I saw a discussion on reddit where people were disagreeing about whether life is hard, because they weren't clear about definitions. I would break it down like this: in the 21st century first world, compared to most human societies and all wild animals, it's really easy to stay alive, and really hard to be happy.
If we keep going in this direction, eventually any death not from suicide will be global news. Suicide might even be normalized, so if you're above a certain age, and you say you're going to kill yourself, no one will even try to talk you out of it. Suicide might become a necessary safety valve, taking people out of the equation who would otherwise drag the system down or destabilize it.
I used to think collapse would come from physical factors like peak oil. Now I think there's no crisis we can't tackle if we're sufficiently motivated — and we're not.
Where does motivation come from? The popular assumption is that it comes from some magical virtue that lives inside individual people. I think motivation is a matter of fit: the fit between what's in our hearts to do, and what society wants done. And right now those two things are really far apart. How many times have you heard someone say that success is about hard work and not talent? It's a big cliche, and it seems to be true, but we wouldn't need to say it so much if we didn't start by assuming the opposite.
I think in our deep ancestral environment, thriving was completely about talent—and of course luck. There was so much overlap between what they felt like doing, and what was in front of them to do, that they didn't need the concept of a work ethic. It's not that hard work makes you successful, but that our culture had to invent success to reward invented activities that hardly anyone feels like doing.
Sometimes I wonder why there are no colleges or employers that target underachievers. They could be like, "We want talented people who just seem lazy because they've never been in an environment as exciting as ours." This is the path to revitalizing our civilization, and no one is trying it. Instead everyone says the opposite: "We want people who are already highly driven, and we'll just teach them to go through the motions of doing our thing."
You know who does recruit underachievers? Terrorists, and cults, and other dangerous movements that I'm mostly against. But that's the hard logic of every human society: if it goes too far astray from human nature, the people who want to keep the game going will be outhustled by the people who want to end it.
From Ran Prieur’s 056.
I very much agree with the part on “it's really easy to stay alive, and really hard to be happy”. One major aspect being of course that success within society has very little to do with genuine happiness, as opposed to nominal happiness, the stuff that is called happiness around us but isn't actually so. So our environment is geared towards the growth of the system, not giving people meaningful or inspiring work, or helping them with their quality of life. This is why motivation is such a problem, because the work you do has very little tangible results on your own personal environment, the people around you, your quality of life. It's energy thrown into a bureaucratic endless hole, which gets you tokens like money or a follower count but not any tangible satisfaction.
And I think his conclusion on how underachievers are being recruited by dangerous movement is very much on point. It seems clear to me that the current iteration of society will collapse under its own weight of complexity and stuff people don't want to contribute to. But so what do people willingly put their energy into? The main ways I see unfolding around me are 1) entertainment 2) movements that provide people with a clear sense of direction: cults and terrorists as he mentions, and other political movements 3) and within 2), rarely but by far the best option out of these 3 so far, the type of movements and small communities that actually address needs of belonging without feeling the need to attack some out-group or destroy something else, by helping people deal with issues and grow as people, not just individually but with one another.
I think the only people who will be able to thrive in the coming decades of societal decline are those with a supportive social environment, or what I like to call a “social exoskeleton”, which is just a fancy word for meaningful relationships in their lives which form a network they can rely on, and can contribute to.
The trends of burnout, nihilism and addictions strike me as being downstream of the total lack of fulfilling relationships. People burn out because they know deep down that their energy doesn't actually go to anything real in their immediate life, they are nihilistic or become addicted because there is no one else to live for, no broader context that makes life feel important.
So is life hard? It is when you are all by yourself. And sadly this is a trend that keeps getting more and more common, but at the same time, it also creates a swing to the other side of the pendulum when people can clearly tell that something is missing from their lives and pursue it.
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2024-08-25