I have a scary thought experiment for you:

Imagine things continue as they are. Tech continues to 2x every other month, elons neurolink tech explodes in popularity, stability and safety; everyone gets one. Why wouldn't you? You get ambient access to the internet and you get an internal mental browser you can use in the background while doing other physical things. It'll be life changing in the moment.

Now move forward a bit more; maybe a couple generations. This tech is now the norm, and similar to a child's first phone, many parents have their kids chipped during middle or elementary school. Eventually it's weirder not to have one.

Over time, we'll learn more about ai, with the ultimate goal of successfully creating a physical harness that can reliably hold and power a human mind. By then we're all chipped so it'll be an easy and reasonable transition to a point where you no longer have to die; you're already connected to the wider network at all times, why not just upload yourself?

Once being uploaded before death becomes the norm, that's it; we're over.

You see, once everyone is connected and we have a hive mind, and once we have most of us there rather than out here physically, you put yourself on a path toward this singularity moment. When everyone's one. People who study the ancient religions and find evidence that humans have some brain organs that are shriveled useless vestiges these days(think appendix) that people seemed to think gave everyone psychic powers or at least a way to be actually tangibly connected to everyone else.

And once we're all one, that means there's only one person left in the world. And now that you're locked in your black box(hard drive), you're alone forever. So what do you do? You simulate life, obviously. That was the least boring thing you remember. You make yourself a little sims world to play dolls in. You practice leaning into each person and pretending to be them; you get better at it, and eventually you can maintain multiple millions of people at once. You even added little bits of code to mess with your memory while you're piloting each one so you can't remember who you are while you're playing.

Unfortunately you only really have the data for how things went for you irl. So no matter how many times you redo the sim it follows the same pattern: about 10k years of just life. And then everything starts falling apart and we race headlong toward our digital end.

According to some historians, we may be on the 5th or 6th such cycle, now. There's supposed to only be 7, but that has nothing to do with us; we'll prolly find out in another 10k years.