We've made the world too complicated

https://user8.bearblog.dev/the-world-is-too-complicated/

by _nxwj • 2 months ago

480 469 2 months ago

user8.bearblog.dev

Terr_4• 2 months ago

Everything has always been "too complicated", it's the default state of the natural world.

Just imagine the baffling profusion of problems that occur from questions like "is that the same plant", or "is that berry safe to eat", or "which kind of sickness is everyone catching and which thing is going to help?" The complexity never went away, we simply made ways to manage it so that it's not seen as often.

So now we don't need divine the complex whims of the ocean god who destroyed the village"... but instead we get to think of the complexity of seismometers and rules about building near tsunami areas.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

The difference I'm trying to discuss is when humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles. You are right, living in the natural world today would be impossible for most people, requiring generations of local knowledge spread across the community. I should have clarified my meaning of complexity as that which is purely human-made.

_wire_• 2 months ago

Yes the world has always been utterly mysterious.

What's cuckoo today is the world is made, and it's not just mysterious it's crazy.

The european intellect is looking like a disease, an aberration, like a maladaptation that's chasing itself seeking a correction, except the rectification is just a recursive continuation of the disease.

And there are very good reasons to anticipate that humanity may be exterminated by this pathology.

Painful to find that your capacity to recognize the malaise is the cause of the malaise.

KurSix3• 2 months ago

Maybe the key difference is that natural complexity asks for adaptation, while human-made complexity often asks for submission

card_zero• 2 months ago

Is The Thinking Game, which sounds like a pile of poop, pivotal to your worries, or did you just mention it in passing?

II2II• 2 months ago

Yet that human complexity was often created to help us deal with natural complexity.

Nature is indifferent. One year may produce an overabundance that the hunter/gatherer may take advantage of, yet the next year may be opposite and people will die from famine. So we learned how to preserve food as best we could. Yet that would result in a growth of population, an over population based on the resources available, so we learned how to grow our own food and manage livestock in order to avoid famine. That encourages the development of settlements. With denser populations disease is able to thrive, and, with trade, it is able to spread. So we learned how to manage waste. Each new development brings new pitfalls since we are meddling with the balance of nature. Or perhaps it is better to say that things are being balanced in new ways, so we must learn how to adapt to that. (We are, after all, a part of nature.)

Sometimes we adapt to those changes in balance in ignorant and extraordinarily damaging ways. I am not denying that. On the other hand, not trying would have hindered the development of intelligence -- or, perhaps, resulted in our extinction.

cityofdelusion3• 2 months ago

Every species molds the world to their desires -- we are just much better at it. Competition and being killed by another species is the only thing that keeps things in check, and even then, you get parts of nature that end up being shaped and dominated by one species (beavers, ants, some fungi/bacteria). The world used to be a molten blob, to eventually an ocean full of mostly one species, to now, and eventually, a dead husk.

pibaker4• 2 months ago

humans started molding the world to our desires in the forms of agriculture, raising animals as resources, and interfering with ecological cycles

What makes human unique in this respect compared to any other species that modify their environment? Is a patch of lichen not interfering with ecological cycles when it breaks down the rocks it lives on into soil?

KurSix3• 2 months ago

Complexity itself obviously isn't new, and in many cases we've replaced terrifying, opaque natural uncertainty with systems that are much better at keeping people alive. But I think there's still a difference between complexity that is encountered and complexity that is administered through

j_maffe5• 2 months ago

But society and civilization systems are inherently unadministered. No single person has a top down engineered view or control of this system. Even kings and pharaohs didn't have as much control as people would think.

greenchair3• 2 months ago

Things are definitely getting more complicated over time if your eyes are open. Vibe coding the core systems that run our world will accelerate this.

emsign• 2 months ago

We used to have gods of several domains each for taking up the blame for specific and (back then) inexplainable events. It at least gave the people closure or blueprints for action in order to appease them. Doesn't matter if it really had an effect.

But since naturalism whichbset out to explain phenomena with science and logic doesn't give the same kind of closure and it leaves many confused and overwhelmed. Nobody understands everything, nobody is an expert in everything.

KurSix3• 2 months ago

Maybe the goal isn't to reject complexity entirely, but to be much more suspicious of complexity that gives no corresponding increase in dignity, beauty, autonomy or peace

lordkrandel2• 2 months ago

Yeah, let's be suspicious of complexity, and blame spirits for our diseases instead of viruses and germs. Simpler narration aint it. God has wanted me to die. How simple is that?

greenchair3• 2 months ago

Romans 1:20

dustractor• 2 months ago

complexity is intrinsic. complications are extrinsic.

lordkrandel2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

simianwords• 2 months ago

yeah lol. if only tech stopped existing we could achieve world peace and everything would be fine and dandy

scotty794• 2 months ago

In history there were countless men that promised paradise, if only we destroyed something.

nkrisc• 2 months ago

As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.

The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.

The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

kortilla4• 2 months ago

This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.

Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.

bspammer• 2 months ago

Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

j_maffe5• 2 months ago

The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.

chr1• 2 months ago

There is effectively infinite space up high, and low is bounded by death, so it never can average out.

_heimdall3• 2 months ago

This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.

scotty794• 2 months ago

remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it

Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?

kortilla4• 2 months ago

That’s not how city water works.

scotty794• 2 months ago

I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

I agree with the cognitive overload and funnily have experienced what you describe. These thoughts are easier to fall into when I've been tired for extended periods. Out of them I feel more motivated to contribute to the economy and reach for material goals, at least temporarily. Then something just reminds of these thoughts, even when well-rested and lucid.

criley2• 2 months ago

Every abstraction is leaky but is ignorance truly bliss?

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

I'm not arguing for ignorance. More acceptance of the ecological forces around us and appreciating them, observing them, and knowing when to let them take their course.

r0ckarong• 2 months ago

Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.

cloogshicer• 2 months ago

What a reductive world view that is.

lstodd• 2 months ago

At least it shows some attempt on reflection/introspection which is rare.

As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?

scotty794• 2 months ago

Nothing ever was solved without reductivity.

balamatom2• 2 months ago

+1 for the original insult ("control fetish") from the disembodied spirit that broadcasts bitflips at your electro-chemical controller ;-)

lo_zamoyski• 2 months ago

Sounds like he’s just burnt out.

greenchair3• 2 months ago

Even if that were true it would still bolster his argument.

dnnddidiej3• 2 months ago

Here... take a blue pill. Go back to your cube. Produce.

hyperadvanced• 2 months ago

I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles

krackers2• 2 months ago

It's also basically what was written about in that infamous manifesto.

sweetheart• 2 months ago

I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.

What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.

Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.

irdc• 2 months ago

This 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 Space, but they are also a choke point. . . ."
"But we knew-I mean, they knew that. There were always safety margins."
Namqem was a triumph of distributed automation. And every decade it became a little better. Every decade the flexibility of the governance responded to the pressures to optimize resource allocation, and the margins of safety shrank. The downward spiral was far more subtle than the Dawn Age pessimism of Karl Marx or Han Su, and only vaguely related to the insights of Mancur Olson. The governance did not attempt direct management. Free enterprise and individual planning were much more effective. But if you avoid all the classic traps of corruption and central planning and mad invention, still-"In the end there will be failures. The governance will have to take a direct hand." If you avoided all other threats, the complexity of your own successes would eventually get you.

(note that this is a flashback scene within a larger story; Vinge put into mere footnotes what others would use to write entire novels)

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 months ago

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.

micromacrofoot• 2 months ago

the world is far more complicated than we may ever understand, what we're doing is quaint by comparison

nilirl• 2 months ago

It's my first time reading Fukuyama's 'The Origins of Political Order', and there's a point in the book he says (I think; and in my words): we don't actually know how things got to be this way but none of the extremes work by themselves, not perfect top-down control, nor complete bottoms-up self-organization.

Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?

hnthrowaway0315• 2 months ago

Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.

I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.

I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

I've read many accounts of the lives of mostly hunter-gatherer tribes living far more care-free and convenient lives. Yes they had no way of treating most diseases, facing natural disasters, and preventable deaths, but from what I understand the reports of scarcity and constant danger are far overblown, at least within certain periods.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/09/anthropological-summer/

_DeadFred_• 2 months ago

Wasn't the whole point, to get so good at things we got back to that eventually? I don't even understand what the point/goal/target is anymore? Like we forgot society should be getting better every year. Or it used to be the conservative towns that had beautiful tree lined streets, but now it's conservative to NOT plant anything for the future. What is it all for at this point?

cityofdelusion3• 2 months ago

Survivorship bias. All the corpses aren't here to tell us anything. Just 100 years ago, most parents would bury at least one of their infant children. People back then were tough, because the physically and emotionally weak died off. Humanity's "natural state" is like the animals, to kill or be killed, to wage war, to reproduce, to die. The difference is we have a big brain that strongly incentivizes us to try to leave that world behind. Its not perfect, but we've improved in basically every measurable way on the scale of our species.

krackers2• 2 months ago

I personally feel "happiness" is more correlated with agency (or at least perceived agency), and in that measure civilization has been regressing since the industrial revolution. The amount of long-term planning required has increased and it's less possible to live "in the present", moment to moment.

RetroTechie• 2 months ago

The great thing about living in modern times is you can do both, and mix & match as much as you want.

There's still countries/areas with large swats of land where it's you against nature. Nothing more, nothing less.

But (contrary to your ancestors millenia ago) you can bring a phone, camping gear, preserved foods, use a lighter to get that fire started, or play Tetris in-between grizzly bear attacks. ;-)

Likewise, people have options whether to 'live in the fast lane' & make lots of money, disappear into the Amazon forest, or somewhere in between. Or do the latter for 3 weeks a year only.

Explore the world, move around, try things & find out what suits you best. Oh and of course: everything changes (and will keep doing so).

Personally I do feel people (from developed countries) should get out into nature more. A good % of people have lost touch with the natural world that we all depend on. And it shows.

doginasuit• 2 months ago

There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.

The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.

jorisw• 2 months ago

Agreed.

I myself have long ago begun ‘curating’ stimuli actively, mostly by shutting out that which isn’t relevant or actionable to me. Social media being #1, not counting DM apps.

Push notifications of any kind except for DMs being #2. Sound off.

News that could never affect me or anyone I know, #3.

Noise cancellation to shut out traffic noise and unwanted conversation.

It has served me well

j_maffe5• 2 months ago

I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.

This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.

renticulous• 2 months ago

You liver doesn't know your name. Neither there is any evidence of you having a liver in your consciousness.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 months ago

I hate this genre of comment. Sometimes the pace or tenor of something that's always been around quickens or otherwise causes new, qualitative change that we do need to discuss and reckon with.

j_maffe5• 2 months ago

Perhaps so. But then one would need to argue that it is not inherently bad to be unaware of how different element in our lives work and that somehow there's an optimal amount that we're exceeding. The blog post does no such thing.

BirAdam2• 2 months ago

This isn’t entirely true. A stylus is easy to understand, as is paper. Buildings of stone are relatively easy to grasp as well. Being a polymath was once doable. Today to truly master anything requires a lifetime of dedication.

XorNot4• 2 months ago

Do you know how to make paper? Can you? Is it any good? Do you really understand it then?

j_maffe5• 2 months ago

But did the writer understand how the language got created and how the words shape her thoughts?

notahacker4• 2 months ago

Plenty of people master more than one domain. It's actually easier when the knowledge is more accessibly distributed in more generalised form, so you don't have to find out how to build stone vaults that don't collapse by trial and error

Ancient civilizations were full of laws people didn't control and property they didn't own, enforced by weapons they had no idea how to make imported from regions they knew nothing of and would have no opportunity to ever visit. And you didn't really understand the priest's explanation for why the gods had determined your infant sons deserved to die any better than the average person nowadays understands the antibiotics that could have enabled them not to die...

triceratops• 2 months ago

http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

fzeroracer• 2 months ago

Do you know what went into Roman Concrete?

onion2k• 2 months ago

Being a polymath was once doable.

Any reasonably intelligent child who can write some poetry, understand basic calculus, and has a working knowledge of chemistry would be heralded as a polymath if you dropped them into the Victorian era. The breadth of human knowledge is just bigger now.

pibaker4• 2 months ago

And yet the stylus was useless to the overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived because they were illiterate. And the stone houses required specialized knowledge held by the masons. And you can walk into any major research university and bump into scores of curious and driven people each holding more knowledge than Pliny the elder.

People seem to have this conception that the average premodern person could do anything from growing crops to coming up with Newtonian theories. No. The average premodern person died before the age the average modern person learned algebra.

scheeseman4863• 2 months ago

A stylus is crafted, paper in manufacturered. I suppose you can rip off some bark and scribble onto it, but what are you writing? Words. Do you know every word ever? Do you have comprehension of the meaning of every word? Building a structure of stone requires knowledge, otherwise it'll fall down and the knowledge that allows for that was accumulated over thousands of years. There were people who mastered pottery and nothing else, people who could do a little bit of everything but were master of none.

We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.

0x1ceb00da• 2 months ago

You don't even need society for that. Remember the bear scene from the revenant?

kortilla4• 2 months ago

[flagged]

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Touché. It breaks down a bit when I admit I would never want to live in isolation away from modern medicine. But maybe the idea can exist in isolation for a moment.

Quarrelsome2• 2 months ago

this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.

You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.

We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.

dnnddidiej3• 2 months ago

To me they are saying more than that. They are saying we have created a world out of tune with outselves. We don't know what we even want but we think it is progress.

Quarrelsome2• 2 months ago

We could say the same for the industrial revolution that is a point in the past for all of us.

tornikeo• 2 months ago

Just as it has always been.

EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.

Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).

So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity

To what end?

“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.” ― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

Paradigm20205• 2 months ago

There is no end.

The world is the way it is because of the desires that the powerful have chosen to pursue because they felt those were worthy of pursuit.

Everything is about entropy. There are those who obey it and those who fight it and yet all will fall because of it.

There is no written way the world should be / is best.

Life is change.

Just choose for yourself what is a good life but accept that there will always be trade offs

keiferski3• 2 months ago

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.

At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.

The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.

This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.

MichaelZuo• 2 months ago

Hmmm… when you put it that way it seems almost tautological.

If complex work could be graspable to the common man, it would no longer be considered as such.

Some new, even more sophisticated work would arise and take its place.

zdragnar• 2 months ago

I think it demonstrates that OP isn't in a team that has any autonomy or meets with anyone outside their team.

I've worked on a large, complex project for a large company, but the whole time I knew what the purpose of the project was, who would benefit from it, why the company was willing to spend money on it.

Even if you don't actually meet end customers, having someone who does put together proper user stories at least takes away some of the busy-work feel.

After all, it doesn't really matter how complex the tool is, what matters is why and how someone will benefit from it existing.

generic92034• 2 months ago

You could try it with some development support work, doing customer tickets. At times there is complexity but you have real people asking for help and usually a limited scope. It is a (nowadays rather small) part of my job and it often gives me that kind of satisfaction you are alluding to.

keiferski3• 2 months ago

It’s funny I actually initially got into tech from parlaying a food service job into a customer service one at a software company.

You’re definitely right that it has more direct problem-solving satisfaction than a lot of other software adjacent tasks.

stiglitz2• 2 months ago

Described by Marx (in too many words, unfortunately) as “alienation”

rixed2• 2 months ago

Rather by Graeber (with way too many words still) as "bullshit jobs".

incr_me3• 2 months ago

The reason Marx developed the more advanced category of commodity fetishism was, in a way, to expose the real alienation in the fantasy that one could opt out of "alienation" by becoming a baker, bike repairman, etc. The heart of a heartless world, indeed.

pcthrowaway• 2 months ago

Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.

derangedHorse2• 2 months ago

If this is the case, maybe the solution is to understand more about the impact of one's work on the service being sold to customers. I find that having people reliant on my work to do something important, however abstract, scratches the itch on feeling useful. If a company is unable to connect the positive customer impact of an employee's work (and seeing that they're increasing the happiness/decreasing the unhappiness of another human), it makes sense that the employee would feel unsatisfied with what they're doing.

port11• 2 months ago

Large companies break down the work into small pieces, many teams, many layers of abstraction. As a developer, I actually enjoyed doing some customer support calls with users, to connect with how they use the software, and what’s not working for them. Almost no large workplace will offer you this option.

fwipsy4• 2 months ago

Consuming goods and services created far away creates a similar problem. If you don't know where it's from or how it's made, it feels like magic, not quite real, and in some sense like it could go away at any time.

Cthulhu_• 2 months ago

Personally I believe a lot of entertainment, especially games, scratch this itch for a lot of people. But it's good to be aware whether you actually enjoy it, or if it's an escape from your day to day drudgery.

Actually it's more complicated than that because for most people said day to day is essential to enable other objectives, like maintaining yourself and / or others.

aaarrm• 2 months ago

If you don't mind me asking (this is unrelated to your post), but is your company hiring? My next position I'm hoping to work at an international remote company, so I'm just following up on any lead that I see, hah

LittleBox• 2 months ago

In my family there are a lot of carpenters who build their own houses. I wonder what it’s like for them since building a house is also a project with a long loop and I could see that closing silently as well with all the “work you actually wanted to do but had to leave undone”. Those couple of licks of paint, that slightly-uneven flooring you made. I wonder.

NonHyloMorph5• 2 months ago

Well that is actually about the long term. If the labour of an international software company is like that, which depends on management is uo to debate. When you follow the discourse on this newsboard, it seems more like the craftsmen building software often struggle with the manifestation in their domain of the fact, that the way corporations are managed is often not in regard to long term goals but to shortcircuits in the service or quick profits incentiviced by the disfunctionalities of current late stage capitalism. (Not being allowed or unable to build the quality software they would like to build; instead having to ship fast building tech dept etc.)

Fizz43• 2 months ago

I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.

With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.

Paradigm20205• 2 months ago

He tries to grok it all at the same time which is impossible.

Free to learn anything we want but never possible to learn everything.

user39393822• 2 months ago

There’s a movie about this called The Gods Must Be Crazy. Highly recommended.

We’ve optimized some problems at the expense of others. It is not necessarily obvious that the trade offs are a net positive.

I’m not sure a net positive strategy even if these society level dynamics were amenable to central planning or management which they pretty clearly are not, would be possible.

Ultimately we’re bound by thermodynamics. We as individuals are capable of finite energy output, that constraint aggregates and emerges at a societal level, it doesn’t disappear.

We have optimized pathways to access food, the food is full of pesticides, refined carbs, and burns oil into the atmosphere for every foot it’s moved, microplastics from the packaging is in our blood (cf NIH). We have access to medicine, we have stress and food that makes us sick. We have access to clean water, we have pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.

Unfortunately if you have a family the calculus makes contemplating the alternative sort of a non starter. A great movie about that is Moquito Coast.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Sounds like you may also have read https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/.

user39393822• 2 months ago

I hadn’t but brilliant minds think alike :) I’ll check it out thanks!

InfiniteAscent3• 2 months ago

I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.

Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.

Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.

specproc• 2 months ago

Jack of all trades, master of none..

"..But sometimes better than a master of one", is the oft-forgotten coda. I'm mediocre at _a lot_ of stuff, and love it. Wouldn't run my life any other way, and it's far too late to change.

I'm, of course, in awe of folks who dedicate their lives to a single craft, but there's a rich, interesting, and productive life out there for us dabblers.

Different strokes for different folks, aye.

InfiniteAscent3• 2 months ago

I actually agree. But art (as in "great art") and craft are two different things.

Paradigm20205• 2 months ago

Such a nature thing to say.

So what about Leonardo da Vinci and countless other "uomo universalis"... He was not an artist? And an engineer and...

I'm firmly in team nurture / choice and would only say that in our time it's harder to be an artist because to be an artist is to sacrifice a lot of other "great options"...

InfiniteAscent3• 2 months ago

I believe you are in team 'haven't found my true talent/calling yet' and it won't necessarily be artistic. You can have talent for many things and you don't have to call anything art.

Regarding Leonardo, and big brains won't like this: a great artist such as Leonardo can become an imaginative engineer as a hobby. The inverse is not true.

squidbeak• 2 months ago

I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.

Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.

Henchman21• 2 months ago

Your comment lays bare the problem with Gerontocracy

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Without saying too much, I think this is more common in young people than you may think.

tardedmeme3• 2 months ago

Could this be because older people have more memories of when certain things were better than they are now?

copx• 2 months ago

The issue is that "better" is subjective and the subjects are shaped by the environment they grow up in.

Most people thus naturally prefer the world as it was during their formative years.

XorNot4• 2 months ago

Sure and the reason why is they were kids and their parents handled everything.

They don't remember when things were better: they don't remember that they were children.

shadowgovt• 2 months ago

But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.

Here's the thing though, I know quite a few people who have done this. It's not particularly easy (after all, most of the complexity of the modern world is a fabric that enables a level of sheer convenience unseen by previous generations). It requires a lot of planning day to day, a willingness to accept setbacks the likes of which you just don't see in a comfortable apartment in an urban environment very often, and the resilience to pick up and keep going.

But if one wants to live that way there are places to do so and you can learn how. I had a colleague who grew up in a yurt and as soon as they had saved up a comfortable nest egg in tech they moved right back into that life. I know someone who lives off the grid in the outer Banks, maintains his own boat and makes his living doing transportation for his neighbors and repair jobs.

I don't disagree with the author and I have felt the stress they have felt, but if they're feeling the need to snap their laptop in half it may just be time to transition to a way of living for them that doesn't require being on the laptop all the time. I suspect they will find it to be much preferable. Or they won't, but if they don't at least the adventure was worth it.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Thank you for this. Sometimes knowing you aren't alone is enough to make it acceptable for yourself. I agree, sometimes we just have to try and see how we react.

ladax72707• 2 months ago

I don't want to downplay the argument, and more importantly - the author's feelings about the topic, but I'd suggest (unsolicited, sorry) the author take some hobbies away from the screen, find a decent friend or two and spend more time with them, and stop or at least reduce the time spent reading news/twitter/whatever.

GeoAtreides• 2 months ago

I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand

that's on you. It takes just a bit of effort, and I suppose time, to have a very good idea of what happens, at all levels, between the moment i had this comment in mind and you the reader conceptualizing it in your mind. Are some details missing? Sure. We still don't know where thoughts come from and I, personally, don't have the mathematically training to understand the quantum mechanics involved in PNP junction, for example. I have never seen a verilog program... but I know it exists and what it does. Nor can I tell you the _implementation_ details of firing high powered lasers at tin droplets to generate uv-rays flashes, but I know it exists and why.

Yes, I can not recreate by myself our current civilization, or even the modern tech stack. It doesn't mean I don't understand how it works. There are no places in my mental map with 'hic sunt dracones'.

I want to never pay with money or read a written word again

not wanting to read might explain why the author doesn't understand the world they are living in

Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age.

good. a child moral compass is neither, and as we grow up and learn, we develop better, more complex ethical framework, against our base instincts and animal intuition.

Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty.

a life unexamined is not worth living

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

I mean the full chain from every line of software to the arrays of semiconductors in my CPU to the cooling system in the fab in Taiwan. I have some understanding of these things, but my point was we can never understand every part anymore. I see we agree.

I in the book We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo the tribe in question has never seen a written word yet has a deeper understanding and respect for the world than even the smartest people around me, but I understand it may have come across the wrong way.

I'm not sure I agree on your next point.

How is examining and appreciating all around you any different? Still aligns with what Socrates said. We can examine in so many different ways.

TheOtherHobbes• 2 months ago

It's not about understanding. The understanding part is a red herring.

It's about lack of agency. Because most people have very little actual freedom, and many have to deal with constant stressors, some of which are existential.

In the US freedom is defined as "the ability to earn money and buy things to consume." The advanced level is "the ability to play status games around money and ownership."

Neither of those are real freedom.

Absolute freedom means being able to do whatever you can imagine.

If your imagination is so constrained that goal collapses to "Make more money", a multibillionaire oligarch barely has more freedom than the peasants.

The West - for all of its flaws - used to be able to imagine a better future, and attempt to steer towards it.

At some point - I think it was around 9/11 - we lost that. The future stopped being an enticing place of possibility and started becoming a frightening place of threats and general diminishment.

Now we're in a churn phase where the old Cult of Tech is still running, and still has followers, but it's become increasingly clear that faith was never enough, and we're not going anywhere unless we develop true collective intelligence.

AI is a kind of attempted simulacrum of that, but it's a poor substitute for the real thing.

BirAdam2• 2 months ago

Having a general understanding of how computer hardware and software works, how it’s built, and how it’s assembled is not the same thing as “fully understanding.” If you truly did fully understand, you’d be making a killing securing the OS and application stack, and the world would have far better software. That we still have constant issues with our hardware and software proves that you do not “fully understand” it.

XorNot4• 2 months ago

What do you fully understand then? Because you absolutely don't understand your own toilet by this metric.

FarmerPotato3• 2 months ago

That's one path to take through life: it's called "engineer". They learn a little about every power of 10 of space and time.

Jordan-117• 2 months ago

Remind Me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwGI-_-5LFI

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Thank you! What a great song and visual representation of exactly what I was thinking of.

"And everywhere I go

There's always something to remind me

Of another place in time"

tolerance• 2 months ago

Which must not be referred to without mentioning Geico's "Caveman" ads, spawning the short-lived "Cavemen" TV series where Cavemen were depicted as a marginalized group.

Paradigm20205• 2 months ago

Kindest 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 wanna have 2h of full attention read/listening it will enhance the experiebve...

"Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well."

Who is this "the world"

Anyway keep up the writing.

Have a great day/evening/night

glitchc2• 2 months ago

Zen Buddhism has been advocating this precise teaching for millenia. What's new here?

collingreen2• 2 months ago

This comment is like the zen version of "simpsons did it!"

xboxnolifes• 2 months ago

Does it need to be new?

patwards• 2 months ago

I was trying to explain to my wife how I felt last night. AI and the pressure to use it and balancing the potential and with the pitfalls is stressing me out. But it’s more than that.

This post perfectly captures the feeling.

tardedmeme3• 2 months ago

What is the potential, besides more mail spam and better google search (that isn't owned by google)?

jebarker• 2 months ago

AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.

MajorTakeaway• 2 months ago

You're really not alone in this. Nature exposure has helped a lot since the industrial revolution as far as any mental health concerns go. A return to the old world, full of trees and brush is still there for all of us.

This is what people mean by 'Go touch grass'. They're not being literal but it's a few simple words that just say go experience primitive roots for a few hours and come back to the artificial world we've created for ourselves.

I used to reject the particular notion until I went outside and depending on where you live, you might experience verbally hostile people if you're alone. Which goes to show there are others feeling far worse if they're being verbally hostile to random people.

The more I read HN symptoms the more I point to trees.

bethekidyouwant5• 2 months ago

People said the same thing in 1800s on the eastern seaboard they even built cute little rail lines.

proee• 2 months ago

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.

Procrastes• 2 months ago

This 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."

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

aspenmayer• 2 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y

bsenftner• 2 months ago

Trying to watch, I have never had a youTube video with such a poor experience. Every 20 seconds there is a 2-5 second buffering. extremely painful.

toofy• 2 months ago

i’ll second this. if you haven’t seen hypernormalisation yet, it’s absolutely worth watching. you can usually find it circling on youtube in various places, just make sure you don’t watch one of the weird copies, the comments will usually indicate.

it will feel entirely disjointed but the way he brings it all together is nothing short of incredible.

ps: the soundtrack is amazing.

pps: nsfw and ya may not want to watch with kids unless documentary footage of some sorta horrific stuff won’t bother them.

skybrian• 2 months ago

This 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?

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

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.

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Extinctions 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.

patcon• 2 months ago

I say this with respect and appreciation for your thoughtful framing, as I also feel for the author:

I'm not a young man, but I believe your this-has-always-been-the-way-ism, is equally clueless, in shared lineage with all the old-dog elders of past who've been helpless to stop what's happening, as the naive fools do the work of imagining it might be otherwise

Blindness goes both ways (a certain type from the end, as from the beginning), and truth is likely somewhere in the middle

pj_mukh2• 2 months ago

I get into the this conversation a lot, when you point out the obvious historical context to "all this change", the response is always "Oh so you want to do nothing?" or "helpless to stop what's happening". That's not the implication of historical context. But it screams for a change in narrative, we aren't helpless, we live in the greatest time, and it can be even greater.

If we are to continue the march of civilization our algorithmic feed driven mania would just be just a blip. But if we give into the hysteria, I am afraid this is the beginning of the end. Our birth rate is dwindling because people are anxious [1], posts like this are not helping.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-pa...

csallen• 2 months ago

In what way is understanding the historical context in which we live "blindness"?

Correcting someone who believes an old phenomenon is a new phenomenon, is not the same as giving up and saying we should do nothing about said phenomenon. In fact, understanding something is the first and most important step to changing it, especially a pattern or a habit.

pfannkuchen• 2 months ago

Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge

I thought this was due to natural climate change?

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

Iran and Afghanistan were green when the Hittites and Babylonians were in charge, if I remember correctly.

What would you say is the secret for people who want to live a long and fulfilling life?

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Probably just "be lucky."

wallst076• 2 months ago

Create a family: Pursue a life that brings others happiness, serve them.

mapontosevenths• 2 months ago

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.

I was fascinated by this so I looked it up, it's mostly inaccurate, but your larger point remains valid.

1) The Greeks did refer to ancient Lebanon as Byblos, because they bought their paper from the port. The paper was actually made in Egypt and imported there for resale though. They did, and still do, have big trees in Lebanon. They were famous for the cedars. Most of the ancient cedar is long gone, but its still green.

2) Iran and Afghanistan basically have the same climate now they did then. Desert then, desert now. You may be thinking of Iraq. Mesopotamia (Iraq) did destroy the fertile crescent by over irrigating it for too long and basically salting the earth.

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Oof, thanks for the corrections.

efavdb• 2 months ago

Worldwide poverty rate in 1800 = 81%. Today under 10%.

https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Could you expand on this?

jddj• 2 months ago

Jonestown, right? Recordings from Jamestown would be quite a big deal.

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Oy, yes, correct, thanks for this.

tomhow3• 2 months ago

Please don't be curmudgeonly on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

globnomulous8• 2 months ago

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Could you explain how this applies? I don't mean to be difficult -- really. I appreciate that Hacker News is a great place for discussion, and I very much appreciate that's partly because of the work you're doing.

I'd just like to think that my criticism is thoughtful and is neither rigidly nor generically negative: I pointed out specific omissions and offered an analogy to explain the immaturity and cluelessness that I see in the piece -- not just that the claims are wrong but that the perspective is delivered so badly that it's difficul to take seriously. It wasn't meant to be unkind or a swipe; I didn't call names or sneer; it wasn't a generic tangent. It was the best way I could find to characterize the ways the piece's tone and content work together, undermining it and (almost certainly) rubbing people the wrong way.

manoDev• 2 months ago

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.

deadonarrival• 2 months ago

most people are living for the next paycheck.

and that's exactly how the ruling class maintains it's power and siphons more and more wealth away from the working class.

bethekidyouwant5• 2 months ago

Also introduce him to mercantilism.

angrydev• 2 months ago

Oh 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.

the__alchemist• 2 months ago

My reaction too, starting with the picture of dense vegetation at the top of the article!

trgn• 2 months ago

get eaten alive by mosquitos and be slightly moist all the time!

scoofy3• 2 months ago

Technology has always existed. The people that lived in nature had no idea how it worked. To them, a plow was technology and I’m sure there were people complaining about it. We only understand nature now because of technology.

I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

Zambyte• 2 months ago

The plow is very obviously life sustaining technology. Plows help make food, food is required to live. I find it extremely unlikely that there was any noteworthy amount of "complaining" about it at any point in history. Every technology exists on a spectrum of obviously good to obviously bad. Lots of things are not in the middle of that spectrum.

I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time

Luckily we don't have to choose either.

BoorishBears2• 2 months ago

I’ll take scrolling myself to death at 80 over smallpox and dying of a trivially curable infection at 40 every time.

I think we could have stopped somewhere between dying of smallpox at 40, and children scrolling themselves into eating disorders and suicide at 13 so Zuck can go for some moonshots.

5-0• 2 months ago

Yes. It's a bit like we're very capable cells that are coming together to build ourselves a body. Why settle for an amoeba? (Other than as a stop along the way.)

ivanjermakov• 2 months ago

Real world is always more complicated than any model of it we design.

retired• 2 months ago

I'm paying someone €500 a year to file my taxes and I just want to go back to trading sea shells. Why do systems have to be so complicated. I have to pay my road tax in bills and I get my change in coins what is that about.

jackdoe• 2 months ago

relax man, just go and touch some grass, there is no 'we', do what you wanna do, go where you wanna go.

also, block the internet for a while, buy a commodore and code some machine code, make a forth, you will be alright.

read `the soul of a new machine`.

the world is in the middle of a storm right now, you cant do much, but weather through it.

booleandilemma• 2 months ago

And it's all for what, really? I read an article earlier today about plans to build a data center the size of Manhattan. I want everyone reading my small comment to please just think about that for a second. Just think about it. What are we doing? We lived for thousands of years without this kind of technoforming activity. Why are we doing this to our planet, to what end?

r2ob• 2 months ago

The world doesn't need another JavaScript framework.

yieldcrv• 2 months ago

I think another framing could be: the world doesn’t have to be this complicated

cdrini3• 2 months ago

Thought-provoking write-up. One part of this is the "meaning of human life". Part of that for me is: humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars and try to understand. And, to the best of our understanding, this ability arose from winning a billion biological lotteries, from the blind system of nature and natural selection which by complete coincidence, stumbled on intelligence as a beneficial trait for reproduction, and optimized for it to the point of creating sentience and free will.

It's this incredibly improbable event that I think gives humanity as a whole an obligation to try to understand and explore the universe. To not do so, I think would be a waste of this incredibly unlikely "gift". And that appears to require complexity in order to understand and explore.

Note I think this is an obligation of humanity, not necessarily every individual human. I think free will means individuals can choose not to.

The other part of this is complexity of modern society. I'm not certain whether all the elements of modern society are necessary for this overarching meaning, and pieces of it could potentially be reduced, but I think it would be tricky. Society begins whether you want it to or not as soon as you have more than one individual with free will, and some complexity arises inevitably. But haven't thought about this side as much; it's an interesting side of this discussion.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

You might find this interesting

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/

Your view might fall under planetary management and beyond. Across so many people maybe the dominant view would prevail in a consensus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/environmentalissues/chapter/1...

cdrini3• 2 months ago

Interesting reads! Apologies, that's not what I intended to communicate, but I can understand where that conclusion came from.

I think understanding and exploring the universe is an essential "success metric" for intelligent life like humanity -- but I don't think it's at the expense of all else. I mentioned it because it, to me, makes a humanity that abandoned complexity a "failed" humanity. Although again, on an individual basis I think this is a fine option.

An underlying principle I believe in is an avoidance of waste. It's this principle that underpins part of why I think there is an obligation for humanity to understand/explore: to avoid wasting our improbable "gift". This principle constrains the principle of understanding/exploration and relates to Earth. Earth and life on Earth is itself rare and the result of its own biological lotteries. To blindly exploit Earth's resources is not only wasteful but shortsighted as well towards humanity's own survival. So I think I'm in stewardship on that spectrum, but need to sit with it a bit more.

With regards to the first article, I think it outlines many of the complexities around humanity's space travel and habitation. For me, the key bit is understanding and exploration; ie the seeing/understanding of what the universe is/has (on Earth as well as elsewhere). I don't actually think this has to be humanity. I think more broadly the obligation I've mentioned lies with intelligent life not necessarily humanity (we just happen to be the only example of such we're aware of). Habitation isn't as big a piece for me. If we can send robotic "eyes" for intelligence to see through, or if we create other intelligent life with different properties from humanity that can see/explore, I consider this goal met.

drivers99• 2 months ago

But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.

Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.

gerdesj• 2 months ago

"But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental." (not sure what you are on about with respect "Time's Second Arrow")

So, why are you not enslaved by your lizard overlords? 8) Homo is a bit of a johnny come lately and yet has managed to travel to the moon and back.

We only have a single extant example of hom sap to work with. We can work backwards, within reason, and still not manage to come up with a completely satisfying origin story. There is no way you can "derive" hom sap from first principles.

cdrini3• 2 months ago

Very interesting book/idea! Adding it to my "to read" list. The more I think about it, there is kind of a two-step process here; entropy creates chaos/disorder, but chaos/disorder creates an environment ripe for kinds of natural selection/complexity build-up. It's almost like an echo or interference pattern or eddy of entropy.

And I think with regards to my initial principle, I think the value is that it came to exist to this extent in one system. That given countless currents/eddies of entropy, a "sand spiral" built up to be miles upon miles tall, where most spirals only made it to a few centimetres before an entropy wave brought them crashing down. Because the "functional bits" in the universe increasing doesn't mean a single sand spiral will get that tall necessarily (unless we assume infinite time?). And if we assume finite time, then that makes this occurrence even more valuable and important to defend, since it's unclear if left to the randomness of entropy/time's arrows if such a buildup of complexity/"functional bits" would occur again before time ends.

Not too sure, those are my initial thoughts, but need to sit with it longer. Thank you for sharing!

trailbits• 2 months ago

Physicists are Atoms way of understanding themselves

farley13• 2 months ago

Agree.

If you walk through a forest there are billions of little things from creatures to bits of dna just looking to pass on their particular brand of biologic layout to another generation. They would love to involve you.

on a world swirling through the chaos of hard and ephemeral matter one big rock away from a new trajectory.

No, we in no way created the complexity. We have some baby complexities we've created sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not. We have complexities we've created to understand the world. Some to try and improve how we live. Some to mimic how we see existing systems or control others. It's all just a drop in the bucket.

I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future. I think we do that by learning more, not trying to back step into ignorance and forget how we got here. That is a dead end. Our present complexity of life is just the farthest we've got so far. Not very far at all.

It's also a good idea to learn our own nature better. Example: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

xedrac• 2 months ago

I happen to subscribe to the general belief that we should aim to make life suck less for others in the future.

In pursuit of this noble goal, one can do more harm than good, if not careful. Take for instance a wealthy parent that gifts their child with $5,000,000 so they never have to work, hoping their child's life will be easier than their own. What is the likely result of this gift? A child that never learns the value of money, and goes broke all too soon with no skills to survive.

n0on3• 2 months ago

Except most of the complexity has nothing to do with “understanding and exploring the universe”, it’s just byproduct of the ever changing fractal composition of attempts to gain or obtain something over someone else.

rixed2• 2 months ago

  humans are the only known lifeform that can look at the stars ... sentience and free will.

Ants look at the canopy and try to understand. Feeling good about themselves while farming a herd of aphids, they marvel: "evolution optimized for intelligence to the point of creating fangs and antennas."

;)

IAmBroom• 2 months ago

"And on the sixth day, the All-Queen made Adam the ant from clay, and antennae-sensed that it was good."

terbo• 2 months ago

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment

This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

umeshunni• 2 months ago

This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).

lotsofpulp3• 2 months ago

This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes.

That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.

raincole• 2 months ago

his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school

Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

irjustin• 2 months ago

I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not.

In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival.

Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them.

Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past.

The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

jmilloy• 2 months ago

I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.

psb5• 2 months ago

Think about what friction means. If there is no frictiom how do you walk? How do you turn? How do you brake?

In systems theory Friction is a requirement for stability, controlability and predictability.

Take any system around you and reduce friction all kinds of x files will start getting reported and pile up. This is all well known(Goodharts Law, Bounded Rationality,Explore-Exploit tradeoff etc) to people who work on system stability not just optimization.

m4632• 2 months ago

I found the rest of the movie after the quote to be quite charming.

qsera11• 2 months ago

casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages.

That is the point though. Most of the atrocities of modern world is justified as a way to "save lives" and "in pursuit of more safety".

Would you choose to live as someones slave if that ensures a boring life of a hundred years?

Modern life is easy mode.

I really wonder how people can say this with a straight face. There is poison and adulteration everywhere. And in other places perpetual wars are going on. People are playing "research" with things that can wipe out human life if it gets out of a lab. I worry about the possibility that it will be done intentionally, because someone needed that breakthrough right now.. There is nothing that I can feed my children without worrying how many poisons and microplastics or some endocrine disrupting shit it contains. I would like to farm something on my own, but I don't own any land. Life without a million kinds of insurance seems impossible. We really are slaves, but everyone around seem to love that...And the joke is that everone, even slave masters are slaves themselves...to money.

Even when man was living in a jungle, you could have some moments peace of mind if you climbed on some high rock with your family with some kill you made earlier. But today, there is no where to hide from the dangers that inhabit this world now. And they kill slowly. Not a quick death, like before...

bigupthewhole• 2 months ago

Some of the hadza tribe left for school only to return to hunter gatherer lifestyle. Living in poverty on a farm isn't really how we used to live, that was already step 1 of industrialization. We used to live in decently large groups hunting.

aboardRat4• 2 months ago

Yet most people don't learn anything in those 10 years. The last 3 are more or less when learning happens.

latexr6• 2 months ago

The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

The quote is from the introduction of a comedy movie from 1980. Not high brow, not literature, before TikTok and tradwife content, before social media, not aiming to feed angst, not meant to be too deep. It’s the setup for 90 minutes of jokes.

metaphor• 2 months ago

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

latexr6• 2 months ago

That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.

FarmerPotato3• 2 months ago

Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.

qsera11• 2 months ago

But he some how didn't know when to stop.

I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more.

No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

Levitz5• 2 months ago

No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.

numpad02• 2 months ago

The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today.

Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem.

Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )

hashmal• 2 months ago

It's a solution only at a superficial level, regarding wealth redistribution. It's just very hard to leave the social class you're born in. Not everyone is doomed by it, far from it, but not enough to consider it a solved problem.

Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.

hliyan2• 2 months ago

Another framing of this is that once you have fulfilled your basic needs of healthy, physical safety and companionship, almost everything else you do is massively deleveraged: you move vast amounts of matter and energy in order to make minute alterations to electrical impulses in your brain.

rglover• 2 months ago

The problem is focusing on the world vs what's around us (and who). Technological society by definition will always be complicated (that's the purpose; to advance the technique [1]). The smaller your area of concern, the smaller your "world," the more manageable and livable it appears.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society

rramadass3• 2 months ago

Nice pertinent reference to Jacques Ellul's work. The wikipedia page is a bit sparse but the article Confronting the Technological Society (linked in the bibliography) is a must read to understand the main ideas - https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-...

rramadass3• 2 months ago

Addendum:

My previous comment chain is also relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980929

nritchie• 2 months ago

There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.

intralogic• 2 months ago

"To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. " I am learning that a "Just this" attitude, like in these words, improves our experience of life. You may enjoy a Kwan Um school (or other) Zen group, where this is reinforced continually.

awwyeah• 2 months ago

I see a lot of "complexity is inherent to existence" type comments. They aren't wrong, but they show that OP's phenomenology could use a little frame work, so to speak. "We've made the world too complicated" could be fairly seen as "complexity is something humans expressed under specific conditions". Not saying we should always strip agency from the discussion (lest we slip into nihilism), but I think it's fair to frame the complexity as a material condition in which we live, rather than something that recedes if you "look at the birbs".

If you can make peace with that, you might then perceive that while all material conditions are complex, it's our existence within them that's fraught. I'd suggest that the discomfort you feel is from inhabiting conditions that change faster than competence can be transmitted across generations. Pre-modern humans (and other animals) didn't experience this (as often, or as intensely at least) because their conditions changed at evolutionary speed. We used to grow up in the same world as our grand parents. Now our parent's lessons are obsolete before we're born, and we're left to cast around for certainty that only comes with generational adaptation. That's almost the definition of anxiety. Thankfully, looking at birds can actually help deal with anxious thoughts!

Barrin92• 2 months ago

I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand [...] I think we do a very good job at convincing ourselves that we are doing good things, working towards honest goals. [...] I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible.

Nobody has ever made anything on the condition that they fully understand it, which is impossible. The world has always been complex and illegible, not just technology has been encountered that way but the natural world. We never lived in a pastoral utopia that was comprehensible or tamable.

Deleuze is relevant here, as he said human beings always start 'in the middle'. Nobody existed before technology, society or what have you, but is already thrown into it. You don't do something because you fully understand it, you can only understand it by engaging with it. You don't know what you will say before you speak.

You practice not for some pre-defined goal but to open up possibilities, 'lines of flight'. Stop caring about goals, start caring about making connections. If you find yourself in a new city you don't attempt to 'fully understand' it, you just walk. If you don't know how your blog works, write a static site generator. Won't mean you understand your entire computer, but that doesn't matter, you'll find yet another thing to learn as you go.

throw7• 2 months ago

AGI is the postmodern tower of babel. Ignore.

If you feel that the devices and technology you use are making you the slave, then master it (learn about it and make it your slave) or dump it.

I'm not being unrealistic. I had a facebook account for about 2 years and then decided I had enough of being Zuckerberg's dumbfuck and deleted it. I still keep a gmail account, but I pay for an email account also. At the very extreme are monastics which is a very real thing even today.

zhxiaoliang• 2 months ago

People mistake complexity for value. People hide behind complexity. Truth is simple, so it's cheap. Truth lays us bare, so we avoid it at all costs.

doitLP• 2 months ago

Thank you for this article. I know no truly effective weapon against the Kingsnorthian Machine, except to name it and remind people that they are still creatures and not machines. That it doesn’t have to be this way. That for 99% of our history it wasn’t this way.

The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.

But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.

artyom• 2 months ago

Invariably, this "simpler life" type of reasoning is unmistakably the product of an urbanite.

There's nothing romantic in progress-adverse, ostracized, uncivilized lifestyles. There's only a small subset of people that would really find it preferable in practice. In the best of cases it implies grueling non-stop hard work. And still you're one bad winter away from being obliterated.

The world is a complex place, but if you find it unnecessarily complicated, scientific and technological progress are not the problem.

It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

buovjaga• 2 months ago

It's usually the psychopaths taking advantage of everyone else and ruining it for the rest of us, technology or not. They've lurked around in "simpler times" too.

Indeed, this is the main hard problem of human societies. It's great that we can now put a name to the issue and there is more and more awareness of it. It's also refreshing to see human history being examined through that lens, like in Luke Kemp's "Goliath's Curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath's_Curse

zdc1• 2 months ago

Yes. We can complain that technology is "too complicated" but so is the human brain, consciousness, and every other biological system which we have failed to fully understand.

Knowing that we are surrounded by systems we can never know is both a gift and a curse, but offering a chicken to the sky god for more rain is not a world I'd like to go back to.

parikshitu• 2 months ago

Who was the "we" who made it this complicated?

This "we" is a huge collective spread across space and time, with a web of complex relationships between groups of humans living in different parts of the world during different eras, acting upon each other through trade, commerce, festivities, wars, politics, etc. This web is so complex, that even good intentions lead to hell.

Perhaps this is just entropy sneaking upon us as time passes, waiting for a critical mass of complexity before it decides to strike with fury.

wizviper• 2 months ago

See also Moloch.

https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

fwipsy4• 2 months ago

It seems it's become fashionable these days to believe that happiness is impossible, or even non-existent; that all positive emotions are intrinsically transient. I think this attitude mostly comes from the phenomenon this author describes where you can forget (or just never know) what it's like to be happy. I don't agree with his proposed remedy.

First, I think that very few people have been privileged to enjoy the "simple" lifestyle he wants. Most cultures have either struggled with nature to survive, or avoided that struggle through restless progress. Any culture/organism that was content within it's niche would be outcompeted by fitter cultures/organisms. Ironically, the author is probably one of those best positioned to achieve his ideals; but they don't, because culture has evolved to program them to struggle.

Second, if the bears don't get you, the boredom will. Moderation is key, and it's good to have some mental stimulation too. You don't need to live in nature all the time to be happy. You just need to prioritize spending some time relaxing.

CyLith• 2 months ago

I strive for a “simple” lifestyle not because I believe it will be enjoyable. Quite the opposite. A simple lifestyle is much more laborious, arduous, and mentally taxing in terms of all the minutiae I need to worry about to achieve even modest levels of comfort. E.g. Do I have enough wood stored for the winter?

I strive for a simple life because it gives meaning to life, and a connection to the earth and other living things. It keeps me resilient in the face of hardship and less reliant on other people. It also provides a connection to the past and our heritage.

bigcat12345678• 2 months ago

Echo words here.

Modern worlds are led by traumatized, through pathological education and media propaganda, with a undertone of those being hurt and damaged to fear for others suffering the same (while they subconsciously are aware that their suffering is actually their own misfortune that are not actually shared to 90% of the population).

I am still feeling that the overall goodness is still the dominant the human trajectory. Even the traumatized leaders know instinctually when they are close to a sane & happy person. The force of life's energy seems inescapable, like the quantum fabrics that waves everyone's whole existence.

vladmk• 2 months ago

Nice philosophical piece

rramadass3• 2 months ago

A trivial angsty article.

Philosophy has had an answer to this (and more) since time immemorial. We simply need to start with "control of our self-grasping mind", "lessen our desires", and "let go" of those things which are not under our control. This is the active and subjective way of approaching it via Hindu/Buddhist/Greek philosophies. Learn to live in the world and yet apart from it.

For a more analytical approach, see Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality by James Tartaglia (free ebook) - https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781...

For a non-philosophical but scientific study, see Complex Systems Science to understand the nature of Complexity itself - https://www.santafe.edu/what-is-complex-systems-science and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

field_reader• 2 months ago

Simple has nothing to do with good. This isn't a deep insight — it's just that "first principles" as an aesthetic keeps tricking people into thinking peeling layers off is the same thing as understanding. A skyscraper is complicated. The answer to "this is too complicated" isn't "live in a hut." The hut is simple. The hut also can't hold a million people.

DANmode3• 2 months ago

But I am not a million people.

Emphatic disagree with your points.

DANmode3• 2 months ago

I've realized this article is slightly naïve

Is it?

Or is it simply unresigned?

To the author:

there are ways to get away from much of what you described, and retain great sense of community.

I hope you and I both find the balance we enjoy.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Still grappling with what to think, of course it is a mixture of both. Thanks for your comment.

DANmode3• 2 months ago

Really needed to read some of what you wrote.

Thank you, for being vulnerable!

fullstackchris• 2 months ago

The world doesn't make sense. It's always been this way, so we don't even know another way to exist.

This is the main line for me. Even around the bonfire with fellow grugs if you got eaten by a tiger, I'm not sure you fully would understand that either. So I'm not exactly sure what this post is getting at? That human history so far is "bad" and we "did it the wrong way"? I'd argue 99% of human adults are just folks trying to do their best to provide for their family. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist though.

gspr• 2 months ago

The more we learn, the more destruction seems to follow.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author, but I don't follow this (quite popular) line of thinking at all. No doubt there's large amounts of destruction and cruelty in the world that wouldn't be possible without "complexity". We should never minimize or forget that.

But more destruction with more complexity? It's only a lifetime ago that minor infections had a good chance of killing you or your loved ones. A few lifetimes since we complexified statecraft into one where the powers that be couldn't just off you on a whim. A few lifetimes ago that we figured out more or less reliable ways of not starving. A few generations since we built a complex system to (try to) prevent genocide. You could go on and on.

Sure our world is complex. And full of destruction. I'm not at all buying the leap that it had less of the latter when it had less of the former.

Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

js8• 2 months ago

Wouldn't watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o... be more appropriate?

numpad02• 2 months ago

IMO the problem is that most people work to earn food allotment by means so far removed from its production because those detached means appear lucrative; software engineers especially do so by proving the first order derivative of their performance, and oh no that's not so sutainable, but they're always too late to do anything about that.

I don't know if eg. farm works are better than white collar work and there is no buts to follow. All my guts tell me is that too many things in this world require everyone to be above-average within the exact cohort from which the said average is derived from, which just burns down everything.

ksec• 2 months ago

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

-Steve Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple

And I say this to pretty much every tech we have at the moment, from USB, CPU, GPU, Web, Programming Languages, OS. And the same with every day life appliance as well. Making something simple and elegant is perhaps the hardest thing most people never achieve.

nuc1e0n• 2 months ago

I disagree. But maximising the acquisition of bits of paper and numbers on a screen above happiness and day-to-day needs is the American way.

larodi• 2 months ago

The image of the article says it all. Look at it. World is already super complicated, and failing in all the possible ways. then it gets recycled for parts. The delusion that order can be sustained easily and in a prolonged manner without immense amounts of energy/information consumed, just does not match the direct observation. Look at the ground and what grows and lives in the grass, it is already super complex, and overcrowded. All of it moves and breaks and comes back.

pprunty97• 2 months ago

"human kind cannot bear very much reality."

alexgoodhart• 2 months ago

Your post script Seems to be a reaction to some quality of finger wagging you may have received from this article. Everything you said was true, it also was true that strategically it is generally outside the realm of most people’s risk tolerance to abandon civilization of life. But you were right about the harmfulness, the alienness, etc. It is not incumbent on you just because you state how you feel to then also mitigate that feeling with the practical obligations one has to protect protecting themselves in their loved ones in their communities and helping steer humanity in which ever best direction we may be able to reach. The idea that it’s naive to speak a pure and simple fact sounded to me like shame being deployed to silence critique.

willguest• 2 months ago

the author is not describing the world. they are describing their experience of it. classic mistake, and quite an anxious version of it.

it's not wrong, but it is tangled in the waves...

people who choose to live in deep in ignorance do so well. many evil people sleep sweetly because they simply do not care.

those that care swim to the surface to escape the pressure, but there they find waves, smashing them against the cliffs.

the trick is to break free from the surface. clearly the author has the will, but not yet the tools. to help, i would suggest the following:

- learn the difference between complexity and complicatedness - learn about systems thinking - keep developing your emotional smarts, and actively use this capacity - read Krishnamurti

wolttam3• 2 months ago

Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age

Well, mine didn’t. It’s called respect and love your neighbours, treat others as you would like to be treated.

It’s pretty simple and feels deeply ingrained

amanaplanacanal2• 2 months ago

I seen to remember Jesus talking about that. I wish more of those who claim to be Christians took those words to heart.

macrocosmos• 2 months ago

He actually said much more. One of his most radical statements was to love your enemy. Even your enemies love their neighbors so why feel good about yourself for doing that. Even some evil people love their friends and it is therefore really not a thing to be proud of. To love your enemy is what all people are called to do.

ericmcer2• 2 months ago

Hard disagree, have you ever seen a group of 5 year olds interacting?

We are little monsters without our parents literally berating us until we develop shame.

Small kids left to their own devices will gang up on anyone different or weak and antagonize them to raise their own social standing. They respect strength/power and have little empathy.

The "intuition" the author refers to only exists because the scoldings he received during his formative years conditioned him to behave "right".

wolttam3• 2 months ago

I have actually, as a parent to a young child

My kid was about 3 when he figured out what it means to be a good person, and that's all he seems to want to be now.

Maybe it's just where I am, but the majority of parents around me also want to raise children who care, and a lot of them seem to be quite successful at it.

It was never scoldings, it was "hey, let's think about how it might feel if that happened to you." Patiently and caringly.

Again, it doesn't feel that hard to me, but I'll respect that it feels alien to other's nature.

saidnooneever• 2 months ago

dont let others choose for you in life and you can keep it as complicated or simple as u like.

skanderbm• 2 months ago

It reminded me for the book "The Unaccountability Machine" by Dan Davies https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1ssv55y/the_unaccoun...

sandworm101• 2 months ago

> I've realized this article is slightly naïve.

Yes. Modern writers think the world we percieve today is somehow more complicated than it was in the past. It is not. The complexity of the world is a function of human thought. When the world appears simple, humanity finds and invents complexity. The past was not simple. It only appears that way when we forget the various invented complexities. Think our schedules are complex? Look into how complicated it was for a roman to specify a paticular day of the year. Look into how many saints and feast days dotted the midieval christian calender. Think modern politics complex? Try organizing a wedding or even a family dinner in a world where invitations travel by horseback.

uwagar• 2 months ago

be the change you want to see. great journeys start with a single step!

watching hypernormalisation u are only digging the hole you are in deeper.

andix• 2 months ago

The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.

Moving to a village in the countryside could solve that. Might reduce complexity too. I'm not saying it's better, but a might be a solution for this problem.

hariseldom• 2 months ago

I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues. Maybe our greatest gift to the world is to do as little as possible. To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well.

This is not always true, it depends on who you are. If you are an employee at Meta, or work for Philip Morris, you'd certainly do more good for the world by doing almost nothing, staying home doing nothing would be more moral compared to going to work everyday. Not so for doctors, nurses, teachers, and many other professions.

lanyard-textile4• 2 months ago

:) I think this very mindset is the one the article resists.

How complicated.

The best gift you can give yourself is enjoying the simple moments of life, no matter who you are and what your role is.

And that's all this is about.

bloomingeek• 2 months ago

Well said. For my part: seek beauty and happiness. Don't make others sad.

The last part is far more difficult. Why? As someone said, "We have caveman emotions, live under medieval systems and have access to god-like technology."

Perhaps a simpler example: when driving on the highway, stay out of other driver's way, enjoy the experience and don't cause danger. I can't control how others drive, but I can get out of the way.

nojonestownpls2• 2 months ago

Yes, when life puts you in a position where you're insulated from the consequences of your actions, just enjoy it :)

If your role is actively making life worse for thousands of others, that's their problem.

When you've been offered the privilege of an uncomplicated life in a complicated world, just grab it by the neck and take it, discard the complications as something for others to deal with!

margalabargala• 2 months ago

Going about your life without concern for how your actions affect those around you is what some might call selfish :)

You feel that's the best give you can give yourself. Others might feel the best gift they can give themselves, is a community.

Perhaps a war criminal might find equal personal fulfillment in seeing a wildflower as a doctor. But there's more than one ingredient in a happy life :)

pyrale• 2 months ago

I guess the issue is that, on average, our society looks more like Phillip Morris or Meta than it looks like a school or an hospital. And, most of all, the people our society promotes to steer itself tend to be the kind that thrives at Meta rather than in a school.

timacles4• 2 months ago

To be more precise, the late stage capitalism phase we are in has designed itself around destroying anything that contributes to society.

Nothing can exist without making a profit. If there is something that is useful, our system makes sure it will be exploited for maximum profit which will in turn destroy that very things.

nine_k• 2 months ago

There are always more people who might use your help, or at least your kind word. Most often they are right next to you.

Maybe producing even more things is not what's worth doing. But doing more than just passively watch the world pass by is quite definitely a worthy goal. (If one cares about reducing the suffering of sentient beings, that is. If one doesn't, one can just sit and strive not to do anything.)

jongjong• 2 months ago

I agree with the sentiment. The devil is in the details. Or the way I see it: The devil hides in the details.

dennis_jeeves2• 2 months ago

Ted Kaczynski had a point...

steveharing1• 2 months ago

I agree with this "Our world is an explosion of environmental harm and damage to everything around us." As humans its our responsibility to protect our mother nature by protecting trees and our nature by planting more to at least be able to give back what our nature gave us. I believe if we can't give back then we should not destroy either.

lanyard-textile4• 2 months ago

I love our complicated world.

I summarize the complexities as emergent properties of industry: Not all good, some very bad.

But some very good. Some life changing.

We are all gears in a huge wild system. Who knows what will happen?

jstummbillig• 2 months ago

I've realized this article is slightly naïve.

Well, I would discard substitute "slightly" for a much stronger adverb but alright, directionally: Good!

The uncomplicated past was horrible. The complications exist for a reason. The natural world is mostly fucking mental by any modern human standard.

Yes, we can do without some regulations and maybe whatever social media is. I don't know.

But we are quite smart at identifying things that are bad for us, over some span of time (due to us discussing them, case in point) and also making them better, working against or in spite of millions of years of evolution. Our lives are short and thus we are incredibly impatient with each other – as we should be! It keeps us on our toes and makes the now important. But we do sometimes forget that, if you are close enough to the now, not everything is a smooth curve and it's not always immediately clear which parts in this complexity do what.

But thing's really do get better. Yes, we do not understand all the systems but it's not like the natural world is a system we understood better in the past. We used to think dancing made rain. And yes, things are getting more dangerous as we are getting more powerful through complications. This is a separate, also complicated issue, because it only requires one rogue agent to do incredible harm anyway. Best I can tell: We need to all get better and keep each other in check.

Unless you are a sort of tourist (and that includes all forms of opt-in naturalness today), the natural world is by and large a complicated, hostile and horrible place by all human standards. We do things for good, selfish reasons and somehow, miraculously this works our fairly well.

everdrive• 2 months ago

HN will suggest we solve this complication problem with yet another layer of technology. This sort of complication like a ratchet; it only goes one way. I am with the author here, but so many people love this complicated world. If they could be more packed in, more distracted, have even greater abundance most people would choose that option every time.

For individuals, all you can choose to do is simplify your home life. This is an imperfect solution, but the world around you will only be moving in the other direction.

probablypower• 2 months ago

every solution engineers a greater problem. Solving horse poop with cars -> Climate change

moichael• 2 months ago

"AI will solve climate change" -> Datacenters that cause more climate change

warumdarum• 2 months ago

No, the solution usually creates a caste of citizens unaware that they would not even exist without it,vehemently protesting against the solutions because of sideeffects.

Take the imperialism of old: people did not do this because beeing evil is fun. They did this because beeing exponential in a linear world produces conflict anyway and to dim the lights elsewhere allowed you to keep the civilizations lights on in the heartland longer.

People fought wars for fertilizer. Now you have hippies protesting against fertilizer made with harber bosch, who would kill each other as some north korean stunted growth dwarfs in imperial wars if they would get their wish.

inglor_cz• 2 months ago

It is a bit like saying that by reducing child mortality to almost zero, we created a huge problem with Alzheimer's.

Not exactly wrong, but an extremely pessimistic perspective which ignores all the positives of the process.

bell-cot• 2 months ago

The problem is that complexity is both a human status signifier, and an extremely convenient weapon for "haves" who are inclined toward "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategies.

derangedHorse2• 2 months ago

Honestly, I've wanted to snap my laptop right at the hinge so many times. To throw my phone into the sea. I've wanted to walk out of my school or office and never return. I want to never pay with money or read a written word again. But to do so would leave you alone and a lunatic.

I think it's normal to want to stop doing things you dislike, but I don't think that this feeling stems from "complexity." Instead, human progress has given us the option to stop doing things we dislike at a relatively low cost. For example, if you didn't want to hunt, migrate, or battle in prehistoric times, the consequence for those things would be death.

To look at the birds, feel the wind and the water in our own hands, and ... nothing more. Eat when we are hungry, laugh when we are happy, cry when we are empty. And maybe that is the greatest gift to ourselves as well.

I believe those things sound nice and worthwhile, but looking at the birds and feeling the wind and water in our hands require safety and surviving requires us to utilize our biological advantages (like our complexity-generating brains). Eating when we're hungry require us to find food, laughing comes from finding safe things to laugh about and/or people to laugh with, etc.

randallsquared• 2 months ago

The article leads with a photo of something far more complicated than the subject matter.

spiderfarmer• 2 months ago

The world has always been complicated.

Go back 10,000 years.

You can’t control the weather. You don’t know what will poison you. You’re always worried about food and safety.

taylodl• 2 months ago

People have been saying this since the dawn of civilization. What is always overlooked is survival is complicated.

pnexk• 2 months ago

TFA’s author notes they’ve watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization. As someone who is vary of his Century of Self documentary, I think it’s worth remembering how deceptive visual mediums can be.

It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.

None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.

plaguuuuuu• 2 months ago

Also worth reading, especially today in LLM age: Simulacra and Simulation by Beaudrillard. Heavily inspired The Matrix. Although unlike the movie, he saw simulacra as irreversibly replacing reality, ie you can't get out of the matrix.

_nxwj18• 2 months ago

Yes I’ve become aware of the fact that documentaries are still mostly audio-visual entertainment masquerading as something more. A lot can be said about the medium as the message and so on, which is why I still value deliberate careful reading and conversation the most. To add on to the complicated world, younger people don’t read much at all, and their reading is becoming shallower thanks to the internet.

solfox• 2 months ago

I agree with this sentiment. And it's hard to change. But there are plenty of examples of people exiting the normalized system and choosing a different life. Even small changes can make a big impact on mental health, like stopping reading the news.

But I'd encourage the author to consider what setting an example might look like for them. What does a less complicated life look like? Then live it, and eventually, more will follow.

rogermarley• 2 months ago

Another aspect of this is it's often intentional.

I've spent most of my career working to simplify systems and processes, and the thing that's surprised me the most is how cool the reception usually is.

I think this is because professionally speaking it acts as a moat. By making something as complex as you are able you raise the participation costs of others.

The example I like to use is: it would never be in a lawyer's interest that the law be simple.

riazrizvi• 2 months ago

Silly premise. Perhaps we haven't done a superb job of making the world more artificially simple while maintaining its select powerful and intriguing qualities that any particular beholder wants to focus on. With that I can agree there's a loooooong way to go. But the real world, real nature, is so complex it can make you puke when you try hard to conceive of it.

light_hue_1• 2 months ago

The more we learn, the more destruction seems to follow

I wish people would read some history. The world was pretty horrific until recently. The urban graveyard effect didn't end until fairly recently: cities were so horrific to live in and so many people died that the only way their populations were sustained was by constant immigration.

dudul• 2 months ago

Hum, I don't know man, I'm always up for venting the stupidity of the world, but this looks very shallow and naive.

I can imagine that the world has always been complicated for "the normal guy kind of close to the bottom". I'm sure the vast majority of people throughout History have felt that they had no influence/control on anything surrounding them.

Without getting into an essay, I think we've made the world too fast and too superficial, that's for sure, and it's hurting our psyche big time. Complicated I don't know.

Yhippa• 2 months ago

Kids aren't allowed to play at the playground unsupervised or walk around anywhere by themselves. Cars are all now 4,000 pounds, have terrible sight lines and are lifeless. I don't like this world.

CosmicBagel• 2 months ago

user8 and ratfactor should have a coffee (or tea) together and chit-chat

https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing

pschnapp• 2 months ago

The futility of a merely human/physical existence strikes deep. I pray the author learns God is who gives it meaning.

fundatus• 2 months ago

Which god?

m4632• 2 months ago

The world is infinitely complicated. The amazing thing is that through things like science, education, government, farming, etc... That people can grasp much of the world around them and function well.

alphabeta3r56• 2 months ago

I feel the OP has not seen the poverty before the world was complex.

The complexity is the price we pay for keeping people fed in Africa and India. Having said that Juicero was too much complexity.

bzmrgonz• 2 months ago

This article resonates with me, mainly, because I think there is one technology, or maybe 2 which can free us, but they will disrupt so much of our technology, that I doubt they will be allowed to exist. Solar flying/hovering craft (aka antigravity) and farming androids. Currently, we are trapped in the 2-dimentional plane of transportation. If we move it to 3d, we wont need roads, grids and even cities(maybe just marker/shopping hubs. As for the droids, we have rhe answer to cheap food production but we are too lazy for manual labour.

stringfood• 2 months ago

As long as man is tempted to make a water wheel next to a river to grind his grain, he will be tempted to fly to the moon on a self made computer controlled rocket - complexity always seems to emerge we just love to build bigger

rdwrrr3• 2 months ago

We've made government so involved that we can not escape. My radical believe is that I just want to be left alone. In theory I have enough investments to live off if it wasnt for taxes and inflation. In theory I could buy a plot of land and take care of myself. An easy and simple existence. I know all very radical..

poisonborz3• 2 months ago

Except not true. Civilised man is not independent. You buy that plot of land and... build a house with which materials. You need to get at least some groceries. If you get sick, who heals you? If you are abused, or you abuse someone, they need protection Etc etc. Coordination and oversight (= government) is a must.

rdwrrr3• 2 months ago

You confuse a colossal government that has its tentacles in every aspect of life with people working together to achieve things. All of the above can be achieved though the market arguable much more efficient than by far away bureaucrats at a fraction of the cost.

klondike_klive• 2 months ago

I've been asked to come give a talk about my career(s) at a school where a friend of mine works.

Thinking about it is turning into a bit of an existential audit. Even though I've been the recipient of a big nationally-recognised award in my field, most of my adult life has been alternately starving in a garret and working for peanuts to make huge faceless conglomerates richer on licensing deals, all the while struggling with an undiagnosed neuro-developmental condition.

On the face of it I've been enormously successful in my career, yet executive function struggles meant I hit a wall 20 years ago and couldn't ascend to management. Now I've aged out of my industry and have had to pivot to a bunch of different things.

I'm really wondering what to say to these kids. The most honest version would be some version of the Far Side cartoon with a mother mantis saying to her dozens of wide eyed offspring "Of course, long before you mature, most of you will be eaten."

le-hu• 2 months ago

You've pretty much written about https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ not knowing it

casey2• 2 months ago

Lots of defeatist, unsubstantiated and unprovable claims made right off the bat. The major irony is that most people who leave society in groups are manipulated by said group.

geldedus• 2 months ago

An entitled First World dweller's post. Try living in true wilderness, with only your thin clothes on. In less that two weeks you'd be begging on your knees with tears in your eyes to return to that "bad, bad and over-complicated" civilized modern world.

We've made the world too complicated

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