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Musings Report 2025-30 7-26-25 You Know What Drives me Crazy? (No, Not That)
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You Know What Drives me Crazy? (No, Not That)
You know what drives me crazy? Yes, all the stuff that drives all of us crazy because it's all so needless and a waste of precious time, but what really drives me crazy is the entire world-system has it backwards.
We're told that abundance is what makes us happy and the only things that are scarce are growth and profit, and so we must always have more of everything to be happy.
But this is actually backwards: abundance doesn't make us happy, it corrupts us, enervates us, bores us and deprives us of purpose and meaning. Profits aren't scarce, what's scarce is a sustainable high quality way of living that doesn't require unsustainable growth and ever-higher profits.
By "high quality way of living" I mean the basics of a good life: enough food, shelter and comforts for a nice life and enough purpose for a meaningful life.
Abundance provides neither, because surfeit doesn't make us happy: if you're already stuffed with food, there's no pleasure in eating more, and if your house is already stuffed with stuff, there's no pleasure in cramming in more stuff.
This is what drives me crazy: the developed world already has everything: TVs, phones, transport, food, shelter, you name it, and so "growth" comes from producing stuff nobody actually needs to have a nice life. But since there's no other way to increase profits, then we waste resources to make stuff nobody actually needs--or even worse, addict people to stuff that is destructive but oh so profitable--what I call Ultra-Processed Life.
This world-system operates on a belief--and yes, it's a belief, not "science"-- that our civilization will collapse in a heap if we don't constantly expand "growth" of consumption and profits.
Let's conduct a thought-experiment: let's set this belief aside as a temporary form of global insanity and consider what a truly objective AI might provide as an answer to this question:
"What world-system would optimize consuming fewer resources while increasing human happiness and providing a high-quality standard of living for the entire human populace?"
The answer would be something like this:
1. Remove growth and profit from the altar we worship. They're no longer the goal, as the goal is now A) continually using fewer resources, i.e. doing more with less; B) increasing human happiness and C) providing a high-quality way of living for the entire human populace. These goals have literally nothing to do with "growth" or profit; they have to do with efficiency, ingenuity and purpose, the real sources of human happiness.
2. The current world-system's notion of human happiness has it backwards: abundance, extravagance and indulgence don't actually make us happy, they make us miserable, for they deprive us of the sources of purpose and meaning, and they deprive us of the happiness of working with others because we need to work with others to be ingenious and clever enough to fashion a high-quality way of living using less of everything rather than more of everything.
The current world-system worships a throwaway abundance I call the "waste is growth Landfill Economy", which is the acme of not just an unsustainable system but a stupidly wasteful system that's disconnected from both the real world and what actually makes us happy.
Abundance immiserates us because there's nothing left to strive for--when you already have everything, more abundance is boring. This is why Ultra-Processed Life is so miserable: the "food products" are increasingly outlandish and unhealthy because we're bored with everything that's already abundant; and since we're never really hungry, then we seek the distractions of surfeit, novelties that have reached the point of absurdity.
Extravagance is worshipped as the font of human happiness but it's actually only fun for a brief moment. After that rush, it's enervating, corrupting, boring.
Have you noticed when couples are happiest? It's when they're starting out, working together on a common goal, having a shared purpose, having to be ingenious to get by on less rather than more. When they "succeed" and have more than enough of everything, they lose their shared purpose and meaning, and that's when they get dissatisfied and break up.
I've been running an experiment here at home that anyone can do: how little resources (and money) do we actually need to have a high quality of life? In other words, strip away everything that isn't actually an essential component of a high quality way of living.
The goal is to explore this question: if the goal is no longer growth or maximizing profit, then how many resources do we actually need to maintain a high quality of life on a global scale?
Here is global energy consumption, which the world-system delusionally views as both sustainable and necessary.
My current guess is a very high-quality way of life requires half of what the world currently consumes / wastes, but if we're ingenious then it's probably more like one-third of what's currently consumed globally.
We seem to have forgotten that humans become ingenious not when there's plenty of everything but when scarcity incentivizes becoming ingenious. So when the isolated village loses its one source of electrical power generation, people improvise ways to live with a fraction of what they once took for granted.
Since tap water is nearly free, we're free to waste it. If you have to carry all the water you use in 5-gallon buckets a kilometer, then guess what happens? We get clever about using less.
In the current world-system, we're constantly told that human happiness flows from novelty and leisure. But this is also backwards: novelty quickly slides into surfeit and boredom, and leisure means we have no purpose or meaning and so we have to invent some "filler" like travel to fill the void.
Happiness is more like being hungry, I mean really hungry because you worked hard physically doing meaningful work, and then you enter the kitchen with real ingredients that still have dirt on the roots, and because you're hungry, you're motivated to make a nice meal. Opening a package of ultra-processed slop isn't a nice meal; real food is a nice meal.
Yes, if you're wealthy you can go to a fine-dining restaurant and buy a nice meal, but after a while this is boring because there's no purpose or meaning to the meal and no opportunity to do good work and be inventive and ingenious in preparing the meal, and therefore there's no satisfaction in the meal, either.
This is why I often write: What can be bought has no value; only what cannot be bought has value.
Let's ask a simple question: if this world-system is making us all so happy, then why are we so unhealthy? Is becoming unhealthy the side-effect of being happy? Or is this backwards, and a system that makes us unhealthy is also making us unhappy? How can being unhealthy be happiness?
Returning to our home experiment of using fewer resources but getting more in terms of a high quality way of living from what we do consume.
The point is to sacrifice nothing that's essential to a high quality way of living, just eliminate what contributes little or nothing to a high quality way of living.
As I've noted before, we use about a third of the water and electricity of other households, and yet we have everything required for a nice life: a refrigerator, TV, laptop PCs, fast Internet, and so on. We just don't waste anything because what's the point in wasting things? Does wasting stuff make us happy? No. We just waste stuff because that's the zeitgeist we live in, and there's no incentive to be ingenious.
We also grow a significant percentage of our own food (as well as a surplus to share with others) on our in-town yard not just to save money but because being productive in a fundamental way is a source of happiness. as opposed to being bored and seeking some distraction.
Yes, I know, nobody has time for anything like that, but we spend near-zero hours on social media or our phones, which are off or muted, so that frees up hours a day, and we work long days. It boils down to priorities, time-triage, goals and purpose. Here's a snapshot of some of this week's harvest: sweet potatoes, cherry tomatoes and lychee.
If we task AI to construct a system that sets aside "growth" and profit and focuses instead on A) continually using fewer resources, i.e. doing more with less; B) increasing human happiness and C) providing a high-quality standard of living for the entire human populace, then "growth" is anathema and profit only exists within the incentive framework of constantly using less, not more, to provide a high-quality way of life.
AI would also point out that we're unhealthy, and the source of our ill-health is "growth" and "maximizing profit by any means available," including addictive products and services and the rest of Ultra-Processed Life, and the incredibly stupid, needless waste of "planned obsolescence."
What drives me crazy is the world-system is set on self-destruct as if there's no other setting possible, because this self-destruction is supposed to be what makes us happy. If there is a crazier system possible, I can't identify it.
Highlights of the Blog
Is the Epstein Affair a Watershed Moment? 7/25/25
AI: Over-Promise + Under-Perform = Disillusionment and Blowback 7/23/25
Maybe AI Isn't Going to Replace You at Work After All 7/21/25
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Food is often the best thing, especially if it's the product of our work and tastes good. Home-baked whole-wheat bread:
A cousin dropped off foraged wild fiddle-head fern (warabi) which must be cleaned thoroughly:
Much of the food we grow is basically foraged from wild gardens. I harvested Malabar spinach (center) which grows wild with Okinawan spinach (pointed leaves) and lilikoi (passion fruit, vine on the right).
What's on the Book Shelf
Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures (Nate Hagens and DJ White)
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal. At a reader's suggestion, I'm identifying links that are free/not paywalled.
Teens Are 'Aura Farming' Now--Here's Why It’s Not as Chill as It Looks: When you're a tween, nothing's more humiliating than being caught trying. (free)
A knockout blow for LLMs? LLM reasoning' is so cooked they turned my name into a verb (free)
AI Models Still Far From AGI-Level Reasoning: Apple Researchers (free)
The Ten Warning Signs: A huge change is coming (free)
Monopoly Round-Up: The Best and the Brightest Under Pressure (free)
Send me some money!’ My unforgettable encounters with the legendary Sly Stone (paywalled, theguardian.com)
Russians struggle with 'crazy' prices (free)
Do AI Models Think? (free)
How Steve Jobs Wrote the Greatest Commencement Speech Ever (paywalled, wired.com)
The Hollywood-like “kidnapping” and ransom story of one of George Harrison's most famous guitars (Lucy the red Les Paul guitar) (free)
Sly Stone and Richard Pryor goof and play duet (12 min, Mike Douglas Show) (free)
Best electric guitars 2025: our top picks for every playing style, ability and budget (free)
How the 'No Buy 2025' trend could help you get your budget on track this year (free)
"Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal." Albert Einstein
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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