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.
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.
"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."
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.
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
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.
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.
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
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!
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
> "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)
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.
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.
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..
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....
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.
As you seem to understand, they are literally that. In fact, all emotion is transient and it's good to acknowledge that.
We're programmed that way for a reason. Once you achieve a goal, you get a momentary burst of dopamine that fades fairly quickly. After that you're meant to find a new goal, not sit around living happily ever after.
The real problem is that people don't understand that there are at least two types of happiness: hedonic and euadamonic. Those who think they can achieve lasting hedonic happiness are doomed to to become addicts of one sort or another. Those who understand euadamonic happiness stand at least some chance at a more lasting joy based less on dopamine and more on a sort of contented striving.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?
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.
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.
Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.
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.
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.
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’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every 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.
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.
This post perfectly captures the feeling.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
I thought this was due to natural climate change?
That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.
In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.
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.
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.
> 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.
What would you say is the secret for people who want to live a long and fulfilling life?
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.
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 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.
"And everywhere I go
There's always something to remind me
Of another place in time"
Free to learn anything we want but never possible to learn everything.
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.
and that's exactly how the ruling class maintains it's power and siphons more and more wealth away from the working class.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
16 May, 2026

We've made the world too complicated. 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.
Our world is an explosion of environmental harm, manipulation, corruption, and damage to everything around us.
This puts us all under a stress we can't consciously notice. Manifesting in the slight clenching our jaws, thinning of our breath, steady incline of our blood pressure. There's a spirit of silent confusion in our mind at all times. The world doesn't make sense. It's always been this way, so we don't even know another way to exist.
In the documentary The Thinking Game about Demis Hassabis and Google Deepmind, we are presented with the worldview that AGI offers the best solution to humanity's biggest problems. The ultimate savior from technology.
I think we do a very good job at convincing ourselves that we are doing good things, working towards honest goals. Participating in society, discovering new truths, implementing new plans and projects. Seeing how easy it is to manipulate others, it makes sense that we are the masters of constructing realities around ourselves as well.
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.
These thoughts are bad. These thoughts are aggrandizing "primitive" ways. No. We are primitive now.
The more we learn, the more destruction seems to follow. The sick irony is that we would never have understood this without tools that help us look back, or so we are led to believe. Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
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.
Living Post Script:
I've realized this article is slightly naïve. This was an emotional flow of consciousness at the time of writing, and I must do a lot more thinking about this topic. I've realized this was a strong reaction, and that I must ultimately do the best with where I am. The modern world is in many ways an exceptional place to live and getting better in some ways, worse in others. I think aiming to in some way ease the suffering of other people in far worse situations than me is a good place to begin. The writing above did come from a genuine place, and I've realized that some people agree with the sentiment. The discussion offers a lot of great insight and starting points for further reading. It's been a reminder of how important it is to think critically for yourself and come to your own best conclusions. I am currently watching Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation.
Russians? It's still true today.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?
Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
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.
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.
That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?
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.
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.
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.
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.