Doctor Stone is an anime where everyone suddenly turns into a statue. Civilization falls apart. Thousands of years pass, and then a superhumanly knowledgeable teenager named Senku wakes up due to nitric acid dripping on him for long enough.

He eventually deduces that the nitric acid caused him to depetrify and drags his petrified friend Taiju under a drip of the acid. Taiju wakes up. The two begin Senku’s quest to rebuild civilization from scratch using the power and knowledge of science.

Senku wants to win

I strive to not make excuses; to fully own my mistakes; to play to win (instead of just looking like I tried). Along this theme, several pieces are dear to me. Whatever I may think of him now, Yudkowsky wrote brilliantly in Trying to Try (and in the rest of the “Challenging the Difficult” sequence). He also wrote of unflinching responsibility and agency in hpmor’s Roles arc, although I find that work’s perspective somewhat toxic and self-corrosive.¹

Dr. Stone takes a different perspective. Senku won’t settle for just surviving—he is determined to achieve full victory. The light of science will drive the stone from every corner of the world. If a challenge comes up, Senku just mockingly laughs and drops some insane 300iq plan to handle it. While that may not be an option in real life, I love the energy. I love this show.

Waking up to beauty

The show also makes me feel alive. I feel reminded of early 2018, when I eagerly read a textbook per month—the world brimmed with wonderful secrets and I was free to learn and grow as I pleased. Where hpmor might say “just work goddamn hard and read the books ‘till you understand”, Dr. Stone takes an easygoing stance of “concepts are easy to learn and explain; most folks can succeed with the right teacher; now shut up and watch this experiment!”. The show has rekindled my excitement to learn, which was extinguished last year and has slowly crept back into existence.

Counting the seconds until depetrification

When I have wished to act but failed to do so, it feels like being stuck in my own body—not quite able to push myself into the decision. When I have stood by injustice and done nothing out of cowardice, or out of self-consciousness, or any other shrinking feeling—at those times, I have felt stuck in my body. The same trap holds me when I feel bored, or depressed, or sharp discomfort.

So there’s something compelling about Senku and Taiju being frozen as statues for thousands of years but never giving up. Taiju was in love with a girl and endured for her. Senku—more distant from his feelings—simply expressed that counting was “the rational thing to do” in order to time his revival during the springtime. But the point I find attractive is that they endured and then awoke to feel the sun on their faces again.

When you’re a statue, you know you’re sitting by as horrible things happen to the world you care about. You can’t do anything about it because you’re made of stone. The world cannot touch you, and you cannot touch it. Your external senses are blank and you’re stuck in your head.

Senku, to his friend Taiju

Episode 1

I was ten billion percent certain that you were alive. There is no way a guy who was intent on confessing to Yuzuriha would give in after just a few thousand years. You aren’t that weak.

In 2023, I became seriously depressed. I did all of the right things:

• waking up at 6am and cycling over to spin class,
• eating well,
• shining tons of light in my face each morning,
• meditating for an hour each day,
• seeing a psychiatrist and getting on antidepressants,
• spending time with friends, and
• spamming gratitude feelings.

But I still felt awful. What did happiness feel like? My memory didn’t serve. At best, I felt nothing. I’d get “stuck” on my couch, unable to muster willpower to do anything besides stare at my wall for hours as horrible thoughts ran through my brain.

My mental “overseer” issued thoughts which were neither dark nor happy, but simply directed me to keep myself safe; to let the horrible thoughts pass by, into the past; that if I waited long enough, I’d feel OK again. I was stuck inside my body as I counted the painful seconds away.

I’d like to say that I have long since left that disturbing state of mind. I can’t say that because it’s not true. However, after a year and a half of work, that state has mostly passed and I usually feel OK—and sometimes even happy! Watching Dr. Stone (seasons 1 & 2) cracked my stone shell a bit more.

Excellent science propaganda

If you want to get a kid excited about science, this show might be the way to do it. In Dr. Stone, the obvious way to win and do cool things is to do science.

But the show is not hard sci-fi. Some dude punches a lion and instantly kills it. Also, Senku counts time accurately enough to know that it’s springtime—an opportune time in which to revive—but I calculate² that (assuming a fixed error) such precision would require him to count off seconds with an error of less than 0.0067% of a second. Lightning strikes immediately after they put down a lightning rod, which is convenient.

But these aren’t big problems. According to infallible Redditors, the chemistry and physics (besides the petrification) is nearly all real. Which is awesome—I’ve learned quite a few fun insights which would have seemed hard to digest. Just accept that the show isn’t hard sci-fi per se.

Conclusion

This show slaps. I can vouch for at least the first two seasons, but I haven’t watched much of the third. The art is great, the plot is generally great, the ideas are interesting, the plot points are not totally predictable, characters are good, & the music is amazing. You can watch the first episode by clicking through to YouTube:

☙❧

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