Everyone’s Existential Crisis

way of reaching understandings of what is going on , i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.

It is a hard task to tend directly to our interpersonal reality without the mediating narrative framework. The epistemology we live in demands that we treat the intersubjective as objective—that is to say, we expect and are expected to treat social knowledge as factual reality, without regard for our personal epistemic distance from the content. De... See more

chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

We are not undergoing a crisis of culture but rather a crisis of epistemology.

technology and globalization have changed our information streams and our patterns of life drastically enough that the ways we calibrate around incoming information are becoming increasingly dangerous for us,

The algorithm by which many of our beliefs about the world are selected and by which they change has more to do with how the people around us change and how our relationships change than it does the world itself.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing. Parasocia... See more

When someone’s political leanings begin to change, most of the time it is because they have fallen into new circles, not because they have learned something new from personal experience about how the government or the economy works.

But the rapid, ample, and aggressively evolving feedback that the internet provides to the social reward circuits is new.