of each other by human beings with no contact with one another. I also like this thought because, like in the book series Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer, there might be some hope that I can exploit some conditions of the simulation to directly benefit myself by either altering my character database or a database of something around me. Silly, but sometimes it keeps me going.