One common defense about how people read less is that people don't have the time to sit down and read an entire novel for 20 to 30 hours, because we now live in a faster paced world. Okay, I think there is some truth to that, but that just begs the question: where is people's time going then? It's not like people have less time than those of the past, people roughly live for as long as before, if not longer, so where is people's time going?
You don't need to think much about this to see the answer: people's time is now sucked into social media, the news, short-form videos, and video games. It's not that people have "less time" than before, it's that they now get sucked far more easily in low-grade things that hardly grow them and waste their time and energy. Hence, the trend of people having less memories as they grow up, because those are downstream of how consciously you live, and thus how vividly you experience events in your life. It's not that life gets faster as people age, it's that they become more mechanical, more entrenched in their habits and comfort zones, and rarely break out of their routine—something which full-time work contributes greatly to by the way.
It's hitting me lately how little time I actually have to bring about the creative projects I want to make. WWhile the average lifespan sits around 70 years, and while I can draw and write well into my 50s and 60s if I take care of my health, that simplistic estimate doesn't take into account many factors.
First of all, money has to be earned somehow, and I am not very optimistic that my creative projects will ever earn me much money. My worldview of society is utterly, and inherently pessimistic (society is not the same thing as human nature however, I like individuals), which means that hardly anyone will read what I have to say. My art skills are not so good that they would interest most people, meaning that I am confined to being niche in that regard too. And I don't know anyone who would support me directly, because evidently, there is no (money) return on investment when it comes to those things. Even my parents don't want to support me in that regard. What all of this means is that I'll probably have to work at a dayjob for much of my life in order to earn the money required to sustain myself, which, to be fair, is what most artists in the past, including many of the best ones, had to do, so I'm not saying this to complain, mainly to make a realistic assessment of my time and what I can do with it. Right now I have the privilege of not having to work at a dayjob, having quit my office job recently, but it won't be the case forever.
Secondly, and more importantly perhaps, society as we know it doesn't have that many decades remaining. I don't know whether that means that the stability that we have, namely, the food supply and the relative safety that we have (as opposed to having to worry about raiders and looters on a regular basis) will be gone in just a few decades from now, but what is certain to me is that the internet, the global supply chains, and much of the complex technology that the modern world relies on won't last for that long, perhaps as early as 2035 many of them will already suffer to a degree that affects Westerners already.
If things unfold as I roughly imagine them to be, then people like me, who live in suburban areas or in citie and have no way of providing food for ourselves outside of the system, which is to say the vast, vast majority of people nowadays, might not necessarily die, though there can certainly be a lot of pandemonium in the coming decade or so, but it won't be a rosy life either, certainly not the type of things that allows you to pursue art in your free time, because there might not even be much free time to begin with. Life as I see it will take form in a strange mix of an agrarian and salvage lifestyle, taking apart things in order to reuse the parts that still function, collecting and trading barrels of (processed) oil for that precious energy, and scrounge whatever is around us for food, and farm in the little patches of soil that we still have.
In conclusion, I don't have that many years for doing the work that I might have wanted in my life. This is why I am shifting more towards writing, rather than drawing, because writing can produce complete works much more quickly in the same amount of time as you would with drawing. Just compare the time that novels take to be written, (less than a year for the most prolific cases, a few years for committed people who don't want to ruin their health) versus your average comic or manga, which take many, many long years of hard work, if not one or two decades for some of them. Time to get to work. No time to waste.
A good heuristic for when you should leave an environment or a relationship is if you spend a lot more time having to justify and defend yourself than feels necessary, especially if it takes away from the time for doing actual work, or for intimacy with the other person, in the case of personal relationships.
I remember just how often I had to justify myself in my office job when it came to the work I did. The irony is that there wasn't such a scrutiny on me when I was not being productive at work, which meant that the incentive structure pushed me towards doing nothing most of the time, and pushing out the most mediocre thing I could put together in the remaining time, as long as it conformed to the guidelines I had to follow.
It's very clear that nothing I could have said or done would have changed that fundamental dynamic, because I would have to justify myself why my point of view is valid to begin with!
If the default position is one of defense, then it's not a good environment or relationship, because healthy ones are the ones that allow us to drop our guard and focus on more important things. That's probably why newly married couples report that they feel a lot more peace than before they got married, because there isn't any ambiguity about the state of their relationship: they have decided to commit with one another, and try as hard as possible to make their one relationship work. Healthy environments dissolve anxiety and ambiguity. Toxic environments constantly put you on your guard.
I've struggled to describe why I hated the office so much, but now I understand it: it felt like one constant sitcom. Boring characters who trade lines with one another hoping to get laughs from an imaginary audience. Doing the same thing day in day out, in the same settings over and over again, because the plot cannot meaningfully change. Feeling reduced to a role in a play that I don't want to take part in. Meaningless work, meaningless interactions, meaningless conflict, meaningless rewards. It's a form of hell.
There is a book called 'Economics in one lesson', which was a recommended reading in one of the scenes I used to be interested in (financial independence stuff). The idea that is repeated again and again in that book is laughably stupid, but is telling of how naive economists are with regards to the nature of the mind, and our models of the world. The author tells us that bad thinking in economics consists in people only thinking about the short-term effects of a policy, and for specific groups only, instead of looking at the long-term consequences that affect every group.
This is as useful as someone telling you that you lost a race because you didn't run fast enough. Sure, it would be nice if you could foresee everything in reality through your mind alone, but the point being that it is obviously not possible. The mind is useful precisely because it can ignore certain parts of Reality, and focus on the parts that matter in the context at hand. You can't magically include all of Reality in your own mind, that would make any predictive model intractable, on top of being impossible, because the mind interfaces with Reality, instead of accessing Reality-as-it-is.
I understand that the simple intention of trying to foresee consequences for other groups of people, besides just your own, and at longer time scales, already helps when it comes to one's understanding of the world. You can preempt a lot of problems by simply sitting down and thinking about what will happen. But the problem of course is that society is an incredibly complex system that can hardly be modelled by our simplistic minds. There are tons of unindented consequences to every decision, unexpected factors that show up, self-fulfilling prophecies that don't seem to be grounded in anything (because human psychology is not purely receptive, it is also participatory), and it certainly doesn't help that economists are from a social class that hardly interacts with the people who are less privileged than them. Why would they? They can keep their nice job by comfortably staying with other wealthy people, why would they spend their time with lower class people in order to understand the world better. It's not just that economists are clueless about the realities around them, it's that they have no incentive to not be clueless. They are not paid to make good predictions, otherwise all of them would be fired very quickly, they are paid to justify how the current system functions.
A lot of "scientific" explanations for fundamental problems sound like this naive creed to me nowadays. (the idea that mistakes in economic thinking can be solved by tracking the consequences that affect every group, and in the long-term) Scientists (I would argue that economics is not a real science, but for this one let's pretend that it is) can say good things within their narrow, specialized domain, but have them talk about deep human problems at an individual or collective scale, or about the metaphysics that underpins their worldview, and it's worse than trash.
Their understanding of truth, delusion, self-deception, mind, and everything related to epistemology in general, is perhaps even worse than the average person, because the average person doesn't have very strong opinions about those things, and is tempted to simply say that they don't know, whereas intellectuals have built a career out of being the person in the room who provides the answers, meaning that they are incentivized to confidently bullshit an answer to things that they are clearly clueless about.
If Reality is One, how is it possible to experience separation? If Truth is Absolute, how is it possible to be deluded, to believe in falsehood?
Most people laugh at those questions, yet they cannot be taken for granted. Where is the source of separation, of falsehood? How is it possible to be wrong about something?
Let's make it even more interesting by looking at the other side. If Reality is only multitudes, how is it possible to come into agreement with anything, between people of different perspectives and experiences? If separation is our starting point, then where does unity come from?
And how is it possible to arrive at the truth if we start from not knowing it? 1 What do we use to distinguish between truth and falsehood? If it's truth that we need to use, then that means that we need truth to arrive at truth, how does that make sense? If ignorance is our default condition, then how do we arrive at the truth?
Like all fundamental questions about Reality, it's impossible to answer this literally, because Reality and Truth are, at their roots, not reducible to literal concepts. But it is still interesting to ponder about epistemology, because evidently we are surrounded by people who cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood. What do they do wrong?
On a more practical level, how do we scale intelligence and wisdom? Today we are seeing the myriads of problems that come from democracy and populism, and the fact that the average person is hardly concerned with much besides their own short-term survival—and even then, that doesn't always seem true—which begs the important question: how do we scale intelligence, wisdom, and other virtues?
My answer is the following, one which certainly doesn't appeal to the self, or the totems of our times. The way to scale those virtues is to live in a world where people are directly confronted with the consequences of their actions, something which happens naturally at low levels of technology. The reason why people are stupid is because their environment allows them to remain so. Hunter-gatherers weren't perfect, but they had to be in tune with their environment otherwise they would die. Nature is a very, very strict teacher, and her main companions come in the form of pain and death (or at least the fear of death). Even a fairly stupid person becomes much more serious and discerning as soon as he realizes, viscerally, not abstractly, that he could something important in his life if he screw up, or when he feels in his bones that he doesn't have much time left on Earth.
Civilization on the other hand is a tranquilizer, it numbs all the pain and uncertainty away from life, and turns everything into props. Big and dangerous bears are turned into teddy bears, food goes from a question of life-or-death to another form of entertainment that people hardly pay attention to, and fire becomes something that people play with in recreational contexts, and stop treating as a dangerous force that can go out of control very easily and very quickly, and all of this complacency weakens the body, mind and soul.
Science, by itself, is no way to scale intelligence, this is plenty evident with the state of modern academia. Science back then was pursued by individuals who were animated by the flame of curiosity. Now it is run by masses of drones working in the machine of academia, who are more interested in the status that comes from having a PhD than by the pursuit of truth for its own sake.
Back then, scientists came up with tons of bad and weird explanations for what they were seeing. And this was a good thing! It meant that they were being explorative with their ideas, they were by and large creative, independent thinkers trying to arrive at satisfying explanations. Nowadays, scientists are incredibly conformist, have next to no creativity, and spend most of their time doing busy work to meet the demands of a bureaucratic institution.
Back then, scientists were interested in all sorts of things. They could be interested in the occult (Newton spent much of his time practicing alchemy, very seriously, not as a casual interest, and much of the Renaissance was in fact an occult movement that has been retroactively perceived as 'scientific'), or in philosophy (no hard distinction between philosophy and science back then), or in people (physiognomy, that type of stuff), or in the wealth of other disciplines, etc.
It could be argued that progress in the sciences can no longer be made by anyone but hyper-specialists, and I can see that, but maybe it means that the fields we have are calling for new fields to emerge. For instance, modern medicine is utterly ineffective at a vast, vast range of conditions (complex and chronic ones), and there is so much untapped potential in Westerners taking an interest in holistic health systems like Ayurveda, or TCM, which view the body in a far more holistic manner: mind, energy and body, instead of just the body as a mechanical set of parts acting causally with one another.
It's unlikely that something similar can be done with physics, but the spirit of a scientist doesn't lie in "progressing" whatever existing field or institution in their current society, but rather in seeking good explanations for phenomena around them. All of the stuff that is built on top of that, such as institutions, methods, the demarcation of fields, and others, are just structures to help that fundamental process, but it is really the explanations that matter, not the fields or the methods.
If that's the version of science that we take, then there is always of wealth of things to understand, most notably, in the problems of our society and its individuals, in the inability to see past certain dichotomies (objective vs subjective), and in the general problem of how to live well amidst our times of cultural decay. Obviously, none of that stuff is being done in the current version of academia, and looking for the flame of curiosity, which is really what science is about, amidst a sclerotic institution is a fool's errand, which is why a serious scientist is one who departs from the current version of academia. Universities bastardize the process of inquiry, the same way that porn is a bastardization of real intimacy. Only a prostitute works in academia.
It's important to know that when people use the word 'drones', they might refer to technologies of wildly different scale, and thus power. When people talk of 'drone strikes', as for instance the drone strikes on the Middle East, they are not talking about the little drones that regular people use to attach a camera onto and record footage, they are talking about drones which are essentially at the size of a plane, though without any passenger on board, and which are equipped with bombs and missiles to destroy buildings and kill people.
So in general, it's good to distinguish between combat drones and camera drones, though of course there are many more types, distinguished not only in their function, but in how they operate.
Similarly, the term 'AI' is basically meaningless, especially because of all of the assumptions that people have attached to it. We have LLMs, we have generative AI (text, images, music), we have robots that interact with the physical world through sensors, and all of those things get confused in the thoughtstopper term of 'AI', especially when people talk about jobs being replaced.
Here is a fairly crazy conjecture, one that I don't believe in, but which I think points to some truth about governments that have access to drones: do they even need human beings anymore? The main thing that people provided to a government in the past, let's think back to the 20th century to have a concrete example, were the men needed to fight in wars, the people working in factories to produce the goods of the country, and the people working in farms to provide the food.
I don't believe that 'AI' will automate everything, not now, but not even in the coming decades, but if a country had a significantly smaller population, there wouldn't be much work that is needed to begin with. You would need people to make food, but again not for the population at large, but just the government. You would need ways to maintain factories, but again, just for the government. And you would need ways to build drones to kill anyone who tries to oppose the government.
But besides that, the network of needs would be so much smaller if you got rid of let's say 95% of the population. Do you see where I am going with this? Instead of all the jobs and all the activities that poorer people do to survive and for one another, if you got rid of all of them, the wealthy could remain in a significantly smaller society, with drones to defend themselves, a few select farmers, and some industrialists to keep supply chains going for the few who need them to begin with.
I don't think that governments are going to actively kill large sections of the population, not because they are concerned about us, but because it would be a heavy expenditure with even heavier costs, but I do think that they will do everything they can to secure power in the turbulent decades to come, no matter the costs to human lives. Securing food amidst the food supply shocks due to oil shortages and climate change, securing power and safety through drones and bunkers, and trying to monitor people as much as possible through surveillance technologies—in Europe, Chat Control seems to become more and more of a reality as the months unfold.
There are a bunch of smaller paths in the suburbs I live, and to some degree in the main city around me too, which have been closed down because they aren't maintained, and are no longer walkable by foot because of the overgrowth of wild plants.
This is how collapse manifests in practice: the main roads are being maintained because they are too important for the system, but the smaller paths just decay on the sideline, without anyone to take care of them. The problem is that the main paths get clogged up by virtue of being used by so many people, such as traffic jams on the roads, or demands for scarce services like unemployment, so there is no easy way out.
As a result, it's unclear to what degree living in rural areas is as collapse-proof as it might seem, as I wrote about in a previous journal entry about urban vs rural sustainability. Rural people tend to be heavily dependent on motorized transport, if not more than urban people because of the distances involved, and most of them only grow some food on the side, certainly not enough to feed themselves if serious shocks to the food supply chain were to arrive. The main advantage of living in rural areas is that the lower population density means that looters and gangs are less likely to form there, but even that is not guaranteed. The main disadvantage is that it is more difficult for help to arrive at, in the case of extreme weather events, or food scarcity, or civil unrest, so again, it's very hard to say which areas tend to do better than others. I think it comes down to very local factors as I mentioned in that post.
I wrote about the surrogate activity of sports, and you might know that the person who coined that term was none other than Ted Kaczynski, the American unabomber, who thought that killing people was a good idea to spread his anti-tech manifesto. He wrote his manifesto in 1995, but I think that back then he couldn't have foreseen just how detached from Reality modern life could become.
Nowadays, people don't just engage in surrogate activities, they watch other people engage in those, like watching professional sports, or watching streamers play video games, and they then engage in surrogate activities about those surrogate activities, like collecting anime figurines and making videos about those.
Perhaps it's best that he never saw any of that with his own eyes (even if he only passed away in 2023, supposedly by suicide). As the story goes, Kaczynski became obsessed with taking down the technological system because of the planes that would frequently fly over his dwelling in the wild, (at first he just wanted to retreat to the wild, but he concluded that modern civilization wouldn't leave him alone) so imagine what his reaction would be to all of the insane activities of our times, utterly detached from anything of real importance.
We should expect more of those activities as we progress through collapse, not less of them, because people will double down on their denial and short-term hedonism, because they don't feel like they can do anything to help their situation—an assessment which is correct, but the response of burrying your head in the sand is hardly warranted, because there is always value in facing the truth, as best as you can. There isn't any value in acceptance to the self however, but living consciously is about living for something more than just your self to begin with.
There is an interesting incentive with regards to writing and 'brand building', and the number of insights you have. If you have a single decent insight, and only have that one, you might feel very intelligent for having that one, because what people perceive as genius is confined by their own horizons (the Dunning Kruger effect), and you will thus build your entire writing career around that one insight, writing an entire book about it, advertising it as much as possible, etc. Because from your point of view, that insight explains so much, and you believe (very naively) that if people could have that one insight, so much of their life would change. Hence, people writing book after book about how narcissists ruin your life, or how a certain system for productivity will solve everything in your life, or how mindfulness meditation will save the world, that kind of stuff.
People who have tons of insights on the other hand, in that same 'decent' category, or even in the 'life-altering' and 'philosophically fundamental' categories, are so overwhelmed in what they understand that they cannot as easily pick what to write about, because writing it all out is very time-consuming and tiring. There is also the fact that much of what they perceive has become obvious to them, such that they do not feel compelled to write about it—why would anyone write about the obvious?—but if regular people could know about what they saw and thought about, they would think, rightly, that such people are geniuses.
I think I am between both of those extremes. I certainly have a lot more ideas than the first camp, and overall higher quality ones, but ultimately much of my writing is contained in the works of much greater minds than I, so I am certainly not a genius either, not even close. I have come to appreciate the gulf that stands between good and great, and I am not convinced that I have what it takes to be great, but it is better to die trying, knowing you've come short of excellent standards, than to remain comfortable in your mediocrity.
I am going through my writing from a few years ago (around 2022) and I was a terrible writer, to the point where even I can hardly read what I wrote back then. I added so many pointless details and clumsily written asides that the main point was drowned in a sea of irrelevant tangents, making even single sentences feel like a jumbled mess of cords that I have to unravel.
I am now slightly better, because I try to remain minimalist and direct, promoting me from 'terrible' to merely bad in terms of writing. I hope that someday I can become a mediocre writer, and who knows, maybe become decent later down the line.
Have you ever noticed how people of the same field tend to interact very differently from one another, compared to how they interact with customers? I observed that when I went to the doctor, for my yearly check-up for my eyes because I have a strange condition in my left eye. 2
Basically, when doctors talk to one another, they talk like regular people do, but as soon as they talk to you, you are basically treated like a dumbbass who needs to be given the stupidest, fail-proof instructions in order to do the right thing. It's not just in the words that they use, but the tone that they subconsciously employ, and even the way that they look at you as well.
Also, a short reminder for myself of how bad most people are at giving instructions and explaining things. There was a machine that I had to use to do scans in my eye, but the doctor didn't explain what I was supposed to do, and thought that she could just move around my head to get me to do the right thing. The instruction I would have given myself in hindsight would simply be: "always look in front of you, but use your body to strafe from side to side, as opposed to rotating your neck or moving your eyes around, and press towards the surface of the machine if it can't detect you". Instead there was an awkward period of janky trial and error, where I had no idea what to do, all because communication is hard for most people.
It is depressing to think about what it means at the scale of our society, because doctors are some of the most clever people in comparison to the average. You could argue that their cleverness doesn't necessarily help them communicate, since those are two different aspects after all, which is fair enough, but cleverness necessarily requires some linguistic proficiency, because it's related to the ability of the mind to interface with Reality, meaning that while a clever person is not necessarily good at communication, a stupid person is definitely not going to be good at expressing themselves, and communicate with others.
I remember reading, when I was around ten or eleven, this French book titled "35 kilos d'espoir" (in English: 95 pounds of hope), and one passage still sticks with me to this day, where our main character is looking at different leaflets that advertise various schools, and his main observation was that the schools that depict students who are smiling, or even laughing, didn't interest him, because it meant that the school was more focused on appearing fun, than in being honest about what was happening there. Mind you, the main character is someone who had serious troubles in school, but his reasoning was that he wanted to do something practical, not academic, and so he was more attracted to the schools that showed people being doing hands-on work, who were focused on their task as opposed to posing in front of a camera.
This observation has become even more true today. The opposite of 'serious' is pretense. The people who are not serious also pretend to be incredibly hard-working, but who have somehow been cursed by circumstances they couldn't control. It's social bullshit that arises from internal loops of self-deception, people who lie to others also lie to themselves.
If you are serious about anything in life, you need to be good at seeing through your own bullshit, and cut through it with precise observations, and follow-up with meaningful action. Precise, non-judgemental observations, such as "I find it difficult to get started writing, because I feel tense in my body, and confused as to how to start", as opposed to hand-waving judgements like "I don't write enough, I am so lazy!"
The latter doesn't help anyone, it's just a way to signal to others how bad you are. Lamenting how terrible of a person you are is an oversocialized response to problems, it comes from the internalized sense that if you cry hard enough, someone will pick you up and help you out, but this is a childish fantasy. Not because there won't be anyone to help you out, but because nothing is solved from such a victim-laced mindset. It is totally possible to ask for help in a sovereign way, but no one wants to help out someone who doesn't take responsibility for their actions, which is why victims, for better or worse, don't get the help that they need.
I wrote an entire piece about the spiral of vagueness, but it's not rocket science to see what is specific from what is vague once you take that seriously enough. The hard part is changing your mind such that you prefer the precise observations, over the vague bullshit that allows you to not take responsibility. Once you realize that no one will change your life for the better if you don't decide to do so, you realize that judging people and situations is a habit that people pick up because they can't face Reality as it is. Being serious is about being serious about Reality.
1 This is called Meno's paradox, or the paradox of inquiry.
2 It's called Coats' disease and by and large only affects one eye, thankfully. In my case, it affected the central vision of my left eye, such that I can't really read stuff when I close my other eye, (kind of, but I have to move around my eye so that the things I read are outside of my central blind spot) but when both of my eyes are open, I don't notice anything, because the two work together to produce a unified, coherent image. Our mind does some pretty cool stuff huh.
Go back to the list of blog posts
Monthly Collapse Time Officejob Economics Delusion Science Writing Medicine
2026-07-13