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.
We've made the world too complicated
101–110 of 496 posts
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#102Kindest 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 w…
Zen Buddhism has been advocating this precise teaching for millenia. What's new here?
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#103This 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 Sp…
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.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#104This 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."
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#105This 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?
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#106Extinctions 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.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#107Kindest 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 w…
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!"
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#108This 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.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#109> 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.
Re: We've made the world too complicated
#110Oh 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.