I'll preface this by saying this is all anecdotal evidence based on my personal observations, so it may not apply to everyone.
I often feel the same way, especially with tech. For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today. I try to keep in mind a few things:
First, we are living in a time that will be regarded as one of the most consequential in history. We're only ~20 years of nearly every person in the planet having access to all human information, instantly. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.
Second, everything that embodies that early optimism is still there, its just harder to find. Which is related to my next point:
We are seeing diminishing returns in the benefits of constant consumption of media, energy, food, etc. There is so much choice out there, and the margins are so thin, that you need to consume more to be "satisfied". I often reflect on how many more full TV series we have all seen compared to a few generations ago. Or how much text we all read daily in the form of news, tweets, and forums, compared to the daily paper. Are we better for it? I think a lot of people don't feel better.
So that leads to the optimistic conclusions of this post. Generally speaking, we have more choice than ever before in history, across the board. But we have the burden of the responsibility of moderation and curation.
I find that when I feel this way, I try to shift my "consumption" mental state to "construction". We live in an amazing time to make things and distribute them. And because there's so much noise to compete with, you have to do it friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. Its a glimpse of how the best parts of the "new world" can provide the best parts of the "old world".
I say this without a political agenda but regarding the diminishing returns of consumption I think there is larger issue that is boiling: there is a huge existential crisis boiling due to the failing of consumerism and growth as the promised way to happiness and so as a goal in life. It’s paradoxical but all that progress has made it obvious that earning more to consume more is pointless because there is already so much available. The whole social contract that was implicit in the last decades/century suddenly has disappeared, climate change and pollution being additional nails in the coffin.
It sounds dramatic but I think the issues OP cites are because people are lost because they are suddenly waking up in a life that was on rails, experiencing a big existential crisis. It used to be a trope, but I think it’s happening for real now, the meaninglessness is becoming impossible to ignore.
But I’m with you on the optimistic side, because we now have so much opportunities to make interesting things and be happy if we can overcome that. For me the passing of relatives and stoic philosophy had already set me on the path of looking outside consumption (and status) for meaning.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is a good entry point. These are reflections of someone who had "everything" for its time (emperor during the golden age of the Roman Empire). It is an eye opener regarding how having things and being rich and powerful doesn't solve anything with what is the meaning of a life.
It is about about differencing what is in your control (what you think and do) and what is not (outcomes and what others think of you), doing what is right with courage and not worrying about outcomes. Ultimately because caring about the opinion of strangers who like you will soon die and be forgotten is pointless. Nobody cares if you're successful in your life, close friends and parents, while they are still there, only care about your happiness (and if not you can then confidently ignore them).
Also the book Sapiens was another eye opener for me on what is physically real and what lives in our mind collectively (nations, institutions, companies, money, relations, the name of things, ... or simply all the things other animals don't see are in our mind). Seems obvious but really working on intuitively knowing to differentiate the two really helps with identifying what problems are real and what problems are juste consequences of mental constructs, and so are self-imposed.
Don't want to spook you with spiritual bullshit but also mindfulness meditation (stoping thoughts, focusing on breathing and experiencing all senses) really works for me for experiencing all of that and happiness without any material thing or doing anything. I could be billionaire nothing I could buy could significantly really improve my life in a meaningful way. Nature will not be prettier, I will not have better friends to laugh, my coffee will not taste significantly better, ... Material thing and experiences are nice of course, I would absolutely enjoy them, but like all things they will pass and leave only insatisfaction if I crave or cling on them too much.
This is a great idea! With everything on the internet trending towards instant gratification, it's counter intuitive for some of the most rewarding things to be slow. Building new relationships with people in your community takes time but it can be one of the nicest things when it goes well. Strengthening friendships usually feels worth it too.
Indeed we live in a world where someone taking a dump in a remote region of the amazon can tweet about it and I can instantly read about it from my couch..
It's astounding as a mere 4 decades ago such news as the amazon poop would of taken weeks to get out.
In the 90s this was not even a pipe dream for most people. I was tech savvy as a kid and at 12 I built my first computer but even I didn't foresee how connected we would end up.
It's not so much about the connection - it was there back then. It's the critical mass of people from all backgrounds communicating on platforms that allow consolidation of people's attention and the lowering of the bar that allows that to happen.
Where it has gotten difficult is filtering of dissenting opinion, finding specific information or other factors that may give reason to enable/disable something that someone may not have done normally due to herd mentality.
For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today.
I don't know. I think there's a little bit of a "you see what you're looking for" effect here. I look at the modern Internet, contrasted with the ideas we were talking about in the 90's and early 2000's and I see a lot of the good stuff has come to fruition in wonderful ways. I mean, right now I can use the Internet to sit in my home, jump on Youtube or Khan Academy, or videolectures.net, or Coursera, or Udemy, or Pluralsight, or Brilliant, etc. and for free or cheap learn just about anything I might want to learn. Math? Physics? Chemistry? Linguistics? AI? Geography? History? All there, in spades. And I can jump on Amazon or Alibris or Bookfinder and find cheap used copies of old / out-of-print books, not to mention tons and tons of (legal) free educational content such as the stuff listed at [1]. And if I'm willing to break the law, I can use ZLib, LibGen, etc. to get almost any book I could want. I can go to Stackoverflow, various niche sub-reddits, Mathoverflow, PhysicsForums, etc. etc. and ask questions of knowledgeable people who will help me with things I'm stuck on. And for free.
I don't mean to paint an overly rosy picture here. Obviously there are negatives that have evolved as well. Constant surveillance, the ubiquity of misinformation and conspiracy theories, election manipulation, etc. My point is just that focusing only on the negatives is also a misleading way of looking at things.
Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.
Agreed, 100%. It's a common refrain (one I believe to be true) in evolutionary psychology circles, that "technology advances much faster than human evolution and we are poorly adapted for the world we find ourselves in right now." Unfortunately I'm not sure what exactly we can to to mitigate that. :-(
Such a great comment, absolutely agree and going into "construction" is indeed the remedy for the bleak worldview. We truly do live in amazing times but it's also overwhelming.
> We're only ~20 years of nearly every person in the planet having access to all human information, instantly. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.
>how much text we all read daily in the form of news, tweets, and forums, compared to the daily paper. Are we better for it? I think a lot of people don't feel better.
To add another anecdotal experience, much of what the complaint sounds like is the cycles of another generational sect (that I would group at about every 5-10 years) reaching an age where they start to see the world as "everything going to hell in a hand-basket", as my grandfather would say, or during my younger years, a college aged version of that. I image its the different information processing stages in which we go through growing pains and the destabilization of that causes this doom world view. My g'father listened to the radio and read the paper instead of watching one of the 3 news/tv stations because "all of the nonsense these days" (we bonded over baseball which we had watched without sound because the commentators "can't shut up and let us watch the game" [umpiring signals really said all that was needed and baseball seems to want to get rid of umps altogether, I see that as a tragedy but the next generation will probably see it as great progress].
I remember and was myself interested in lowrider culture, ie loud exhaust but also large woofers and amps. A friends dad had converted the entire truck bed with custom speakers, amps as well as including a hydraulics system. I dont see nearly as much of that these days, in the same city, that I did in the late 80's.
As for the OP and the "no body seems to give a shit about anyone except themselves anymore" this is also nothing new. people care about their clan and then care about outsiders when it is neutral or beneficial to do so, but now that the world is 'smaller' and it seems these 'outsiders' are everywhere it seems to make people overwhelmed and dig into their clan for respite (that's what I see anyway). Even my disdain for selfie culture can't be looked at as a new phenomena, I remember disposable cameras and Polaroids and how annoying it was to wait on friends/family taking pictures of themselves instead of enjoying The Experience™.
I just think with the increase volume and speed of stories and random people thoughts — that never would have made it into my sphere in the 80's/90's — and the change that brings, it again appears that the world is "going to hell in a hand-basket"
I often feel the same way, especially with tech. For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today. I try to keep in mind a few things:
First, we are living in a time that will be regarded as one of the most consequential in history. We're only ~20 years of nearly every person in the planet having access to all human information, instantly. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.
Second, everything that embodies that early optimism is still there, its just harder to find. Which is related to my next point:
We are seeing diminishing returns in the benefits of constant consumption of media, energy, food, etc. There is so much choice out there, and the margins are so thin, that you need to consume more to be "satisfied". I often reflect on how many more full TV series we have all seen compared to a few generations ago. Or how much text we all read daily in the form of news, tweets, and forums, compared to the daily paper. Are we better for it? I think a lot of people don't feel better.
So that leads to the optimistic conclusions of this post. Generally speaking, we have more choice than ever before in history, across the board. But we have the burden of the responsibility of moderation and curation.
I find that when I feel this way, I try to shift my "consumption" mental state to "construction". We live in an amazing time to make things and distribute them. And because there's so much noise to compete with, you have to do it friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. Its a glimpse of how the best parts of the "new world" can provide the best parts of the "old world".