(I'll heavily rewrite this and explore the concept of "utopia" much more broadly... this does not belong on the Demichronia page, it's off-topic)
Throughout the years, I've explored many ideologies, trying to find "the best (though not necessarily "ideal") society". My method to explore ideologies has always been worldbuilding, as I've always been fascinated with creating fictional countries and "run" countless hypothetical scenarios in order to test my ideas. The first ideology I was truly obsessed with was Marxism, and I believed that kind of system would be the best for humankind to live in. I loved the idea of equality, it seemed fair, how things should be. However, as a deep thinker, and as someone who makes a lot of thought experiments and scenarios to understand things, eventually I realized Marxism was in fact a terrible system, for several reasons which I won't list here because otherwise this section would be way too long. After I got disillusioned, I felt a little "lost", I was like "ok, Marxism sucks... so what is the best system for humankind to live in, then?". My search for the best way to organize a society persisted: I was stubborn and wanted to find something. After Marxism, I explored Libertarianism (and for a brief time, anarcho-capitalism, which didn't seem to make much sense to me, so I discarded it pretty quickly). (To be expanded with the rest of the history with my search for "the best society possible"... coming soon!)
I've never been attracted to systems such as Christianity or Islam, or Nazism or fascism, because even on paper, they have too much unnecessary cruelty. I define unnecessary cruelty as a type of cruelty that provides no benefit to anyone, and it's not some sort of "trade-off", no, it's just cruelty for its own sake, and that of course shouldn't be part of a system that is supposed to be the best for humankind. All other problems, such as "extreme surveillance and repression for the sake of equality", or "extreme poverty for the sake of economic freedom", "social chaos for the sake of cultural freedom", "social repression for the sake of so-called 'political correctness'", "banning guns for the sake of saving lives from firearm violence", "allowing some lives to get lost for the sake of allowing freedom of gun ownership" etc. are not what I call "unnecessary cruelty". Those are what I call "sacrifices": sacrificing something to gain something else. Of course, depending on your personal views, what is worth sacrificing for the sake of what will change dramatically, and it's not my intention to say one is right or the other is wrong, but regardless of your personal preferences, the underlying concept is the same: allowing or doing something bad for the sake of a greater purpose (regardless of whether or not you agree with that purpose, of course). On the other hand, for example, killing someone for having homosexual relationships, like strict Islamic countries (eg. Saudi Arabia, Iran) do is not a "sacrifice". Like, the system just does something bad, without any positive thing that happens in return. Perhaps in ancient societies it was functional to reproduction and sanitary reasons (and even then, I'm not entirely sure, but let's concede that), but now it's just an atavistic vice that does not belong to a system that is supposed to be the best for humankind. So, "unnecessary cruelty" vs "sacrifice". What does Demichronia sacrifice? Perhaps, Demichronia sacrifices freedom, autonomy, perhaps dignity during work time in order to have a free time with a huge variety of things and experiences to buy. I'm not sure, however, that "freedom, autonomy and dignity" ever existed within the context of work in the first place, so perhaps, could it be that Demichronia is not sacrificing anything, and that the work conditions there are not much worse than those in Gaia (I'm not implying work conditions in Gaia are benign by any means... they are what they are)? And this makes me wonder whether or not Demichronia can be considered "dystopian" in the sense of "worse than real Gaian countries". Probably not? I'll explore this in better detail eventually.
To explore potentially non-dystopian variants of Demichronia (or something close to Demichronia), or to find out if Demichronia can even be considered "dystopian" in the first place: I'll try to find out first of all if, in all possible societies, there can be work conditions that are not toxic. In that case, I'll try to understand how much can the alpha be increased while still remaining a society with non-toxic work conditions. This is the "locked work, alpha slider". The other thought experiment will be trying to understand how much can work conditions be ameliorated while still having an alpha that is as maximized as possible. This one is the "locked alpha, work slider". This may be very interesting!
Throughout the years, I've explored many ideologies, trying to find "the best (though not necessarily "ideal") society". At some point, many years ago, I identified as a Marxist (the first ideology I was truly obsessed with), and I believed that was the best system for humankind to live in. However, as a deep thinker, and as someone who makes a lot of thought experiments and scenarios to understand things, eventually I realized Marxism was in fact a terrible system, for several reasons. After I got disillusioned, I thought "ok, Marxism sucks... so what is the best system for humankind to live in, then?". Around 2018/2019 I started exploring Libertarianism, and at first, I was obsessed with it. I thought I had finally found the best system for humankind to live in. However, after creating a lot thought experiments and scenarios regarding Libertarianism, I figured out that while there's no direct coercion in Libertarianism, due to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), there's plenty of indirect coercion, which can take many forms, some of which are extremely severe. Plus, due to freedom of association, after a society reaches a certain level of complexity, there will be plenty of discrimination (which can take many forms, including racism), indirect coercion (i.e. "do this or otherwise we (a quasi-monopoly that owns most things that you'll need in your life) won't offer you service (making your life pretty much impossible"), ostracism etc. I got disillusioned with Libertarianism around 2020, though it was a relatively gradual process, as there were phases where I thought "ok, it sucks... but what's the alternative?". By 2021, I completely abandoned the idea of Libertarianism, and I went through a phase of exploration, where I explored or even created as many ideologies as possible to see which one was the best (and this habit evolved into the philosophy part of this website, where I list as many ideas as possible, I've figured out that's a good approach to have to ideas). I had created literally dozens of them, or more. They're too many to list, but one of them, which I called "Space" (it was literally set on other planets!), included "tolerance/acceptance" as a virtue. Tolerance included tolerance towards racism, "homophobia" and such, but for some reason, less than 1% of the population was racist etc. Not because it was suppressed or frowned upon, but simply because it felt unnatural, the same it'd feel unnatural for a Gaian to be "tomatophobic" (hating people who eat tomatoes). "Space" was still a proportion-dependent society, however, and if for some reason racists and the like surpassed a certain percentage, it would had influenced society negatively. After some scenarios, I understood it was a society in a very fragile equilibrium, and that it was extremely unrealistic. Plus, it's unclear if certain things ought to be tolerated. It's one thing to tolerate people who have racist, anti-homosexual etc. opinions but who don't do anything about that. Like, you may disagree with them, but unless they actually harm anyone, it's not that hard to tolerate them, even if their views are antithetical to yours. On the other hand, what about people who punch random strangers for no reason? What about people who cause acoustic pollution (e.g. playing an electric guitar super loudly) in a dense neighbourhood in the middle of the night while everyone else is trying to sleep? Should that be tolerated as well? It soon became clear to me that "tolerance" was not a very meaningful or useful concept, so I kept exploring other ideas. There was one in 2019 that I called "Wishik", where basically, before the age of 15, no matter where you lived, you would be protected from extreme ideologies by international standards, and at the age of 15 you chose a town where you wanted to live. The world was divided into millions of towns, each one with a different characteristic: some were Buddhist, some were fascists, some were nudists, some were pro-LGBT, some were anti-LGBT etc. basically, for any ideology you could think of, there was a town based on it, and you decided where to go. I also made a lot of thought experiments about that one and while I liked the idea of choosing where to live, there were still certain things I didn't like, though they were subtle and would be long to explain. There was also one, also in 2019 but that I kept exploring over the following years, that was basically Panchronia (though I didn't call it that way, I didn't give it a name until 2025): a virtual reality where everyone had everything they wanted, though it was a solipsistic reality, you were the only conscious entity in it. For a period of time I was fascinated by the idea, and I also coincidentally had learned that Robert Nozick had already thought about it, "The Experience Machine", though it was a thought experiment to argue against hedonism, not in favor of it. And it was a coincidence that idea was already explored, since I developed that idea independently. There were also many (like, easily over 30, I'm not exaggerating!) other ideologies that I had explored, but it'd be way too long to list all of them.
Then, in the last few years but most strongly in 2025, something clicked, like an "Eureka" moment. The inevitability of work. Think about it: what is the constant of all human societies? What do they all have in common? It became clear to me that the answer was: work. Soul-crushing, exploitative, physically and mentally exhausting, stressful, it sucks your life away day after day. Has any society managed to fix that? No. Can it be fixed in the future? Maybe with robots and AI, and even then, the side effects may be unpleasant. So, it became clear to me that work is a constant throughout all human societies, and it's always exploitative, and generally unpleasant. A human society cannot exist without work. The house you (hopefully) live in, the device you're reading this with, the streets, medical services, restaurants etc. all exist because of someone's work. There is no human society that exists without work, and in all human societies, work is exploitative, unpleasant, and has dark characteristics no matter how much some people want to deny it. And so I thought, if work was the constant in all human societies (including Demichronia, which is fictional but retains this characteristic), then what is the variable, the thing that changes across different societies?
Free time. And this is where Demichronia comes in. It had occurred to me that work is pretty much the same everywhere, but free time varies considerably from society to society. And what's interesting is that the quality of work time and free time is not a zero sum. Rather, work mostly remains the same no matter what, it's free time that can change dramatically. For instance, consider that in Islamic countries, like Saudi Arabia, you're not allowed to drink alcohol, or to have homosexual relationships, or to watch a lot of types of media, since a very large proportion gets labelled as "blasphemous", "inappropriate", "sexual" or whatever. There's plenty of things you cannot do in your free time in an Islamic country, and the same reasoning goes for, say, North Korea or China. Now, think about the work in an Islamic country or China or any other super restrictive country. Is it any less stressful or any less exploitative than in a more "free" country? No. What is the use of such restrictions, then? By definition, it worsens the quality of free time, without improving the quality of work time. It's nonsense. On the other hand, the nature of work in "free" countries is only marginally better, and still has dark characteristics hidden behind a facade of hypocrisy. It's clear to me, then, that work is a hopeless, unsolvable problem of humankind (at least until robots arrive). Trying to make it better is an uphill battle that seems to go almost nowhere. I'm aware work can vary somewhat too, it was worse in the past, and in some countries, but overall its nature, even today, is darker and more exploitative than most people would like to admit, and I don't believe it's fixable (before robots). So, I believe the true potential for improvement lies not in the context of work, but in the context of free time. Demichronia is not supposed to be some sort of utopia: work remains as dark, exploitative and unpleasant as it is in Gaia (the real world), it's free time that Demichronia tries to optimize, by approximating a situation of "everyone has everything they want in their free time". I've named Demichronia to mean something along the lines of "half of the time". Which means, the "good" part is the free time, and it would be hypocritical to claim that Demichronia is good "as a whole". Work in Demichronia retains the dark (even unacceptable) characteristics of work in Gaia, but focuses on optimizing wish fulfillment in free time. The purpose of the "Delta" (low variability) is not to make work "less stressful", or "less exploitative", or anything of the sorts, but rather, if a worker had to do everything (or even a high variety of things) a customer asked, it had the potential for "asynchronous punishment", that is, someone who gets treated badly at work for something they did in their free time. The problem is not that it's merely unpleasant, as work is as unpleasant in Demichronia as it is in Gaia, but rather, if asynchronous punishments are allowed, then one is not truly free in their free time, because one would avoid doing things that would lead to negative consequences the day after at work. And that would undermine the very concept of "Demichronia" ("half of the time"). It wouldn't be "Demichronia" if asynchronous punishments happened. The solution to that is to make work days very similar to each other, so that whatever you do in your free time won't have consequences in your work time. Of course, they shouldn't be identical either: a comic book artist shouldn't work on the same scene over and over again every day: the scenes will be different, the comics will be different, but every day at work, the comic book artist works on comic books, it's not like a customer can ask pay them for a kiss on the lips. And a "professional kisser" cannot be paid to create a comic book either. So the delta means low variability... not "identical", but low enough to prevent asynchronous punishments. Work in Demichronia may as well be very unpleasant, exploitative, soul-crushing etc. just like in Gaia, the purpose of the low variation is simply to let free time be truly free. So, this is what Demichronia is about, I hope the concept is clear. I find it to be a very interesting concept, and I want to explore it deeply.
To explore potentially non-dystopian variants of Demichronia (or something close to Demichronia): I'll try to find out first of all if there can be work conditions that are not toxic. In that case, I'll try to understand how much can the alpha be increased while still remaining a society with non-toxic work conditions. This is the "locked work, alpha slider". The other thought experiment will be trying to understand how much can work conditions be ameliorated while still having an alpha that is as maximized as possible. This one is the "locked alpha, work slider". This may be very interesting!