When you get caught up on the hustle of modern society and lose yourself in modern technology, it's so easy to forget that you are a part of a larger whole and there is more life on Earth besides human.
For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems even when there's a simple solution. I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place.
Sometimes we should just trust nature to do it's work. This article was a refreshing read.
Had a very similar thought this morning.
With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive.
My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.
When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment.
I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.
Only if you think that wealth is what makes people happy, but we just need to take a look at all the unhappy wealthy people all around us to see that that is not the case. Poverty can make people unhappy of course, especially the stress that comes from uncertainty. But prosperity alone is not sufficient for happiness. Generations of social researchers and philosophers have thrown themselves at this problem.
I'd wager a lot of it comes down to the difference between material wealth vs. a wealth of time. That's the one thing money can't buy.
Except that money DOES buy time. When I have money, I can convert it to time to do things I enjoy. When I don't have money, I need to spend my time to get money in order to survive. I find the statement that "money can't buy time" something that only a fairly wealthy person would believe, and not at all accurate in practice.
Most people with money are old, because that's how you get money in general: provide value over a long period of time. But they would probably all trade that money for being 22 again, and having a lifetime ahead.
Someone asked a substitute teacher if she would make that trade, and she said she wouldn’t, not unless she could retain what she knew now. So, buy a renewed youth? Sure. But do 22 again as a 22 year old? Nope. Now that I’m “over the hill”, I see what she meant. Being 44 is similar to the difference between 11 and 22; not as drastic, but the stuff I understand about life I would not even be able to communicate to 22 year old me. Definitely would not want to relive my 20s. “Life starts at 40” is not just cope, there’s some truth in there, too.
Yes, but you're not 70 and wealthy. 44 is still pretty young[0].
[0] this may be cope
I would agree with the statement that money can't buy time that has already passed, because nothing can do that. Money can definitely buy time in the present moment, though.
Where did you get the "amount of technology" = "wealth" from parent's comment?
With the current amount of technology we could put a roof over people's head, provide clean water and safe foods and medicines. This has nothing to do with owning a Lamborghini or eating a Michelin star restaurant, which would indeed count as superfluous wealth that doesn't actually improve happiness.
Technology makes possible things cheaper and impossible things possible, which is a form of wealth. At any rate, both money and technology can make us materially comfortable. But the reason “money can’t buy happiness” is that a large part of happiness comes from connections with people, to society, and perhaps even to nature. Another large part comes from one’s meaning or purpose. Neither of those can be bought or technologied.
Maybe it's not about the things we have, but about the hope we have. You run away, you change, you survive things because you have hope in a better future. You even work to make a better future for your kids. You have hope. What hope have those people today?
Or phrased differently: she struggled for her survival. It's a very physical one-off challenge that you can master (or not).
That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking.
None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too.
A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire.
You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?
Historically, the people taking up arms certainly did NOT distribute wealth if they won. Rather, the leaders of any successful rebellion just became the new elite and the poor remained the poor but with new leadership.
That’s not how it was among the Germanic peoples at least. They followed people who were called “gold-giver”. It was seen as the responsibility of the leader to bring wealth to his followers in exchange for their loyalty and courage. I think Christianity changed that expectation to some degree.
Replace the word wealth with prosperity and the same applies for your later example. The leader is just someone you can’t see, touch, or hear so is harder to displace.
You're looking at it very 1-dimensionally.
The war leaders certainly didn't literally distribute wealth to the conscripted people. Instead you had plundering, with the winners simply taking things and the dead were ... Well, outta the picture, consequently the survivors had the opportunity to become skilled craftsman and marry after their return, as most didn't survive (even if their side won).
Let's say a farmer family's children were all conscripted. 5 left and 2 returned. Before the war, 4 had few prospects. After the war, both will have prospects, one to succeed the farm and the other one as the husband to another farm that didn't have anyone return.
You mean like kids looking forward to growing up. But once you’re grown up, or even old, there just isn’t anything to look forward to anymore?
I think there is a lot to unpack in your anecdote about the baker vis-a-vis happiness vs proliferation of depression in modern life.
If I had to summarize my own thoughts about it, it’s ownership, community/relationships, and hardships/challenges that can be overcome through hard work.
Modern technology counter intuitively gives us very little agency everything is owned by faceless/soulless corporations, technology “connects us” in unparalleled ways but also isolates us, and while life has and likely will always be hard for the majority there is a feeling of invisible prisons enabled through technology that no amount of hard work can overcome.
I agree. Especially the ownership thing.
Tangent:
I remember my mother, in the 1980s, getting a parking ticket. So she had to go to the local police officer. We were a tiny town, a village almost. But there was a police station. And the officer was in charge of this case. He talked to my mother. She explained. And he ended up saying that in this case, he’d be willing to make an exception.
Fast forward to today. I drive to school in the morning. There’s a van at the side of the road. It’s not even police; some kind of contractor. Out on the road, there’s a fancy radar/speed trap thing. They probably paid €100,000 of taxpayer money for it, plus a servicing contract. Were probably promised that it’s gonna pay for itself within two years. And now the two dudes sit inside the van. The machine is doing the work. Tickets are being sent out automatically by a computer system. And there is literally nobody who owns the process.
It is an abstract machinery, turning citizens into objects.
My mother and the policeman, as a result of the encounter, had reached an understanding. They became partners in the higher principle. There was a true connection between the citizens and the state. The state had a face, and there was a local representative who was in charge.
Today, the state has no face. Even the judges in the legal system just act as tiny wheels in the machinery. It’s hard to find anyone whoever owns anything. Much less owns up to anything.
The opening scene of American Gangster Denzel Washington’s character is the driver/right hand man for Bumpy Johnson. They go into a store and Bumpy has a heart attack, Denzel calls for help, and Bumpy just says “forget it frank, there’s no one in charge.”
And so it is when PayPal or coinbase accounts get frozen, or social media accounts get suspended without notice or explanation, Gmail accounts get hacked or deleted in freak occurrences. Good luck getting any help, there’s no one in charge, the best you can hope for is social media shamming which only works when you already have influence.
There is someone in charge of PayPal (and sort of Coinbase), it's their regulator.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/
Maybe this is just because we culturally overvalue the individual. Maybe technology helps us survive and have 'more' on a macro level but causes problems on a micro level, and maybe we are more geared 'naturally' than we believe to sacrifice our micro for a good human macro. I think about ants that sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony, surely without the same reasoning we would do something similar for[1].
[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/exploding-ants-sacri...
Evolutionary biology and game theory can offer insight here. Ants are genetically identical which drives this behavior.
Interesting! I didn't know that
Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe:
Just like the winegrowers, who, living in a garden not cultivated by them, had to understand and feel that they were in immeasurable debt to the landlord, people must also understand and feel that from the day of their birth until their death, they are always in immeasurable debt to someone: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those yet to come; to that which was, is, and will be the beginning of everything. They must understand that with every hour of their life, as they accept life, they reinforce this obligation that binds them to life and its origin, and that therefore, the person who denies this obligation and lives for themselves, in trying to preserve their personal life, ultimately destroys it.
This is precisely what Christ repeated many times.
The true life is only that which continues the past life and contributes to the salvation of the present and future life.
At least as measured by suicide rates in the US your grandmothers likely generation new quite well what depression was even if the word didn’t matter. Between the 1920s and the end of WW2 the suicide rate per 100000 was lowest at 15 but reached almost 22.
The pandemic rate which caused (rightly) lots of angst and introspection was 14.3.
We should investigate what is causing increased levels of depression currently but we shouldn’t assume it was absent in other generations when we do it.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...
They knew what suffering was, and arguably did more of it. But very few of them thought of it as a primarily medical problem, one requiring intervention by professionals, medicine, and so on. People who think of their problems in this newer way handle them differently, and not always better.
Point taken. Can’t get more textbook survivorship bias. :)
Should have let the op continue their victim blaming tirade. Was just getting good.
While I agree with what a lot of what you said, there is a lot of survivorship bias in a single anecedote. My Grandma also has a very similar story, born in 1920s, fled from the Russians, no depression. But there is family from the same time period that committed suicide. Then for every one suicide there were 10 people that lived out of the bottle. So even though no one talked about depression it was there.
Is she still alive? I can recommend interviewing her about the past and recording it. There may come a time where you will be glad to have those recordings. Or your children/grandchildren. Also, given the right prompting, you may learn things about her that you have never seen before.
She is, and mentally very sharp too. That is a great idea, will do that.
They don’t have to be perfect. With Wisper and LLMs it’s easy to later filter out the interesting parts. Or even to turn it into some kind of personal memoir booklet.
Is that true, the mass produced bread is more expensive?
Difficult to calculate, with inflation and everything. But I do remember from the 1980s that a roll of bread was ~2 Euro cents (5 Pfennig), nominally. And now it’s ~20.
With industrial baking, modern fertilizers, farming automation, global container shipping, and all of that, one would reasonably expect it to have gotten significantly cheaper.
I think there are 2 aspects to the anecdote about your grandma.
Firstly, no one spoke about depression, because it as a condition was not recognized. It doesn't mean people didn't feel depressed.
Secondly, this time supporting your argument, perhaps when people go through terrible things in their childhood, they grow resilient towards adversity. If you know things can get a lot worse, you don't really worry about minor things.
"With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive."
I actually think we are.
Reminds me of Act 2 from this “This American Life” episode. Sub “Toska” for “depression” and maybe you’ll see things in a different light.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/822/transcript
This is overly simplistic thinking. Of Course increases in technology isn't the only factor determining aggregate societal well being or happiness or whatever. But it would be naive and disingenuous to suggest anything other than it being monotonic at the very least.
This also asks for a search for better social technology, as opposed to asserting that we must slow down the search for better physical technology because the social technology isn't keeping up.
I don't quote The Bible often but I think we can have some space for a quote here:
"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26
I'm curious, what does that quote really mean? I can attempt to draw a few conclusions, but I'm not quite sure of either and they can also almost be the opposite of each other.
It's interesting how people come and mock without having any framework of understanding the thing. It's almost like a lost language. Consider air - it is immaterial, the spirit/principle/reason/meaning/pattern of things. It's also the vehicle for speech, and when we stop breathing it we die. I don't think the quote (or the broader text) means a single concrete thing - it's saying something about how the world works, and should be applicable in multiple ways. Under appreciated rabbit hole!
A purpose of a religious text is to control people. They do that through well-known ways. It says “blah-blah, but look at this fallacy you aren’t aware of, so believe in god”, at different zoom levels. Every one of these is trivially deconstructible cause their main target was uneducated masses which had no scrutiny. Those who had it were religiously “educated” and accounted for. Religions that didn’t do that didn’t survive. That’s the framework of understanding. This thing wasn’t written by “god”, it’s a work of a few scammers, sadly the biggest in our history.
It seems to me that your stand is analogous to anarchists' about law and government. Sure, there's a tyrannical aspect that can get out of hand, but it's far from the whole story.
I don’t think this is a good analogy, since laws and government don’t tell you how the world works, it’s either observable without explanation or left unexplained. In religion there’s no whole story, it all made up. It may contain some real life parts, but it could do so without religious parts. Real life stories doesn’t make it more credible in sentences containing “god”. In fact, the quote of this subthread is wrong, false, debunked. There’s no need to look at it in context, cause whatever role it plays in it can’t make it look good. Looking at falsehoods “in context” and referring to “deeper knowledge and proper understanding” is a beloved theme of religious manipulation.
I think the disconnect is that you seem to consider religious texts as a dry statements of fact. That doesn't make any sense, they're clearly not that.
Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales that for some reason keep grabbing our attention and we repeat them for generations? That they're just falsehoods because duh, frogs obviously can't talk? Or can they have some deeper meaning? Stating facts is not the only way to describe the world.
Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?
per previous poster: "laws and government don’t tell you how the world works"
works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts, as much of the contents of the Bible does - but some things in there are meant to be at least partially literal, such as the existence of a divine being that created the world.
What's the greater message behind "God takes care of lesser creatures" when there's no proof of such a thing? That things will generally turn out alright if you don't plan ahead (demonstratably bad advice)..
No, I'm not suggesting that. The alternatives to just reporting facts are more than "merely a metaphor".
Disagree - I think they distill patterns from the factual and present them in the form of stories, encoded in the structure of the story. If you're a materialist you might say that the story is less true than the factual manifestations of the patterns, I'd say it's more true; and that it's telling something about the world.
We're debating if zero even exists, don't ask me about analysis ;)
Actually the purpose of that whole chapter is about not being a hypocrite, being authentic, not being greedy, and having faith. It's a quick < 5-minute read.
Yeah, a bunch of dudes created a book (which costed a fortune or two before typewriter age) to tell everyone to be good just for the sake of it. As plausible as it can get. /s
It’s a medieval gaslightenment and it would be great if people kept it private at least.
PS. purpose is different from meaning, the latter is just a medium for purpose and may be arbitrary.
I feel the same sometimes about people's opinions. Alas, people can say what they want.
Maybe they do have a framework, allowing them to mock it? There must be a reason why there are so many holy writings on this remote little planet.
I don't know that I know what it means, but I'll tell you a thought it brought to mind.
A while ago I was having a discussion, and someone asserted that synthetic fertilizers are necessary because composting doesn't scale.
And my reaction was, surely composting scales to an entire biosphere - like, empirically we know this, right? There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber. Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom to create supply chains that can run as closed loops and accept inputs that aren't so rich and concentrated?
I don't want to argue this point, there are definitely good counterarguments that could be made, but I'm just trying to illustrate the shift in perspective I think the commenter may have been going for rather than change the topic.
The argument doesn't quite work imo because farmers are actively working against the normal ecosystem - we don't want the normal plants to grow there, we want our desired crops. With enough production for us to feed the world and to give farmers a living wage.
I still think it's doable (but not if we also want to feed many times our mass in lifestock), but it's not easy.
Farmers also want to have a large swaths of a monoculture plant, because it is easy then to mechanize. That goes, as you say, against the normal ecosystem. Permaculture gardens look much different, but you can't easily mechanize that.
Yes, and the more manual labor it needs, the more time intensive it is, the harder it is for someone to make a living.
I don't want to argue the point (but I also am not dismissing your points, the position I put forward is definitely not unassailable), but I think there's an opportunity to make my original point better here, which is; sometimes we get trapped in the logic of our own systems and fail to think outside the box. Is it monoculture or low-N culture really required? Or is it a local optimum we lack the imagination to see beyond?
What got you here might not get you there. You can go really far with a monolithic web app running on top of a relational database. But if you scale far enough, you'll need to pull some pieces out and hook them up to databases with relaxed constraints.
There are good engineering reasons for us to do things the way we do them, and maybe it was the only feasible way for us to get to this point. But presumably if we continue to grow, we will enter a different phase with a different set of tradeoffs. That phase will probably involve exerting less control, it will probably also involve worse unit economics, but may also scale further with fewer externalities.
By definition, yes.
There are about five times more humans today than there were when Fritz Haber invented his process.
The question is not “will there be an ecosystem”. Of course there will be. The question is are you ok with 4 out of 5 person potentially starving to death.
Synthetic fertilizers is the required technology and accepting that is the wisdom.
Again, I don't want to get into a debate about agriculture, I'm trying to discuss the quote, but these are the types of assumptions I'm suggesting are worth questioning.
The question is, are there ways to exert less control and get better outcomes? I'm not suggesting we let 80% of people starve. I'm suggesting we not be obsequious to the logic of the technology we've already built, when deciding on what to build next. (I elaborate in a cousin comment.)
Consider that in the extreme, if you have a linear supply chain with Haber-Bosch on one end and a landfill on the other - when you scale to enough people, you will also have mass starvation. Haber-Bosch isn't a "wisdom we accept" or "the" definitive technology. It has tremendous application, but it isn't magic. We're not simply done innovating in this area.
What “real” meaning do you think here? It says look, birds live somehow and you’re a man, much more important being to the guy in the sky. So don’t worry and continue to pay, he’s on it.
It has been taken in a variety of ways. See the "Analysis" section on the Wikipedia page [1] for it for a few examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_6:26
Most verses aren't intended to be read alone, they weren't written that way originally. The indexes were added later. The whole section (25-34) is about not worrying. With the summary being "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
You have to bust your ass to live while the bird just lives freely with helpings from God, despite man supposedly being made in God's image and stuff.
I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.
A systematic study of birds would find that many do indeed starve to death.
Is the goal of humanity to replicate infinitely and love as long as possible regardless of anything else ?
Because that's what cancers do and it never end well for the host
To a point, yes. That's the goal of practically any living thing, including cancer.
We're supposedly smart monkey who can project in the future and act accordingly.
In what way does cancer "love"?
I don't think anyone said or implied that
I do enjoy scientific debunkment of religious quotes.
After the Notre Dam fire someone on Twitter was claiming a miracle because the golden (statues I think?) had survived. Someone then pointed out that the melting point of gold is several hundred degrees above the temperature of a wood fire.
A grand miracle indeed
So do people - at least those lucky enough not to be part of a reasonably affluent industrial society.
You do realise that metaphors are never perfect?
And quickly too, the small ones live on a metabolic knife edge and can go down in as little as two days.
Here in the valley of Oregon, we don’t get snow often or for very long, but one late winter/early spring we suddenly got 1-2 feet snow cover for at least 3 days. I’ll never forget the few dozen birds I saw dead on the side of the roads because they couldn’t get to food.
the heavenly step-dad doesn't care when they die of starvation either.
This has come into hyper clarity for me ever since transitioning to minimalist shoes/sandals ten years ago and foregoing all caffeinated beverages this past December.
It's actually quite insane to think about how accessible coffee is and how much of our modern economy relies on people consuming it.
Consulting, big law, investment banks and lots of blue collar jobs (for example) rely on workers pulling 12+ hour days to do what mostly amounts to eye-watering amounts of paperwork. Given that sleep naturally becomes an afterthought when working under these conditions and showing any signs of weakness is frowned upon, coffee, sodas and energy drinks are all but required to function.
Similar deal with shoes. Feet are incredibly complex systems that are designed to withstand lots of abuse. Unfortunately, big shoe companies built their fortunes off of selling shoes that are great for sports but terrible for everyday use. Instead of pushing more minimal shoes that counteract weakening feet while being simpler to make, they push orthotics and shoes with more advanced technology and thicker sole stack.
It's depressing to think about, so I try not to!
Caffeine isn't an invention of modern industrial society, we've been boiling every caffeinated plant we could find for thousands of years. I would still drink it if I didn't have to work for a corporate employer. In fact I enjoy it much more on my days off when I get to make art. I don't mean to get too defensive of it, but I find it quite strange when people lump caffeinated drinks in with completely artificial aspects of life.
Caffeine (and coffee) are not inventions of modernity, but hyper-caffeinated drinks, like energy drinks and sodas, most definitely are. Also, coffee consumption has increased over time, like this article shows: https://perfectdailygrind.com/2024/04/us-consumption-hits-20...
Sure but that's different from total abstinence.
+1 for minimalist footwear. I keep telling anyone who will listen, “isn’t it crazy that we don’t have foot shaped shoes?” And then we wonder why we have bunions, knee pain, and tight hips when we sit sedentary at a desk all day in our not-foot-shaped shoes.
I highly recommend reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It was written in the ‘60s about how technology influences the direction of humanity and all the unintended consequences that come from that, and how we turn to more technology to solve those problems. It was a very prescient book.
In that vein, I highly recommend Katy Bowman's "Move Your DNA," and "Whole Body Barefoot." Bowman's biomechanical analysis of modern movement, furniture, and the built environment has changed the way I walk, sit, and carry things.
We invented technology and methods to make things that are meant to be difficult, easy (like food, transportation, mating, surviving). So now we have to invent more technology and methods to find an equilibrium for the system that we broke and barely understand, so we continue to break it and abstract away the instability, understanding it less and less. I mean, what is the purpose of the stock market? housing/mortgage market? An upvote? The cookie banner and ad tracking industry?
- Maintaining and increasing high level wealth, also Control
- Control, also profit
- Control, albeit in a less direct form than housing also data and profit
- The pretense of caring about privacy issues, so politics and control
- Profit/control
If you ask, "why?" for almost anything in today's society it'll come down to money/power, which are functionally mostly the same thing.
Exceptions exist sure, but they are called exceptions for a reason.
My perspective at least, i'm sure others think differently.
The purpose of the stock market isn't "control". If you wanted control of something you owned you wouldn't be interested in selling it. This is why some fascists were opposed to capitalism, they thought corporate owners should be running them like kings and not selling it for money.
It's to reduce risk by letting other people share in funding a venture.
The point of the housing market is so you can buy a house without anyone except the seller having to like you enough to interact with you. The alternative is a popularity contest, which doesn't work out for unpopular people or minorities, and doesn't encourage production of new houses.
Humans actually utilize quite a big chunk of the biomass.
It depends how you count it, whether you include plants etc. Humans are only 0.01% of all biomass, but humans and livestock completely dominate the "mammals" category.
Funnily enough, the livestock population weighs about twice as much as the human population.
Humans and livestock completely dominate not only the "mammals" category, but the entire "terrestrial vertebrates" category.
There are only a few other terrestrial animals of comparable biomass with humans, e.g. ants and termites.
There's some further thought-provoking discussion in a recent conversation with Daniel Scmachtenberger [1] talking about what you suggest.
[1] Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment - https://youtu.be/tmusbHBKW84