The mirage of hope, constrained by shame and fear, the perspective of perspective
I would say there are 3 distinct aspects of life which can be labelled with hope:
My position is that 1) is undoubtedly true, 2) is completely false because the technological system is inherently unsustainable. And my intuition tells me that 3) is true, though it is worth keeping in mind that I have various biases informed and reinforced by my reading, and thus my “intuition” could also be the result of a form of echo chamber. I think ultimately, aspect 3) can only be experienced through living, although we can try to point at it as best as possible through various metaphors and ultimately, art. But it isn't well suited to short-form non-fiction writing, which is why I won't say more about it.
As for 2), hope for societal prosperity, this is essentially what most of my writing here points to: the coming decades are going to bring the decline of the modern world, because its relationship to the physical world, mainly being extraction, and to human beings, coercion, are inherently unsustainable. And that form of "hope" creates far more suffering than a way of living which accepts hardships, is willing to let go of the luxuries of the modern world and focuses on what one can do right now in their own life.
I would say there is a rather deep incentive structure for hope in the current information ecology, which is that people who sell ideas sell hope because it makes the readers feel good about their own lives. They are not incentivized to solve problems or tell you what you need to hear 1, they are incentivized to be good at spreading their ideas, and it is incredibly naive to believe that the truth spreads the best.
The truth is the best at playing the long games, because it is what is the case, by definition, such that only time and the conscious experience of it, can reveal the truth. But in the short-sighted games of our times, it is not truth which prevails, which is why I do not believe in the virtue of hope for our society, though as I have said, I know I can make my individual life better, and I trust in the Goodness of the Universe.
Reverse rizz is when all the wrong types of people are attracted to you. Inverse rizz is when the only people interested in you are sucked into a tiny attractor basin. Negative rizz is when people are so repulsed by the things you say that they are captivated by you.
Comment I received on twitter here.
Expanding on that so it makes sense to me: Trump, and in general people with edgy opinions who are somewhat charismatic, has negative rizz, which is why so many people talk about him even if they hate him. The thing to note is that haters rarely have a strategy about what they spend their time on, and therefore often reinforce the very same thing they pretend to hate by simply talking about it so much.
Inverse rizz is when the people who like you are heavily filtered by a variety of factors—for instance consciousness and integrity, a combination which is rather rare these days—such that you feel like no one likes you. It might not be true at all, but who you appeal to might be so rare in your environment that you feel unlovable.
And then reverse rizz is what is behind cult dynamics for instance, people who worship you instead of listening to you and leading their own life, or dating the people who make you miserable and being weirdly attracted to them.
I sometimes have this situation where a person (A) might like a person (B) because (B) is funny, but overall (B) is not a very good person—which is not the same thing as being nice—and because I like (A) I almost gaslight my own judgement of (B) this way and try to convince myself that they're fine when they are really not.
This is simply a reminder of myself to trust the vibes I directly get from someone, rather than the indirect reputation they might have. The latter is easily gamed, the former not so much.
A helpful reframe for insomnia is: “I am not sleeping and I should be” versus “I am not sleeping and that is simply what’s happening.” This is helpful for life in general, and is typically preached by Buddhists and Stoics, though I think acceptance is probably a universal virtue when applied in the right context. 2 There are things happening, and adding a commentary about what “should” be the case or not is basically never helpful.
It might be helpful to think about what you want and how to get there, but even then, a desire can only meaningfully exist while accepting that the current situation is what it is, even if you wish to change it in one way or another.
People who feel constrained by shame will attempt to constrain others by shame. 3
From a tweet by Visa.
Noticing how often, people's concerns when you share something you want to do says far more about them than anything about you. They are trying to convince themselves that whatever you want is impossible, because it gives them a justification as to why they're small, scared, and are not getting a result they might want, etc. This is simply because bullshitting oneself is far easier than actually changing one’s life, and the ego tends to pursue the path of least resistance in maintaining itself, i.e. survival at lowest cost.
I think the ability to notice how other people try to make you carry their baggage, their shame, beliefs and fears, has been immensely helpful in my life. Most of the time I try to remove fearmongering people from my life, but even the best have their insecurities, and sometimes I do the same to other people, so the discernment is still very much needed.
In general, I notice that human beings don't interact with Reality, they interact with their social reality, which is the first interfacing layer. The second interfacing layer is that they don't even interact with the social reality, but their own internalized shame landscape which limits what they believe is acceptable, or even possible.
So people bound by shame will believe that they are simply dealing with reality and not just an internalization that resulted from certain experiences, which might or might not be relevant in the current situation, which means that learning to dissolve shame can feel like opening up reality in a sense.
“This is awful, i gotta show everyone how awful this is” is the single worst most demonic social media instinct
From this tweet.
Similar to my post on being possessed by thought experiments, this social media instinct, like most of the habits which dominate our information landscape, is not grounded in any conscious principle. Outrage, disgust and fear are very potent ways by which ideas and images can spread, and they have the advantage of creating a lot of possible interaction. For instance, when someone shares something wholesome, people will simply press on the like button and then move on, but sharing some horrible event on social media generates a lot of energy in its direction: "How could this happen?!" "What type of world do we live in?!" and so on.
It doesn't have to be this way, people can use social media more consciously, which includes not using it at all, and decide to share the stuff that actually adds to their life. This structure of behavior isn’t unique to social media, because in general unconsciousness spreads and maintains itself very well in the modern world. But ultimately the only way to unroot that pattern is through consciousness, and the only way I can manifest that is through my own life.
Why are the youth depressed today? There are a lot of valid reasons to examine, but interestingly one of the sentences which immediately came to my mind when prompted by that question was: “Terrorism really works”.
I wouldn't say that it is the main reason behind the ubiquity of depression, I would say it is more so a combination of 4
But terrorism really works, which is of course why it is used. It makes parents obsessed with safety, such that children have less and less liberty, and overall the culture shifts from making sure the kids grow well so they can thrive in the world, to making sure they are constantly safe. As a result, playing outside shifts more and more to being in front of a screen, which makes people disembodied and influenced by all sorts of things they would never be exposed to without a screen, on and on.
The obsession with safety has tons of downstream effects in our culture, and has become so central to the West that it can become the justification for any type of tyranny. Safety is the false god of the modern world, and it is in its name that many values will be sacrificed, which is why terrorism works so well at undermining it.
Efficiency is an incredibly misleading concept because it only focuses on one isolated thing at a time, as already discussed in Simpler is more efficient. For instance, while an individual machine can become more efficient, people's personal lives certainly haven't as a whole, because all of our main needs are scattered in different activities and containers. You go to one place to exercise, because your job doesn't involve any physical activity, and on top of that it requires significant commuting. Then you spend additional time to socialize, do creative work, etc. All separated.
Unsurprisingly, this means that a lot of core needs are neglected: most people aren't very healthy and are on a downwards trend for most of their life, an increasing number of people are completely isolated from any meaningful social interaction, most people don't do anything after work because they're so tired, etc.
People who defend the current system will point out how tremendously productive and efficient we have become, but in reality, only the System has become more efficient. It is very questionable whether people's access to what they want has become easier, because of what I just pointed out. Moreover, when your life depends on a single source of income which exists within an alienating and bureaucratic environment in which you have no freedom, you are not free. You are dependent on a collective which only sees your productive input, and doesn't care about you as an individual.
I don't know to what extent primitive or medieval lifestyles were “better” than ours, but they are valuable examples for our times because they show certain axes which modern discourses completely ignore. Having a lower level of technological complexity also comes with a lower level of fragility, both social and technological, and a lower level of interdependence, which means that local groups of people could fix their own tools and deal with their own problems, without relying on a massive centralized power, like a state or a company, who have their own interests of control and profits.
Also, when most of your work is related to the land or a form of hunting/gathering, it means that the impact of your work is immediate and self-evident. There is a felt sense of accomplishment from all the work you do, which cannot be said for the bureaucratic work of our times. This is not just good for individuals, it also creates a collective which is more motivationally robust, unlike modern work which is alienating and leads to burnout, which means that people are more likely to drop their job as soon as they find better alternatives, though modern societies are also really good at making people unable to pivot in any meaningful way to another job.
Does that mean we “should” go back to those times? I don't know, since our sense of the past is distorted by our present times. What I know however is that the current landscape of work and people's relationship to it is unsustainable, and that there are a growing number of people who wish to exit the growth-obsessed society and paradigm, for the simple reason that their individual life doesn't become more fulfilling when GDP goes up.
What will replace it then? I know that a large amount of intelligent people before me have tried to predict the trajectory of their own society and have failed, enough so to know that it is a futile endeavor. Instead of trying to predict the future, better find whatever way you can to be better prepared for it. And what is always robust within uncertain times? Relationships, skills, and the ability to direct your time, energy and attention to what you want.
The best thing about human beings is that they can adapt to any environment.
But the worst thing about human beings is that they can adapt to any environment.
I think that the quest of meaning that so many are engaged in is misguided. I think what human beings ultimately care about is belonging, but that a lot of people do not even know what it feels like, so they attach themselves to an idea of what belonging is. Belonging can be to: a community, or a broader collective and the narrative that imbues it, and it can even be more existential like belonging to the Universe.
The key aspect is that it is felt to the core, and collectively as well, and it is not just something WHICH sits in your mind. But because feeling something in every part of your body is something rare in the modern world, which promotes constant disembodiment, and because communities are even rarer in the age of atomization, people turn to ideas in order to cover the utter sense of alienation they have from the Universe itself.
My guess is that for the vast majority of people, the quest of meaning doesn't do anything, and they despair at how empty Life is, when in reality, the real problem is that they are disembodied and lonely, both in terms of a community, but also in an existential way.
A more general case of the red herring of meaning is that people go for what is “best” within their constraints, especially the constraints of what they believe Life can hold. For example:
The idea of "economic stability" or "long-term investments" within our economy is very dubious. Is buying a house when you are young really all that safe considering it locks you down to one place which might be subject to environmental catastrophes, spending your most productive years on paying large amounts of interests and a house too big which makes lifestyle inflation creep into your life?
Similarly, is compromising for an office job really the most stable career considering that it is utterly reliant on the technological system to be remotely useful? It might be a good way to earn money in the short term, but what about the long term?
If you believe in societal collapse, it is obvious that shocks will happen in the economy and that the usual wisdom of house-buying and careerism cannot be taken for granted. If you believe in perpetual technological progress, then the sense of value in an economy is wildly destabilized by new powerful technological innovations, which will happen because technological growth is not one smooth ascending curve, but instead is made of regular discontinuous breaks due to how discoveries utterly change the playing field which came before them. Those breakthroughs then lead to massive shocks in the economy, which inevitably lead to losers of said changes, i.e. people whose skills and investments are now worthless.
This has happened several times in history, and it will happen again if we assume that society can keep going up on the technological scale. I do not believe in this obviously, but I am here noting that the rosy future techno optimists imagine isn't so rosy for individuals who will continually have to relocate their skills and sense of value to fit within the system.
Of course there are limits with this simple analysis:
The way people—at least from what I can see in Europe—will be squeezed out of the typical modern lifestyle is through regulations and price increases. Cars get more and more regulated based on how much they pollute, such that you cannot afford one as easily, and have to compromise on other things or seriously reconsider your lifestyle based on commuting one or two hours a day. In general, prices will of course increase across the board, since energy becomes more expensive as the energy return on energy investment of fossil fuels can only decrease over time.
Therefore people will be squeezed out more and more from the typical modern middle-class lifestyle, and the first thing that they will skimp on are of course the luxuries of life. Anything related to entertainment will be severely hit in the decades to come, unless it is relatively cheap.
To the extent that more necessary goods increase in prices, they will do so in hidden ways at first, through a process called stealth inflation, which refers to how inflation is hidden away from most people by a variety of tricks. Skimping on product quality, reducing the size of portions sold to consumers, replacing materials or products by cheaper substitutes, tracking inflation over a different pool of goods, these are all ways of reducing the real price of a good without having to change its nominal price, i.e. the price tag which the consumer sees.
This process of price increase is a rather smooth one, which is to say it doesn't occur in sudden spikes, unlike let's say a financial crisis which is inevitable to happen in the coming decade as governments do everything they can to hide the unsustainable nature of our system.
One thing for sure is that most people will not willingly give up all the pointless things they have been brainwashed into desiring, when this could result in the exact same quality of life, if not more because of the effects of a different mindset towards material goods. After all, what rules our world is not conscious decisions but comfortable routines dictated by other people.
Never met someone who claimed to be good at reading people who didn't just always assume the most cynical reductionist motivations and never realized they are just adopting “prestige tv” traits of people who are good at reading people and never verify their ability in the real world.
From this tweet.
I guess this could be called the cynicism fallacy: the belief that because your interpretation of people or events is cynical, then it means it is somehow more "true" than a more charitable one. I think the bottom line is simply that cynical people project their cynicism everywhere, and become stuck in a prison of their own from which they believe they understand the world and everyone within it. They are likely to be people who don't interact much with others but who read a decent amount, giving them an illusion of understanding human psychology.
In my experience though, there is a fair amount you can predict from people by assuming they are mostly selfish—including the selfish display of selflessness funnily enough—and acting in whatever way has worked for them in the past, but this isn't enough to fully understand regular people. There is at the very least a few odd things which can pop up here and there given unconventional circumstances, a glimpse of genuine warmth and perhaps heartfelt laughter. Even in a society of machines, finding people who are purely mechanical 100% of the time is quite difficult.
Cryptomnesia is the process by which someone forgets the source of their ideas, and believes those same ideas to be their own, instead of something they read or heard. This is something I notice I do a lot, which is why I try to note down the sources of the various ideas I have while reading things. Not because I think ideas "belong" to people and thus should be attributed to whoever claimed a term or phrase, but because I want to be more self-aware in how much I simply regurgitate other people's ideas, since that same process also inevitably imports some of their assumptions, which I might not agree with.
Linear perspective 7 arose because people started to live in environments where straights lines were commonly found. In Medieval times however, those were incredibly rare, therefore there was no need for linear perspective to convey depth because it wasn't part of the daily life of people.
This view is in contrast to the typical modern-biased perspective, where the Middle Ages were dumb and unskilled—implicit message being: because of Religion 8 —whereas the Renaissance was this great era of intellectual and artistic growth and people finally started drawing properly for once. Just pay attention to how loaded the terms "Middle Ages" and "Renaissance" are to get a sense of the modern bias view how we view History.
It is certainly quite easy to find Medieval art with an almost childlike depiction of human faces, and then build a narrative on top of that with cherry-picked examples. Then again, I am sure you could do the same with other time periods, though perhaps, there was genuinely an increase in skill from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It is worth keeping in mind though that the art we remember through the centuries was commissioned, mostly by the Church during the Middle Ages, and as such there was a certain expectation and restrictions imposed from above. Most notably, depicting clothed people to preserve the Christian purity regarding sexuality, and artists having fairly limited access to anatomy from what I understand. As such, the comparison of skill always to be contextualized in what the demand for art was—in the case of the Middle Ages, certainly not realism—and the several constraints that artists inevitably had to deal with.
This change in subject and most particularly the focus of the painting can be seen in how humans are depicted. They can appear incredibly small in Renaissance paintings, for instance The School of Athens by Raphael where people are towered by the immensity of their environment, whereas the focus of Medieval art is almost always the characters. Moreover, light is an external element in Renaissance art, whereas it comes from the saintly characters in Medieval art, further emphasizing the divide between depicting human beings as the focal point, versus them living in 3D space
All those observations together seem to point to me that the artist's relationship to the world changed pretty significantly between those two periods. The focus in the Renaissance seems to be about conveying an objective, which is to say a mind-graspable version of Reality, formalized by linear perspective.
This isn't to say that I dislike the latter, or that all art is equal. I do enjoy a lot of works of the Renaissance, probably more so than Medieval ones, but the point of my writing here is to highlight how much our modern world tends to perceive objectivity as the “correct” relationship with Reality, when it simply isn't. It is an incredibly biased worldview which leaves us with many blind spots, though it is certainly great at providing us with immense power through technology and science.
Thus we could say that this small bit of the history of perspective highlights a pretty significant aspect of Perspective with an upper case 'P'—how we relate with other worldviews, and especially those that came before us. Our view of history, like how we view space in the lens of perspective, has a foreshortening effect, which is to say that distant events appear smaller to us, making us more likely to misunderstand them or simply apply our modern views to look at the past.
1 Ultimately everyone sees through the world in a partial lens, and I am not so arrogant as to think that I can see the truth in what is going to unfold in the next decades. However, I am certainly not bound to an agenda of appealing to society and what it creates, and appealing to the ego and what it wants to cling to. It's usually best to look at the dynamics of the ego through your own life, since that merely requires your own discernment and some honesty, and then examine how those build up to the collective ego dynamics that shape our world, which is unlikely to be what you want to hear.
2 In the wrong context, “acceptance” is merely fear or plain old apathy, clearly not a virtue.
3 There's a 2nd part about it not working on shameless people, especially if they like the attention, but it didn't feel super relevant to my life.
4 A way to categorize the first 4 reasons is with the 4 elements: Powerlessness = lack of fire, Disembodiment = lack of earth (the body), Atomization = lack of water (relationships ~ love ~ water), Boredom = lack of air (curiosity/excitement ~ air)
5 See for instance Has Peak Oil become self-evident yet and 2030: Our Runaway Train Falls Off the Seneca Cliff from Honest Sorcerer, and The Collapse by Darren Allen, or The false promises of green energy from the Doomer Optimism podcast (lovely name I know)
6 Asking such a question is sure to make people think about purely technical solutions. The thing though is that a technical solution is only as good as its social implementation, and you can bet that people in power would want nothing to do with a post-scarcity world if it doesn't help them control large amounts of the population, because it would make their power be meaningless. So to the extent that post-scarcity is ““possible””, again which is not because we are already in ecological overshoot, it might not be so desirable. After all, who said that post-scarcity would come along with freedom? It seems to me that the most plausible way to achieve post-scarcity is to brainwash the human population so much that they happily work to feed the machine-world, removing any need for freedom, joy and community since they aren't relevant to the system.
7 I use the term "linear" to distinguish it from other techniques of perspective, i.e. conveying 3D space onto a 2D representation, such as atmospheric perspective or curvilinear perspective. I'm not sure if it is the common terminology, but I think it describes it rather well: lines that are parallel in 3D are represented as lines converging to the same vanishing points, which gives an overall "linear" feel to environments.
8 Not that I am in favor of institutional religion, but that this fixation on religion=bad makes people blind to how much dogma there still is in the modern world. In many ways, we still have a religion, or at the very least a series of myths, which people unconsciously live by, but now they are disenchanted and hidden from most people.
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2024-12-14