Seeking The Good Life

Sunday, March 5, 2017

One thing that has held me back from the blog is knowing who the audience is.  I think I want to just write for my kids.  They’re the reason I got caught in the vine in the first place, after all.  Ok, ok, that’s not true… I can’t blame them for our decision about where to live.  But they are the two people on the planet I care most about reaching.  So here we go again…

I realized yet again yesterday that I’m living too much of my life in a self-inflicted virtual hell.  ACK!  Perhaps I’ve had a little bit of help from the algorithms that load my Facebook feed and such, but mostly, I’ve been doing it to myself.  This insight came after listening to an Ezra Klein Show interview with historian and author Yuval Harari (Sapiens, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow), about a wide range of topics, from how we treat animals to how AI will likely treat humans in the future (e.g., without feeling).  They talked about the evolution of human economic activity from hunter-gatherers to agrarians to a mechanized system to the service industrial complex.  What’s next is the era of data, connectivity, and AI, which all come with a big test of our species’ ability to adapt well in evolutionary terms.  My current level of optimism says we’ll probably just decline and head toward “Idiocracy” but anyway… the conversation between Harari and Klein was just fascinating.  I wish, as I so often do, that I had someone to share and process it with.

The future as Harari sees it (disclaimer:  all from my faulty memory, and my impressions are intertwined here; any mistakes in representation of his view and the conversation are honest ones) say 300 years from now, involves co-operative artificial intelligence (think self-driving transport networks, delivery of medical diagnoses and knowledge globally connected) playing a central role in solving problems, doing everyday tasks, and running the world’s economy.  The challenge for humans will be to create a way of life that adapts in meaningful ways as we get there.  The challenge of our time and the next perhaps then will be to think big… for the average American to be open to the idea of a universal basic income, a strong social safety net, and lots of leisure.  Hard to imagine people embracing this, based on society as we know it, but when you think about it, it’s actually hard to imagine people NOT embracing such a better life!  I mean logically, don’t we all want a shorter work week with a better quality of life?  More time for family and hobbies?  Personally, I think maybe the biggest challenge is in how to get from here to there.

This is something I’ve puzzled about for years.  Since we have indoor plumbing, washing machines and Amazon, why don’t’ we have more free time?  It’s not hard to imagine that many things that many people do for work today will be better done by machines and/or automated, integrated systems in the future.  Sure, there will still be people doing jobs.  We will need software engineers and yoga instructors.  We are going to need philosophers to help us figure out the meaning of our existence when we don’t have to work so hard.  What is important for a good life? 

One direction some may go, and may already be going, as time becomes more available is to use the extra time we have to just check out, for example by entering the gaming or VR realm, smoking a lot of weed or doing opiods… spending more time away from the here and now, in places like the news cycle or social media, rather than in actual their own personal development or human interaction.  He talks about religion as a form of Virtual Reality that has served our species for a long time…it’s a place where, depending on where you enter, the rules help you to make sense of the world and know your place in it.  In the same way, we use social media &/or the news cycle to do that now (my ACK realization), or gaming and/or VR to create our own realities.

That podcast was what got me to realize the self-inflicted nature of the trap I have set for myself, and the change in direction that I want to take.  That, and looking at pictures over the past couple of days… seeing that it was only a few years ago when our kids were growing up we didn’t have cell phones or wifi in our lives.  Thank goodness the kids had their childhood.  I know that tech isn’t going anywhere, but I earnestly want to try and keep it more in its place from now on, in the background of my life instead of the automatic extension of me that connectedness is now.  Do I sound 90 yet?!

My goal now is to unplug as much as possible without hurting work.  Keep building and reframing my tribe, my time, my play, my work around a more “here and now” existence.  Carli comes to mind as inspiration here.  She hasn’t really been into technology much as she has matured.  I see her bare feet, a flower in her hair, and hands in the soil on a sunny day. Butterflies, the sparkle of light on water…mindful meditations… tea and conversation, let these be my new addictions.  Good life, here I come!