> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.

Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.

Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.

The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.

>But he some how didn't know when to stop.

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..

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.

Physicists are Atoms way of understanding themselves

Agree.

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....

You liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.

i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.

it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.

ps: the soundtrack is amazing.

pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.

> that all positive emotions are intrinsically transient.

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.

Echo words here.

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” lifestyle not because I believe it will be enjoyable. Quite the opposite. A simple lifestyle is much more laborious, arduous, and mentally taxing in terms of all the minutiae I need to worry about to achieve even modest levels of comfort. E.g. Do I have enough wood stored for the winter?

I strive for a simple life because it gives meaning to life, and a connection to the earth and other living things. It keeps me resilient in the face of hardship and less reliant on other people. It also provides a connection to the past and our heritage.

> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment

This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school

Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological.

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.

But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.

Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.

You might find this interesting

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...

This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.

Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.

I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.

My reaction too, starting with the picture of dense vegetation at the top of the article!

Zen Buddhism has been advocating this precise teaching for millenia. What's new here?

Agreed.

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

See also Moloch.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team.

I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.

Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.

After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.

Do you know how to make paper? Can you? Is it any good? Do you really understand it then?

But did the writer understand how the language got created and how the words shape her thoughts?

Do you know what went into Roman Concrete?

Plenty of people master more than one domain. It's actually easier when the knowledge is more accessibly distributed in more generalised form, so you don't have to find out how to build stone vaults that don't collapse by trial and error

Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...

get eaten alive by mosquitos and be slightly moist all the time!

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.

Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.

Worldwide poverty rate in 1800 = 81%. Today under 10%.

https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/

> Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge

I thought this was due to natural climate change?

> 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.

That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.

This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not.

In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.

I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.

An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.

With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.

"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")

So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.

We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.

The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum.

> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time

Luckily we don't have to choose either.

This comment is like the zen version of "simpsons did it!"

Jonestown, right? Recordings from Jamestown would be quite a big deal.

> Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.

What would you say is the secret for people who want to live a long and fulfilling life?

Could this be because older people have more memories of when certain things were better than they are now?

I found the rest of the movie after the quote to be quite charming.

The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.

There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.

But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)

Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.

Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).

Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.

That's one path to take through life: it's called "engineer". They learn a little about every power of 10 of space and time.

We used to have gods of several domains each for taking up the blame for specific and (back then) inexplainable events. It at least gave the people closure or blueprints for action in order to appease them. Doesn't matter if it really had an effect.

But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.

I mean the full chain from every line of software to the arrays of semiconductors in my CPU to the cooling system in the fab in Taiwan. I have some understanding of these things, but my point was we can never understand every part anymore. I see we agree.

I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.

I'm not sure I agree on your next point.

How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.

Things are definitely getting more complicated over time if your eyes are open. Vibe coding the core systems that run our world will accelerate this.

It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.

It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.

In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."

Neither of those are real freedom.

Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.

If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.

The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.

At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.

Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.

AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.

Unless you were in the High Beyond, where you could always escape the collapse by heaping on more complexity. And if you were willing to skip out into the Transcend, you might even become a god. Small consolation to those of us down here in the Slow Zone, though maybe you could stumble upon some leftover computronium and carve murals into it celebrating your anti-libertarian triumphs.

complexity is intrinsic. complications are extrinsic.

Thank you! What a great song and visual representation of exactly what I was thinking of.

"And everywhere I go

There's always something to remind me

Of another place in time"

It's also basically what was written about in that infamous manifesto.

Which must not be referred to without mentioning Geico's "Caveman" ads, spawning the short-lived "Cavemen" TV series where Cavemen were depicted as a marginalized group.

Please don't be curmudgeonly on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe read as: something as normal as going out for a walk puts you in direct contact with a complicated system. Not that every time one goes outside they feel alienated or anything negative at all.

Without saying too much, I think this is more common in young people than you may think.

He tries to grok it all at the same time which is impossible.

Free to learn anything we want but never possible to learn everything.

Your comment lays bare the problem with Gerontocracy

Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.

Even if that were true it would still bolster his argument.

Here... take a blue pill. Go back to your cube. Produce.

I'm not arguing for ignorance. More acceptance of the ecological forces around us and appreciating them, observing them, and knowing when to let them take their course.

Sounds like you may also have read https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/.

I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.

I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/anthropological-summer/

Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?

In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.

Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.

>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.

Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through

Having a general understanding of how computer hardware and software works, how it’s built, and how it’s assembled is not the same thing as “fully understanding.” If you truly did fully understand, you’d be making a killing securing the OS and application stack, and the world would have far better software. That we still have constant issues with our hardware and software proves that you do not “fully understand” it.

The difference I'm trying to discuss is when humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles. You are right, living in the natural world today would be impossible for most people, requiring generations of local knowledge spread across the community. I should have clarified my meaning of complexity as that which is purely human-made.

To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.

Yeah, let's be suspicious of complexity, and blame spirits for our diseases instead of viruses and germs. Simpler narration aint it. God has wanted me to die. How simple is that?

> The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.

I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.

1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.

2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.

> all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity

To what end?

“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.” ― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

I say this with respect and appreciation for your thoughtful framing, as I also feel for the author:

I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise

Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle

As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.

The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.

The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.

What is the potential, besides more mail spam and better google search (that isn't owned by google)?

yeah lol. if only tech stopped existing we could achieve world peace and everything would be fine and dandy

I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.

You're really not alone in this. Nature exposure has helped a lot since the industrial revolution as far as any mental health concerns go. A return to the old world, full of trees and brush is still there for all of us.

This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.

I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.

The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.

> barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

Russians? It's still true today.

The plow probably isn't the best technology for the example because it is such a substantial improvement in farming capabilities, but something like weaving loom technology or grain milling technology might work better. Because while they reduce labor, it is perfectly feasible to live your entire life using simpler techniques. Hand mills and hand weaving take a lot of labor but aren't hard enough to make living in any particular enviroment too difficult to sustain well into old age. And I can imagine many people scoffing at that tech as unneccessary and dieing without ever feeling a need or desire to adopt it.

I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.

But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.

We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.

Probably just "be lucky."

Oy, yes, correct, thanks for this.

The issue is that "better" is subjective and the subjects are shaped by the environment they grow up in.

Most people thus naturally prefer the world as it was during their formative years.

Sure and the reason why is they were kids and their parents handled everything.

They don't remember when things were better: they don't remember that they were children.

I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.

Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.

There's friction.. and then there's human-created obstacles.

Also introduce him to mercantilism.

But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.

What do you fully understand then? Because you absolutely don't understand your own toilet by this metric.

Every species molds the world to their desires -- we are just much better at it. Competition and being killed by another species is the only thing that keeps things in check, and even then, you get parts of nature that end up being shaped and dominated by one species (beavers, ants, some fungi/bacteria). The world used to be a molten blob, to eventually an ocean full of mostly one species, to now, and eventually, a dead husk.

Yes the world has always been utterly mysterious.

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.

Is that how we have to live?

There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.

It would be if they hadn’t asked that question at the end, which is a fair question.

> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".

I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.

You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.

The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.

If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!

How much money and power is required? Should we stop technological development now or do humans still need new stuff?

Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?

Yet that human complexity was often created to help us deal with natural complexity.

Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)

Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.

Maybe the key difference is that natural complexity asks for adaptation, while human-made complexity often asks for submission

Is The Thinking Game, which sounds like a pile of poop, pivotal to your worries, or did you just mention it in passing?

We could say the same for the industrial revolution that is a point in the past for all of us.

Romans 1:20

Oof, thanks for the corrections.

In what way is understanding the historical context in which we live "blindness"?

Correcting someone who believes an old phenomenon is a new phenomenon, is not the same as giving up and saying we should do nothing about said phenomenon. In fact, understanding something is the first and most important step to changing it, especially a pattern or a habit.

The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.

Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

There is effectively infinite space up high, and low is bounded by death, so it never can average out.

This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.

Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.

AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.

In history there were countless men that promised paradise, if only we destroyed something.

I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.

People said the same thing in 1800s on the eastern seaboard they even built cute little rail lines.

There is no end.

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

I get into the this conversation a lot, when you point out the obvious historical context to "all this change", the response is always "Oh so you want to do nothing?" or "helpless to stop what's happening". That's not the implication of historical context. But it screams for a change in narrative, we aren't helpless, we live in the greatest time, and it can be even greater.

If we are to continue the march of civilization our algorithmic feed driven mania would just be just a blip. But if we give into the hysteria, I am afraid this is the beginning of the end. Our birth rate is dwindling because people are anxious [1], posts like this are not helping.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-pa...

> remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it

Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?

That’s not how city water works.

Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections.

Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.

That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends.

After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.

Well, Zen tries to build a whole religion around the idea, losing the spirit of simple easily comprehensible advice that can be expressed in a single sentence.

So one answer to “what new” could be “delivering the advice without unnecessary complication”. Although I can’t really tell if the advice above covers the whole of Zen, which is part of the issue.

Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.

Others won't stop it, the'll just invade later on. Look at Lebanon for instance.

You mean like this?

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.

I think they are including the whole stack. Even the written word!

Ding ding ding we have a winner. Salivate!

The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.

Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.

Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with. Adapt ourselves to, move in harmony with, rather than trying to adapt nature to our whims. The trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us; maybe our duty here is just to shut up and listen.

Correct me where I was wrong then My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.

That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?

That's true. This brings to mind an idea by Dr. Tom Murphy about sustainability. Human civilization lived sustainably, or in the same state with little change, in the natural world for tens of thousands of years, with much lower entropy than now.

By definition, any behavior that cannot go on forever, or deep into the future is unsustainable. Of course all life on Earth will end and humanity far before it. Maybe our current level sustainability is causing entropy to accelerate.

I'm not saying either way is better, of course better or worse isn't really even a thing. I just wanted to share my thoughts that may inform what I choose for myself to discuss it with others.

Beginning of the end seems a tad hyperbolic. We aren’t running out of humans.

The amount of women having children hasn’t changed since the 80s about 80% the difference is how many they choose to have

Yes, there have been standards for years already. It was proven in s US city some time ago when it faced a bad drought.

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.

i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span

There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.

I think you are both saying the same thing?

Human civilization is often used to describe the last ~ 12k years of us becoming farmers making cities etc.

But way before that, approximately around the time we had both mastered fire and good enough communication skills neanderthals and other homo became the very top of the food chain and started massively altering this planet.

I think scientists in the relevant field call the current extinction period the 4th? One caused by humans.

Sustainable is a "loaded word/concept" of the imprecise language we call English... For who? How long? For self / others? Externalities?

If Mark Zuckerberg creates a robot army and closed loop food producing system and clone installation that keeps him / his descendents alive till the heat death of the universe on an island in Hawai while 99.999999999999999999% of humans and animals die (some other billionaires on new Zealand etc etc) one could argue it's sustainable for said people but not very sustainable for "humanity"

There is no better way. Better way requires a big man / woman / it in the sky / your shoulder who supposedly knows.

You, me and most people on this forum are just the lucky ones (at least top 40% and most likely average top 3% financially ) who can imagine more than we can achieve in life and hence get philosophical from time to time...

Anyway I see you read / quote a lot of books so yeah recommend you the Derek Sivers book "how to live", he's much better than almost everyone at destillation and has the bonus of not having to sell.

Anyway as a tip: You can use sources / references but proof of authority / reference to authority (doctor this,..) Doesn't really add unless it's about a highly practical field. Can just add a source link at the bottom if you wanna reference his words but ideally the idea can stand by itself.

It is a modern miracle, though the miracle is in part that we can now drink poop water.

We aren't?

> Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with.

Your ancestors did that, and invented unknowable gods and spirits to explain/blame everything on, so that people can give up trying to understand or manage the unmanageable.

I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.

Although it's worth noting theres evidence the earliest civilizations like the Sumerians did this at least in part as a "fill in the blanks" exercise. The gods were their dark matter - a stand in for the problem that they were trying to predict the rains, rather then invent a suitably large father/mother to take responsibility away from them.

Agreed, it wasn't necessarily from a place of laziness. I'm just frustrated with this narrative of "Our Ancestors Were One With Nature", since:

1. It is imaginary nostalgia for a golden-age that didn't exist.

2. It is its own covert form of human hubris/egotism, suggesting we had something uniquely different from what all other species struggle with. Closely related to the inverted-snobbery of claiming only humans do $EVIL_THING.