It's 3 AM. Two friends sit on a dorm rooftop with fries between them. They've gone through several Angry O's; many have fallen into the bushes below them. The night hums brightly.

River: (scrolling through phone, then tossing it aside) You know what's genuinely psychotic? This whole "balance" fetish everyone's got. Like we're all supposed to be ChatGPT: reliable, efficient, but completely fucking soulless.

Saxon: (smirking) Oh here we go, you discovered philosophy TikTok again. What's next, you gonna tell me we live in a simulation? Time isn't real? We should all be vegetarian?

River: No, shut up and listen for once. Look at this—(pulls up notes app)—Aristotle said virtue is the mean between extremes. Courage exists between cowardice and rashness. Proper pride between humility and vanity, blah blah. But that's literally cope for people who are too scared to actually live. Think about it: every memorable experience you've had, every story worth telling, it's from when you were at the extremes. Either absolutely smashing it or spectacularly crashing out. Nobody remembers their moderately pleasant Monday evening.

Saxon: Uh—

River: Most people think you're supposed to find the sweet spot in the middle. But what if the whole game is wrong? What if you're supposed to speedrun both extremes? Maximum buffoonery until it breaks, then maximum boorishness until you can't breathe, then back again.

Saxon: That's insane. You're basically advocating for voluntary bipolar disorder.

River: No, I'm advocating for actually experiencing the full range of what's possible. Look at anyone who's done anything interesting—they're all extremists in some dimension. Jobs was a tyrant perfectionist. Musk is an obsessive zealot. They're not sitting around journaling about "work-life balance." They are completely fucking unhinged in at least one dimension.

Saxon: That's interesting but you're cherry-picking data points. Extreme outcomes have extreme variance. For every Steve Jobs and Elon there are thousands of delulu founders who burned through their trust funds.

River: (grinning) See, that's exactly my point! You just called them "delulu founders," but at least they tried to build something instead of posting LinkedIn updates about their latest tech internship. Jobs was a complete psycho who treated many of his employees like shit, but he literally generated reality instead of... whatever the fuck we're doing here at 3 AM eating Louies.

Saxon: Jobs also died at 56 from a completely treatable form of cancer because he thought he could cure it with fruit juice. I call that... retarded.

River: At least he lived. He didn't exist his way through eight decades of beige purgatory. Look, there's this Hindu thing—tamas, rajas, sattva. Everyone glazes sattva, the balanced harmonious state, but rajas—the chaotic, passionate state is where shit actually happens. The Zhuangzi aligns too, embracing natural spontaneity rather than over-optimizing and engineering. That's where you get Tesla inventing the future while slowly going insane, or Hamilton inventing the American financial system out of nothing.

Saxon: (smiling) Did you just confirmation bias your way into justifying your bipolar disorder?

River: Experiencing the full dimensionality of consciousness is so much more interesting than living like a hedge fund—bounded downside, bounded upside. You want to know what's really fucked? We literally train ourselves out of this. Kids are idiots, they love everyone, trust everything, want impossible things. They cry immediately when something hurts. No emotional risk management, no hedging strategies. And they're... they're actually happy. We learn to be "smart"—which apparently means loving nothing, trusting no one, wanting only achievable things, and swallowing pain until it metastasizes. We sacrifice our dreams to avoid our nightmares.

Saxon: Empirically speaking, emotional regulation and risk management do correlate with better life outcomes. Lower rates of depression, addiction, financial ruin—

River: Better according to whom? Some effective altruist dataframe? Look at your own life, Saxon. When were you most alive? When you were being reasonable and measured, or when you were either flying high or crashing hard? The variance is the point. The middle of the distribution is where dreams get focus-grouped to death.

Saxon: (considering, pauses) The mathematical reality is that you can't optimize for one tail without accepting the other. Extreme positive experiences require accepting extreme negative ones. Most people aren't equipped to handle that level of psychological volatility.

River: Everything worth doing is destabilizing! Love is destabilizing. Art is destabilizing. Having kids, starting companies, believing in anything—it's all completely fucking destabilizing.

Saxon: Most of society functions precisely because people stay in the middle. Infrastructure, institutions, civilization itself depends on—

River: On most people being NPCs, yeah. But we're not talking about most people. We're talking about whether YOU want to live like you're a beta-neutral hedge fund or like you're actually alive. Stop trying to control where you land on the spectrum. Stop trying to moderate yourself. Just let yourself be fully whatever you are in each moment, even if that's completely contradictory to what you were five minutes ago. We go through our entire lives avoiding everything that puts us off center.

Saxon: This is literally how you end up alone at 45 with a bunch of weird stories and no stability.

River: Better than ending up at 45 with stability and no stories. At least the first person was alive. The second person just existed. I'll probably live more in one year than most people live in a hundred.

Saxon: (long pause) You know what's fucked up? I know you're wrong logically but—

River: But you feel it, right? That pull toward the edges? That's not your death drive talking—that's whatever's left of your actual self trying to break through all the conditioning that says "be reasonable, minimize risk, find your balance."

Saxon: (quietly) Or that's just compound interest on twenty years of emotional suppression finally coming due.

River: (laughing) See? Even when you're having an existential breakthrough, you phrase it like a finance bro. We're so fucked.

A car speeds past and a cold gust hits the duo. Fall is near. Neither moves.