the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.
I think they should get over it. The chance to really matter in the world is a narcissistic illusion that used to be the privilege of kings, who in practice usually made the world worse, but since the Enlightenment we all want to do it. The world in which you can really matter is the world of your own friends and family, but it's hard to feel satisfied with that when your culture constantly turns your attention to the Big World.
On a similar subject, thanks Anne for sending this post from the collapse subreddit, Missing the forest for the trees. It reminds me of an insight from Dmitry Orlov: that large-scale collapse, viewed on the scale of ordinary lives, seems like personal failure. But this post goes into more detail, and it adds an even more interesting idea: that collapse can seem like success if our values change so that necessary adaptations are stuff we want to do anyway.
The author seems to think we're fooling ourselves, that if we want to live cheaply and avoid having a job, we're just putting a positive spin on something bad. But if you take a step back, that judgment comes from a value system that is much more clearly a distortion of reality.
In the 1950's, with a college degree, you could easily get a high-paying job doing something that your whole culture told you was making a better world. You build wealth, you buy a house, you raise a family, everything is improving. This was the dominant perspective for only a few decades in all of human history. Even in the 1950's you could see cracks forming, as people sensed that this was not the dawn of utopia but a new level of humans blundering around the planet.
By the end of the 1960's everyone knew it, and when I was in school in the 1980's, our perspective on wage labor was the realistic one people had in the 1920's or the 1850's: your job is just some shit you have to do for money. In Reagan's America, we still expected to make easy money by cynically exploiting the college-job system. Now even that part of the illusion is gone.
First-worlders dream of the zombie apocalypse because it would be so much simpler than the real collapse. We're not going to starve -- but without the deep social connections of preindustrial people, and the ever-increasing numbers of the industrial age, what will keep us going day after day? Drugs and video games are not ideal, but they're better than political extremist movements with a storybook understanding of big systems. Living well in this age is a book-length subject, but it involves rebuilding deep connections, letting go of epic stories, and learning to skillfully navigate your stream of experience, seeking rising quality without rising numbers.
Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down... superforecasters have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world.
This is just intellectual maturity. The good news is that anyone can learn it. The bad news is that hardly anyone has.
Related, from Aeon magazine, The dangerous idea that life is a story, and from the LessWrong blog, Tyler Cowen on Stories. These are both more about personal stories than stories about the world, but the basic idea is the same: it's foolish to filter our perception of reality to make it seem more appealing or meaningful.
Gabriel sent me that Cowen link in August, and it partly inspired my August 31 post about hedonic technology, but I didn't link to it then because I disagree with Cowen that life is merely a random mess. Through decades of observation I can sense the influence of storytelling forces whose motives and literary standards are far beyond my understanding. Rather than look at reality the way a child would look at clouds, ignoring and emphasizing certain things to see faces or castles, I try to look at reality the way a scientist would look at clouds, to begin to understand an alien order.
Through no fault of their own, kids these days are weak as fuck. They're allergic to every fucking thing, they fall the fuck apart if they think you're criticizing them, damn near zero recess, damn near zero self-advocacy skills... I'm a teacher and I love kids, but God damn...
Also, apparently my generation is only one that's good with computers, because boomers were set in their ways when computers appeared, and millennials have no experience getting under the hood since Steve Jobs took that power for himself.
Anyway, if this trend of treating young people like delicate museum pieces is temporary, then all we have is a lost generation. If it goes far enough, then we have a really pathetic extinction.
What keeps me on target is seeing the positive changes in my life. I think it would be nearly impossible if I were trying to do something where I could not see or feel improvement in some way.
Now I'm thinking you can hack your motivational system by learning to notice smaller and smaller improvements. But also, there has to be a context in which the improvements are valuable. Two winters ago I worked out for a few months, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Doing squats enabled me to climb hills better on my bike, but I was already climbing hills well enough, I was already thin and healthy, and the main practical difference was my bigger thighs ripped out a pair of expensive jeans. Being able to do more pull-ups would be great if I was climbing trees every day to pick fruit.
If we are all guaranteed basic survival (which I support) then there's less room for improvements to have practical value, and what counts as an improvement is mostly a function of personality and culture. If you like listening to music, and your friends are musicians, getting better at playing music will have high value. What if you like killing and your friends are killers? Destruction is easier than creation, and I think most of the tragedies of history happened because whole cultures discovered that they could feel good by telling themselves that something easy was an improvement. If ancient civilizations had video games there would be more forests left. And even in modern society, how much meaningful activity is really just people motivating themselves at the expense of others?
Finally, a comment from Aaron:
]]>It's been a while since I read the Continuum Concept but I remember Jean Liedloff describing the elders of the community and how their focus on life was achieving bliss. From what I understood they were aiming to have a perfectly still mind and to just let bliss wash over them. I know that western eyes see a stone age people as living in a state of extreme deprivation but as far as the Yequana people were concerned they had everything they needed - which is why the elders could indulge themselves by aiming to live in a perpetual state of bliss.