The article is interesting as a way to understand how people are feeling. I think there are deeper questions to examine.
We don't necessarily "feel" it or "see" it, but the world has been changing dramatically for the last 50 years, or so. We all know this.
The introduction of key technology has resulted in accelerated changes. If we could step back from the everyday, we would see ourselves on a slope of change that is almost vertical.
This slope of change affects everything in our lives--society, culture, psychology, environment, government, etc.--there is nothing that can escape these changes.
The question of "the world falling apart" is really a question of how dynamic the change in the world has been over the last 50 years and our collective reticence to adaptation.
Some sense that we need to "return to better times" as a coping mechanism. Except the concept of "better times" is a fallacy. Intellectually we know this.
It is true that many of us enjoy the benefits of the changes in our ability to communicate, to entertain ourselves, to do our jobs, to travel, and so on. But some are unfortunately not able to enjoy the benefits, while certainly receiving the negative impacts.
I believe that we are all better off if we first recognize and accept the changes, and then find ways to navigate these changes collectively--even if this requires letting go of concepts that have worked in the past and/or adapting those ways to the new realities. It requires a new state of mind to begin to accomplish this. Reach out to those that need help in adapting.
I think there's a pretty simple explanation for this: It's hard to admit when we're not doing well. It's easy to say that the world is getting worse, that you're worried for the future, but to admit that you personally are having trouble is depressing and a little humiliating. I'm guilty of this -- even when times are really bad for me personally, I try to be optimistic and consider my current misery as a temporary misfortune. It helps to keep moving forwards.
It’s also possible that what affects you personally is actually going well, but what affects everyone indirectly is not going well. Rivers of plastic may be flowing in the ocean, but your local trash collector collects “recyclables” weekly for no additional charge and you feel good about sorting the trash.
A person is also more in control of what's going on around them personally, the larger that scope increases the less any normal individual has any effect. The ant can be optimistic about it's chances of surviving the winter while still pessimistic about what the fate of all of the grasshoppers.
Yup. Long range it looks dire. But things haven't fallen apart *yet*. I don't see why these are supposedly contradictory. The altimeter unwinding at a dizzying pace inflicts no harm on the occupants. But it's an awful lot easier to say "this time it's different" than admit what it says.
This framing seems like justification of the assumption that "how the world is doing is the equal average of how everyone is individually doing". Quite simply the "direction of things" is either completely uncontrolled or controlled by a small group of people with incentives misaligned with the rest of the world. Everyone can be doing fine despite losing a war against them.
I made a decision to reframe "news" as the "fear network" so my brain had that context as I found out the news of the day. The article had an interesting perspective on information diets contributing to overall pessimism.
In the intro to the "Crack Up", there's a quote which I used a a mantra
The ability to hold two conflicting thoughts and yet continue to function is a test of intelligence - be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
You don't need to lie yourself that the world is not falling apart, but being truly optimistic instead of nihilistic at the face of that is a difficult test for any intelligent human being.
In the scale of the universe and history, most of what you do is not important, but it is very important that you do it (rambles on about Gita, Ecclesiastes and Plato ...).
I don't think that it's falling apart. Rather, there are undeniable mathematically-confirmable trends that bode ill. And I don't know that what I have is so much optimism as it is boneheaded stubbornness and some degree of wishful thinking. Maybe that's the same thing though, no one ever really explained the distinctions to me.
We are living in the best times in human history. 200 years ago, the wealthiest kings in the world didnt live in such luxury.
We are pulling people out of poverty like no other era has ever been able to do.
In my lifetime I expect we create a food factory that takes clean water, atmosphere, and electricity in. Automation happens, no humans, and it produces foods. We can simply build as many of these as we please, anywhere.
Literally everywhere I look things are going fantastically.
My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.
Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.
There is an abundance of cheap clothes, cheap enough that there is no need to worry about repairing them, like in the distant past, but anything that I can buy in a normal shop has a much worse quality than the clothes that were available many decades ago. At least unlike with food, I can still find good quality clothes, but only if I order them online from various countries and from a different country for every kind, as there is no place where everything is optimum (e.g. I buy some things from Sweden, others from Scotland, others from Ireland, others from Austria, and so on).
There are of course things that are much better, mainly those with electronic components, but there are already many years since the prices of these have been growing almost continuously, so they have become less and less affordable.
In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.
I'm worse than I was 5 years ago. I am NOT optimistic about my life, the country, or the world.
WARNING: This is going to be a rant.
- I can't change my job. There are no more jobs available in my area. All competitors got bought or went bankrupt during Covid. I have no leverage for better wages. If I get fired (not likely, but just saying), I'm screwed. I'll have to move in a bigger city. And even then, chances for a better job are very slim. I'm not paying rent or mortgage here, but I'll have to if I move. Bigger city also means more time wasted commuting.
- I almost had enough money to buy a house in another city. Then Covid came, prices exploded. Now I can't. I'm getting older and each year the max. bank loan I can get is one year shorter.
- I had to replace my car. I had enough money to buy new and I wanted a PHEV instead. But then reality hit me: all new cars have road sign beeping, lane change beeping, tyre pressure beeping, service reminder beeping (by calendar instead of distance), Ecall tracking, DCM non-removable, head unit not replaceable, etc. etc. I can't buy that! I had to buy a 10y old used car instead. I took the same model as the old one, but different year/gen, and it is worse in almost every way. I still couldn't escape the service reminder, a suggested gear indicator that's always wrong, a more powerful (+20hp) engine that feels waaay weaker and consumes a bit more than the old one, no feedback in the steering wheel even in "sport" mode, less powerful air conditioning, less ergonomic interior, worse mirrors, worse view ahead, worse view diagonal due to thicker and more inclined roof pillars, wind noise from the left front door, etc.
- I can't upgrade my PC. I'm trying to vote with my wallet and there's nothing to vote for. I'm stuck at Phenom II 1100. I'm against UEFI and secure boot and, except Longsoon, all decent CPUs are locked down with signed firmware. The GPUs are all too expensive relative to how very few recent games are worth playing and how much time I have to play them.
- I can't watch Netflix anymore. I'm trying to vote with my wallet again and not buy a closed-source spyware-infested media player. I've been using a RPi4 with LibreELEC. Netflix plugin for Kodi (CastagnaIT) is abandoned and stopped working 2 months ago.
- At job, mandatory upgrade to Win 11. This week, font antialiasing got enabled after an update and I can't find any setting to disable it. All I see is a blur, my eyes hurt.
- Also at job: new colleague, Facebook generation, if you know what I mean.
- This year the last 3G phone network is going down. I searched for a phone replacement and I can't find any. I have just 2 requirements: 1) call and answer with one hand without looking at the screen and 2) auto-record phone conversations so I don't have to search for a pen and paper all the time. Nothing matches. I bought a Fairphone, the last one with an audio jack, and I'm keeping it in a drawer until the Nokia stops working.
- Electricity got a lot more expensive. Gas too (for heating, hot water). The other gas (for car) too.
- Food got worse at my favorite restaurant. Probably the cook emigrated.
- I can't find any classic style pants with nice wide accesible pockets (insert hand from the back toward the front of the pants). All pants are tight at the hips and have jeans-style vertical pockets (insert hand from the top, straight down) that I can't access while sitting and without scratching the back of my hands.
I could go on and on. I'm trying to think of some good things that happend in the last 10y and there are very few.
It's called disaster capitalism, and it's intended. The tech overlords realized they could make money on things if they helped the world collapse. Why? Because they know they would be immune to the nightmare they would create. Plus they need another yacht for their yacht.
When the answer is not general but particular - "better" or "worse" can be about many things including entirely non-quantifiable and subjective ones like "moral virtue" - but when it's about economy, it's easy to see how the average of "personal" metrics matches stats: things were going on average very well in the last 10 years for majority of people, excluding a slight spike fuelled by free printed money in the era of covid payments, and a slight depression after when inflation compensated for those - otherwise they were almost uniformly well without much visible change.
But the amount of doom-and-gloom messaging skyrocketed in the period and most people tend to believe the news and think that things suck for everyone else, just they are doing ok personally. And something in the middle for people they can personally observe like their town or district.
Idk what's wrong about it. Fixing the messaging is unlikely because positive messages are not newsworthy and not clickable.
this is the first time I've seen someone actually use the practical version of Turkiye spelling - without weird non-English letters
why is it so hard for people to understand that naive should be spelled with 'i' because that one is part of English alphabet and keyboard, while the 2-dotted one isn't?
I apologize for the long comment...
The article is interesting as a way to understand how people are feeling. I think there are deeper questions to examine.
We don't necessarily "feel" it or "see" it, but the world has been changing dramatically for the last 50 years, or so. We all know this.
The introduction of key technology has resulted in accelerated changes. If we could step back from the everyday, we would see ourselves on a slope of change that is almost vertical.
This slope of change affects everything in our lives--society, culture, psychology, environment, government, etc.--there is nothing that can escape these changes.
The question of "the world falling apart" is really a question of how dynamic the change in the world has been over the last 50 years and our collective reticence to adaptation.
Some sense that we need to "return to better times" as a coping mechanism. Except the concept of "better times" is a fallacy. Intellectually we know this.
It is true that many of us enjoy the benefits of the changes in our ability to communicate, to entertain ourselves, to do our jobs, to travel, and so on. But some are unfortunately not able to enjoy the benefits, while certainly receiving the negative impacts.
I believe that we are all better off if we first recognize and accept the changes, and then find ways to navigate these changes collectively--even if this requires letting go of concepts that have worked in the past and/or adapting those ways to the new realities. It requires a new state of mind to begin to accomplish this. Reach out to those that need help in adapting.
I think there's a pretty simple explanation for this: It's hard to admit when we're not doing well. It's easy to say that the world is getting worse, that you're worried for the future, but to admit that you personally are having trouble is depressing and a little humiliating. I'm guilty of this -- even when times are really bad for me personally, I try to be optimistic and consider my current misery as a temporary misfortune. It helps to keep moving forwards.
It’s also possible that what affects you personally is actually going well, but what affects everyone indirectly is not going well. Rivers of plastic may be flowing in the ocean, but your local trash collector collects “recyclables” weekly for no additional charge and you feel good about sorting the trash.
A person is also more in control of what's going on around them personally, the larger that scope increases the less any normal individual has any effect. The ant can be optimistic about it's chances of surviving the winter while still pessimistic about what the fate of all of the grasshoppers.
Yup. Long range it looks dire. But things haven't fallen apart *yet*. I don't see why these are supposedly contradictory. The altimeter unwinding at a dizzying pace inflicts no harm on the occupants. But it's an awful lot easier to say "this time it's different" than admit what it says.
This framing seems like justification of the assumption that "how the world is doing is the equal average of how everyone is individually doing". Quite simply the "direction of things" is either completely uncontrolled or controlled by a small group of people with incentives misaligned with the rest of the world. Everyone can be doing fine despite losing a war against them.
I made a decision to reframe "news" as the "fear network" so my brain had that context as I found out the news of the day. The article had an interesting perspective on information diets contributing to overall pessimism.
In the intro to the "Crack Up", there's a quote which I used a a mantra
The ability to hold two conflicting thoughts and yet continue to function is a test of intelligence - be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
You don't need to lie yourself that the world is not falling apart, but being truly optimistic instead of nihilistic at the face of that is a difficult test for any intelligent human being.
In the scale of the universe and history, most of what you do is not important, but it is very important that you do it (rambles on about Gita, Ecclesiastes and Plato ...).
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
Interesting, I am the complete opposite. I'm pretty optimistic for the world and humanity, but have rarely found that optimism in my own person.
I don't think that it's falling apart. Rather, there are undeniable mathematically-confirmable trends that bode ill. And I don't know that what I have is so much optimism as it is boneheaded stubbornness and some degree of wishful thinking. Maybe that's the same thing though, no one ever really explained the distinctions to me.
We are living in the best times in human history. 200 years ago, the wealthiest kings in the world didnt live in such luxury.
We are pulling people out of poverty like no other era has ever been able to do.
In my lifetime I expect we create a food factory that takes clean water, atmosphere, and electricity in. Automation happens, no humans, and it produces foods. We can simply build as many of these as we please, anywhere.
Literally everywhere I look things are going fantastically.
You must be very lucky.
My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.
Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.
There is an abundance of cheap clothes, cheap enough that there is no need to worry about repairing them, like in the distant past, but anything that I can buy in a normal shop has a much worse quality than the clothes that were available many decades ago. At least unlike with food, I can still find good quality clothes, but only if I order them online from various countries and from a different country for every kind, as there is no place where everything is optimum (e.g. I buy some things from Sweden, others from Scotland, others from Ireland, others from Austria, and so on).
There are of course things that are much better, mainly those with electronic components, but there are already many years since the prices of these have been growing almost continuously, so they have become less and less affordable.
In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.
I'm worse than I was 5 years ago. I am NOT optimistic about my life, the country, or the world.
WARNING: This is going to be a rant.
- I can't change my job. There are no more jobs available in my area. All competitors got bought or went bankrupt during Covid. I have no leverage for better wages. If I get fired (not likely, but just saying), I'm screwed. I'll have to move in a bigger city. And even then, chances for a better job are very slim. I'm not paying rent or mortgage here, but I'll have to if I move. Bigger city also means more time wasted commuting.
- I almost had enough money to buy a house in another city. Then Covid came, prices exploded. Now I can't. I'm getting older and each year the max. bank loan I can get is one year shorter.
- I had to replace my car. I had enough money to buy new and I wanted a PHEV instead. But then reality hit me: all new cars have road sign beeping, lane change beeping, tyre pressure beeping, service reminder beeping (by calendar instead of distance), Ecall tracking, DCM non-removable, head unit not replaceable, etc. etc. I can't buy that! I had to buy a 10y old used car instead. I took the same model as the old one, but different year/gen, and it is worse in almost every way. I still couldn't escape the service reminder, a suggested gear indicator that's always wrong, a more powerful (+20hp) engine that feels waaay weaker and consumes a bit more than the old one, no feedback in the steering wheel even in "sport" mode, less powerful air conditioning, less ergonomic interior, worse mirrors, worse view ahead, worse view diagonal due to thicker and more inclined roof pillars, wind noise from the left front door, etc.
- I can't upgrade my PC. I'm trying to vote with my wallet and there's nothing to vote for. I'm stuck at Phenom II 1100. I'm against UEFI and secure boot and, except Longsoon, all decent CPUs are locked down with signed firmware. The GPUs are all too expensive relative to how very few recent games are worth playing and how much time I have to play them.
- I can't watch Netflix anymore. I'm trying to vote with my wallet again and not buy a closed-source spyware-infested media player. I've been using a RPi4 with LibreELEC. Netflix plugin for Kodi (CastagnaIT) is abandoned and stopped working 2 months ago.
- At job, mandatory upgrade to Win 11. This week, font antialiasing got enabled after an update and I can't find any setting to disable it. All I see is a blur, my eyes hurt.
- Also at job: new colleague, Facebook generation, if you know what I mean.
- This year the last 3G phone network is going down. I searched for a phone replacement and I can't find any. I have just 2 requirements: 1) call and answer with one hand without looking at the screen and 2) auto-record phone conversations so I don't have to search for a pen and paper all the time. Nothing matches. I bought a Fairphone, the last one with an audio jack, and I'm keeping it in a drawer until the Nokia stops working.
- Electricity got a lot more expensive. Gas too (for heating, hot water). The other gas (for car) too.
- Food got worse at my favorite restaurant. Probably the cook emigrated.
- I can't find any classic style pants with nice wide accesible pockets (insert hand from the back toward the front of the pants). All pants are tight at the hips and have jeans-style vertical pockets (insert hand from the top, straight down) that I can't access while sitting and without scratching the back of my hands.
I could go on and on. I'm trying to think of some good things that happend in the last 10y and there are very few.
It's called disaster capitalism, and it's intended. The tech overlords realized they could make money on things if they helped the world collapse. Why? Because they know they would be immune to the nightmare they would create. Plus they need another yacht for their yacht.
When the answer is not general but particular - "better" or "worse" can be about many things including entirely non-quantifiable and subjective ones like "moral virtue" - but when it's about economy, it's easy to see how the average of "personal" metrics matches stats: things were going on average very well in the last 10 years for majority of people, excluding a slight spike fuelled by free printed money in the era of covid payments, and a slight depression after when inflation compensated for those - otherwise they were almost uniformly well without much visible change.
But the amount of doom-and-gloom messaging skyrocketed in the period and most people tend to believe the news and think that things suck for everyone else, just they are doing ok personally. And something in the middle for people they can personally observe like their town or district.
Idk what's wrong about it. Fixing the messaging is unlikely because positive messages are not newsworthy and not clickable.
this is the first time I've seen someone actually use the practical version of Turkiye spelling - without weird non-English letters
why is it so hard for people to understand that naive should be spelled with 'i' because that one is part of English alphabet and keyboard, while the 2-dotted one isn't?