what i would(n’t) ask the genie

the other day i was having this discussion with a group of friends at dinner, a twist on the typical what-would-you-ask-a-genie question. what 3 skills or abilities that are theoretically already possible would you request from a genie?

the common answers came to mind first (although they are still very useful). speaking every language. photographic memory. being infinitely, perfectly good at maths, which i still think is one of the coolest things on any version of this list, novelty aside, because if you are infinitely good at maths you have access to essentially all possible knowledge in the universe.

the more interesting ones are the ones that didn’t occur to me at the dinner itself, only when i couldn’t sleep later that night and made a list in my head of the ones i didn’t say.

my favorite is perfect self-delusion, the ability to rewrite your own reality at the root level. you could believe you are destined for greatness and never have imposter syndrome, believe someone loves you and never experience attachment anxiety, believe that life is meaningful and never feel existential dread, believe failure is temporary and become infinitely resilient. you could believe you are beautiful and feel zero insecurity, believe death is peaceful and stop being afraid of it. it’s like a cheat code for human suffering.

the scary part is that come to think of it, this is probably the closest thing to real-world power that already exists. not exactly the full version, as i’m describing it here, but partial ones show up everywhere, like founders with delusional optimism, cult leaders, narcissists, the deeply religious, certain athletes, “it-was-meant-to-be”ers. society rewards it constantly.

what is strange is that almost none of the highest-agency people i know would take this. the caveat is that you become emotionally invincible and separated from reality and truth in the same motion, and most of these people are compulsively truth-oriented, even when the truth is the thing hurting them. they would spiral inside the wish, because the mind keeps interrogating reality anyway. am i actually capable enough, is this meaningful or am i idealizing it, am i choosing this life or is it happening to me, etc etc. they don't want comfort on its own, they even need to earn it, which is the harder and slower thing. the fantasy still appeals to me, mostly because the cognitive overhead of self-awareness is exhausting and the power on offer is real. but i do also notice in the back of my head that i want the version where i chased it and earned it, which means i don't actually want the wish.

the runner-up ability is going viral every time you post, which sounds a lot sillier than it is, i think. guaranteed virality = guaranteed attention allocation, and in the internet age attention is close to raw power. you could steer discourse, start movements, move markets, launch a company overnight, reshape what people find beautiful. it is extremely extremely underrated as a form of influence.

the slight catch for this one is that if every post goes viral, attention stops being information, because right now a thing landing tells you something true about the thing, but then take that away and you lose the one signal that tells you whether anything you made was actually good. you would be culturally all-powerful but like creatively blind, which is its own kind of self-delusion, just outsourced to the feed.

then there are the two that i talked myself out of pretty quickly.

the first was being loved by whoever you want, unconditionally and always. i thought this was perfect until i saw obsession recently (the 2025 movie, highly recommend!). emotionally this is almost godhood, and not even just because of romance, but because social rejection is one of the deepest regulators of human behavior, so removing it removes abandonment fear, loneliness, status anxiety, grief over losing people. you would be psychologically untouchable. but like this reddit user so accurately articulated, the cost is enormous because love loses voluntariness. you fundamentally have to change someone else against their will to make this come true, which is both immoral and distasteful at some level - love without consent stops being love and becomes species-level social manipulation, and the things it drives the unwilling to do are genuinely disturbing.

the second was being able to pause or stretch a moment at will. this one is different from the rest, because it aims at life rather than power. for the record i am not someone who would turn down immortality, as long as the length of my life stayed at my own discretion, because why wouldn't i want to live as long as i felt like living? more on this in another blog post down the line, probably.

anyways, this ability sounds existentially soothing, but then the danger is the inability to let go. most of the best moments of my life have been good precisely because they were outside my control, and beautiful only in retrospect (at the time it might have felt normal, chill, stressful, even). a sunset, a glance, a night out, a trip, love, youth, the view you only understood once it was gone - not one of those survive being frozen or stretched. so actually maybe the better version of this is to bottle a feeling and be able to replay it later, and to discard it when you are done.

which reminds me of something from a philosophy of ai tutorial i have been taking at oxford this term, with helena ward, who is fantastic chefs kiss. most of our analyses of human-machine relationships and the future of work keep collapsing into the idea of friction. and this is not even a post about ai, but the friction point travels.

look back at the wishes and they line up. self-delusion removes the friction of having to earn your beliefs. virality removes the friction of earned attention. unconditional love removes the friction of being freely chosen, and freely refused by someone. pausing time removes the friction of finitude. the most tempting abilities are all the same move in different clothes, each one promising to delete some friction of being human, whether it be doubt, rejection, finitude, the work of earning what you believe.

the problem is that those frictions are also the place where reality and meaning live, so if you take them out then you don't win the thing you actually wanted, you just lose the part of it that was worth having.