We've made the world too complicated(user8.bearblog.dev) |
We've made the world too complicated(user8.bearblog.dev) |
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?
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.
Thank you, for being vulnerable!
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
watching hypernormalisation u are only digging the hole you are in deeper.
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.
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.
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.
Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?
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.
"..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.
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"...
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?
That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?
Anything that goes down the drain is then treated at a sewage treatment facility and is then dumped into a river/ocean/whatever. Sometimes it’s used for toilet water in large facilities like airports and they put warnings all over everything that it’s not potable because it came from sewage.
There are a few cities with cutting edge “piss to table” technology, but it’s not the norm. The closest you get normally is when an upriver city discharges into a river used downstream.
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.
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.
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!
> "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)
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.
-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.
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?
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
The complexity is the price we pay for keeping people fed in Africa and India. Having said that Juicero was too much complexity.
"And everywhere I go
There's always something to remind me
Of another place in time"
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
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
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.
My previous comment chain is also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980929
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
I can imagine that the world has always been complicated for "the normal guy kind of close to the bottom". I'm sure the vast majority of people throughout History have felt that they had no influence/control on anything surrounding them.
Without getting into an essay, I think we've made the world too fast and too superficial, that's for sure, and it's hurting our psyche big time. Complicated I don't know.
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.
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.
I wish people would read some history. The world was pretty horrific until recently. The urban graveyard effect didn't end until fairly recently: cities were so horrific to live in and so many people died that the only way their populations were sustained was by constant immigration.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
> 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.
[1]: https://openthemagazine.com/india/the-baby-slump-the-fear-of...
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.
Maybe producing even more things is not what's worth doing. But doing more than just passively watch the world pass by is quite definitely a worthy goal. (If one cares about reducing the suffering of sentient beings, that is. If one doesn't, one can just sit and strive not to do anything.)
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.
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.
The last part is far more difficult. Why? As someone said, "We have caveman emotions, live under medieval systems and have access to god-like technology."
Perhaps a simpler example: when driving on the highway, stay out of other driver's way, enjoy the experience and don't cause danger. I can't control how others drive, but I can get out of the way.
You feel that's the best give you can give yourself. Others might feel the best gift they can give themselves, is a community.
Perhaps a war criminal might find equal personal fulfillment in seeing a wildflower as a doctor. But there's more than one ingredient in a happy life :)
If your role is actively making life worse for thousands of others, that's their problem.
When you've been offered the privilege of an uncomplicated life in a complicated world, just grab it by the neck and take it, discard the complications as something for others to deal with!
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.
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.
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
We are little monsters without our parents literally berating us until we develop shame.
Small kids left to their own devices will gang up on anyone different or weak and antagonize them to raise their own social standing. They respect strength/power and have little empathy.
The "intuition" the author refers to only exists because the scoldings he received during his formative years conditioned him to behave "right".
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.
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
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.
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
Luckily we don't have to choose either.
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.
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
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.
Actually it's more complicated than that because for most people said day to day is essential to enable other objectives, like maintaining yourself and / or others.
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.
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.
humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars ... sentience and free will.
;)
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.
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.
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...
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
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.
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.
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.
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.
We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
A war criminal, really! You are making this... complicated ;)
1. There is an evil at both extremes -- I do not advocate for either.
2. Life's simple moments include the ones that build up your communities.
"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.
The simple fact is that our society isn't organized in a way that optimizes for Jesus' teachings. We built practically the opposite kind of society - moneylenders (banks and investment firms) and the rich receive not only massive material comfort, but also most of the allocated power in our society, and are generally lauded by us.
Meanwhile the poor are, generally, considered to be reaping the reward of their laziness, or lack of self control, or spiritual malaise.
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.
> no matter who you are and what your role is
that view is exactly what you are endorsing. You may not feel that way, but unfortunately, you don't have to explicitly feel it in those words to act exactly in accordance to that.
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.
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.
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.
Russians? It's still true today.
> Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent.
That quote really stuck out to me. Personally I help myself with this frequently by attempting to write down steps to recreate guides or other basic material - rubber ducking to a beginner essentially.
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.
This has a ton of effects. Some of the most important: it obscures exploitation (profit appears to derive from capital/risk/trade/etc., i.e. anything but labor), it naturalizes capitalism (markets, competition, money, and wage labor seem transhistorical), it disempowers producers (alienation), and it produces ideological mystification in general (people attribute to greed, unfair exchange, moral failure, production scale, division of labor, or technologies what should be attributed to the specific historical form of labor).
So your example is probably a third-order effect of commodity fetishism.
This condensation of the concept really sucked. I suggest struggling through Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1.
Because of a random ass rock 65 million years ago hitting the reset button.
> at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures
It's unlikely Aristotle made the mistake of thinking that because other people generally weren't writing this stuff down that meant the world was an uncomplicated place
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
As I see it, the quote neither advocates nor critiques unreasonableness, but rather observes that unreasonable people are most often the ones responsible for change. Whether you take that as a lesson on the merits of unreasonableness, the dangers of it, or something in between, is up to interpretation, and depends on how much one values reasonableness vs progress (for the record, I've heard the quote more often in a negative sense by people who put reasonableness above "progress"). It also depends on one's definition of "reasonableness" of course, and whether something can be unreasonable yet still a positive.
So I guess my point is that the quote can mean just about whatever you want it to mean. It's an interesting litmus test. I do agree that people using it as carte blanche for unreasonableness in the name of some sort of nebulous "progress" is, well, unreasonable, though with context I'm certain GP was using it as more of a critique.
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.
In one sense, no because we get this programmed in for free by our ancient biology. But do note that it did not just pop up full formed and took quntillions of complex interactions over eons of time to get to the point it is now. This is why making robots that behave like biological entities is insanely hard, evolution has spent an epic fuckton of compute on the problem already.
Now, if you're building human like robots, then yes, you need to understand all the above.
Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.
Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.
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.
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 often joke that the company I work for did the same job 100 years ago but they only had manual laborers on hundreds of locations. They made the work schedule, they did recruitment. they filled out the contract, every Friday there was an envelope with your salary in it, always the same amount.
Today we have local managers, regional managers, job agencies, cluster coördinators, quality control people, layers of hr people, doctors, instructors and lots of fancy sounding expensive titles that translate poorly. Each with their own fancy car.
So, I ask them what value they add. Makes them furious. I'm not bitter about it, I'm honest about the joke/hypothetical.
The show is much more expensive and we do the manual (actual) work with fewer people. We work much harder and if someone calls in sick all hell breaks lose among the office folk. Zero redundancy.
Some nepotism aside they all think they do important work. Say, the schedule man makes a schedule for 700 people. He works hard but the results are vastly inferior to 8 people working on one location making their own schedule. If you need a day off or want to trade shifts, you just ask a coworker or two. The office worker begs people not to call him. In the future I'm sure he can also make schedules for the office folk(?)
It is that I remember how things use to work. Otherwise i wouldn't even consider if their jobs are useless.
Sitting down for a few minutes to do some administrative tasks is really nice if you are hurling heavy objects and running from left to right all day. Rest improves productivity so it doesn't really cost time. It makes the work less repetitive and if you screw up organizing things yourself you know who to blame.
Here is a simple concept. The job agencies schedules employees, counts hours and pays salaries. After they are done multiple people at the company have to check everything they do. They are doing everything twice! It's very complicated!
With just 8 people on location any idiot can schedule, count hours and multiply by $. It worked fine for 70ish years.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to change your world, demonstrate empathy in your very small, very local society. I'll try to do better in my small world, too. Maybe some day your little society will extend out to touch my little society. Let's hope that together they would form a bigger bubble where empathy is a strength.
I am a very devout capitalist. I believe very deeply in contributing to society. I don't think I am that unusual in this respect. I see people acting very capitalistic to operate community gardens with the maximum margins. I see highly trained experts volunteer as educators. I see well-paid doctors and lawyers raking up leaves for their neighbors. I see accountants freelancing to keep the blind center afloat.
There is a lot of greed in the world. I don't deny it. I confess it in myself. But there are a lot of people doing a lot of good as well. If you're feeling discouraged about the dimmer side of human nature, start up something bright and wholesome and be amazed at how many people flock to help you. Surround yourself with these people. If you don't feel you have the energy to start your own thing, be one of the people who flock to somebody else's bright efforts.
What kind of world do you want to live in? Spend your effort building that world. (Even if it takes a lot of effort.)
Charity won't save us, and all these "good" and "moral" people actively resist any change that could actually solve systemic issues, like progressive tax.
If charity won't save us taxes never will.
> 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.
Similarly, when politicians pass laws that maximize a single value while disregarding the harm it does on other consequential values, they are considered bad people.
The world is complex. Systems of decision making must do careful multi-value optimization to be considered good. Single value maximization is evil because it abdicates responsibility.
In the specific case of modern capitalism as-is-implemented, structures like ETFs and bank saving accounts are specifically designed to launder moral responsibility. "I just allocated my capital to the highest return instruments as recommended by my financial advisor. How could I know through all the opaqueness that I was directly enabling child labor and environmental destruction?"
I don't think that's a binary. I've seen plenty of cases where due to mob culture/etc where 'speaking the truth' despite it being well reasoned ethically/morally, might get you considered an asshole by the group in question. Of course there is a grey line for where the overton window is for such discussions, and a good person would communicate such in a thoughtful manner rather than in an intentionally abrasive fashion.
Otherwise your point is spot on.
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".
> 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
> Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village.
The rival tribe is MAGA, ironically destroying the commons partly because somone told them another tribe was taking their jobs. The ransacking is uncontested and uncontestable because the civilizing forces they oppose only serve to bind others against fighting back.
> Or a predatory animal.
That would be capitalism, killing far more people daily than wolves or bandits ever did.
> Or bacterial infections.
Full circle with this threat, since having lost healthcare at the same time as losing a job means that modernity isn't saving you from a risk like this anyway.
Is fear of losing jobs still a step up? This is more savage than actual savagery and deeply unnatural. Poll 5 strangers, and remove the threat of permanent isolation. You can snap your fingers, and be accepted into the community of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Or be a monk in medieval times. Transported with your family/community to pioneer days, whatever. At least 1 will tell you they don't want to live like this, that almost anything is better, and they'll be very happy to risk early death, extra illness, and extra lawlessness, come what may, because they face these things anyway. Whether you'd choose it personally or think it's wise isn't really the question.. it's hardly an inconsistent position and it's a very common way to feel about modern life.
Nobody is going to want to read anything after that. It’s incredibly patronizing.
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.
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?
Charity is when you pay for things you dont need yourself, tax is when you pay for things you need being part of a larger group.
The desire for control interferes with efficiency, and this is a lesson every decent NGO operating out of Africa learned thirty years ago.
I think our real problem is that we've been dismissing working solutions with "but that's socialism" for so long that socialism is starting to look kind of amazing.
Sometimes socialism can provide solutions that are in the best <qualifier> self interest for a particular issue. In those cases, a good capitalist will choose socialism when <qualifier> is their priority.
I would expect that a good socialist would utilize the principles of capitalism to execute the most cost-effective socialist solutions.
> I think that capitalism describes the effects of acting out of self interest.
Acting out of self interest has results that can be described in many ways, but is too unrelated to the economic structure of capitalism to draw the thread I think you're trying to draw.
Capitalism is a very simple definition: private ownership of the means of production in service of capital accumulation. It's a system that rewards selfishness, but selfish behavior alone doesn't lead to capitalism - there were selfish people in gift economies, and there were selfish Party leaders in the Soviet Union.
The fact is, the charity stuff you do is in spite of capitalism. It's suboptimal behavior under this system. Every dollar you donate could have instead been invested, and then leveraging compound interest, used with higher effectiveness sometime in the future. Also, in giving money away, you harm yourself as a capitalist actor - for no return of investment for your capital accumulation, you spend money. That's suboptimal behavior.
It's certainly POSSIBLE to behave this way under capitalism, you and I both are doing it, however meanwhile a lot of corporations and people aren't doing it, and because capital == power, those corps and people will have more capability of directing the systems that cause whatever issues we're donating to ameliorate.
Donating time to dig wells in a town whose rivers are polluted by mine waste? Meanwhile, the mining company is buying politicians to let them spew more waste. Soon, a several hundred billion dollar oil and gas company is going to show up to frack, and now the wells are poisoned too.
Spending money on groceries that you give to the homeless? The Walmart you bought it from will redirect capital to its lawyers and lobbyists that let it get away with paying such low wages that its workers need to be subsidized by food stamps and your charity in order to survive.
Perhaps capitalism was necessary to get to where we are today. Marx thought so. I don't know. At this point though, it feels like we're industrialized enough that we don't need this "hyper optimal" industrialization economic structure to provide for our society. Look at how poorly resources are allocated: public health crisis in the streets of America while its billionaires horde and control truly unfathomable amounts of capital. Incredibly inefficient and ineffective system!
sorry, but these cannot coexist. you are deceiving yourself.
Before you choose to practice capitalism or something else, you should choose whether to be a good person who contributes to society. Those two things are independent of each other. First choose to be a good person. Then employ whatever gift of intelligence you have to build super efficient systems in pursuit of doing good.
Capitalism is like gravity. Gravity isn't good or bad. It just is. Everybody takes advantage of gravity all the time to do things like walking. Some people build clever systems that explicitly rely on gravity. The current state of gravity is not making the world better or worse than the state of gravity did a million years ago.
People are doing amazing things that seem to defy gravity. But they don't defy gravity. They still rely on principles of physics that include gravity. People who understand gravity can depend on it to make things like Burj Khalifa possible.
Any interaction between people involves economics. Capitalism is just a set of observations about those interactions. Capitalists can be selfish or generous (or both). Capitalism focuses on the effects of acting in self interest. But people have to decide for themselves what is in their best interest. That decision is independent of capitalism. I think it is best not to confuse that decision with capitalism.
That might help better explain why I think capitalism is super awesome when informed by enlightened ideas of self interest. Your gripe doesn't seem to me to be against capitalism. Your argument seems to be that people have mistaken ideas about their own self interest.
This is a very reified stance.
What that means is that it expouses a position that has gone through the process of reification. It is a human behavior that takes an idea, usually social, and simultaneously does two things. It forgets the authors and substitutes nature/the universe/reality as the basis/authority for its existence. We see this across human societies, and across time.
Capitalism is a product of human choices. It exists as a set of human behaviors and legal protections. It is not a natural phenomenon like gravity because unlike gravity, it didn't exist until the 14th or 15th centuries[1]. Capitalism would not exist if legal protections(namely the legal construct of private property) ceased to exist. Laws, like many other products of human production, are dependent on humans for their existence.
1. Depending on whether you want to start with the Muscovy Company or the British East India company.
I argue that capitalism (lower-case) is as old as humans. Was not the shift away from hunter-gatherer a capitalist choice?
(Thank you for your comment. I know a discussion about capitalism is completely off-topic, and an explanation of reification is even more off-topic. But I've enjoyed you bringing it up and exploring the tangent.)
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?
I mean, just no. Unfortunately I don't have a time machine to kick your ass back 300 years ago to a city like London so you get to experience it for yourself.
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!
Before we get too far into the weeds, I want to be very specific about Capitalism. I am referring it to be the ability to buy and sell portions of a company[the capacity to produce]. The conception of company as property. This didn't arise until the events mentioned. From what I gather, it's not a particularly contested definition.
Happy to correspond elsewhere! Contact available in my bio.
What's the difference between capitalism and Capitalism? Are you just describing the act of exchanging resources as capitalism? The Soviet Union fed its workers (usually lol), was that exchange of resources "capitalism?"
This isn't a really accurate use of terms, and imo is an example of the hypernormalization of capitalism, or as the op said, reification. There's a tendency in people to believe that things that existed as recently as a day before they were born, have existed for essentially forever, and are as certain as gravity. In reality, capitalism, which is the private ownership of the means of production in service of accumulating capital, is as stated very young. We have about 25,000 years of human society operating without capitalism.
Trade is not capitalism, nor did the switch to agrarian society represent a capitalist choice. It's frankly a bog standard example of primitive communism. Fields were owned in common by a society, worked in common, reaped in common, consumed in common. Depending on the society, you might have elders, matriarchs, patriarchs etc that determined how resources would be allocated (e.g. successful hunters getting more, spiritual leaders getting more, assholes getting less), but those people weren't "owners" by our capitalist understanding. Nobody paid them rent.
Furthermore, one village trading with another e.g. ox for squash or whatever, isn't capitalism. Even if the ox were "privately owned," and exchanged for e.g. a dowry, the land on which the ox feeds is still owned in common, and such resources were still generally expected to be shared in emergency or for religious or cultural events. Depending on the society of course, but it's a pretty common thread throughout history - the gift economy, and primitive communism.
I think it's very important to keep clear on terms and our history, because dogmatism can cast our feet in concrete and prevent us from trying new, exciting things that are possibly more well suited for the times. One could argue that the global takeover by capitalism is evidence of its effectiveness in all aspects of organizing society, I would say it's more likely to be evidence at its effectiveness of spreading and consuming societies while regulating them just enough to prevent their collapse. Efficient? Hardly - look at the wealth disparity between Apple shareholders and the factory workers that throw themselves off buildings after making the phones that generate apple's fat profit margins. How is that efficient? Therefore I want to push back on this idea of capitalism as gravity to leave us room to explore new ideas.