"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop.
The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it.
So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into.
And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".
I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.
You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.
The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.
If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.
i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span
Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?
In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.
Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.
> The 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.
> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment
This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.
Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections.
Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
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.
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.
It seems it's become fashionable these days to believe that happiness is impossible, or even non-existent; that all positive emotions are intrinsically transient. I think this attitude mostly comes from the phenomenon this author describes where you can forget (or just never know) what it's like to be happy. I don't agree with his proposed remedy.
First, I think that very few people have been privileged to enjoy the "simple" lifestyle he wants. Most cultures have either struggled with nature to survive, or avoided that struggle through restless progress. Any culture/organism that was content within it's niche would be outcompeted by fitter cultures/organisms. Ironically, the author is probably one of those best positioned to achieve his ideals; but they don't, because culture has evolved to program them to struggle.
Second, if the bears don't get you, the boredom will. Moderation is key, and it's good to have some mental stimulation too. You don't need to live in nature all the time to be happy. You just need to prioritize spending some time relaxing.
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.
I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.
At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.
The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.
This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.
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.
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.
Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.
I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.
An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.
With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.
I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.
But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.
But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.
Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")
So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.
We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.
We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.
If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.
on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.
No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.
I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.
Plenty of people master more than one domain. It's actually easier when the knowledge is more accessibly distributed in more generalised form, so you don't have to find out how to build stone vaults that don't collapse by trial and error
Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...
I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.
Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.
Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.
Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.
I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.
The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum.
> I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time
The plow probably isn't the best technology for the example because it is such a substantial improvement in farming capabilities, but something like weaving loom technology or grain milling technology might work better. Because while they reduce labor, it is perfectly feasible to live your entire life using simpler techniques. Hand mills and hand weaving take a lot of labor but aren't hard enough to make living in any particular enviroment too difficult to sustain well into old age. And I can imagine many people scoffing at that tech as unneccessary and dieing without ever feeling a need or desire to adopt it.
> 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.
This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences.
"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."
i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.
it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.
ps: the soundtrack is amazing.
pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.
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.
There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.
The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.
I myself have long ago begun ‘curating’ stimuli actively, mostly by shutting out that which isn’t relevant or actionable to me. Social media being #1, not counting DM apps.
Push notifications of any kind except for DMs being #2. Sound off.
News that could never affect me or anyone I know, #3.
Noise cancellation to shut out traffic noise and unwanted conversation.
Kindest advice: read Derek Sivers's "how to live".
Think of it as a distilled wisdom and a choose your own adventure book which will give you perspective, options, frustration and probably become a "quake book".
Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account.
If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...
"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."
Well, Zen tries to build a whole religion around the idea, losing the spirit of simple easily comprehensible advice that can be expressed in a single sentence.
So one answer to “what new” could be “delivering the advice without unnecessary complication”. Although I can’t really tell if the advice above covers the whole of Zen, which is part of the issue.
There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.
I see a lot of "complexity is inherent to existence" type comments. They aren't wrong, but they show that OP's phenomenology could use a little frame work, so to speak. "We've made the world too complicated" could be fairly seen as "complexity is something humans expressed under specific conditions". Not saying we should always strip agency from the discussion (lest we slip into nihilism), but I think it's fair to frame the complexity as a material condition in which we live, rather than something that recedes if you "look at the birbs".
If you can make peace with that, you might then perceive that while all material conditions are complex, it's our existence within them that's fraught. I'd suggest that the discomfort you feel is from inhabiting conditions that change faster than competence can be transmitted across generations. Pre-modern humans (and other animals) didn't experience this (as often, or as intensely at least) because their conditions changed at evolutionary speed. We used to grow up in the same world as our grand parents. Now our parent's lessons are obsolete before we're born, and we're left to cast around for certainty that only comes with generational adaptation. That's almost the definition of anxiety. Thankfully, looking at birds can actually help deal with anxious thoughts!
> Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
I think it’s the opposite - Kant did too.
But modern way of life don’t leave time and space for people to think about right and wrong. One really has to elevate his spirit to begin pondering about that, most people are living for the next paycheck.
The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears.
I think the key is to find the right work/life balance to maintain a fulfilling life. For the work portion of your life, you should find problems that interest you and people that you enjoy working with. For your life balance, you should connect with nature in way that resonates with you, be it hiking or growing food, or exploring new places. And of course, in your life balance you should have relationships that can bring witness to your life's journey and help you along the way.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.
Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.
I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.
Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?
Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.
There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.
I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.
Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world.
Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.
So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.
The difference I'm trying to discuss is when humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles. You are right, living in the natural world today would be impossible for most people, requiring generations of local knowledge spread across the community. I should have clarified my meaning of complexity as that which is purely human-made.
Yet that human complexity was often created to help us deal with natural complexity.
Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)
Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.
Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with. Adapt ourselves to, move in harmony with, rather than trying to adapt nature to our whims. The trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us; maybe our duty here is just to shut up and listen.
> Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with.
Your ancestors did that, and invented unknowable gods and spirits to explain/blame everything on, so that people can give up trying to understand or manage the unmanageable.
Although it's worth noting theres evidence the earliest civilizations like the Sumerians did this at least in part as a "fill in the blanks" exercise. The gods were their dark matter - a stand in for the problem that they were trying to predict the rains, rather then invent a suitably large father/mother to take responsibility away from them.
Agreed, it wasn't necessarily from a place of laziness. I'm just frustrated with this narrative of "Our Ancestors Were One With Nature", since:
1. It is imaginary nostalgia for a golden-age that didn't exist.
2. It is its own covert form of human hubris/egotism, suggesting we had something uniquely different from what all other species struggle with. Closely related to the inverted-snobbery of claiming only humans do $EVIL_THING.
Every species molds the world to their desires -- we are just much better at it. Competition and being killed by another species is the only thing that keeps things in check, and even then, you get parts of nature that end up being shaped and dominated by one species (beavers, ants, some fungi/bacteria). The world used to be a molten blob, to eventually an ocean full of mostly one species, to now, and eventually, a dead husk.
What's cuckoo today is the world is made, and it's not just mysterious it's crazy.
The european intellect is looking like a disease, an aberration, like a maladaptation that's chasing itself seeking a correction, except the rectification is just a recursive continuation of the disease.
And there are very good reasons to anticipate that humanity may be exterminated by this pathology.
Painful to find that your capacity to recognize the malaise is the cause of the malaise.
Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through
But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.
We used to have gods of several domains each for taking up the blame for specific and (back then) inexplainable events. It at least gave the people closure or blueprints for action in order to appease them. Doesn't matter if it really had an effect.
But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.
this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.
You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.
We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.
To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.
This argument has been made before by Vernor Vinge in his 1999 novel A Deepness In The Sky: civilisations fall due to the sheer complexity they accumulate.
> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end
there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)
Unless you were in the High Beyond, where you could always escape the collapse by heaping on more complexity. And if you were willing to skip out into the Transcend, you might even become a god. Small consolation to those of us down here in the Slow Zone, though maybe you could stumble upon some leftover computronium and carve murals into it celebrating your anti-libertarian triumphs.
"To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. " I am learning that a "Just this" attitude, like in these words, improves our experience of life. You may enjoy a Kwan Um school (or other) Zen group, where this is reinforced continually.
This is just one detail, but I think something must have gone wrong if you go for a walk and even the "city-owned sidewalk" seems part of an alienating scene? How are sidewalks part of the problem?
Maybe read as: something as normal as going out for a walk puts you in direct contact with a complicated system. Not that every time one goes outside they feel alienated or anything negative at all.
Maybe the goal isn't to reject complexity entirely, but to be much more suspicious of complexity that gives no corresponding increase in dignity, beauty, autonomy or peace
Yeah, let's be suspicious of complexity, and blame spirits for our diseases instead of viruses and germs. Simpler narration aint it. God has wanted me to die. How simple is that?
EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.
Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).
So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.
> all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity
To what end?
“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
That's true. This brings to mind an idea by Dr. Tom Murphy about sustainability. Human civilization lived sustainably, or in the same state with little change, in the natural world for tens of thousands of years, with much lower entropy than now.
By definition, any behavior that cannot go on forever, or deep into the future is unsustainable. Of course all life on Earth will end and humanity far before it. Maybe our current level sustainability is causing entropy to accelerate.
I'm not saying either way is better, of course better or worse isn't really even a thing. I just wanted to share my thoughts that may inform what I choose for myself to discuss it with others.
Human civilization is often used to describe the last ~ 12k years of us becoming farmers making cities etc.
But way before that, approximately around the time we had both mastered fire and good enough communication skills neanderthals and other homo became the very top of the food chain and started massively altering this planet.
I think scientists in the relevant field call the current extinction period the 4th? One caused by humans.
Sustainable is a "loaded word/concept" of the imprecise language we call English...
For who? How long? For self / others? Externalities?
If Mark Zuckerberg creates a robot army and closed loop food producing system and clone installation that keeps him / his descendents alive till the heat death of the universe on an island in Hawai while 99.999999999999999999% of humans and animals die (some other billionaires on new Zealand etc etc) one could argue it's sustainable for said people but not very sustainable for "humanity"
There is no better way. Better way requires a big man / woman / it in the sky / your shoulder who supposedly knows.
You, me and most people on this forum are just the lucky ones (at least top 40% and most likely average top 3% financially ) who can imagine more than we can achieve in life and hence get philosophical from time to time...
Anyway I see you read / quote a lot of books so yeah recommend you the Derek Sivers book "how to live", he's much better than almost everyone at destillation and has the bonus of not having to sell.
Anyway as a tip: You can use sources / references but proof of authority / reference to authority (doctor this,..) Doesn't really add unless it's about a highly practical field. Can just add a source link at the bottom if you wanna reference his words but ideally the idea can stand by itself.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand
that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.
Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.
>I want to never pay with money or read a written word again
not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in
>Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.
>Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.
Having a general understanding of how computer hardware and software works, how it’s built, and how it’s assembled is not the same thing as “fully understanding.” If you truly did fully understand, you’d be making a killing securing the OS and application stack, and the world would have far better software. That we still have constant issues with our hardware and software proves that you do not “fully understand” it.
I mean the full chain from every line of software to the arrays of semiconductors in my CPU to the cooling system in the fab in Taiwan. I have some understanding of these things, but my point was we can never understand every part anymore. I see we agree.
I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.
I'm not sure I agree on your next point.
How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.
It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.
It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.
In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."
Neither of those are real freedom.
Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.
If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.
The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.
At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.
Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.
AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.
Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.
There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.
The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.
It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
I don't want to downplay the argument, and more importantly - the author's feelings about the topic, but I'd suggest (unsolicited, sorry) the author take some hobbies away from the screen, find a decent friend or two and spend more time with them, and stop or at least reduce the time spent reading news/twitter/whatever.
Thank you for this article. I know no truly effective weapon against the Kingsnorthian Machine, except to name it and remind people that they are still creatures and not machines. That it doesn’t have to be this way. That for 99% of our history it wasn’t this way.
The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.
But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.
I'm paying someone €500 a year to file my taxes and I just want to go back to trading sea shells. Why do systems have to be so complicated. I have to pay my road tax in bills and I get my change in coins what is that about.
Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.
> The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.
1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.
2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.
I say this with respect and appreciation for your thoughtful framing, as I also feel for the author:
I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise
Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle
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.
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.
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.
I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.
Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.
I was trying to explain to my wife how I felt last night. AI and the pressure to use it and balancing the potential and with the pitfalls is stressing me out. But it’s more than that.
AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.
You're really not alone in this. Nature exposure has helped a lot since the industrial revolution as far as any mental health concerns go. A return to the old world, full of trees and brush is still there for all of us.
This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.
I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.
The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.
I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.
With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.
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.
As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.
The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.
The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.
Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.
Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.
This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.
The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.
This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.
Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.
This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.
Correct me where I was wrong then
My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.
That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?
I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.
I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.
>I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand [...] I think we do a very good job at convincing ourselves that we are doing good things, working towards honest goals. [...] I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible.
Nobody has ever made anything on the condition that they fully understand it, which is impossible. The world has always been complex and illegible, not just technology has been encountered that way but the natural world. We never lived in a pastoral utopia that was comprehensible or tamable.
Deleuze is relevant here, as he said human beings always start 'in the middle'. Nobody existed before technology, society or what have you, but is already thrown into it. You don't do something because you fully understand it, you can only understand it by engaging with it. You don't know what you will say before you speak.
You practice not for some pre-defined goal but to open up possibilities, 'lines of flight'. Stop caring about goals, start caring about making connections. If you find yourself in a new city you don't attempt to 'fully understand' it, you just walk. If you don't know how your blog works, write a static site generator. Won't mean you understand your entire computer, but that doesn't matter, you'll find yet another thing to learn as you go.
> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.
There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.
I'm not arguing for ignorance. More acceptance of the ecological forces around us and appreciating them, observing them, and knowing when to let them take their course.
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
And it's all for what, really? I read an article earlier today about plans to build a data center the size of Manhattan. I want everyone reading my small comment to please just think about that for a second. Just think about it. What are we doing? We lived for thousands of years without this kind of technoforming activity. Why are we doing this to our planet, to what end?
Touché. It breaks down a bit when I admit I would never want to live in isolation away from modern medicine. But maybe the idea can exist in isolation for a moment.
> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
So what about Leonardo da Vinci and countless other "uomo universalis"... He was not an artist? And an engineer and...
I'm firmly in team nurture / choice and would only say that in our time it's harder to be an artist because to be an artist is to sacrifice a lot of other "great options"...
"..But sometimes better than a master of one", is the oft-forgotten coda. I'm mediocre at _a lot_ of stuff, and love it. Wouldn't run my life any other way, and it's far too late to change.
I'm, of course, in awe of folks who dedicate their lives to a single craft, but there's a rich, interesting, and productive life out there for us dabblers.
Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.
At least it shows some attempt on reflection/introspection which is rare.
As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?
"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.
Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.
Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.
The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.
Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
> I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop".
I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era.
You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior.
The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it.
If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
Pre-education is swinging too far in the opposite direction for your own argument. Jacobus Uys the guy who wrote The Gods Must Be Crazy was sixty when the film came out in 1980. He watched the entire shift from the machine age to the nuclear age to the information age. His required childhood education in the 1920s and 1930s would've been six to eight years with highschool as optional. His parents who were children in the 1890s likely would've had education be entirely optional. He lived through the change from school being a privilege to being required and watched as it grew from six to eight to twelve years. The film itself is literally about the dichotomy between a post-agrarian tribe and nuclear age civilians and how less than a century separated most of the world from being one before they became the other. He wasn't reaching back to some pre-modern past, he was commenting on the rapid expansive changes he had seen during his own lifetime.
The issue with 10 years of school is that we outsource schooling and childcare to others specialized on these matters. In the past we spuld teach them how to hunt, fish or take care of plants, animals.
i don't know where you want to take this critic but there's a lot of learn that is meant to be forgotten. transfer of learning is a scientific phenomenon. how it's useful for the day to day is at least questionable, as it's pretty hard to measure. if you take with a pretty rational look it feels insane to teach kids nobel prize type of knowledge that can't be understood or figured out entirely by crytalized knowledge (which is also a scientific term). how much that's necessary and how some fields like regulating emotions, arts and even critical thinking are missing on the grade, the quote about "we didn't know where to stop" feels pretty prevalent. it's not impossible to find a phd graduate working in some job someone without high-school graduation could learn, probably at the same rate/time span
How much money and power is required? Should we stop technological development now or do humans still need new stuff?
Others won't stop it, the'll just invade later on. Look at Lebanon for instance.
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.
There's friction.. and then there's human-created obstacles.
> 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
Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.
> 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.
> 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.
Is that how we have to live?
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.
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).
> barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).
Russians? It's still true today.
> 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.
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
There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.
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.
It seems it's become fashionable these days to believe that happiness is impossible, or even non-existent; that all positive emotions are intrinsically transient. I think this attitude mostly comes from the phenomenon this author describes where you can forget (or just never know) what it's like to be happy. I don't agree with his proposed remedy.
First, I think that very few people have been privileged to enjoy the "simple" lifestyle he wants. Most cultures have either struggled with nature to survive, or avoided that struggle through restless progress. Any culture/organism that was content within it's niche would be outcompeted by fitter cultures/organisms. Ironically, the author is probably one of those best positioned to achieve his ideals; but they don't, because culture has evolved to program them to struggle.
Second, if the bears don't get you, the boredom will. Moderation is key, and it's good to have some mental stimulation too. You don't need to live in nature all the time to be happy. You just need to prioritize spending some time relaxing.
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.
I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.
At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.
The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.
This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.
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.
Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”
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.
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.
Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.
It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.
Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.
The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.
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...
Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.
I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.
An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.
With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.
I completely agree with you. It’s honestly wild to think about the sheer capacity of the human mind. Beyond our ability to process complex emotions or reflect on our own existence, we literally have the biological hardware to rewire our brains and learn just about anything through neuroplasticity. We are built to achieve extraordinary things.
But it's frustrating to see how traditional education systems often fail to push us to that full potential. Seeing this firsthand, I've realized that digging into topics on your own, really committing to rigorous, self-directed learning is often the only reliable path forward. The problem is that the modern attention economy makes this incredibly hard. Instead of diving deep, so many of my peers are caught in the loop of endless scrolling, and it’s actively eroding our capacity for sustained thought. Blaise Pascal’s quote that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone' hits incredibly close to home right now. If we could just break that cycle and encourage even a small percentage of people to become genuine deep thinkers, our ability to actually fulfill that obligation of understanding the universe would change drastically.
But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.
Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")
So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.
We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.
We(mammals) kind of were enslaved by those lizard overlords. Mammals evolved around 225 million years ago and by the time dinosaurs went extinct (through no fault of their own!) 160 million years later, mammals were, at best, small nocturnal mouse-sized creatures. Anything bigger was stomped out by the dinosaurs before it could leave a trace.
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....
Physicists are Atoms way of understanding themselves
Nice philosophical piece
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.
This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.
This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.
http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
But did the writer understand how the language got created and how the words shape her thoughts?
Do you know how to make paper? Can you? Is it any good? Do you really understand it then?
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...
You liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.
I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.
Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.
Oh boy, I don’t know about this one. You are born into a body that is so complicated we will perhaps never understand how all of it works. Our society if anything wrangled so much of the chaos of the natural world. It’s hardly simple to live in a world where you are under constant threat from animals, and other humans.
Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.
I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.
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.
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’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.
My reaction too, starting with the picture of dense vegetation at the top of the article!
get eaten alive by mosquitos and be slightly moist all the time!
This reminds me of the central ideas in Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization[1]. I feel the pressure of the complexity, too, but attempting to oversimplify complex things has consequences.
"Politicians, financiers and technological utopians, rather than face up to the real complexities of the world, retreated. Instead, they constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang on to power. And as this fake world grew, all of us went along with it, because the simplicity was reassuring."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
Who was the "we" who made it this complicated?
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.
See also Moloch.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.
The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.
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
Kindest advice: read Derek Sivers's "how to live". Think of it as a distilled wisdom and a choose your own adventure book which will give you perspective, options, frustration and probably become a "quake book".
Buy it from his own website so the money fully goes to a charity or from amazon because you cannot be bothered to make an account.
If you buy it at his website as a bonus you'll get the audiobook and if you wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...
"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."
Who is this "the world"
Anyway keep up the writing.
Have a great day/evening/night
Zen Buddhism has been advocating this precise teaching for millenia. What's new here?
This comment is like the zen version of "simpsons did it!"
It would be if they hadn’t asked that question at the end, which is a fair question.
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.
There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.
I see a lot of "complexity is inherent to existence" type comments. They aren't wrong, but they show that OP's phenomenology could use a little frame work, so to speak. "We've made the world too complicated" could be fairly seen as "complexity is something humans expressed under specific conditions". Not saying we should always strip agency from the discussion (lest we slip into nihilism), but I think it's fair to frame the complexity as a material condition in which we live, rather than something that recedes if you "look at the birbs".
If you can make peace with that, you might then perceive that while all material conditions are complex, it's our existence within them that's fraught. I'd suggest that the discomfort you feel is from inhabiting conditions that change faster than competence can be transmitted across generations. Pre-modern humans (and other animals) didn't experience this (as often, or as intensely at least) because their conditions changed at evolutionary speed. We used to grow up in the same world as our grand parents. Now our parent's lessons are obsolete before we're born, and we're left to cast around for certainty that only comes with generational adaptation. That's almost the definition of anxiety. Thankfully, looking at birds can actually help deal with anxious thoughts!
> Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
I think it’s the opposite - Kant did too.
But modern way of life don’t leave time and space for people to think about right and wrong. One really has to elevate his spirit to begin pondering about that, most people are living for the next paycheck.
>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.
Also introduce him to mercantilism.
The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
I think the key is to find the right work/life balance to maintain a fulfilling life. For the work portion of your life, you should find problems that interest you and people that you enjoy working with. For your life balance, you should connect with nature in way that resonates with you, be it hiking or growing food, or exploring new places. And of course, in your life balance you should have relationships that can bring witness to your life's journey and help you along the way.
Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.
I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.
I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.
The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.
There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.
But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)
Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.
Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).
Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.
I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/anthropological-summer/
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.
I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.
Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?
Man that's what I've been asking people all the time: what is our end goal? When will we say "this is enough", we can stop here? If we don't know the answers for these question, then we better find answers before going "forward" blindly.
There is no collective goal, just emergent behavior. It might be our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. We're technologically capable of shaping our world for the better and incapable of cooperating or even agreeing enough to pull it off.
I think people forget we are primates and that our roots are very much encoded into our more primitive brain parts. It would be nice (in some definition of that word) if we operated as a social hive like ants or bees, but that is just not the world we live in. The neocortex is a powerful evolutionary thing, but it doesn't (and in many ways, cannot) override our baser instincts.
Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world.
Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.
So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.
The difference I'm trying to discuss is when humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles. You are right, living in the natural world today would be impossible for most people, requiring generations of local knowledge spread across the community. I should have clarified my meaning of complexity as that which is purely human-made.
Yet that human complexity was often created to help us deal with natural complexity.
Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)
Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.
Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with. Adapt ourselves to, move in harmony with, rather than trying to adapt nature to our whims. The trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us; maybe our duty here is just to shut up and listen.
> Maybe natural complexity is not supposed to be something we deal with, just something we live with.
Your ancestors did that, and invented unknowable gods and spirits to explain/blame everything on, so that people can give up trying to understand or manage the unmanageable.
Although it's worth noting theres evidence the earliest civilizations like the Sumerians did this at least in part as a "fill in the blanks" exercise. The gods were their dark matter - a stand in for the problem that they were trying to predict the rains, rather then invent a suitably large father/mother to take responsibility away from them.
Agreed, it wasn't necessarily from a place of laziness. I'm just frustrated with this narrative of "Our Ancestors Were One With Nature", since:
1. It is imaginary nostalgia for a golden-age that didn't exist.
2. It is its own covert form of human hubris/egotism, suggesting we had something uniquely different from what all other species struggle with. Closely related to the inverted-snobbery of claiming only humans do $EVIL_THING.
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.
Maybe the key difference is that natural complexity asks for adaptation, while human-made complexity often asks for submission
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.
Ding ding ding we have a winner. Salivate!
Is The Thinking Game, which sounds like a pile of poop, pivotal to your worries, or did you just mention it in passing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
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.
Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through
But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.
We used to have gods of several domains each for taking up the blame for specific and (back then) inexplainable events. It at least gave the people closure or blueprints for action in order to appease them. Doesn't matter if it really had an effect.
But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.
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.
this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.
You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.
We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.
To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.
We could say the same for the industrial revolution that is a point in the past for all of us.
I think they are including the whole stack. Even the written word!
This argument has been made before by Vernor Vinge in his 1999 novel A Deepness In The Sky: civilisations fall due to the sheer complexity they accumulate.
> "They've accepted optimizing pressures for centuries now. Genius and freedom and knowledge of the past have kept them safe, but finally the optimizations have taken them to the point of fragility. The megalopolis moons allowed the richest networking in Human Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
> "But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
> Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.
(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)
Unless you were in the High Beyond, where you could always escape the collapse by heaping on more complexity. And if you were willing to skip out into the Transcend, you might even become a god. Small consolation to those of us down here in the Slow Zone, though maybe you could stumble upon some leftover computronium and carve murals into it celebrating your anti-libertarian triumphs.
"To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. " I am learning that a "Just this" attitude, like in these words, improves our experience of life. You may enjoy a Kwan Um school (or other) Zen group, where this is reinforced continually.
I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles
It's also basically what was written about in that infamous manifesto.
This is just one detail, but I think something must have gone wrong if you go for a walk and even the "city-owned sidewalk" seems part of an alienating scene? How are sidewalks part of the problem?
Maybe read as: something as normal as going out for a walk puts you in direct contact with a complicated system. Not that every time one goes outside they feel alienated or anything negative at all.
Maybe the goal isn't to reject complexity entirely, but to be much more suspicious of complexity that gives no corresponding increase in dignity, beauty, autonomy or peace
complexity is intrinsic. complications are extrinsic.
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?
Romans 1:20
Just as it has always been.
EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.
Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).
So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.
> all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity
To what end?
“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.” ― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
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
That's true. This brings to mind an idea by Dr. Tom Murphy about sustainability. Human civilization lived sustainably, or in the same state with little change, in the natural world for tens of thousands of years, with much lower entropy than now.
By definition, any behavior that cannot go on forever, or deep into the future is unsustainable. Of course all life on Earth will end and humanity far before it. Maybe our current level sustainability is causing entropy to accelerate.
I'm not saying either way is better, of course better or worse isn't really even a thing. I just wanted to share my thoughts that may inform what I choose for myself to discuss it with others.
Human civilization is often used to describe the last ~ 12k years of us becoming farmers making cities etc.
But way before that, approximately around the time we had both mastered fire and good enough communication skills neanderthals and other homo became the very top of the food chain and started massively altering this planet.
I think scientists in the relevant field call the current extinction period the 4th? One caused by humans.
Sustainable is a "loaded word/concept" of the imprecise language we call English... For who? How long? For self / others? Externalities?
If Mark Zuckerberg creates a robot army and closed loop food producing system and clone installation that keeps him / his descendents alive till the heat death of the universe on an island in Hawai while 99.999999999999999999% of humans and animals die (some other billionaires on new Zealand etc etc) one could argue it's sustainable for said people but not very sustainable for "humanity"
There is no better way. Better way requires a big man / woman / it in the sky / your shoulder who supposedly knows.
You, me and most people on this forum are just the lucky ones (at least top 40% and most likely average top 3% financially ) who can imagine more than we can achieve in life and hence get philosophical from time to time...
Anyway I see you read / quote a lot of books so yeah recommend you the Derek Sivers book "how to live", he's much better than almost everyone at destillation and has the bonus of not having to sell.
Anyway as a tip: You can use sources / references but proof of authority / reference to authority (doctor this,..) Doesn't really add unless it's about a highly practical field. Can just add a source link at the bottom if you wanna reference his words but ideally the idea can stand by itself.
> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand
that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.
Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.
>I want to never pay with money or read a written word again
not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in
>Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.
good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.
>Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.
a life unexamined is not worth living
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.
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.
What do you fully understand then? Because you absolutely don't understand your own toilet by this metric.
I mean the full chain from every line of software to the arrays of semiconductors in my CPU to the cooling system in the fab in Taiwan. I have some understanding of these things, but my point was we can never understand every part anymore. I see we agree.
I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.
I'm not sure I agree on your next point.
How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.
It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.
It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.
In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."
Neither of those are real freedom.
Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.
If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.
The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.
At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.
Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.
AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.
Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.
There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.
The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.
It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.
I don't want to downplay the argument, and more importantly - the author's feelings about the topic, but I'd suggest (unsolicited, sorry) the author take some hobbies away from the screen, find a decent friend or two and spend more time with them, and stop or at least reduce the time spent reading news/twitter/whatever.
Thank you for this article. I know no truly effective weapon against the Kingsnorthian Machine, except to name it and remind people that they are still creatures and not machines. That it doesn’t have to be this way. That for 99% of our history it wasn’t this way.
The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.
But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.
I'm paying someone €500 a year to file my taxes and I just want to go back to trading sea shells. Why do systems have to be so complicated. I have to pay my road tax in bills and I get my change in coins what is that about.
Extinctions followed homo sapiens across the planet millennia before the emergence of the technologies that you seem to think make the world 'complicated.' The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
Mostly I agree with overall perspective and tenor of the piece, but there's a profound absence of (historical) awareness, paired with a weird, presumptuous, sophomoric sanctimoniousness -- clearest in the strange insistence on using the word "we." If you've ever listened to recordings of sermons from Jamestown, you'll hear something similar: the breathless outrage and stupefaction at what "we" have become and what "we" do and "the world today." It's millenarianism and apocalypticism, and it's just goofy. It's the tone of a kid in his mid-teens who is worked up by his latest epiphany: he finally gets it and is wildly excited to make it clear, and he's performing it and acting it out for his parents, showing how serious he is -- and all the adults in the room know that he's on his way to figuring something out but doesn't grasp that he's trying on an idea and a personality to see how it feels. I hear the same cluelessness in this piece.
Please don't be curmudgeonly on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The Greek work biblos, for book, derives from the name of the region of the Levant (Bublos) that produces much of the best paper in the ancient world, until people denuded it, turning it into a desert. Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.
I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.
1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.
2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.
I say this with respect and appreciation for your thoughtful framing, as I also feel for the author:
I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise
Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle
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...
Beginning of the end seems a tad hyperbolic. We aren’t running out of humans.
We aren't?
The amount of women having children hasn’t changed since the 80s about 80% the difference is how many they choose to have
I think you are both saying the same thing?
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.
Worldwide poverty rate in 1800 = 81%. Today under 10%.
https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/
Jonestown, right? Recordings from Jamestown would be quite a big deal.
> Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge
I thought this was due to natural climate change?
> 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?
Remind Me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwGI-_-5LFI
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.
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"
I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.
Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.
Could this be because older people have more memories of when certain things were better than they are now?
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.
Without saying too much, I think this is more common in young people than you may think.
Your comment lays bare the problem with Gerontocracy
I was trying to explain to my wife how I felt last night. AI and the pressure to use it and balancing the potential and with the pitfalls is stressing me out. But it’s more than that.
This post perfectly captures the feeling.
What is the potential, besides more mail spam and better google search (that isn't owned by google)?
AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.
You're really not alone in this. Nature exposure has helped a lot since the industrial revolution as far as any mental health concerns go. A return to the old world, full of trees and brush is still there for all of us.
This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.
I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.
The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.
People said the same thing in 1800s on the eastern seaboard they even built cute little rail lines.
People mistake complexity for value. People hide behind complexity. Truth is simple, so it's cheap. Truth lays us bare, so we avoid it at all costs.
I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.
With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.
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.
AGI is the postmodern tower of babel. Ignore.
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.
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As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.
The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.
The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.
Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.
Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.
This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.
The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.
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.
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.
That’s not how city water works.
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?
> 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?
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.
It is a modern miracle, though the miracle is in part that we can now drink poop water.
I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.
I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.
yeah lol. if only tech stopped existing we could achieve world peace and everything would be fine and dandy
In history there were countless men that promised paradise, if only we destroyed something.
>I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand [...] I think we do a very good job at convincing ourselves that we are doing good things, working towards honest goals. [...] I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible.
Nobody has ever made anything on the condition that they fully understand it, which is impossible. The world has always been complex and illegible, not just technology has been encountered that way but the natural world. We never lived in a pastoral utopia that was comprehensible or tamable.
Deleuze is relevant here, as he said human beings always start 'in the middle'. Nobody existed before technology, society or what have you, but is already thrown into it. You don't do something because you fully understand it, you can only understand it by engaging with it. You don't know what you will say before you speak.
You practice not for some pre-defined goal but to open up possibilities, 'lines of flight'. Stop caring about goals, start caring about making connections. If you find yourself in a new city you don't attempt to 'fully understand' it, you just walk. If you don't know how your blog works, write a static site generator. Won't mean you understand your entire computer, but that doesn't matter, you'll find yet another thing to learn as you go.
relax man, just go and touch some grass, there is no 'we', do what you wanna do, go where you wanna 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.
Sounds like he’s just burnt out.
Even if that were true it would still bolster his argument.
Here... take a blue pill. Go back to your cube. Produce.
> But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.
Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.
But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.
I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.
Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.
There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.
We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.
I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.
Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.
We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.
Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.
Sounds like you may also have read https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/.
the world is far more complicated than we may ever understand, what we're doing is quaint by comparison
It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.
Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?
The world doesn't need another JavaScript framework.
Every abstraction is leaky but is ignorance truly bliss?
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.
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.
What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.
Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.
I think another framing could be: the world doesn’t have to be this complicated
And it's all for what, really? I read an article earlier today about plans to build a data center the size of Manhattan. I want everyone reading my small comment to please just think about that for a second. Just think about it. What are we doing? We lived for thousands of years without this kind of technoforming activity. Why are we doing this to our planet, to what end?
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Touché. It breaks down a bit when I admit I would never want to live in isolation away from modern medicine. But maybe the idea can exist in isolation for a moment.
> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.
Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.
Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.
Such a nature thing to say.
So what about Leonardo da Vinci and countless other "uomo universalis"... He was not an artist? And an engineer and...
I'm firmly in team nurture / choice and would only say that in our time it's harder to be an artist because to be an artist is to sacrifice a lot of other "great options"...
> Jack of all trades, master of none..
"..But sometimes better than a master of one", is the oft-forgotten coda. I'm mediocre at _a lot_ of stuff, and love it. Wouldn't run my life any other way, and it's far too late to change.
I'm, of course, in awe of folks who dedicate their lives to a single craft, but there's a rich, interesting, and productive life out there for us dabblers.
Different strokes for different folks, aye.
Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.
What a reductive world view that is.
Nothing ever was solved without reductivity.
At least it shows some attempt on reflection/introspection which is rare.
As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?
+1 for the original insult ("control fetish") from the disembodied spirit that broadcasts bitflips at your electro-chemical controller ;-)