[HN Gopher] The future will have to wait (2006)
___________________________________________________________________
The future will have to wait (2006)
Author : laurex
Score : 84 points
Date : 2022-05-04 03:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (longnow.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (longnow.org)
| djokkataja wrote:
| > If you don't believe in the Future, unreservedly and
| dreamingly, if you aren't willing to bet that somebody will be
| there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now,
| runs down, then I don't see how you can have children. If you
| have children, I don't see how you can fail to do everything in
| your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and
| their grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandchildren,
| will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished
| by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and
| free. And I don't see how anybody can force me to pay up on my
| bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.
|
| We didn't stay dead.
|
| We were supposed to. That was what I had learned, anyway. Short
| of magic, nothing was going to resurrect us after we died.
|
| "You're not dead anymore, Mike."
|
| That was the first thing I heard when I was Reawakened. I'd tell
| you about how I felt all kinds of astonishing tingly sensations
| and sat up in dazed wonder at the glorious euphoria of my shiny
| new bionic body, but who hasn't experienced that and heard about
| it and talked about it a million times already?
|
| No, what was interesting was that I came from a generation that
| was supposed to stay dead. Before my generation, most people had
| religious beliefs of one kind or another whereby they would
| magically be resurrected, with their status afterward depending
| on various criteria. But my generation had learned that all that
| religious stuff was nonsense, unscientific magical thinking, so
| we were just going to stay dead.
|
| "I'm pretty sure that I'm _supposed_ to be dead, " I asserted,
| looking suspiciously at the disappointingly stereotypically
| futuristically beautiful and androgynous figure before me. "Thus
| I can only conclude that the experience of my demise was a
| terribly convincing deception."
|
| "Mike, I'm a doctor, not a simulation engineer," the figure said.
| "But you've hit the nail on the head. The experience of your life
| until now was a computationally rendered projection, a terribly
| convincing deception. You're likely not precisely the same person
| as the version of you that died in reality, but that Mike
| wouldn't have been precisely the same as the Mike the day before
| anyway. What matters is that you and your experiences are as
| close to those of the Mike who died in reality as everything and
| everyone can tell us. You're a full person now, full societal
| presence, participation and rights same as me and everyone else.
| We do not discriminate between people with simulated experiences
| and people with real-universe experiences. That would be
| unscientific magical thinking. It's the same basic hardware
| architecture for you and me, see," they tapped knuckles to the
| side of their head lightly. "The people you knew were simulated
| just as you were, and when they die in that simulation of the
| past, you'll get to meet them again, too."
|
| This was obviously too good to be true. "What's the catch?"
|
| "You're alive again."
|
| "Damn. No, but really."
|
| "You're _alive_ again, Mike. This ain 't heaven, it's more
| living. And you're not gonna just keel over and die like last
| time. This new body's more than slightly better put together, and
| we're more than slightly better at cheating death than we used to
| be. So the catch is no one waltzes away from consequences via old
| age anymore. Aaand society and people may have changed from what
| you're used to. A bit."
|
| My shiny new balls tingled, alert to the mistruthing in that last
| "A bit." I paused, taking it all in. "So why are you here with
| that expectant look on your face?"
|
| "Well, Mike. Ten thousand years ago you made a bet. And there's
| this clock running down, see, and nobody's crying."
| tveita wrote:
| The zeitgeist is one of clinical depression; Negative outcomes
| are taken for granted, every action to improve the situation is
| futile, and fatigue and paralysis sets in.
|
| We might expect the fashion to turn from activism to nihilism and
| then hedonism. But as the pendulum swings again we could again
| see increased sense of responsibility, maybe with a twist like
| the return of small communities instead of global connections,
| carving out a future for yourself and your loved ones.
|
| Who knows, the motions of the pendulum are chaotic and always
| reactionary.
| kardianos wrote:
| I don't strictly disagree with you, but I dislike the pendulum
| model for the same reason I dislike modeling history/future as
| linear. Society can regress, it can progress, it can do both in
| different areas. It can be reactionary, but it can also way too
| far for a hundred or more years. Maoist China was not by itself
| reactionary or linear, but a totaling force. The Dang era that
| followed changed some essential aspects, but even that has been
| reversing under Xe.
|
| Each component in life must be modeled by itself. Societies can
| and have destroyed themselves. There are real better and worse
| ways of living.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| You may well be right, but as an optimist I look hard for other
| explanations regarding our collective psychology.
|
| Depression is not the same as frustration. And self limitation
| is not the same as confinement. The latter allow more for
| overcoming, whereas depresssion can be an inescapable
| existential state for Kirkegaardian reasons.
|
| As discussed in another thread today, on the rise of mental
| illness connected to technology [1], there is a sense of
| societal trauma. So many wars, recessions, pandemics and
| tragedies flow like water under the bridge, never giving us
| time to grieve, reflect or learn. We are, as Nietzsche said,
| forever tumbling, "plunging continually" into a future, with
| nothing to grab hold of [2].
|
| Some years ago I gave a talk at Goldsmiths University in London
| at a conference "Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future"
| [3] on the role of technology in paradoxically limiting
| available futures.
|
| David Graeber and Peter Thiel [4] had more or less the same
| debate we had at Goldsmiths. Inevitably the much maligned
| Fukuyama, simplified into a sound-bite about the "End of
| History" [5] is brought out for a whipping. Part of the issue
| _is_ the transformed role of capital as a closure around
| possibility, rather than an enabler of radical possibility. But
| that 's not limited to Capital(ism) as such. Indeed, one
| possibly apocryphal story was the Chinese CCP banning stories
| about time travel and alternative futures.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31268222
|
| [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)
| http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html
|
| [3]
| https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/178054/a...
|
| [4] https://thebaffler.com/latest/graeber-thiel
|
| [5]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
| dzdt wrote:
| As an American, it seems too me that our country is at an end of
| a long upwards arc of scocial progress. While technological
| progress continues, it isn't clear that progress will be good for
| humanity. Global warming looms as an immense threat but without
| any meaningful response. As a nonbeliever religion offers no
| solace, but even believers tend towards welcoming the "end times"
| rather than non-apocolytpic comfort. Political power of
| individuals is infintesimal and shrinking, as money interests and
| gerrymandering remove any remaining impact of our voices on the
| process.
| dqpb wrote:
| I think we're living in the most exciting time in the history
| of the universe.
|
| Our resource consumption is on trajectory to result in global
| civilization collapse around 2040:
| https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vind...
|
| On the other hand, Juergen Schmidhuber (and Eric Schmidt, and
| Ray Kurzweil) predicts the "Omega point" of technological
| development (including AGI) to be around 2040:
| https://youtu.be/pGftUCTqaGg
|
| This race between progress and destruction was destined to
| happen and it culminates in our lifetime.
| faitswulff wrote:
| Kurzweil's predictions haven't been very reliable IIRC.
| bregma wrote:
| When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the
| shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few
| years. That affects your thinking.
|
| Our parents' and grandparents' generations were the people that
| wrecked the world with their European/Asian/Pacific wars and
| their plastics and their nucleotides and their freeways and their
| pesticides and their phosphates and acid rain and their racism
| and sexism and chauvinism. Rounding up their own children to send
| them to almost certain death in a foreign land to score brownie
| points at the country club. Still, we had hope for the future: we
| could put white men on the moon, we could eradicate many of the
| more common transmissible causes of death, we could feed the
| world at least in theory. Then came the Boomers who would change
| everything with their peace, love, and free thinking. That was
| reflected in the (non-commercial) music and writing of the time.
| Then they discovered money and how it could benefit them
| personally.
|
| Now I listen to the music and every other song seems to be about
| the medication they've been given is not enough, or how angry
| they are about what they've been given. The books seems to all be
| dystopian. The zeitgeist has gone from "Eat drink and be merry
| for tomorrow we may die" to "Starve yourself we're going to die."
|
| Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect anything
| to handed to you.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| When all you have and all that surrounds you is garbage, and
| the future is what you make it, the future is probably going to
| be garbage.
| sebastos wrote:
| That's exactly the kind of fatalistic attitude that's being
| criticized here though. If you can recognize that you're
| surrounded by garbage, you can decide that you want things to
| be different. If you decide you want things to be different,
| you can potentially inspire other people to feel the same
| way.
|
| If the current environment just dictated the future one,
| there would be never be any change in our culture. In my
| opinion you are underestimating how voraciously we humans get
| sick of <current thing> and seek out something new.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > Hey folks, the future is what you make it. Don't expect
| anything to handed to you.
|
| Expecting that you will be able to make anything particular of
| the future is also a mistake. The future is mostly just
| something that happens to you, no matter how hard you may work
| to shape it.
| kardianos wrote:
| > It's only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a
| blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human
| endeavor and creation, for granted.
|
| This is so sad. It is the purposeful breakdown of obligation and
| responsibility. After all "Entitlement will thrive where there is
| a lack of obligation." And entitlement is the antithesis of
| responsibility.
|
| > If you don't believe in the Future, unreservedly and
| dreamingly, if you aren't willing to bet that somebody will be
| there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now,
| runs down, then I don't see how you can have children. If you
| have children, I don't see how you can fail to do everything in
| your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and
| their grandchildren, and their grandchildren's grandchildren,
| will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished
| by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and
| free.
|
| This is the correct response that correctly recognizes each
| person's personal responsibility and societal obligation.
|
| We have a future should we choose it.
|
| Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.
| mempko wrote:
| I think what we are finding out quickly is the true death cults
| are those that think we have a future if we keep doing what
| we're doing.
| kardianos wrote:
| I don't object to reasoned change.
|
| I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a
| current trajectory.
|
| I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning.
|
| I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a
| future.
| mempko wrote:
| I have kids. I tell them they have a future. They have no
| responsibility to change what is happening, we do. What's
| horrible is people telling them they have a future but
| doing everything possible to destroy it. Think the
| Republican party for example, they are 100% climate
| denialists who place ideology ahead of reality.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| If nothing changes, they won't have a future. It's that
| simple.
| kardianos wrote:
| I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even
| eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more
| hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil
| reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets
| transition to electric and nuclear before then.
|
| Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who
| would look for any excuse to tear society down so they
| can try their social experiments again. Be that class,
| identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything
| down because it isn't perfect, no.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years,
| we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will
| cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to
| grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at
| effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live?
|
| Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like
| saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation
| that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads
| out of our collective asses and start investing in
| alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50
| years.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| My gut feeling is that the science/tech side of this is
| mature and becoming more so all the time.
|
| Our true cultural failure is articulating specific,
| accessible, and _optimistic_ visions for what the future
| could actually look like. Our current teenagers and young
| adults came up in a time period where dystopian stories
| were prominent. Maybe we need to see a prominent success
| of an optimistic worldview.
|
| People won't fight for an idea they can't imagine.
| beauzero wrote:
| We need to start investing in alternative energy because
| coal and oil are a very efficient energy vault. That
| vault gave us an easy leg up through energy
| manipulation/controlled release at a scale that is easy
| for humans to use. Fusion, solar, fission, etc. are all
| jumpstarted through this stored vault. Without it it is
| difficult to get materials built to even jumpstart us
| through the current knowledge base/technology chain. We
| will have to revisit a lot of technology if we don't use
| the next 100 years to step to another century or even
| millennium technology/energy chain.
|
| e.g It is difficult to burn enough trees to extract
| enough electricity to mine and refine resources needed to
| build solar panels or even build wire for transport.
| mempko wrote:
| Actually we only have proven reserves at the current rate
| of consumption for 47 years. USA has only reserves for 5
| years. The bet is that oil companies keep finding new
| reserves, but that's not looking well. Rate of finding
| oil reserves is something like 8 billion barrels a year
| but we use 30+ billion. And if we keep burning that oil
| past 2040 at our current rate, the climate could lead to
| the extinction of all life including human life.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _I object to not having kids_
|
| You may not, but everyone chooses differently. It's not
| unreasonable to not want children, they do take resources
| to take care of after all, resources that could be better
| used elsewhere.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human
| endeavor and creation, for granted.
|
| That's called education failure.
| coldtea wrote:
| It's also parroting what he hears from around him.
|
| It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and
| gave much thought to the situation.
|
| It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages
| from kids parroting what their parents think (often with
| adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).
| pjc50 wrote:
| > We have a future should we choose it.
|
| As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"?
|
| The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of
| power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man
| with the power decides there should be no future for you.
|
| > Keep your children away from death cults who would say
| otherwise.
|
| Who do you have in mind here?
| kardianos wrote:
| > Who do you have in mind here?
|
| Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a
| moral good.
|
| Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth,
| where our best option is our own destruction.
|
| Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when
| confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil
| in themselves, on in others.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| >> _" Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you
| children as a moral good."_
|
| Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I
| know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans
| people with this because they've been given twisted ideas
| about what acceptance means and what happens from media
| grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean
| here.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| Circumcision.
| notriddle wrote:
| Circumcised people aren't castrated. Castration makes you
| infertile. Circumcision doesn't.
|
| (Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a
| medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but
| it doesn't make you infertile.)
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I suspect it is more along the lines of "it's immoral to
| have children when you're only birthing them to suffer
| due to [insert existential fear]".
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| I think it's natural for older people to react with dismay when
| confronted with a younger person's pessimism about the future,
| but to say that it is failure of obligation or responsibility
| is seriously misunderstanding, even willfully, the kids
| thoughts on this. The situation is, in fact, quite reversed!
| Consider a child who is more pessimistic about the future than
| their parent at the same age, why is that? You could hand-wave
| it away, as people tend to do here, and say its a problem of
| education, or they have been brainwashed, but no one seems to
| consider just how much intellectual autonomy or rationality you
| are denying the kid to have, you are choosing to simply deny
| flat out any basis for the kids pessimism.
|
| You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for
| the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams
| razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the
| generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the
| apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the
| schools, but who was responsible for the character of education
| in a country but the voting generations of the past? But
| instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they
| are lazy!
|
| We _inherit_ the world we are born into, yes, but there is no
| sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people
| are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep
| down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they
| have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this
| thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected
| onto presumptions about the kid 's responsibility.
|
| It's sad to not have a _shared_ future between generations, but
| like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of
| the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like _your_
| future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of
| the world as it stands.
|
| To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense
| of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly
| identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense:
| the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long
| time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful
| critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our
| time.
|
| If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity
| of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something
| more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down
| you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.
| kardianos wrote:
| Yes, you describe a failure of obligation quite well.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Perhaps, but I don't see how my point still stands. If
| individual responsibility and obligation are the things
| that make the difference, then by that logic, the
| responsibility and obligation of generations before have
| created a world that has instilled kids with the sentiment
| they have. Like... when you say this, who are you blaming?
| Who _is_ to blame?
|
| You can say something like "Well, in fact, the world is
| doing fine, we are progressing, it is all just appearance,
| it is an epistemological problem for these kids,
| brainwashing"; and you might cite some NGO report about
| decreasing world hunger or the happiness index, or
| whatever, and say "these kids have nothing to complain
| about". I see this argument a lot. But I would just ask,
| OK, if thats true, it simply shifts the problem. If it is
| just about the kids perceptions, and their dwindling sense
| of obligation in response to that, we can still ask: why
| are they being misled in this way? Why do they feel selfish
| entitlement instead responsible obligation? Surely it is
| something about the world they find themselves in, the
| world inherited from their parents. I don't know who else
| you can blame. You spent many decades voting, consuming,
| building the apps, creating the culture that kids find
| themselves in, the very same one where they arrive at the
| sentiments they do. It is still on you!
|
| You could also accept my initial conclusion and say: "yes
| the world is worse then when I was a kid, but it isn't _my_
| fault. " But then, that troubles the conceit that
| individual obligation/responsibility is the operating
| variable there. And really, you are just hold the same
| pessimism as the kid, but through the filter of a lived
| life grasping for purpose. You are asking the kid to have
| more faith than yourself!
|
| At the end of the day, a life might just be a lesson in
| having faith in progress, but that is less a value to
| impose, less something to punish the kid for not realizing,
| as it is something we all must come to.
|
| To blame the kids is just not logical. Even if it turns out
| that the flouride in the water or whatever has caused this
| rash of irresponsibility in young people, that is still on
| the generations before them for putting it in the water! If
| its not on the generations before, if it was going to
| happen no matter what, then that is just reason to throw
| out the idea the kids lack anything at all, that something
| about their sentiments are _their_ fault.
|
| So, either you are guilty (as presumably an older person),
| or you need to cut the kids some slack.
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| Older people bemoaning the pessimism, fatalism and short-termism
| of the younger generations really ought to try engaging younger
| people in meaningful dialog and attempting to understand their
| points of view. Younger people are interested in the future and
| they are passionate about tackling emerging global problems.
| Market research shows gen Z place a huge emphasis on
| sustainability for example.
|
| Personally I don't think the Jetsons, Star Trek and other sci-fi
| fantasies and space operas were really about the future at all.
| They were reflections of a contemporary culture of blind techno-
| utopian optimism which was disconnected from the _actual_ future
| and was perhaps quite detrimental to it. The false image of the
| future lives on in e.g. techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars
| instead of solving our problems here on Earth. Younger genres
| like Solarpunk feel much more connected to humanity 's future
| than these older sci-fi tropes ever did.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Right now, Solarpunk feels more like an aesthetic than a genre.
| It also seems to be getting bogged down in political cruft
| around what it means to be "punk".
|
| Edit: I'd love to hear why I'm wrong. Are there prominent
| Solarpunk authors I'm not aware of?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I think this is why I liked DS9 so much more than TNG or
| Voyager. It put less of a fourth wall between the conflict on
| the screen and the real-world conflicts it tried to map to, and
| it handled them without cynicism or easy, unrealistic
| solutions. When a chunk of the station got blown off, you saw
| people working on it in the opening of the next episode.
| Conflicts weren't always solved with a good speech.
|
| _Q finally got his ass kicked._ Sometimes the only way through
| is to punch a god.
| goatlover wrote:
| > Sometimes the only way through is to punch a god.
|
| Duarte tries that in The Expanse and it doesn't go so well.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I've only seen the show where the gate builders and their
| enemy are still, and forever, a mystery. I don't think even
| Holden knows that much, but he at least has the good sense
| to not anger them. Q is more like a bored puppy.
| kardianos wrote:
| You sound like a teenager "You don't understand me! You're too
| old!"
|
| Or, we've been there, and have a different perspective after
| having walked through it.
|
| Solarpunk isn't new. It strongly reminds me of the 1960 to
| early 1970s graphics.
|
| And yes, StarWars is an opera. Also, opera can be fun.
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| >"You don't understand me! You're too old!"
|
| If a younger person said this to me I would find it quite
| reasonable. As an older person I don't presume to
| automatically understand the unique problems and
| circumstances of a different generation from my own. That's
| why I put effort into engaging younger people in dialogue.
| What I'm suggesting is that others do the same.
| goatlover wrote:
| There was the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War,
| environmental concerns around overpopulation, deforestation and
| acid rain. And there were dystopian movies like Terminator,
| Alien and Threads with fears around technology, corporations
| and world war. Older people did have to deal with the
| possibility of bad future outcomes. It seems to have been
| forgotten in the 90s and and the first decade of the 2000s when
| those issues didn't seem so world ending in the absence of the
| Cold War and the failure of environmental doom predictions from
| the 60s though the 80s.
| CipherThrowaway wrote:
| My point isn't that older generations didn't have problems
| worth worrying about. It's that younger generations have
| their own unique problems worth worrying about. I wouldn't
| expect someone who grew up in the 00s to really understand
| the Cold War, so why would I expect someone who grew up in
| the 80s to understand the unique challenges of Generation Z?
| This is why dialogue is important.
|
| The environmental comparison is very shallow. Climate change
| is a higher stakes and larger scale environmental issue than
| we have ever seen and will require radical changes to modern
| life and modern economies merely to _limit_ the damage.
| Compare it to a past looming disaster like ozone depletion
| where the risk was bad sunburns and all we had to do was stop
| spraying Freon into the air. I remember actually being
| worried about the ozone layer. Boy does that feel quaint now.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there.
| Everything feels like "blind techno-utopian optimism" because
| you're intentionally blinding yourself to progress and focusing
| entirely on the negatives.
|
| I think this especially stands out with your example of
| "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being
| exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being
| fairly beneficial to each other.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Anyone know the status?
|
| BTW can recommend "The Pattern on the Stone" by Hillis to anyone
| interested in computer science principles.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| The future is now. It's just unevenly distributed.
|
| > When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970 it was in the
| shadow of The Bomb and we all expected to be dead within a few
| years. That affects your thinking.
|
| We have climate change and a demographic cliff now.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Needs [2006] appended to the title.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, the future still has to wait.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Or 02006
| Danieru wrote:
| Hmm, I don't think its an Octal date.
| katabasis wrote:
| > The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra
| zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come
| into effect in about 8,000 years
|
| https://longnow.org/about/
|
| The current year in Long Now parlance would be 02022.
| [deleted]
| cheschire wrote:
| We don't take the time to process and grieve anymore. In the same
| way that a minor physical act can result in a major physical
| injury, we can often endure great trauma from seemingly small
| events. And yet, we have built so many fire hoses ready to bath
| us in small events, never really knowing or understanding the
| impact of these minor events on our psyche.
|
| Many people wake up, pick up their phone/tablet and immediately
| subject their brain to defensive thought patterns. We get to
| work, now often in what used to be our relaxing space at home,
| and we have very little social chit chat opportunities to explore
| our feelings on topics. When our day is done, how do we relax?
|
| - Watching endless streams of depressing media on TV
|
| - Playing games with conflict loops
|
| - Doom scrolling news
|
| - Rapid-fire bite sized thoughts (tiktok, youtube, twitter,
| imgur, 90% of reddit)
|
| You can't even escape it doing mundane things like going to the
| store or restaurants anymore. How many places have either news or
| sports on the media player? That's never ending conflict being
| sprayed all over you.
|
| What happens when a person is in a never ending defense mode for
| years? How does the brain change physically? How does the person
| engage with their children, and then how do those children engage
| with each other? I've tried to break out of this, and feel like
| I've made progress. I ignore the news most of the time and try to
| focus more on long form analysis. I don't inundate myself with
| current events anymore. And then when I try to talk to people
| about how much happier I am, I get the worst response: how can
| you ignore something that might affect you? I tell them well, I
| have to for my sanity.
|
| A life of perpetual preparation for the zombie apocalypse is not
| much better than living through the zombie apocalypse.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| The extent to which the bulk of the comments here illustrate
| your points is breathtaking. Most of them represent a
| profoundly dismal and cynical view of both the now and the
| future, angrily lashing out at their preferred culprits.
| scottLobster wrote:
| For my family, I prefer the more positive connotation of
| "building an Ark for the inevitable flood" or the classic "make
| hay while the sun shines". Both of which can be healthy if done
| right.
|
| As for the information loops you mention, that's why
| discernment is now more important than access. But I wouldn't
| blame media/games/the internet entirely for our perception of
| the state of the world.
|
| I grew up upper-middle-class in the 90s with all the optimism
| that came with it, school plays about how great the future is
| going to be, in 6th grade choir they actually made us sing a
| really cringe song called "We are the people of the 21st
| century" basically about how awesome the future is going to be,
| link if you want a listen (https://www.musick8.com/html/current
| _tune.php?songorder=5&nu...).
|
| Well fast forward 22 years since I was forced to sing that, and
| at least here in the US, everything you need to live a middle
| class life (housing, education, healthcare, even food these
| days) is substantially, sometimes multiple times more expensive
| than it used to be, and wage growth has been stagnant.
| Meanwhile we've lived through several "once in a generation"
| crises. All of which we were not simply unprepared for, we were
| explicitly told the opposite was going to happen our whole
| lives. It wasn't really until the GFC that the facade started
| to crack.
|
| There will be "a future" for us, but it's not guaranteed
| positive anymore, particularly on an individual level. I'm in
| the process of spinning up lifestyle businesses I don't
| particularly like in addition to my 9-5 so my kids to have what
| my dad could afford with just his 9-to-5. And I'm one of the
| lucky ones to even have that possibility.
|
| I'm also sticking close to family, for the time being I'm
| refusing to move anywhere out of the US NorthEast corridor and
| surrounding regions. I'm lucky to have largely supportive
| family, and I'd be foolish to abandon that resource for a job I
| "might" like better 1000 miles away, especially if things are
| going to get worse before they get better. A recession is
| basically baked in at this point, although it's impossible to
| say exactly when.
|
| Maybe things will get better, but don't bet on it. If there's
| one thing current events do bear out: Complacency kills.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-05 23:02 UTC)