reading, watching & listening to
sharing a selection of things I'm reading and find thought provoking
reading, watching & listening to
fascinating historical perspective.
our ancestors experienced day-to-day unpredictability (you could die from childbirth, starvation was a constant threat, etc…) but global stability (if your parents were peasants, you’d prob be a peasant).
modern humans inverted that - routine defines us but there is global instability (the world is constantly changing - technology, climate, politics)
other weird things about modern life:
children teach their parents how to use tools that are critical to thriving in modern society, a complete inversion of the transmission of knowledge through generations.
non-local social comparison - we compare ourselves to billions of people, not a few hundred in close proximity to us.
we are distanced from nature, whereas for generations before survival was tied to understanding the natural world.
From Jeff Bezos’ conversation with Lex Fridman:
... See moreIf you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like, in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives, by and large, than our grandparents did and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see