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Agreed! When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't p
by throwaway13337 1y ago
Agreed!
When I was learning to drive, I was afraid of hitting the curb. It made me a bad driver. My driver's ed guy told me the common sense advice of 'don't pay attention to the curb - watch the road'. When I internalized that, I drove much better.
It was so simple.
We cannot even conceive of a good future today. We have no vision of what the better future looks like. We need positive fiction to help paint the picture.
Paying attention to the negative just gives you more negative.
The hard question is why it is so hard to imagine a good future. Maybe because we no longer understand our own core problems deeply.
The world waits for the new story.
- natebc 1y agoI took the Motorcycle Safety Foundations safety course before getting my motorcycle license. They have a similar mantra about avoiding something in the road (puddle, pot hole, car with no taillights). Look where you want to go. I don't know where I'm supposed to look right now.
- imglorp 1y ago"Target fixation", ie you semi-autonomously go where you look. I always thought that should have been named "hazard fixation," though.
- natebc 1y agoIndeed. It's quite amazing both how effective it is and how hard it is to not do. The fixation side of this that is. I suppose it's a lizard brain thing. Our ancestors that didn't fixate on the lion got got!
- ratrocket 1y agoYou can consciously harness "target fixation" for good purposes, though. It would be more difficult to talk about that side the coin if it were referred to as "hazard fixation".
- worldsayshi 1y agoExactly this.
- peppers-ghost 1y agoTo me at least it's hard to imagine a good future because I understand climate change will ruin quality of life for most of humanity. I know what must be done to combat it will not be done due to the economic systems that dominate most countries. It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism. Just knowing we do have the ability to slow things down, but actively choose not to in the name of profits and comfort is incredibly depressing and demotivating. The future looks bleak because it will be.
- worldsayshi 1y ago> It's easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism. Yes, so let us try to envision the end of capitalism; in a myriad different stories. That's one thing I want sci fi writers to do.
- abakker 1y agoWe don't even need this - we have a pretty good explanation for what's going on, it's just that people don't want to admit it. the reality is that "work grows to fill available space", but, up until a point. Slowing/declining populations, but high workforce productivity speak to the basic tenets of the population-led economic growth model starting to get a little suspect. A very broad brush view might be that it took 60 years for automations in the workplace to finally match pace with demand, but increasing automation in knowledge work vs the potential for aggregate demand to fall means we'll have to come to terms with the "required" level of productivity, rather than assuming more growth is the objective. If we can get this right, we might see the globe get more equal, more leisure time, and a shrinking of the investment sector since the pursuit of growth might get more nuanced. All of that would take a long time, though.
- ryandrake 1y agoAnything written about "Ending Capitalism" will remain speculative fiction for the foreseeable future. Capitalism has become humanity's majority religion--people believe in it almost without question. Ending capitalism as about as likely as ending Christianity or ending Islam. I don't think it's possible to have enough utopian fiction to cause us even envision ending it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]