Billionaires should by definition not exist if they abided by all laws and regulations that existed, including paying taxes and paying their workers a fair wage. These people got to where they are because they've committed several serious crimes and destroyed an awful lot of lives in the process, and simply do not care that they did.

This isn't a "skill issue". If we're going to put it into video game logic, this world is a video game where cheaters and hackers are rampant, and nobody does anything about them as they destroy the world. It doesn't matter how good you are at the game, it doesn't matter how much effort you put into learning how to play it, that cheater has godmode and aimbot activated. Nothing you ever do will affect them in any meaningful way. The game masters are also cheaters and thus, it's in their best interests to maintain this. The cheaters have the monopoly on the game and the only reason the game is still going is because we all participate in it or we all die.

The cheaters need us to keep playing or they die as well. Just like how the wealthy elites need us to keep working or everything they have becomes redundant. Their way of life gone and buried. They didn't get there by being good or skilled, they got there because they gave the literal and proverbial middle finger to morals and ethics, and the law, and got rewarded immensely for it. Then they changed the system so it would always benefit them via paid lobbying in politics and getting their bribed politicians to destroy every little thing that could possibly protect the peasants, like you and me.

Stop defending the people who would happily raze your entire neighborhood to the ground and toss you and your family into the meat grinder if it meant making slightly more money this year than the year before. They do not give a FUCK about you. Not a singular fuck. You will not be rewarded for your loyalty. You will not be acknowledged for your perseverance. You do not matter to them. Unless you are the brother of a certain plumber, then you matter greatly enough that terrorism charges are applied to you.

That should tell you everything you need to know. Stop this crabs in a bucket mentality.

And it's time to make pineapple pizzas illegal!! Lol. I wouldn't worry so much about your memories. Other folks in here have suggested some good methods to keep track of things. Journaling, photography, art, these are all great ways to keep track of your memories! I used to write about my dreams after I had them so I'd remember and what surprised me was how I had completely forgotten them when I reread my journal.

It was like I reading something written by someone else entirely!

if I get a concussion and forgot everything, I wouldn’t really be… well… “me” anymore

I get what you mean by this. It's been my theory for a while that your memories are "you", so it's no longer "you" if you lose even half of your memories. You're an entirely different person. Everything that we are, are contained in these memories. If you cloned a person then automatically, they will be a different person from the start. Simply because the memories they make will be different and are no longer identical. It's why I think if someone loses their memories through diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, it's no longer "them".

Hell, every time you go to sleep, you will wake up an entirely different person. Ship of Theseus style. Your memories and even the cells in your body are slowly being replaced by new ones. So... in a way, every single second of our life, we are no longer the "me" that we were and we are now someone else.

It does seem like the eventual destination of any civilization to plug themselves into a simulation. Seeing that the universe expands at the speed of light, with our current understanding of physics and tech, we just simply wouldn't be able to expand as quickly as the universe did. So, we'd always be trapped in this bubble and unable to reach any further.

Why bother with all that trouble when you can be essentially gods in your own virtual reality simulation? You can have any life that you could possibly want in there if it was advanced enough.

This was my exact thought as well. There's really no reason why sufficiently advanced computers couldn't eventually simulate anything and everything. I'm going to go a bit off-topic but there's a theory about the simulation in The Matrix operating from a different set of laws from the real world. Hence the reason why humans can actually work as human batteries very efficiently compared to other forms of energy.

So, there's the possibility that if we are in a simulation then the "real world" might be operating by a different set of laws and physics to what we know in here. If that's the case then I really don't know where the limit actually is or how we could tell from inside here.