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What I love about these types of articles is it reminds me how fortunate I am to live in the wealthiest and most comfortable time Earth has ever seen and it’s v

What I love about these types of articles is it reminds me how fortunate I am to live in the wealthiest and most comfortable time Earth has ever seen and it’s very likely to get better. These types of existential panics aren’t possible when you’re sustenance farming as nearly every human that has existed was forced by nature to endure until a painful, horrifying death from disease or illness perished them. In order to access our hyper modern comfort you’re only asked to contribute something frivolous like clocking in at a record store or writing something that will entertain some people as they enjoy their morning tea. That we increasingly measure contribution, although terrifying in many ways, is also a more just way to compensate contributions. This article seems to yearn for a more political system that would allow her to indulge her creative passion at her whimsy without accountability to the reality of if anyone wants those outputs. A very self serving system indeed. But again what great fortune to be alive today in a wealthy western political zone. To be able to entertain this fantasy.

jacamera 2y ago
I agree generally, but I feel like we're slowly coming to realize that maximal leisure and safety might not necessarily be the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life.
- InkCanon 2y ago
  By certain angles it is even less important than spiritual, community and philosophical purpose. It's not something that you can measure directly but by many possible proxies (Amish levels of depression, the Roseto effect, various studies on happiness of underdeveloped countries), people need very few material things to be happy. Perhaps it is a kind of mass delusion or confirmation bias that happiness must correlate linearly, or even logarithmically, with disposable income.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  This is more or less the point of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Technology is essentially evil as it replaces the things that truly connect man to his nature. That technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Most everything we do now is a “surrogate” activity” to try and get control/power over ourselves and find meaning, which has been vaporized by technological progress. In particular the Industrial Revolution but he himself sees an ideal world basically void of technology. That the revolution should strive to destabilize industrial society enough to force its collapse. I think he has many interesting observations that are really worth exploring. He also predicted a lot of things more or less. But end of the day life is what you make of it. You don’t really have to participate in modern society. And people have always had existential problems and a desire to find meaning, even if they had less time to ponder it (and possibly be antagonized by it) because they were tending a field, etc. They probably had a long time to think about it as an infection slowly ate its way through their body causing immeasurable pain over days or weeks.
InkCanon 2y ago
Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stress etc are all getting worse. Our children will live longer and be more well fed (they're very likely to be overweight), but by every upper metric they are predicted to suffer. The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Im more positive on the topic, and think what we are seeing is growing pains, and they are not equally distributed. Almost all of our historic writings wrestling with the higher levels of the pyramid came from social elites, and now vast swaths of humanity are able (or forced) to wrestle with these tough questions. Many people seem to be avoidant and running from these tough questions to their own detriment, but culture takes time to adjust. I think your points about levels of self fulfillment and satisfaction are strong evidence that the destination state of Brave New World is unstable equilibrium at best. Most people being miserable from their own existential angst is not long sustainable in an environment where the cognitive tools to overcome it exist and are available. I think culture will adapt because I think there is a lot of selection pressure favoring being well adapted. People will look at those with fulfillment and satisfaction and emulate them. Thats what I try to do. Right now just happens be a tough time for a lot of people to identify that because we are in a period of transition. I think people will have a much better sense of which one of us is correct 5 generations from now.
- carapace 2y ago
  > The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades. E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1] As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed." > Depends on what you mean by good. This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?) Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it. Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.) All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after. [1] core transformation process https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/
inquisitorG 2y ago
We simply do a terrible job at educating people about how much the past sucked and instead do the opposite with ridiculous Goethe like romanticism of the past. Never mind that Goethe was the eldest of 7 children with only one sibling not dead as a child. Then going on to have have 5 children of his own. 4 that also happened to die as young children. Modern people are so clueless we literally take the lack of dead children completely granted. The type of person who writes this cultural word salad slop I suspect has an IQ of 100, thinks it is 140 and can't figure out what is wrong with the modern world that they are not above average in their output.

jacamera 2y ago

I agree generally, but I feel like we're slowly coming to realize that maximal leisure and safety might not necessarily be the recipe for a happy and fulfilling life.

InkCanon 2y ago
By certain angles it is even less important than spiritual, community and philosophical purpose. It's not something that you can measure directly but by many possible proxies (Amish levels of depression, the Roseto effect, various studies on happiness of underdeveloped countries), people need very few material things to be happy. Perhaps it is a kind of mass delusion or confirmation bias that happiness must correlate linearly, or even logarithmically, with disposable income.
nemo44x 2y ago
This is more or less the point of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto. Technology is essentially evil as it replaces the things that truly connect man to his nature. That technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Most everything we do now is a “surrogate” activity” to try and get control/power over ourselves and find meaning, which has been vaporized by technological progress. In particular the Industrial Revolution but he himself sees an ideal world basically void of technology. That the revolution should strive to destabilize industrial society enough to force its collapse. I think he has many interesting observations that are really worth exploring. He also predicted a lot of things more or less. But end of the day life is what you make of it. You don’t really have to participate in modern society. And people have always had existential problems and a desire to find meaning, even if they had less time to ponder it (and possibly be antagonized by it) because they were tending a field, etc. They probably had a long time to think about it as an infection slowly ate its way through their body causing immeasurable pain over days or weeks.

InkCanon 2y ago

Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stress etc are all getting worse. Our children will live longer and be more well fed (they're very likely to be overweight), but by every upper metric they are predicted to suffer. The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. Those sci-fi stories of higher life with both vast technology and purpose - like the Forerunners (Halo) - is a pipe dream. We're not even heading in the direction The Culture - a post scarcity society that's like a rich old lady trying to find charities to work with. We're heading towards (at best) a Brave New World society - pacified, materially sound but vacuous and empty.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
Im more positive on the topic, and think what we are seeing is growing pains, and they are not equally distributed. Almost all of our historic writings wrestling with the higher levels of the pyramid came from social elites, and now vast swaths of humanity are able (or forced) to wrestle with these tough questions. Many people seem to be avoidant and running from these tough questions to their own detriment, but culture takes time to adjust. I think your points about levels of self fulfillment and satisfaction are strong evidence that the destination state of Brave New World is unstable equilibrium at best. Most people being miserable from their own existential angst is not long sustainable in an environment where the cognitive tools to overcome it exist and are available. I think culture will adapt because I think there is a lot of selection pressure favoring being well adapted. People will look at those with fulfillment and satisfaction and emulate them. Thats what I try to do. Right now just happens be a tough time for a lot of people to identify that because we are in a period of transition. I think people will have a much better sense of which one of us is correct 5 generations from now.
carapace 2y ago
> The spiritual/philosophical progress of humanity has stagnated. I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades. E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1] As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed." > Depends on what you mean by good. This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?) Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it. Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.) All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after. [1] core transformation process https://www.coretransformation.org/ https://www.coretransformation.org/

inquisitorG 2y ago

We simply do a terrible job at educating people about how much the past sucked and instead do the opposite with ridiculous Goethe like romanticism of the past. Never mind that Goethe was the eldest of 7 children with only one sibling not dead as a child. Then going on to have have 5 children of his own. 4 that also happened to die as young children. Modern people are so clueless we literally take the lack of dead children completely granted. The type of person who writes this cultural word salad slop I suspect has an IQ of 100, thinks it is 140 and can't figure out what is wrong with the modern world that they are not above average in their output.