We rural farmers have found the ignorance of city folk about how their food and electricity and water are produced depressing and hilarious in this ambivalent way for decades. One can only wonder how far society can build technical, monetary and moral debt in this matryoshka doll sort of way before collapse...
In Haruki Murakami's "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" he mentions:
"It cost a lot less to open your own place back then [1974] than it does now. Young people like us who were determined to avoid “company life” at all costs were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation... It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system."
Children are pulled towards these gaps where the giant experience advantage adults have are not already dominating, unless adults spend much one-on-one time grooming children to take over their current roles. Most parents are in roles that will not be around for their children, or the parents cannot give such roles to their children. This inter-generational alienation has grown for centuries.
I fear that our institutions will be, in particular, unprepared to cope with the nigh-invisible problems that the very new increase in life-expectancy will bring. What happens when groups and teams of people performing and designing at unprecedentedly high levels due to abnormal extra decades of experience start dying off, without ready replacements because the strongest minds went to niche tech sectors with the least competition from more experienced older people? I wonder if there is a cohort in some field where people with elongated life-spans dominated limited positions to the point where replacements with enough experience to keep things going will simply be impossible to find. Is this happening already? Any examples? I definitely read that there are a plethora of continuously unfilled job openings requiring too much experience and growing crowds of unemployed who cannot build experience, but maybe this is not too new or unendurable and a brutal transition is not necessary. I hope it is just a neurosis of mine. I welcome any words in response that will soothe this fear.
I think too, here, of how the average age of a Nobel Prize in Physics winner is increasing at a superlinear rate. I feel a new Tower of Babel collapse will come because technological change will outpace the rate at which human brains can learn. I feel technical debt outpaces even national debts and idiocracy is resulting. I had to stop reading (ironically) Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation because it was literally giving me panic attacks. I've always been successful in school and the book just solidifies my conceit that I am king turd of a shit mountain. What if we get too weak to hold on to the shoulders of the
I can understand why society requires faith; maybe it's always been Wile E. Coyote refusing to look down—and Spengler would hardly make one think otherwise. But weren't many older generations working for future generations? When have societies so obviously borrowed from the future instead of building it? Straddled their children with debt instead of taking it on for their benefit? I went to my eighth choice school out of eight to avoid debt and I'm now at an even-worse graduate school (I got into the number 1 grad program for my major, balked at $180k of debt, and am now attending an unranked school, i.e. it's not even in the top 150) and all I get in exchange is worry that the program is not challenging enough, and self-hate that I can't motivate myself enough independently of school.
Todays kids build in Minecraft, just as I built in Legos, because neither of us could fight through the massive amount of red tape to build something real in, say, California. Why should kids go outside when they are allowed to do so little? There's no treasure to be found at the local park, if there was, it's been found by the crowds already, and you're not allowed to dig to try to find some anyway. My mother is a gatherer (as in hunt and gatherer) at heart, and her deepest love is to wander the mesas of desolate Wyoming, find artifacts and weird rocks, bring them home, and add them to an ever-growing found-object arrangement in her driveway that I consider a folk art installation (she is more humble). It is very illegal. But when kids do this in Minecraft or I hunt and gatherer in a Bethesda Softworks game, no one arrests me even if I get caught. But I'm exercising once-valuable skills and instincts that I should fast from and eventually eliminate if I want to gain advantage in my current sociopolitical environment. I fear I'm merely an echo of a old way of life and I find myself unable to enjoy Fallout: New Vegas without guilt or fear, and stressed out when I try to build skills for the new world order.
I once had a vision that I interpreted to mean that absolute power is absolute weakness. I haven't integrated it into my life, but when I think about how people can learn how to push buttons without learning how to build the machines those buttons control, I get an in to the truth, that the pursuit of power, is the pursuit of comfort, is the pursuit of weakness, is the pursuit of stress. And this flux is eternal.