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Musings Report 2021-6 2-6-21 A Happier Path
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they're a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
A Happier Path
As the saying aptly has it, happiness is less a destination and more a path. As corporeal beings, it's difficult to be happy if we're hungry, cold, damp and without means or livelihood.
Setting aside those material needs for a moment, what else could make for a happier path?
Two things come to mind:
1. Greatly reducing the influence of social media and the online sphere in our life.
2. Viewing the future as "different" rather than "good" or "bad."
There's an old saying that "nobody wishes they'd spent more time at the office on their deathbed," and the same can be said of scrolling through endless and endlessly deranging feeds online.
A recent New York Times article summarized the issues around social media and the online sphere that attract increasing attention: I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age. The internet rewired our brains. He predicted it would.
Here are a few key paragraphs:
Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.
Most of this came to him in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Goldhaber, a former theoretical physicist, had a revelation. He was obsessed at the time with what he felt was an information glut — that there was simply more access to news, opinion and forms of entertainment than one could handle. His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: “the attention economy.”
Every single action we take — calling our grandparents, cleaning up the kitchen or, today, scrolling through our phones — is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something. This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.
The idea changed the way he saw the entire world, and it unsettled him deeply. He couldn’t shake the idea that this would cause a deepening inequality. “When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.”
In subsequent obscure journal articles, Mr. Goldhaber warned of the attention economy’s destabilizing effects, including how it has disproportionate benefits for the most shameless among us. “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”
“In an attention economy, one is never not on, at least when one is awake, since one is nearly always paying, getting or seeking attention.”
His biggest worry, though, is that we still mostly fail to acknowledge that we live in a roaring attention economy. In other words, we tend to ignore his favorite maxim, from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”
Indeed. All attention is not equal, something the article did not explore. It turns out that the kind of attention needed to learn new skills and knowledge--sustained, focused, organized attention--is what's lost in the Attention Economy that races to the lowest common denominator in every sphere.
This essay discusses the eventual inability of the online addict to read a difficult, "slow" book. This loss of cognitive ability is consequential, and scrolling through endless feeds is not a substitute. Just Read the Book Already.
Ways to reduce our exposure to the online sphere cover a spectrum from "cold turkey" (completely end exposure to social media etc.) to time limits to limits on what content you will view.
For example, limiting your online attention to learning skills on YouTube University and researching specific topics as one would in a library would eliminate most of the race-to-the-bottom churn and derangement competing for your scarce attention.
Many target social media as the primary culprit here, but this may be too narrow a scope. Time spent online is typically time spent away from happier pursuits.
However we choose to limit our exposure, limiting our exposure is a happier path.
The second thing is a key element of classic Taoism: by avoiding labeling everything as "good" or "bad," we are less likely to lose our equilibrium.
This is not to suggest being Pollyannaish and finding the silver lining in everything. Being hungry, cold, damp and without means of support is not a desirable state, regardless of how we frame it.
But many things awaiting us in the near future may well be different enough from our present expectations that we'll label them "bad" when it's simply "different."
As a general rule, whatever is inefficient, costly, superfluous, inessential and wasteful will be replaced by things that are more efficient. To the degree much of our current consumerist lifestyle is inefficient and wasteful, those will likely go away.
If we define inefficiency and waste as "essential" and "good," then we're likely to find the future disappointing, as inefficiencies, waste and non-essentials that we currently deem essential will all go by the wayside.
The global movement will be towards DeGrowth, the reduction of consumption as a means of increasing efficiency and the fair distribution of the planet's resources. Those who are squandering resources will face constraints in supply, cost and availability.
Consider food as an example. Food may well become more expensive globally due to various constraints. This would be labeled "bad" but the solutions would be "good": producing more food locally, reducing waste from 30% to 5%, eating lower on the food chain, boosting restorative agriculture and adopting new technologies that reduce inputs and costs.
Higher prices can be seen as "good" because higher prices incentivize better use of resources and the reduction of waste.
This is one of many examples of how the future will undoubtedly be different, but ti doesn't have to be viewed as "bad" unless we cling to the present lifestyle as the only possible "good."
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
Jay Taylor and I discuss The Upcoming Revolt of the Middle Class (22 min)
Posts:
The Top 10% Is Doing Just Fine, The Middle Class Is Dying on the Vine 2/4/21
Our Fragile, Brittle Stock Market 2/2/21
Silver Swans, Maginot Lines and the Unforeseen Risks of Collapse 2/1/21
The Stock Market, Fatally Wounded by the Truth, Will Stumble and Crash 1/30/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The household made Chicken Hekka. Here is a photo of the prepped ingredients.
From Left Field
Colombia's 'cocaine hippos' must be culled, scientists say -- but not everyone agrees
With a Gift of Art, a Daughter Honors, if Not Absolves, Her Father: Douglas Latchford, a scholar of Khmer antiquities who was accused of trafficking in looted artifacts, bequeathed his world-class collection to his daughter. She has returned it to Cambodia.
The Dictatorship of Data -- the Whiz Kids...
Covid linked to risk of mental illness and brain disorder, study suggests
Many steps using fossil fuels to make cans & potato chips
Ocean Deoxygenation: Short Video
The wind-power boom set off a scramble for balsa wood in Ecuador (via David E.)
Collapseologists are warning humanity that business-as-usual will make the Earth uninhabitable
The Cantillon Effect and GameStop: Why our politics centers around the unreal world of finance.
John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires
The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists: We analyzed 193 people arrested in connection with the January 6 riot—and found a new kind of American radicalism.
The Coup We Are Not Talking About: We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. (Shoshana Zuboff)
"The man who has a garden and a library has everything." (Cicero)
Thanks for reading--
charles
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