Ran Prieur

May 8.

2023-05-08T20:20:52Z

May 8. Continuing from last week, a thought experiment. What would happen if humans became permanently incapable of doing any task that we don't find intrinsically enjoyable?

First, the global economy would disappear like smoke. Then, over the next few years, billions of people would die -- not because farmers would quit working, but because they'd have to start over without industrial supply chains. By the way, during famines, most people don't die from actual starvation, but from disease and violence that emerge when people are hungry.

A hundred years down the line, would we all be back to the stone age? No way. Unlike stone age people, we would know about all the cool stuff we can do. We would have books and tools and skills. Eventually, enthusiasts in garage workshops would be making everything from transistors to bike tires.

How complex could a society get on a 100% volunteer workforce? How complex is the forest? We wouldn't have big box stores with a hundred thousand items. Instead, there would be ten million items all spread out across the land. Instead of schools forcing everyone to learn the same boring stuff, every student would follow their own peculiar obsession. It would take many generations to work out the details, but eventually a low coercion society is going to have a higher ceiling than a high coercion society.

The problem with this scenario is that it ignores the main reason people do things: not because particular tasks are enjoyable in an absolute sense, but because they fit a social context. People will happily do work to feed their children, where they would revolt against doing exactly the same work to feed strangers.

That's why our system is collapsing. I think in a thousand years, historians will look back and see us, right now, somewhere in a transition more epic than the fall of Rome, and faster. They'll probably blame climate change, but I blame psychosocial factors, one of which is atomization, the stripping away of context. We've become isolated individuals scanning our screens for isolated pleasures. We no longer feel like we are part of anything larger that gives us a reason to do things. And dangerous movements are filling this void.

May 4.

2023-05-04T16:40:18Z

May 4. I have no ideas this week. This is a post I drafted a while back, that didn't meet my standards, but this week my standards are lower:

Efficiency is a value system, which seeks to minimize the human work that goes into doing something. But if someone is doing work they enjoy, outside the money economy, then it doesn't matter how long it takes. So the value system of efficiency only arises when the person doing the work doesn't enjoy it, or when someone is paying for it.

Imagine there's a factory owner who's obsessed with efficiency. He makes sure that in his factory, everything is done in the smoothest possible way, with no human movement that's not necessary. Then he goes out on weekends and climbs mountains.

Of course, climbing mountains has no practical value at all. It's completely about feeding the owner's hunger for meaning.

So we can't understand motivation and meaning without looking at power. The workers are not allowed to do their jobs in a way that feels more meaningful to them, unless it fits the owner's sense of meaning. And that owner-defined sense of meaning -- quantity of wealth produced per quantity of human activity -- goes hand in hand with economic domination.

I suggest a numerical measure of a society's health. I call it intrinsic-extrinsic overlap, and I can think of two ways to measure it: 1) Of all the people who are really into something, what percent are into something that the economy considers valuable? 2) Of all the people with jobs, what percent would still do their jobs if money was not a factor?

May 2.

2023-05-02T14:20:57Z

May 2. Gordon Lightfoot has died. I've been listening to his stuff for decades, and he has a lot of great songs other than the hits, so I whipped up a 95 minute Spotify playlist.

May 1.

2023-05-01T13:10:26Z

May 1. Today's subject is drugs, a word I'm using to include alcohol. There's a set of things that a lot of people say about drugs: they make you numb, they temporarily block the misery of existence, they take you away from reality.

My experience is exactly the opposite, and I'm specifically talking about cannabis a few times a week and psychedelics a few times a year. Drugs take me closer to reality. Edges are sharper, sounds are clearer, social situations are more comprehensible. Emotions are stronger, including unpleasant emotions. I get some anxiety from weed but it's worth it for the benefits. Rather than zoning out on the couch, I pack every experience and activity I can into the magic hours before I return to the padded cell of my thick head.

I think this is related to the fact that I don't like alcohol or opioids. I mean, I won't try heroin, but I've had prescription hydrocodone, and after one pill I'm like, nope, the negatives outweigh the positives.

Last week I took my yearly LSD trip. In Pullman I would always walk up the Palouse River. In Seattle I walked around Westcrest Park, an urban forest that has gone long enough without logging to have trees you can't reach halfway around. And it was nice, but I still like the river better. I feel like the best part of the forest must be up in the treetops where the sun is.

About the drug, I discovered something crazy. Neither LSD nor psilocybin has ever given me visuals, so I thought, I'll try to jump-start some visuals by imagining something. And I couldn't! LSD gives me aphantasia. A substance known for taking people to dreamland, takes me extra hard into my senses. I've poked around online and can't find anyone else reporting this.

I suppose my point is, a lot of what we think drugs do is really down to individual brains.