Culture is wild. If you think about humans being around for 300k-ish years. All of the wild fucking change we know about started 10k-ish years ago, with agriculture, and then another boom again with industrial era only 300 years ago. Each leap gives people more free time. The more free time we have, the larger culture gets, the more billions of minds are pushing into wild new frontiers, psychologically…. (i.e. AI chatbots).
So it’s like… where is this all going, and to what end?
But it’s also like, shit, we won the survival game already, like we are already over the finish line, modern life is a fucking miracle. Whatever happens from here is pure fireworks – hopefully we (the human race collectively) don’t get lost in them.
The amount of change we are witnessing in our lifetimes is absolutely unprecedented. Think about your kids having no pre-internet memories…
I have no idea what the antidote for AI-powered mass hallucinations are, but I have to believe meditation has something to do with it. Or just spending more time outside. Like, sunrises are cool.
“With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.”
James Suzman
For better or worse, things are only getting weirder.
Yet somehow, it’s all good.