> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well.
This is not always true, it depends on who you are. If you are an employee at Meta, or work for Philip Morris, you'd certainly do more good for the world by doing almost nothing, staying home doing nothing would be more moral compared to going to work everyday. Not so for doctors, nurses, teachers, and many other professions.
I guess the issue is that, on average, our society looks more like Phillip Morris or Meta than it looks like a school or an hospital. And, most of all, the people our society promotes to steer itself tend to be the kind that thrives at Meta rather than in a school.
To be more precise, the late stage capitalism phase we are in has designed itself around destroying anything that contributes to society.
Nothing can exist without making a profit. If there is something that is useful, our system makes sure it will be exploited for maximum profit which will in turn destroy that very things.
The people leading this society right now sincerely believe that empathy is the fundamental weakness of our civilization, and introspection is something to be avoided as much as possible. I believe our state of affairs stems from those two propositions.
And much of our society believes those two things. You see it every day watching people interact in public with a sense of extreme entitlement. Toxic individualism.
That's not true. Capitalism is merely indifferent to things without economic value. If something is monetizable it will be monetized, which can be very harmful in itself, but capitalism does not seek destruction for it's own sake.
The latest examples are the current war-profiteers in office who drive conflict to fuel a war economy, capitalizing on the rising stock shares of 'defense' contractors.
I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.
At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.
The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.
This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.
Consuming goods and services created far away creates a similar problem. If you don't know where it's from or how it's made, it feels like magic, not quite real, and in some sense like it could go away at any time.
If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.
Large companies break down the work into small pieces, many teams, many layers of abstraction. As a developer, I actually enjoyed doing some customer support calls with users, to connect with how they use the software, and what’s not working for them. Almost no large workplace will offer you this option.
You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.
Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.
The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.
I've heard people describe commodity fetishism as replacing social relationships with relationships to things you own (e.g. your car, your iPhone etc). Is this accurate?
I get the appeal of his arguments but after reading the book, it just doesn't sit right with me. A lot if it reminds me too much of fascist arguments about how all of those city liberals don't do actual labor and the only "real jobs" are farm jobs or something.
Perhaps they have that in common, but facism pushes out into directions that marxism does not. Esp wrt to class, race, and self-determination.
It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.
I agree. I think Stardew Valley is an exhibition of pastoral fascism disguised as a liberal cozy game. A highly mystifying piece of art. I would give it more leeway if it weren't the fact that its utopian imagination is so limited; you build relationships by gifting the exact items the townspeople desire, production still market oriented, homelessness is understood as a choice, large corporations are violently negated in favor of petty production, etc.
For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team.
I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.
Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.
After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.
I work for a small startup and really enjoy my job, honestly. Definitely have a ton of autonomy.
And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing.
My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company.
When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.
I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations.
It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare.
So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on.
So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.
Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.
on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.
No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.
I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.
> I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future.
In pursuit of this noble goal, one can do more harm than good, if not careful. Take for instance a wealthy parent that gifts their child with $5,000,000 so they never have to work, hoping their child's life will be easier than their own. What is the likely result of this gift? A child that never learns the value of money, and goes broke all too soon with no skills to survive.
But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.
Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")
So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.
We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.
We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.
humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars ... sentience and free will.
Ants look at the canopy and try to understand. Feeling good about themselves while farming a herd of aphids, they marvel: "evolution optimized for intelligence to the point of creating fangs and antennas."
Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.
I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.
An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.
With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.
I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.
But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.
Except most of the complexity has nothing to do with “understanding and exploring the universe”, it’s just byproduct of the ever changing fractal composition of attempts to gain or obtain something over someone else.
HN will suggest we solve this complication problem with yet another layer of technology. This sort of complication like a ratchet; it only goes one way. I am with the author here, but so many people love this complicated world. If they could be more packed in, more distracted, have even greater abundance most people would choose that option every time.
For individuals, all you can choose to do is simplify your home life. This is an imperfect solution, but the world around you will only be moving in the other direction.
No, the solution usually creates a caste of citizens unaware that they would not even exist without it,vehemently protesting against the solutions because of sideeffects.
Take the imperialism of old: people did not do this because beeing evil is fun.
They did this because beeing exponential in a linear world produces conflict anyway and to dim the lights elsewhere allowed you to keep the civilizations lights on in the heartland longer.
People fought wars for fertilizer. Now you have hippies protesting against fertilizer made with harber bosch, who would kill each other as some north korean stunted growth dwarfs in imperial wars if they would get their wish.
I’ve heard this idea but don’t believe it was actually a serious claim? Surely it’s only ever been more of a post-hoc PR kind of justification for the massive energy use that nobody genuinely believes?
"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it.
So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".
I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.
You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.
The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.
If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
Just like almost everyone above... 40 years? 50 years? talk about their childhood with rose tinted glasses on and how nowadays children are spoiled brats.
But if you actually paid attention to what adults were saying when you were a teenager, you would remember more or less the same concepts.
>when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far.
10 years of schooling for children is too far. We just adapted to the masochism and forgot how unnatural it is. Then we grow and splurge on therapy and anti-depressants or lose ourselves in addictions and the rat race.
The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.
i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span
It's just that we don't get to enjoy so much time with our kids as we did in the past, that's all. And then we get upset for being thrown into elderly homes.
Some of the hadza tribe left for school only to return to hunter gatherer lifestyle. Living in poverty on a farm isn't really how we used to live, that was already step 1 of industrialization. We used to live in decently large groups hunting.
The fact that one (1) tribe refuses to live in modern society is such big and shocking news affirms GP's point. Preference for industrialized life is so normal that those who choose otherwise are made newsworthy, just like the news will tell you about any plane crash big or small but never the thousands of flights that landed safely everyday.
Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?
In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.
Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.
> The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
The quote is from the introduction of a comedy movie from 1980. Not high brow, not literature, before TikTok and tradwife content, before social media, not aiming to feed angst, not meant to be too deep. It’s the setup for 90 minutes of jokes.
>casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".
Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
>Modern life is easy mode.
I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.
Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...
> Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
There were more slaves and serfs 250 years ago than today. It takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are actually a slave when you are not, in fact, being shipped off to a foreign land in shackles just to pick cotton and get whipped because your owner got bored.
I wish your kids the best. Living under parents with this level of delusional paranoia can do some incredible damage to the minds of young people.
So using your perfectly working and well adjusted mind, you can only imagine a single kind of "slavery"?
Would it have helped if I said "bondage" instead of "slavery"? I think so, because you seemed to have latched on to some imagery strongly associated with that word, without trying to understand the point that is being made.
If you have to stretch the meaning of words in order to try to paint the present as comparable to the past, you've already lost the argument.
I'm sorry but an statement like:
>There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains.
Is an obscene display of ignorance. Do you know what dysentery is? Do you have any idea of the immense amount of pain and suffering caused through the ages by famine? Sickness? Have you in your life taken a history course?
You worry about your children, how afraid were you of their mother dying when giving birth? Because that happened constantly.
I mean the word. It's obscene. That people like you can be so utterly detached from the harsh realities of nature is the greatest testament imaginable that by God yes, we do have it easy.
What? we don't have sickness now? Or an ever increasing amount of sickness? We now have kids with diabetes now! Childhood cancer anyone? We don't have Dysentry for kids, but we have diabetes, and cancer for them now. They can now happily live a 100 years in a hospital!
Ok, I agree if that is your hypothetical. But we have t define "if its happening" and what "everyone is more sick" means relative to before microplastics, or whatever your argument is.
I get your point, just disagree that more people are sick now (depending on the definition of sick). If you die, you're not sick anymore.
There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food. And it is not slowing down. We are adding more and more of it..Look up "Regrettable substitution", and that is exactly as hopeless as it sounds...
So regulations are not doing shit.
So given that, and the basic implication that consuming more sickness inducing stuff would make more people sick, why do you need additional proof that people will get more and more sick going forward?
>Grab a coin right now, try to call the result. If you fail, your child dies before age 10.
And today's reality is that the child would not die, but with a similar chance (may be not right now but in the near future) will have some disease that would make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources...and then child dies anyway....
You think *half of children* are going to have life-ending diseases that will "make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources"???
What's your point? The fact that we still have sickness means things are worse?
What I find fascinating is how people like you, who reference a "pure" and "analog" world, have very "binary" views. Nature is complex, everything is continuous and lives on a spectrum, nothing is binary (not even death). Things can be way better, slightly better, worse etc. There's no such thing as "good" or "bad", everything exists somewhere in between.
But your thinking is so simple and naive, it's a travesty of the nature you appeal to.
Another framing of this is that once you have fulfilled your basic needs of healthy, physical safety and companionship, almost everything else you do is massively deleveraged: you move vast amounts of matter and energy in order to make minute alterations to electrical impulses in your brain.
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.
> Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state.
I.e. progress is understood as positive advancement. Otherwise we use other words like “regression”.
The quote as it is typically used is advocating for the unreasonable man because they precipitate progress. My point is that we shouldn’t idolise this idea of advancement in the abstract, because pretty clearly it can turn everything to shit. We’re not benefiting from those unreasonable men, quite the contrary.
>Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.
But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power.
It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power.
It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.
> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment
This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.
Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections.
Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started.
Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?
> Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will.
This is barely relevant, because it's not a plan for agency or comfort, it's strictly worse in that it would destroy both, in addition to adding displacement and isolation.
> No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.
Frankly that's just projecting your cowardice onto everyone else. But there's a point where anyone will trade comfort for agency. Ready to lose access to modern dentistry if you don't ever have to worry about the coercive attention of the tax man? How about losing access to hot water if your vote is worth 1000x? No more scented soap if you can work on your schedule instead of the one the boss chooses?
By your logic, Ukraine would fold the first time the power went out. And there's a reason you can't just opt out of capitalism or citizenship, that land which is not used is still off limits everywhere, and so on. It's because probably a fifth of the population would take a very big hit in comfort to increase their agency
This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).
The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today.
Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem.
It's a solution only at a superficial level, regarding wealth redistribution. It's just very hard to leave the social class you're born in. Not everyone is doomed by it, far from it, but not enough to consider it a solved problem.
Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.
I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not.
That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends.
After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.
That doesn’t work, on multiple levels. Existing is a prerequisite to wanting; you cannot want if you do not exist. But even if you ignore that, it’s not immediately ethical or unethical to do or not do something just because someone else wants it. But even if you ignore that too, there’s no way of knowing that child won’t be the next genocidal despot. And even if you ignore all that, you could never birth even a fraction of everyone who could ever be born, since those depend on genetics and you can never have every combination of human mating with the other half.
the author is not describing the world. they are describing their experience of it. classic mistake, and quite an anxious version of it.
it's not wrong, but it is tangled in the waves...
people who choose to live in deep in ignorance do so well. many evil people sleep sweetly because they simply do not care.
those that care swim to the surface to escape the pressure, but there they find waves, smashing them against the cliffs.
the trick is to break free from the surface. clearly the author has the will, but not yet the tools. to help, i would suggest the following:
- learn the difference between complexity and complicatedness
- learn about systems thinking
- keep developing your emotional smarts, and actively use this capacity
- read Krishnamurti
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.
Any reasonably intelligent child who can write some poetry, understand basic calculus, and has a working knowledge of chemistry would be heralded as a polymath if you dropped them into the Victorian era. The breadth of human knowledge is just bigger now.
You’re stretching it way too far. Most adults don’t have all those, let alone “reasonably intelligent” children. There were child geniuses before, too.
And yet the stylus was useless to the overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived because they were illiterate. And the stone houses required specialized knowledge held by the masons. And you can walk into any major research university and bump into scores of curious and driven people each holding more knowledge than Pliny the elder.
People seem to have this conception that the average premodern person could do anything from growing crops to coming up with Newtonian theories. No. The average premodern person died before the age the average modern person learned algebra.
You’re stretching the meaning of understanding to ridiculous levels of uselessness. If you’re slapped across the face, do you need to understand physics and biology to know how the movement and speed of a hand interacting with the tissue of your face and interpreted by your brain and nervous system makes it hurt?
Plenty of people master more than one domain. It's actually easier when the knowledge is more accessibly distributed in more generalised form, so you don't have to find out how to build stone vaults that don't collapse by trial and error
Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...
I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.
Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.
TFA’s author notes they’ve watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization. As someone who is vary of his Century of Self documentary, I think it’s worth remembering how deceptive visual mediums can be.
It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.
None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.
Also worth reading, especially today in LLM age: Simulacra and Simulation by Beaudrillard. Heavily inspired The Matrix. Although unlike the movie, he saw simulacra as irreversibly replacing reality, ie you can't get out of the matrix.
I agree with this sentiment. And it's hard to change. But there are plenty of examples of people exiting the normalized system and choosing a different life. Even small changes can make a big impact on mental health, like stopping reading the news.
But I'd encourage the author to consider what setting an example might look like for them. What does a less complicated life look like? Then live it, and eventually, more will follow.
Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.
Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.
I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.
> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.
I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.
80s would be a fine place to have stopped, you even get the Gameboy!
But I also feel obligated to point out... the last time smallpox killed as many people in the US as social media does was well before 1980. The final US death was in the 40s.
There's a lot of meat between "We beat smallpox!" and "I can click a button and expose myself to commentary from any of 3 billion people." in terms of technology.
The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum.
> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time
The plow probably isn't the best technology for the example because it is such a substantial improvement in farming capabilities, but something like weaving loom technology or grain milling technology might work better. Because while they reduce labor, it is perfectly feasible to live your entire life using simpler techniques. Hand mills and hand weaving take a lot of labor but aren't hard enough to make living in any particular enviroment too difficult to sustain well into old age. And I can imagine many people scoffing at that tech as unneccessary and dieing without ever feeling a need or desire to adopt it.
Yes. It's a bit like we're very capable cells that are coming together to build ourselves a body. Why settle for an amoeba? (Other than as a stop along the way.)
This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences.
"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."
i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.
it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.
ps: the soundtrack is amazing.
pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.
it's on your end, works fine here and i go out of my way to piss google off.
with that being said, both my extremely liberal doctor of political science friend and myself (i lean authoritarian and center) find it to be ... underwhelming.
Your post script Seems to be a reaction to some quality of finger wagging you may have received from this article. Everything you said was true, it also was true that strategically it is generally outside the realm of most people’s risk tolerance to abandon civilization of life. But you were right about the harmfulness, the alienness, etc. It is not incumbent on you just because you state how you feel to then also mitigate that feeling with the practical obligations one has to protect protecting themselves in their loved ones in their communities and helping steer humanity in which ever best direction we may be able to reach. The idea that it’s naive to speak a pure and simple fact sounded to me like shame being deployed to silence critique.
There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.
The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.
I myself have long ago begun ‘curating’ stimuli actively, mostly by shutting out that which isn’t relevant or actionable to me. Social media being #1, not counting DM apps.
Push notifications of any kind except for DMs being #2. Sound off.
News that could never affect me or anyone I know, #3.
Noise cancellation to shut out traffic noise and unwanted conversation.
IMO the problem is that most people work to earn food allotment by means so far removed from its production because those detached means appear lucrative; software engineers especially do so by proving the first order derivative of their performance, and oh no that's not so sutainable, but they're always too late to do anything about that.
I don't know if eg. farm works are better than white collar work and there is no buts to follow. All my guts tell me is that too many things in this world require everyone to be above-average within the exact cohort from which the said average is derived from, which just burns down everything.
It seems it's become fashionable these days to believe that happiness is impossible, or even non-existent; that all positive emotions are intrinsically transient. I think this attitude mostly comes from the phenomenon this author describes where you can forget (or just never know) what it's like to be happy. I don't agree with his proposed remedy.
First, I think that very few people have been privileged to enjoy the "simple" lifestyle he wants. Most cultures have either struggled with nature to survive, or avoided that struggle through restless progress. Any culture/organism that was content within it's niche would be outcompeted by fitter cultures/organisms. Ironically, the author is probably one of those best positioned to achieve his ideals; but they don't, because culture has evolved to program them to struggle.
Second, if the bears don't get you, the boredom will. Moderation is key, and it's good to have some mental stimulation too. You don't need to live in nature all the time to be happy. You just need to prioritize spending some time relaxing.
I strive for a “simple” lifestyle not because I believe it will be enjoyable. Quite the opposite. A simple lifestyle is much more laborious, arduous, and mentally taxing in terms of all the minutiae I need to worry about to achieve even modest levels of comfort. E.g. Do I have enough wood stored for the winter?
I strive for a simple life because it gives meaning to life, and a connection to the earth and other living things. It keeps me resilient in the face of hardship and less reliant on other people. It also provides a connection to the past and our heritage.
Modern worlds are led by traumatized, through pathological education and media propaganda, with a undertone of those being hurt and damaged to fear for others suffering the same (while they subconsciously are aware that their suffering is actually their own misfortune that are not actually shared to 90% of the population).
I am still feeling that the overall goodness is still the dominant the human trajectory. Even the traumatized leaders know instinctually when they are close to a sane & happy person. The force of life's energy seems inescapable, like the quantum fabrics that waves everyone's whole existence.
There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.
Kindest advice: read Derek Sivers's "how to live".
Think of it as a distilled wisdom and a choose your own adventure book which will give you perspective, options, frustration and probably become a "quake book".
Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account.
If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...
"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."
Well, Zen tries to build a whole religion around the idea, losing the spirit of simple easily comprehensible advice that can be expressed in a single sentence.
So one answer to “what new” could be “delivering the advice without unnecessary complication”. Although I can’t really tell if the advice above covers the whole of Zen, which is part of the issue.
The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears.
Nice pertinent reference to Jacques Ellul's work. The wikipedia page is a bit sparse but the article Confronting the Technological Society (linked in the bibliography) is a must read to understand the main ideas - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...
I agree with this "Our world is an explosion of environmental harm and damage to everything around us." As humans its our responsibility to protect our mother nature by protecting trees and our nature by planting more to at least be able to give back what our nature gave us. I believe if we can't give back then we should not destroy either.
I've spent most of my career working to simplify systems and processes, and the thing that's surprised me the most is how cool the reception usually is.
I think this is because professionally speaking it acts as a moat. By making something as complex as you are able you raise the participation costs of others.
The example I like to use is: it would never be in a lawyer's interest that the law be simple.
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.
-Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple
And I say this to pretty much every tech we have at the moment, from USB, CPU, GPU, Web, Programming Languages, OS. And the same with every day life appliance as well. Making something simple and elegant is perhaps the hardest thing most people never achieve.
> The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
Moving to a village in the countryside could solve that. Might reduce complexity too. I'm not saying it's better, but a might be a solution for this problem.
> Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
I think it’s the opposite - Kant did too.
But modern way of life don’t leave time and space for people to think about right and wrong. One really has to elevate his spirit to begin pondering about that, most people are living for the next paycheck.
Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world.
Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.
So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.
The difference I'm trying to discuss is when humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles. You are right, living in the natural world today would be impossible for most people, requiring generations of local knowledge spread across the community. I should have clarified my meaning of complexity as that which is purely human-made.
Yet that human complexity was often created to help us deal with natural complexity.
Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)
Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.
Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with. Adapt ourselves to, move in harmony with, rather than trying to adapt nature to our whims. The trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us; maybe our duty here is just to shut up and listen.
> Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with.
Your ancestors did that, and invented unknowable gods and spirits to explain/blame everything on, so that people can give up trying to understand or manage the unmanageable.
Although it's worth noting theres evidence the earliest civilizations like the Sumerians did this at least in part as a "fill in the blanks" exercise. The gods were their dark matter - a stand in for the problem that they were trying to predict the rains, rather then invent a suitably large father/mother to take responsibility away from them.
Agreed, it wasn't necessarily from a place of laziness. I'm just frustrated with this narrative of "Our Ancestors Were One With Nature", since:
1. It is imaginary nostalgia for a golden-age that didn't exist.
2. It is its own covert form of human hubris/egotism, suggesting we had something uniquely different from what all other species struggle with. Closely related to the inverted-snobbery of claiming only humans do $EVIL_THING.
> humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles
What makes human unique in this respect compared to any other species that modify their environment? Is a patch of lichen not interfering with ecological cycles when it breaks down the rocks it lives on into soil?
Every species molds the world to their desires -- we are just much better at it. Competition and being killed by another species is the only thing that keeps things in check, and even then, you get parts of nature that end up being shaped and dominated by one species (beavers, ants, some fungi/bacteria). The world used to be a molten blob, to eventually an ocean full of mostly one species, to now, and eventually, a dead husk.
What's cuckoo today is the world is made, and it's not just mysterious it's crazy.
The european intellect is looking like a disease, an aberration, like a maladaptation that's chasing itself seeking a correction, except the rectification is just a recursive continuation of the disease.
And there are very good reasons to anticipate that humanity may be exterminated by this pathology.
Painful to find that your capacity to recognize the malaise is the cause of the malaise.
Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through
But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.
We used to have gods of several domains each for taking up the blame for specific and (back then) inexplainable events. It at least gave the people closure or blueprints for action in order to appease them. Doesn't matter if it really had an effect.
But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.
Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.
The natural ("prehistoric") state used to be a low density distribution of mobile tribes, which sidestepped a lot of the problems that afflict civilizations, like pandemics and local resource exhaustion.
I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.
Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?
Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.
There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.
I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.
> Honestly, I've wanted to snap my laptop right at the hinge so many times. To throw my phone into the sea. I've wanted to walk out of my school or office and never return. I want to never pay with money or read a written word again. But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
I think it's normal to want to stop doing things you dislike, but I don't think that this feeling stems from "complexity." Instead, human progress has given us the option to stop doing things we dislike at a relatively low cost. For example, if you didn't want to hunt, migrate, or battle in prehistoric times, the consequence for those things would be death.
> To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well.
I believe those things sound nice and worthwhile, but looking at the birds and feeling the wind and water in our hands require safety and surviving requires us to utilize our biological advantages (like our complexity-generating brains). Eating when we're hungry require us to find food, laughing comes from finding safe things to laugh about and/or people to laugh with, etc.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand
that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.
Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.
>I want to never pay with money or read a written word again
not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in
>Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.
>Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.
Having a general understanding of how computer hardware and software works, how it’s built, and how it’s assembled is not the same thing as “fully understanding.” If you truly did fully understand, you’d be making a killing securing the OS and application stack, and the world would have far better software. That we still have constant issues with our hardware and software proves that you do not “fully understand” it.
I mean the full chain from every line of software to the arrays of semiconductors in my CPU to the cooling system in the fab in Taiwan. I have some understanding of these things, but my point was we can never understand every part anymore. I see we agree.
I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.
I'm not sure I agree on your next point.
How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.
It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.
It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.
In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."
Neither of those are real freedom.
Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.
If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.
The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.
At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.
Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.
AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.
I see a lot of "complexity is inherent to existence" type comments. They aren't wrong, but they show that OP's phenomenology could use a little frame work, so to speak. "We've made the world too complicated" could be fairly seen as "complexity is something humans expressed under specific conditions". Not saying we should always strip agency from the discussion (lest we slip into nihilism), but I think it's fair to frame the complexity as a material condition in which we live, rather than something that recedes if you "look at the birbs".
If you can make peace with that, you might then perceive that while all material conditions are complex, it's our existence within them that's fraught. I'd suggest that the discomfort you feel is from inhabiting conditions that change faster than competence can be transmitted across generations. Pre-modern humans (and other animals) didn't experience this (as often, or as intensely at least) because their conditions changed at evolutionary speed. We used to grow up in the same world as our grand parents. Now our parent's lessons are obsolete before we're born, and we're left to cast around for certainty that only comes with generational adaptation. That's almost the definition of anxiety. Thankfully, looking at birds can actually help deal with anxious thoughts!
I don't want to downplay the argument, and more importantly - the author's feelings about the topic, but I'd suggest (unsolicited, sorry) the author take some hobbies away from the screen, find a decent friend or two and spend more time with them, and stop or at least reduce the time spent reading news/twitter/whatever.
this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.
You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.
We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.
To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.
I think the key is to find the right work/life balance to maintain a fulfilling life. For the work portion of your life, you should find problems that interest you and people that you enjoy working with. For your life balance, you should connect with nature in way that resonates with you, be it hiking or growing food, or exploring new places. And of course, in your life balance you should have relationships that can bring witness to your life's journey and help you along the way.
Simple has nothing to do with good. This isn't a deep insight — it's just that "first principles" as an aesthetic keeps tricking people into thinking peeling layers off is the same thing as understanding. A skyscraper is complicated. The answer to "this is too complicated" isn't "live in a hut." The hut is simple. The hut also can't hold a million people.
This argument has been made before by Vernor Vinge in his 1999 novel A Deepness In The Sky: civilisations fall due to the sheer complexity they accumulate.
> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end
there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)
Unless you were in the High Beyond, where you could always escape the collapse by heaping on more complexity. And if you were willing to skip out into the Transcend, you might even become a god. Small consolation to those of us down here in the Slow Zone, though maybe you could stumble upon some leftover computronium and carve murals into it celebrating your anti-libertarian triumphs.
Maybe the goal isn't to reject complexity entirely, but to be much more suspicious of complexity that gives no corresponding increase in dignity, beauty, autonomy or peace
Yeah, let's be suspicious of complexity, and blame spirits for our diseases instead of viruses and germs. Simpler narration aint it. God has wanted me to die. How simple is that?
This "we" is a huge collective spread across space and time, with a web of complex relationships between groups of humans living in different parts of the world during different eras, acting upon each other through trade, commerce, festivities, wars, politics, etc. This web is so complex, that even good intentions lead to hell.
Perhaps this is just entropy sneaking upon us as time passes, waiting for a critical mass of complexity before it decides to strike with fury.
EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.
Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).
So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.
> all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity
To what end?
“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
That's true. This brings to mind an idea by Dr. Tom Murphy about sustainability. Human civilization lived sustainably, or in the same state with little change, in the natural world for tens of thousands of years, with much lower entropy than now.
By definition, any behavior that cannot go on forever, or deep into the future is unsustainable. Of course all life on Earth will end and humanity far before it. Maybe our current level sustainability is causing entropy to accelerate.
I'm not saying either way is better, of course better or worse isn't really even a thing. I just wanted to share my thoughts that may inform what I choose for myself to discuss it with others.
Human civilization is often used to describe the last ~ 12k years of us becoming farmers making cities etc.
But way before that, approximately around the time we had both mastered fire and good enough communication skills neanderthals and other homo became the very top of the food chain and started massively altering this planet.
I think scientists in the relevant field call the current extinction period the 4th? One caused by humans.
Sustainable is a "loaded word/concept" of the imprecise language we call English...
For who? How long? For self / others? Externalities?
If Mark Zuckerberg creates a robot army and closed loop food producing system and clone installation that keeps him / his descendents alive till the heat death of the universe on an island in Hawai while 99.999999999999999999% of humans and animals die (some other billionaires on new Zealand etc etc) one could argue it's sustainable for said people but not very sustainable for "humanity"
There is no better way. Better way requires a big man / woman / it in the sky / your shoulder who supposedly knows.
You, me and most people on this forum are just the lucky ones (at least top 40% and most likely average top 3% financially ) who can imagine more than we can achieve in life and hence get philosophical from time to time...
Anyway I see you read / quote a lot of books so yeah recommend you the Derek Sivers book "how to live", he's much better than almost everyone at destillation and has the bonus of not having to sell.
Anyway as a tip: You can use sources / references but proof of authority / reference to authority (doctor this,..) Doesn't really add unless it's about a highly practical field. Can just add a source link at the bottom if you wanna reference his words but ideally the idea can stand by itself.
Which must not be referred to without mentioning Geico's "Caveman" ads, spawning the short-lived "Cavemen" TV series where Cavemen were depicted as a marginalized group.
Well, I would discard substitute "slightly" for a much stronger adverb but alright, directionally: Good!
The uncomplicated past was horrible. The complications exist for a reason. The natural world is mostly fucking mental by any modern human standard.
Yes, we can do without some regulations and maybe whatever social media is. I don't know.
But we are quite smart at identifying things that are bad for us, over some span of time (due to us discussing them, case in point) and also making them better, working against or in spite of millions of years of evolution. Our lives are short and thus we are incredibly impatient with each other – as we should be! It keeps us on our toes and makes the now important. But we do sometimes forget that, if you are close enough to the now, not everything is a smooth curve and it's not always immediately clear which parts in this complexity do what.
But thing's really do get better. Yes, we do not understand all the systems but it's not like the natural world is a system we understood better in the past. We used to think dancing made rain. And yes, things are getting more dangerous as we are getting more powerful through complications. This is a separate, also complicated issue, because it only requires one rogue agent to do incredible harm anyway. Best I can tell: We need to all get better and keep each other in check.
Unless you are a sort of tourist (and that includes all forms of opt-in naturalness today), the natural world is by and large a complicated, hostile and horrible place by all human standards. We do things for good, selfish reasons and somehow, miraculously this works our fairly well.
I'm paying someone €500 a year to file my taxes and I just want to go back to trading sea shells. Why do systems have to be so complicated. I have to pay my road tax in bills and I get my change in coins what is that about.
This is just one detail, but I think something must have gone wrong if you go for a walk and even the "city-owned sidewalk" seems part of an alienating scene? How are sidewalks part of the problem?
Maybe read as: something as normal as going out for a walk puts you in direct contact with a complicated system. Not that every time one goes outside they feel alienated or anything negative at all.
Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.
There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.
The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.
It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Yes. We can complain that technology is "too complicated" but so is the human brain, consciousness, and every other biological system which we have failed to fully understand.
Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.
> It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
"To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. " I am learning that a "Just this" attitude, like in these words, improves our experience of life. You may enjoy a Kwan Um school (or other) Zen group, where this is reinforced continually.
I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.
Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.
I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.
With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.
Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.
> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
Could you explain how this applies? I don't mean to be difficult -- really. I appreciate that Hacker News is a great place for discussion, and I very much appreciate that's partly because of the work you're doing.
I'd just like to think that my criticism is thoughtful and is neither rigidly nor generically negative: I pointed out specific omissions and offered an analogy to explain the immaturity and cluelessness that I see in the piece -- not just that the claims are wrong but that the perspective is delivered so badly that it's difficul to take seriously. It wasn't meant to be unkind or a swipe; I didn't call names or sneer; it wasn't a generic tangent. It was the best way I could find to characterize the ways the piece's tone and content work together, undermining it and (almost certainly) rubbing people the wrong way.
> [the whole Jonestown (?) bit as a metaphor – at least a little disproportionate, no?]
> I hear the same cluelessness in this piece
I guess the issue is the number of negative terms and characterizations all crammed into one paragraph. It just seems to lay it on too heavy.
The writer is clearly wrestling with something and trying to process it, and the post has tapped into broader sentiment here, given the amount of front page time and discussion, so the dismissal seemed excessively scathing.
It may be that you underestimated how strongly your words come across to the reader, which is a common pitfall with online discussion forums; words often don't seem as harsh when we formulate them in our own mind as they do when read by others.
> The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.
1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.
2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.
I say this with respect and appreciation for your thoughtful framing, as I also feel for the author:
I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise
Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle
In what way is understanding the historical context in which we live "blindness"?
Correcting someone who believes an old phenomenon is a new phenomenon, is not the same as giving up and saying we should do nothing about said phenomenon. In fact, understanding something is the first and most important step to changing it, especially a pattern or a habit.
I get into the this conversation a lot, when you point out the obvious historical context to "all this change", the response is always "Oh so you want to do nothing?" or "helpless to stop what's happening". That's not the implication of historical context. But it screams for a change in narrative, we aren't helpless, we live in the greatest time, and it can be even greater.
If we are to continue the march of civilization our algorithmic feed driven mania would just be just a blip. But if we give into the hysteria, I am afraid this is the beginning of the end. Our birth rate is dwindling because people are anxious [1], posts like this are not helping.
I was trying to explain to my wife how I felt last night. AI and the pressure to use it and balancing the potential and with the pitfalls is stressing me out. But it’s more than that.
AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.
You're really not alone in this. Nature exposure has helped a lot since the industrial revolution as far as any mental health concerns go. A return to the old world, full of trees and brush is still there for all of us.
This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.
I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.
The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.
The image of the article says it all. Look at it. World is already super complicated, and failing in all the possible ways. then it gets recycled for parts. The delusion that order can be sustained easily and in a prolonged manner without immense amounts of energy/information consumed, just does not match the direct observation. Look at the ground and what grows and lives in the grass, it is already super complex, and overcrowded. All of it moves and breaks and comes back.
The problem is that complexity is both a human status signifier, and an extremely convenient weapon for "haves" who are inclined toward "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategies.
Yes. Modern writers think the world we percieve today is somehow more complicated than it was in the past. It is not. The complexity of the world is a function of human thought. When the world appears simple, humanity finds and invents complexity. The past was not simple. It only appears that way when we forget the various invented complexities. Think our schedules are complex? Look into how complicated it was for a roman to specify a paticular day of the year. Look into how many saints and feast days dotted the midieval christian calender. Think modern politics complex? Try organizing a wedding or even a family dinner in a world where invitations travel by horseback.
Thank you for this article. I know no truly effective weapon against the Kingsnorthian Machine, except to name it and remind people that they are still creatures and not machines. That it doesn’t have to be this way. That for 99% of our history it wasn’t this way.
The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.
But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.
If you feel that the devices and technology you use are making you the slave, then master it (learn about it and make it your slave) or dump it.
I'm not being unrealistic. I had a facebook account for about 2 years and then decided I had enough of being Zuckerberg's dumbfuck and deleted it. I still keep a gmail account, but I pay for an email account also. At the very extreme are monastics which is a very real thing even today.
> The world doesn't make sense. It's always been this way, so we don't even know another way to exist.
This is the main line for me. Even around the bonfire with fellow grugs if you got eaten by a tiger, I'm not sure you fully would understand that either. So I'm not exactly sure what this post is getting at? That human history so far is "bad" and we "did it the wrong way"? I'd argue 99% of human adults are just folks trying to do their best to provide for their family. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist though.
Philosophy has had an answer to this (and more) since time immemorial. We simply need to start with "control of our self-grasping mind", "lessen our desires", and "let go" of those things which are not under our control. This is the active and subjective way of approaching it via Hindu/Buddhist/Greek philosophies. Learn to live in the world and yet apart from it.
> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.
There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
>I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand [...] I think we do a very good job at convincing ourselves that we are doing good things, working towards honest goals. [...] I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible.
Nobody has ever made anything on the condition that they fully understand it, which is impossible. The world has always been complex and illegible, not just technology has been encountered that way but the natural world. We never lived in a pastoral utopia that was comprehensible or tamable.
Deleuze is relevant here, as he said human beings always start 'in the middle'. Nobody existed before technology, society or what have you, but is already thrown into it. You don't do something because you fully understand it, you can only understand it by engaging with it. You don't know what you will say before you speak.
You practice not for some pre-defined goal but to open up possibilities, 'lines of flight'. Stop caring about goals, start caring about making connections. If you find yourself in a new city you don't attempt to 'fully understand' it, you just walk. If you don't know how your blog works, write a static site generator. Won't mean you understand your entire computer, but that doesn't matter, you'll find yet another thing to learn as you go.
It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.
I'm not arguing for ignorance. More acceptance of the ecological forces around us and appreciating them, observing them, and knowing when to let them take their course.
> The more we learn, the more destruction seems to follow.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author, but I don't follow this (quite popular) line of thinking at all. No doubt there's large amounts of destruction and cruelty in the world that wouldn't be possible without "complexity". We should never minimize or forget that.
But more destruction with more complexity? It's only a lifetime ago that minor infections had a good chance of killing you or your loved ones. A few lifetimes since we complexified statecraft into one where the powers that be couldn't just off you on a whim. A few lifetimes ago that we figured out more or less reliable ways of not starving. A few generations since we built a complex system to (try to) prevent genocide. You could go on and on.
Sure our world is complex. And full of destruction. I'm not at all buying the leap that it had less of the latter when it had less of the former.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
Touché. It breaks down a bit when I admit I would never want to live in isolation away from modern medicine. But maybe the idea can exist in isolation for a moment.
And it's all for what, really? I read an article earlier today about plans to build a data center the size of Manhattan. I want everyone reading my small comment to please just think about that for a second. Just think about it. What are we doing? We lived for thousands of years without this kind of technoforming activity. Why are we doing this to our planet, to what end?
As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.
The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.
The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.
Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.
Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.
This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.
The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.
This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.
Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.
This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.
Correct me where I was wrong then
My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.
That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?
I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.
I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.
> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
So what about Leonardo da Vinci and countless other "uomo universalis"... He was not an artist? And an engineer and...
I'm firmly in team nurture / choice and would only say that in our time it's harder to be an artist because to be an artist is to sacrifice a lot of other "great options"...
"..But sometimes better than a master of one", is the oft-forgotten coda. I'm mediocre at _a lot_ of stuff, and love it. Wouldn't run my life any other way, and it's far too late to change.
I'm, of course, in awe of folks who dedicate their lives to a single craft, but there's a rich, interesting, and productive life out there for us dabblers.
Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.
At least it shows some attempt on reflection/introspection which is rare.
As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?
This is not always true, it depends on who you are. If you are an employee at Meta, or work for Philip Morris, you'd certainly do more good for the world by doing almost nothing, staying home doing nothing would be more moral compared to going to work everyday. Not so for doctors, nurses, teachers, and many other professions.
How complicated.
The best gift you can give yourself is enjoying the simple moments of life, no matter who you are and what your role is.
And that's all this is about.
Nothing can exist without making a profit. If there is something that is useful, our system makes sure it will be exploited for maximum profit which will in turn destroy that very things.
> On January 17, 1961, in this farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
The latest examples are the current war-profiteers in office who drive conflict to fuel a war economy, capitalizing on the rising stock shares of 'defense' contractors.
At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.
The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.
This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.
You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.
It helps to ask: how many of the modern fascist leaders are retreating to the farm? I see them developing and deploying tech to inceease their grip on power. I see the "farmsy-folk" as a contingent the facists have persuaded to nip at those in the middle. And the means of the persuasion is, ironically, using the Marxist argunent of alienation.
For what it's worth, even ignoring the fact that "uselessness" is an ideologically mediated concept, and so taking his horizon for granted, Graeber's work is empirically incorrect. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09500170211015067 His was the bullshit job.
If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such.
Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.
I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.
Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.
After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.
And yeah I do know our customers and how we help them, but again it’s a bit of a second-step thing.
My point was more that white collar work is inherently less immediate and direct than some other professions, in the sense of doing an end thing for an actual human being, not a company.
When you work as a cook, you make a meal and someone eats it (a really fundamental human activity) immediately. Compare to say, working on a software feature that a few people at a company on the other side of the world uses to decrease their monthly churn rate. Not quite the same level of directness.
I have spent months on projects that benefit a small subset of a service that's a small dependency of another service that's ultimately only used in emergency/outage situations.
It was absolutely essential for the company to have these systems in place, but I was under no illusion that I'd actually see them used during my time in the team because disasters of the necessary magnitude are rare.
So seeing the user journey and understanding the importance did nothing for my feeling on disconnection from what I'm working on.
So I emphasize with the original poster a lot on this.
Well, mine didn’t. It’s called respect and love your neighbours, treat others as you would like to be treated.
It’s pretty simple and feels deeply ingrained
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.
on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.
No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.
I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.
It's also a good idea to learn our own nature better. Example: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
In pursuit of this noble goal, one can do more harm than good, if not careful. Take for instance a wealthy parent that gifts their child with $5,000,000 so they never have to work, hoping their child's life will be easier than their own. What is the likely result of this gift? A child that never learns the value of money, and goes broke all too soon with no skills to survive.
Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.
We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.
;)
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/
Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/environmentalissues/chapter/1...
I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.
An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.
With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.
But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.
For individuals, all you can choose to do is simplify your home life. This is an imperfect solution, but the world around you will only be moving in the other direction.
Take the imperialism of old: people did not do this because beeing evil is fun. They did this because beeing exponential in a linear world produces conflict anyway and to dim the lights elsewhere allowed you to keep the civilizations lights on in the heartland longer.
People fought wars for fertilizer. Now you have hippies protesting against fertilizer made with harber bosch, who would kill each other as some north korean stunted growth dwarfs in imperial wars if they would get their wish.
Not exactly wrong, but an extremely pessimistic perspective which ignores all the positives of the process.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.
You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.
The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.
If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
10 years of schooling for children is too far. We just adapted to the masochism and forgot how unnatural it is. Then we grow and splurge on therapy and anti-depressants or lose ourselves in addictions and the rat race.
Or become empty idiots who find this "normal".
In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.
Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.
The quote is from the introduction of a comedy movie from 1980. Not high brow, not literature, before TikTok and tradwife content, before social media, not aiming to feed angst, not meant to be too deep. It’s the setup for 90 minutes of jokes.
That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".
Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?
>Modern life is easy mode.
I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.
Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...
There were more slaves and serfs 250 years ago than today. It takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you are actually a slave when you are not, in fact, being shipped off to a foreign land in shackles just to pick cotton and get whipped because your owner got bored.
I wish your kids the best. Living under parents with this level of delusional paranoia can do some incredible damage to the minds of young people.
Would it have helped if I said "bondage" instead of "slavery"? I think so, because you seemed to have latched on to some imagery strongly associated with that word, without trying to understand the point that is being made.
I'm sorry but an statement like:
>There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains.
Is an obscene display of ignorance. Do you know what dysentery is? Do you have any idea of the immense amount of pain and suffering caused through the ages by famine? Sickness? Have you in your life taken a history course?
You worry about your children, how afraid were you of their mother dying when giving birth? Because that happened constantly.
I mean the word. It's obscene. That people like you can be so utterly detached from the harsh realities of nature is the greatest testament imaginable that by God yes, we do have it easy.
Congratulations! What a win!
But to compare modern medical care and nutrition to even 100-200 years ago and say it was better in the past is quite... insane.
You can't cherrypick specific problems now and then compare to the entire existence in whatever before times you think were better.
To put it another way... I would easily trade being below average income/class now, to top 1% 200 years ago every single time.
No one is saying that though. I am saying that if the price for that is that everyone is more sick, then it is not a better thing.
I get your point, just disagree that more people are sick now (depending on the definition of sick). If you die, you're not sick anymore.
There are more sickness inducing things in air, water and food. And it is not slowing down. We are adding more and more of it..Look up "Regrettable substitution", and that is exactly as hopeless as it sounds...
So regulations are not doing shit.
So given that, and the basic implication that consuming more sickness inducing stuff would make more people sick, why do you need additional proof that people will get more and more sick going forward?
That was REALITY in the XII century. If you like that better by all means, contact a therapist as soon as possible.
And today's reality is that the child would not die, but with a similar chance (may be not right now but in the near future) will have some disease that would make the child's and the families life hell until they run out of resources...and then child dies anyway....
Do you like that better?
And a huge contributor is the perception that it is OK, because we have advanced medical procedures for them...for who can afford them.
So capitalism/consumerism makes them sick (indiscriminately) and then sells them cure (when they can). Progress!
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and:
> the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress
> Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state.
I.e. progress is understood as positive advancement. Otherwise we use other words like “regression”.
The quote as it is typically used is advocating for the unreasonable man because they precipitate progress. My point is that we shouldn’t idolise this idea of advancement in the abstract, because pretty clearly it can turn everything to shit. We’re not benefiting from those unreasonable men, quite the contrary.
But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power.
It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power.
It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.
This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.
That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.
Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started.
Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?
> Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader?
No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.
This is barely relevant, because it's not a plan for agency or comfort, it's strictly worse in that it would destroy both, in addition to adding displacement and isolation.
> No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.
Frankly that's just projecting your cowardice onto everyone else. But there's a point where anyone will trade comfort for agency. Ready to lose access to modern dentistry if you don't ever have to worry about the coercive attention of the tax man? How about losing access to hot water if your vote is worth 1000x? No more scented soap if you can work on your schedule instead of the one the boss chooses?
By your logic, Ukraine would fold the first time the power went out. And there's a reason you can't just opt out of capitalism or citizenship, that land which is not used is still off limits everywhere, and so on. It's because probably a fifth of the population would take a very big hit in comfort to increase their agency
Russians? It's still true today.
Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem.
Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )
Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.
Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.
In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287
After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.
I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more.
No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..
On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.
it's not wrong, but it is tangled in the waves...
people who choose to live in deep in ignorance do so well. many evil people sleep sweetly because they simply do not care.
those that care swim to the surface to escape the pressure, but there they find waves, smashing them against the cliffs.
the trick is to break free from the surface. clearly the author has the will, but not yet the tools. to help, i would suggest the following:
- learn the difference between complexity and complicatedness - learn about systems thinking - keep developing your emotional smarts, and actively use this capacity - read Krishnamurti
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
Any reasonably intelligent child who can write some poetry, understand basic calculus, and has a working knowledge of chemistry would be heralded as a polymath if you dropped them into the Victorian era. The breadth of human knowledge is just bigger now.
People seem to have this conception that the average premodern person could do anything from growing crops to coming up with Newtonian theories. No. The average premodern person died before the age the average modern person learned algebra.
Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...
It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.
None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.
But I'd encourage the author to consider what setting an example might look like for them. What does a less complicated life look like? Then live it, and eventually, more will follow.
I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.
I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.
But I also feel obligated to point out... the last time smallpox killed as many people in the US as social media does was well before 1980. The final US death was in the 40s.
There's a lot of meat between "We beat smallpox!" and "I can click a button and expose myself to commentary from any of 3 billion people." in terms of technology.
> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time
Luckily we don't have to choose either.
"If plows had not been invented nobody would have to plow the fields!!!"
OK, if that logic sounds ridiculous to you, just realize that this is the whole basis of the argument about things getting complicated.
"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.
ps: the soundtrack is amazing.
pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.
with that being said, both my extremely liberal doctor of political science friend and myself (i lean authoritarian and center) find it to be ... underwhelming.
The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.
I myself have long ago begun ‘curating’ stimuli actively, mostly by shutting out that which isn’t relevant or actionable to me. Social media being #1, not counting DM apps.
Push notifications of any kind except for DMs being #2. Sound off.
News that could never affect me or anyone I know, #3.
Noise cancellation to shut out traffic noise and unwanted conversation.
It has served me well
I don't know if eg. farm works are better than white collar work and there is no buts to follow. All my guts tell me is that too many things in this world require everyone to be above-average within the exact cohort from which the said average is derived from, which just burns down everything.
First, I think that very few people have been privileged to enjoy the "simple" lifestyle he wants. Most cultures have either struggled with nature to survive, or avoided that struggle through restless progress. Any culture/organism that was content within it's niche would be outcompeted by fitter cultures/organisms. Ironically, the author is probably one of those best positioned to achieve his ideals; but they don't, because culture has evolved to program them to struggle.
Second, if the bears don't get you, the boredom will. Moderation is key, and it's good to have some mental stimulation too. You don't need to live in nature all the time to be happy. You just need to prioritize spending some time relaxing.
I strive for a simple life because it gives meaning to life, and a connection to the earth and other living things. It keeps me resilient in the face of hardship and less reliant on other people. It also provides a connection to the past and our heritage.
Modern worlds are led by traumatized, through pathological education and media propaganda, with a undertone of those being hurt and damaged to fear for others suffering the same (while they subconsciously are aware that their suffering is actually their own misfortune that are not actually shared to 90% of the population).
I am still feeling that the overall goodness is still the dominant the human trajectory. Even the traumatized leaders know instinctually when they are close to a sane & happy person. The force of life's energy seems inescapable, like the quantum fabrics that waves everyone's whole existence.
I summarize the complexities as emergent properties of industry: Not all good, some very bad.
But some very good. Some life changing.
We are all gears in a huge wild system. Who knows what will happen?
Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account.
If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...
"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."
Who is this "the world"
Anyway keep up the writing.
Have a great day/evening/night
So one answer to “what new” could be “delivering the advice without unnecessary complication”. Although I can’t really tell if the advice above covers the whole of Zen, which is part of the issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
My previous comment chain is also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980929
I've spent most of my career working to simplify systems and processes, and the thing that's surprised me the most is how cool the reception usually is.
I think this is because professionally speaking it acts as a moat. By making something as complex as you are able you raise the participation costs of others.
The example I like to use is: it would never be in a lawyer's interest that the law be simple.
-Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple
And I say this to pretty much every tech we have at the moment, from USB, CPU, GPU, Web, Programming Languages, OS. And the same with every day life appliance as well. Making something simple and elegant is perhaps the hardest thing most people never achieve.
Moving to a village in the countryside could solve that. Might reduce complexity too. I'm not saying it's better, but a might be a solution for this problem.
I think it’s the opposite - Kant did too.
But modern way of life don’t leave time and space for people to think about right and wrong. One really has to elevate his spirit to begin pondering about that, most people are living for the next paycheck.
and that's exactly how the ruling class maintains it's power and siphons more and more wealth away from the working class.
Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.
So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.
Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)
Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.
Your ancestors did that, and invented unknowable gods and spirits to explain/blame everything on, so that people can give up trying to understand or manage the unmanageable.
1. It is imaginary nostalgia for a golden-age that didn't exist.
2. It is its own covert form of human hubris/egotism, suggesting we had something uniquely different from what all other species struggle with. Closely related to the inverted-snobbery of claiming only humans do $EVIL_THING.
What makes human unique in this respect compared to any other species that modify their environment? Is a patch of lichen not interfering with ecological cycles when it breaks down the rocks it lives on into soil?
A: If you eat this plant before boiling it, it kills you. By boiling it first, I've submitted to natural complexity.
B: If you touch this wire without turning off the power, it kills you. By turning it off first, I've adapted to artificial complexity.
You're just picking between two near-synonyms based on how one sounds scarier.
What's cuckoo today is the world is made, and it's not just mysterious it's crazy.
The european intellect is looking like a disease, an aberration, like a maladaptation that's chasing itself seeking a correction, except the rectification is just a recursive continuation of the disease.
And there are very good reasons to anticipate that humanity may be exterminated by this pathology.
Painful to find that your capacity to recognize the malaise is the cause of the malaise.
But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/anthropological-summer/
The goal is to figure it out for yourself and add meaning, to help your friends and family, the people you love and support.
For humanity, there is no goal, its for each to figure this out. There never was or will be. This isn't Star Trek.
I think it's normal to want to stop doing things you dislike, but I don't think that this feeling stems from "complexity." Instead, human progress has given us the option to stop doing things we dislike at a relatively low cost. For example, if you didn't want to hunt, migrate, or battle in prehistoric times, the consequence for those things would be death.
> To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well.
I believe those things sound nice and worthwhile, but looking at the birds and feeling the wind and water in our hands require safety and surviving requires us to utilize our biological advantages (like our complexity-generating brains). Eating when we're hungry require us to find food, laughing comes from finding safe things to laugh about and/or people to laugh with, etc.
that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.
Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.
>I want to never pay with money or read a written word again
not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in
>Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.
>Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.
a life unexamined is not worth living
I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.
I'm not sure I agree on your next point.
How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.
It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.
In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."
Neither of those are real freedom.
Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.
If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.
The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.
At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.
Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.
AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.
If you can make peace with that, you might then perceive that while all material conditions are complex, it's our existence within them that's fraught. I'd suggest that the discomfort you feel is from inhabiting conditions that change faster than competence can be transmitted across generations. Pre-modern humans (and other animals) didn't experience this (as often, or as intensely at least) because their conditions changed at evolutionary speed. We used to grow up in the same world as our grand parents. Now our parent's lessons are obsolete before we're born, and we're left to cast around for certainty that only comes with generational adaptation. That's almost the definition of anxiety. Thankfully, looking at birds can actually help deal with anxious thoughts!
You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.
We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.
Emphatic disagree with your points.
> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)
This "we" is a huge collective spread across space and time, with a web of complex relationships between groups of humans living in different parts of the world during different eras, acting upon each other through trade, commerce, festivities, wars, politics, etc. This web is so complex, that even good intentions lead to hell.
Perhaps this is just entropy sneaking upon us as time passes, waiting for a critical mass of complexity before it decides to strike with fury.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.
Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).
So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.
To what end?
“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.” ― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
The world is the way it is because of the desires that the powerful have chosen to pursue because they felt those were worthy of pursuit.
Everything is about entropy. There are those who obey it and those who fight it and yet all will fall because of it.
There is no written way the world should be / is best.
Life is change.
Just choose for yourself what is a good life but accept that there will always be trade offs
By definition, any behavior that cannot go on forever, or deep into the future is unsustainable. Of course all life on Earth will end and humanity far before it. Maybe our current level sustainability is causing entropy to accelerate.
I'm not saying either way is better, of course better or worse isn't really even a thing. I just wanted to share my thoughts that may inform what I choose for myself to discuss it with others.
But way before that, approximately around the time we had both mastered fire and good enough communication skills neanderthals and other homo became the very top of the food chain and started massively altering this planet.
I think scientists in the relevant field call the current extinction period the 4th? One caused by humans.
Sustainable is a "loaded word/concept" of the imprecise language we call English... For who? How long? For self / others? Externalities?
If Mark Zuckerberg creates a robot army and closed loop food producing system and clone installation that keeps him / his descendents alive till the heat death of the universe on an island in Hawai while 99.999999999999999999% of humans and animals die (some other billionaires on new Zealand etc etc) one could argue it's sustainable for said people but not very sustainable for "humanity"
There is no better way. Better way requires a big man / woman / it in the sky / your shoulder who supposedly knows.
You, me and most people on this forum are just the lucky ones (at least top 40% and most likely average top 3% financially ) who can imagine more than we can achieve in life and hence get philosophical from time to time...
Anyway I see you read / quote a lot of books so yeah recommend you the Derek Sivers book "how to live", he's much better than almost everyone at destillation and has the bonus of not having to sell.
Anyway as a tip: You can use sources / references but proof of authority / reference to authority (doctor this,..) Doesn't really add unless it's about a highly practical field. Can just add a source link at the bottom if you wanna reference his words but ideally the idea can stand by itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwGI-_-5LFI
"And everywhere I go
There's always something to remind me
Of another place in time"
Well, I would discard substitute "slightly" for a much stronger adverb but alright, directionally: Good!
The uncomplicated past was horrible. The complications exist for a reason. The natural world is mostly fucking mental by any modern human standard.
Yes, we can do without some regulations and maybe whatever social media is. I don't know.
But we are quite smart at identifying things that are bad for us, over some span of time (due to us discussing them, case in point) and also making them better, working against or in spite of millions of years of evolution. Our lives are short and thus we are incredibly impatient with each other – as we should be! It keeps us on our toes and makes the now important. But we do sometimes forget that, if you are close enough to the now, not everything is a smooth curve and it's not always immediately clear which parts in this complexity do what.
But thing's really do get better. Yes, we do not understand all the systems but it's not like the natural world is a system we understood better in the past. We used to think dancing made rain. And yes, things are getting more dangerous as we are getting more powerful through complications. This is a separate, also complicated issue, because it only requires one rogue agent to do incredible harm anyway. Best I can tell: We need to all get better and keep each other in check.
Unless you are a sort of tourist (and that includes all forms of opt-in naturalness today), the natural world is by and large a complicated, hostile and horrible place by all human standards. We do things for good, selfish reasons and somehow, miraculously this works our fairly well.
There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.
The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.
It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.
Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse
Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.
Most people thus naturally prefer the world as it was during their formative years.
They don't remember when things were better: they don't remember that they were children.
With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.
Free to learn anything we want but never possible to learn everything.
Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Could you explain how this applies? I don't mean to be difficult -- really. I appreciate that Hacker News is a great place for discussion, and I very much appreciate that's partly because of the work you're doing.
I'd just like to think that my criticism is thoughtful and is neither rigidly nor generically negative: I pointed out specific omissions and offered an analogy to explain the immaturity and cluelessness that I see in the piece -- not just that the claims are wrong but that the perspective is delivered so badly that it's difficul to take seriously. It wasn't meant to be unkind or a swipe; I didn't call names or sneer; it wasn't a generic tangent. It was the best way I could find to characterize the ways the piece's tone and content work together, undermining it and (almost certainly) rubbing people the wrong way.
> a profound absence of (historical) awareness
> weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness
> strange insistence
> [the whole Jonestown (?) bit as a metaphor – at least a little disproportionate, no?]
> I hear the same cluelessness in this piece
I guess the issue is the number of negative terms and characterizations all crammed into one paragraph. It just seems to lay it on too heavy.
The writer is clearly wrestling with something and trying to process it, and the post has tapped into broader sentiment here, given the amount of front page time and discussion, so the dismissal seemed excessively scathing.
It may be that you underestimated how strongly your words come across to the reader, which is a common pitfall with online discussion forums; words often don't seem as harsh when we formulate them in our own mind as they do when read by others.
I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.
1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.
2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.
I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise
Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle
Correcting someone who believes an old phenomenon is a new phenomenon, is not the same as giving up and saying we should do nothing about said phenomenon. In fact, understanding something is the first and most important step to changing it, especially a pattern or a habit.
If we are to continue the march of civilization our algorithmic feed driven mania would just be just a blip. But if we give into the hysteria, I am afraid this is the beginning of the end. Our birth rate is dwindling because people are anxious [1], posts like this are not helping.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-pa...
[1]: https://openthemagazine.com/india/the-baby-slump-the-fear-of...
https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/
I thought this was due to natural climate change?
What would you say is the secret for people who want to live a long and fulfilling life?
This post perfectly captures the feeling.
This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.
I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.
The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.
Go back 10,000 years.
You can’t control the weather. You don’t know what will poison you. You’re always worried about food and safety.
Yes. Modern writers think the world we percieve today is somehow more complicated than it was in the past. It is not. The complexity of the world is a function of human thought. When the world appears simple, humanity finds and invents complexity. The past was not simple. It only appears that way when we forget the various invented complexities. Think our schedules are complex? Look into how complicated it was for a roman to specify a paticular day of the year. Look into how many saints and feast days dotted the midieval christian calender. Think modern politics complex? Try organizing a wedding or even a family dinner in a world where invitations travel by horseback.
The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.
But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.
If you feel that the devices and technology you use are making you the slave, then master it (learn about it and make it your slave) or dump it.
I'm not being unrealistic. I had a facebook account for about 2 years and then decided I had enough of being Zuckerberg's dumbfuck and deleted it. I still keep a gmail account, but I pay for an email account also. At the very extreme are monastics which is a very real thing even today.
This is the main line for me. Even around the bonfire with fellow grugs if you got eaten by a tiger, I'm not sure you fully would understand that either. So I'm not exactly sure what this post is getting at? That human history so far is "bad" and we "did it the wrong way"? I'd argue 99% of human adults are just folks trying to do their best to provide for their family. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist though.
Is it?
Or is it simply unresigned?
To the author:
there are ways to get away from much of what you described, and retain great sense of community.
I hope you and I both find the balance we enjoy.
watching hypernormalisation u are only digging the hole you are in deeper.
Philosophy has had an answer to this (and more) since time immemorial. We simply need to start with "control of our self-grasping mind", "lessen our desires", and "let go" of those things which are not under our control. This is the active and subjective way of approaching it via Hindu/Buddhist/Greek philosophies. Learn to live in the world and yet apart from it.
For a more analytical approach, see Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia (free ebook) - https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...
For a non-philosophical but scientific study, see Complex Systems Science to understand the nature of Complexity itself - https://www.santafe.edu/what-is-complex-systems-science and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
also, block the internet for a while, buy a commodore and code some machine code, make a forth, you will be alright.
read `the soul of a new machine`.
the world is in the middle of a storm right now, you cant do much, but weather through it.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
Nobody has ever made anything on the condition that they fully understand it, which is impossible. The world has always been complex and illegible, not just technology has been encountered that way but the natural world. We never lived in a pastoral utopia that was comprehensible or tamable.
Deleuze is relevant here, as he said human beings always start 'in the middle'. Nobody existed before technology, society or what have you, but is already thrown into it. You don't do something because you fully understand it, you can only understand it by engaging with it. You don't know what you will say before you speak.
You practice not for some pre-defined goal but to open up possibilities, 'lines of flight'. Stop caring about goals, start caring about making connections. If you find yourself in a new city you don't attempt to 'fully understand' it, you just walk. If you don't know how your blog works, write a static site generator. Won't mean you understand your entire computer, but that doesn't matter, you'll find yet another thing to learn as you go.
Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author, but I don't follow this (quite popular) line of thinking at all. No doubt there's large amounts of destruction and cruelty in the world that wouldn't be possible without "complexity". We should never minimize or forget that.
But more destruction with more complexity? It's only a lifetime ago that minor infections had a good chance of killing you or your loved ones. A few lifetimes since we complexified statecraft into one where the powers that be couldn't just off you on a whim. A few lifetimes ago that we figured out more or less reliable ways of not starving. A few generations since we built a complex system to (try to) prevent genocide. You could go on and on.
Sure our world is complex. And full of destruction. I'm not at all buying the leap that it had less of the latter when it had less of the former.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.
The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.
Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.
This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.
Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.
That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?
Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?
Las Vegas is a 100% closed loop system. All grey water is recycled back into Lake Mead fur reuse.
Modern sewage treatment is a modern miracle.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
So what about Leonardo da Vinci and countless other "uomo universalis"... He was not an artist? And an engineer and...
I'm firmly in team nurture / choice and would only say that in our time it's harder to be an artist because to be an artist is to sacrifice a lot of other "great options"...
"..But sometimes better than a master of one", is the oft-forgotten coda. I'm mediocre at _a lot_ of stuff, and love it. Wouldn't run my life any other way, and it's far too late to change.
I'm, of course, in awe of folks who dedicate their lives to a single craft, but there's a rich, interesting, and productive life out there for us dabblers.
Different strokes for different folks, aye.
As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?