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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> "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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This post perfectly captures the feeling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe the best we can do is make survival meh?

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.

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.