It kind of reminds me of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky[1] where the antagonists use technology/chemistry they called "Focus" on the protagonists in order to induce obsession of a single idea and turn them into brilliant and overachieving slaves. Except many of us, here in the real world, are willingly doing this to ourselves to out-compete each other, for the benefit of our corporate captors.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky
2: (EDIT, since I'm post-limited) Yes, not just coffee. Ritalin/Adderall use to cope with workload is not unheard of in offices I've worked. Probably more common than I think since I'm not really in "the scene". If a square like me has seen it, it's probably widespread.
The most obese person I knew drank like a large latte every 45 minutes, smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day.I thought he was addicted to coffee, but it was actually a combination of both sugar and coffee. Eventually I saw that spillover to him eating bowls of desserts every day at lunch. Cans of beers by eod. The office free food just made that worse.
He made lots of money, but he had to retire early, he was like close to 160 kgs or something and would breath heavily just standing 5 minutes during the daily stand up. He had troubles using the rest room. And it was pretty clear he was just months away from a heart attack.
He just had to quit and fix his health.
Another manager I knew had similar problems, eventually it took him a lot to quit smoking. For coffee addiction he would keep a small quantity of black coffee decoction around and would just feel the taste on his tongue by taking an occasional sip. By his own admission it was next to impossible to get rid of this. He wasn't obese but being a chain smoker and coffee drinker does as equal damage to your health.
We are still absolutely at the mercy of such forces. They rule us. We sort of understand them (game theory, complexity, evolutionary dynamics) but have yet to come up with any reliable way of controlling them. Totalitarian government force is the best we can do, and it comes with equally large downsides and is itself subject to the same forces over time. It’s a very clunky primitive instrument.
I feel like we will not truly become an intelligent species until we are able to flip the table on the complex system in which we are embedded. Until then we are merely very clever animals. True intelligence has yet to evolve on this planet.
If humans behaved like ants, but had the current capabilities, we could colonize mars, at huge cost to many's lives. Essentially, they will be sacrifices for the greater "good", whatever that good means in that context.
Despotic systems like communism on the other hand only reflect the goals of a chosen few. So by human limitation these goals can never adequately represent the complexity of the governed. Such societies will inevitably degenerate and fall behind.
While pure market oriented societies can fall into “activity traps” from which it might be hard for them to climb out of.
The fact that it is considered remarkable is absurd. From the perspective of a money system that rewards short term thinking it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that short term thinking is natural. You can also build a money system that rewards long term thinking and then short term thinking becomes remarkable.
You can call it an activity trap if you want. What I think is remarkable that there is this idea of "the" free market. There is no such thing. As soon as you mandate any monetary system its properties will permeate throughout the entire market.
Consider Say's law. It assumes people do not keep money over the long term and always spend everything they earn. In other words, general gluts and the recessions they cause, are impossible. He simply assumed the properties of money away and treated money equivalent to barter. This alone is enough to blame money. One could now construct a huge barter exchange and solve all money related problems by getting rid of it. Alternatively one could merely do away with the ability to keep money over the long term and force everyone to spend everything they earn. Another extreme proposal but it would work. People will argue, hey but there are lots of debtors promising to pay later so holding onto money will help them do investments. So banks do fulfill an important role and they do offer a reason why people shouldn't spend their money or rather, why they should be allowed to keep it. But then people forget that it is the debtors who are the ones providing the ability to accumulate money. People want savings to drive investments when in reality it is investments that should drive savings.
The former position creates the illusion that raising interest rates will drive more investments. It also gives an excuse to always demand at least 0% interest on their unspent money. The latter position shatters that illusion. Rather than letting interest rates be determined by fantasies, the providers of that interest rate have to exist. It means that 0% interest isn't a magic number but rather a distortion of the free market and that is why I have no sympathy for those who cry about inflation. The fact that it is possible to hold onto non degrading money in a world that is degrading all the time is absurd.
It's why the deflation money story (gold standard or Bitcoin) is so ridiculous. Money goes up in value, therefore you receive your most valuable income when you are young. Possibly enough to retire by 40. The incentives are clear, earn as much money as quickly as possible, no matter the long term damage. Who cares about reality when the value of your money is going up? Yet the outcome is obvious, reality catches up, your money will be worthless. The boom is followed by a bust, ahem, because the value of that money didn't follow the fundamentals it was based on, a degrading world. Short term thinking was built into money itself.
If your money system accounts for degradation of the real world, it will reward people to minimize degradation rather than earn money in a way that accelerates degradation and then use money to extract a growing share out of the degrading world. The idea that you can exist independently of the real world if you have money is an "activity trap".
The value of money goes down because of inflation, which is why you are incentivised to earn more when you’re younger, so after accounting for decay, you have enough saved up for your eventual retirement.
But a deflationary system like gold, btc etc. are a tad unfair because the early adopters in the founding generation accumulate “a fortune for generations” for say an x amount of work, whereas an individual born in an established crypto or gold system will only accumulate an exponentially low fortune for a similar kind of effort. So this locks in permanent inequality like in the old days.
By activity trap I mean things that
- prevent science from moving forward
- prevent society from expanding its social space for everyone (ie every society has outcasts who don’t have a place in the current system)
- invent activities that keep obsolete arrangements relevant etc
Given such a broad definition I admit I’m not in a position to say what is an activity trap and what isn’t. It could all just be necessary drudge work to get to a better situation. But right now it “feels” like an activity trap.
Your solution, if I understand correctly, is to have some type of money that decays back into the system, if left accumulated and unspent after some time.
But there is still nothing here to stop someone from gathering enough quantum of value to force some sort of gate-keeping type situation. People will always be incentivised to save what they earn. Maybe for tomorrow, a bad season or the next 10 generations. It isn’t people who are thinking short term. People in large groups behave in ways that suggest to the observer that short term benefits trump long term goals.
While money seems like a good tool for societies to manage social behaviour perhaps we are looking at it wrong when we think it can easily be used to set the kind of long term goals that can easily avoid activity traps. The obsession with money and monetary system, maybe distracting attention from avenues where much greater improvements can be made.
What is becoming increasingly complex is the amount of band-aids you have to apply to achieve a semblance of stability.
They are busy with specializing themselves to keep the society machine going.
The easy part is imagining a future in which all that stress is unnecessary. The hard part is getting there, even if all it takes is the courage to open the door and walk up some stairs.
What?
Kind of an oblique reference to the exam system and the system of bureaucratic appointments.
If I'd wanted to be serious I'd have said something about "involution".
I take armodafinil. When I won't have to work for money in a few years, I'll still take it, because it allows me to do things I care about.
I think this is a lot like the whole debate around depression: unless you've been affected, you won't understand or know what you're talking about.
But I have zero familiarity with his work (maybe I saw The Grandmaster? I saw some movie about Ip Man... actually it was probably just Ip Man...) so I would need some help to actually understand your reference. Given that his parents fled to Hong Kong in advance of the Cultural Revolution (says Wikipedia), I have to assume that they had some resources, would have been more on the Revolution's receiving end, and might have been more sympathetic to meritocratic order -- and maybe their son absorbed some similar opinions? Am I on the right track? (Probably not, simply given my ignorance.)
So, I'd be grateful if you could explain what the heck you meant :-) ... but I'd also just take a film suggestion!
That seems obvious to me, the scary part is how many “regular dudes” use viagra without having any impotence problems..
Not very related: I hear Viagra was the one thing Americans had that reliability bought the support of aging warlords in Afghanistan. Between their "wives" and "dancing boys", I imagine those septuagenarians must have been exhausted. God bless America.
When this last happened under the Qin dynasty, it ended in the Taiping Rebellion, and produced nothing of value except those little canned oranges.
I hear pornographic performers are on Viagra too.
Meanwhile nobody actually has children, and CO2 PPM keeps going up and up and up.
What the fuck is everyone doing?
Just going through the motions on pills, while our intrinsic motivations scream at us that we're supposed to be doing something else.