Sentimental Crashes

With the risk of sounding nihilistic, what we do doesn't really matter much. At least in the grand scheme of things. We might think that we are important as a species, but at the end of the day, we are just here for a short time, and no matter what good or damage (mostly damage) we do, we will be gone in what is a blink for the universe, and it will never know we have existed, because it doesn't know anything. We can add all the anthropomorphisms we want to humanize it, but it is not conscious.

Nature, is a perfect energy exchange pool with the utmost efficiency, swapping energy from one thing to another, with no wastage, as anything lost in the process, gets used somewhere else, transferred into something else. It is quite an incredible system, and what we should be looking to accomplish with an economy. However, man-made processes are always going to be imperfect and flawed, because we have a problem that nature does not.

We have preferences.

And, we don't just have preferences, we have needs. We favor some conditions over others, because we must. For instance, while nature doesn't care what climate the earth's atmosphere has, we can only really survive in a narrow band of weather and environment. Change the makeup enough, and we disappear. Even if the entire earth gets sucked into a sun and burned to nothing, the energy transfer pool just makes the swap.

The universe isn't sentimental.

None of this makes living life meaningless, it just makes it futile. Just because something is pointless in the grand scheme, it doesn't mean we can't find meaning in what we are doing right now and throughout our lifetime. And this makes me question what we should be doing, and what actually matters to the individual.

Over the last however long, we have been told to maximize the self, where as long as it makes the individual happy, it is fine to do. To "each their own" as long as you don't hurt anyone else.

Directly.

It is okay to hurt people indirectly, isn't it? After all, if we know that something is bad for us at scale, why would we keep supporting it? Because it costs too much to change, like investing into moving to renewable energy over fossil fuels? But, what does "costs too much" mean in terms of economics? It is just energy transfer in the form of money, moving from one industry to another. The economy doesn't care where money flows, it just tracks it.

We care.

Well, some of us care. And when it comes to hurting a traditional industry that lobbies and gets support from governments, and the richest people in the world profit from; They care very much. So convincing a change in energy transfers isn't well supported. If we shift our preferences to the advancement of wellbeing, the speed at which innovation can happen in key areas of energy, health and environment, could be quite extreme. The best minds in the world working together for solutions to real problems, instead of building more war machines, or financial derivative mechanisms.

But, if we take maximizing the individual to the extreme, why would anyone choose to try and cure a cancer, or save an animal, or clean up the environment, as the path to cure is a bitter road. It doesn't feel good to continuously fail, does it? It is interesting to note though, that the people who generally support the "whatever makes you happy" paradigm, are also those who add the least value to society. Those who are adding tend to realize that in order to generate value, a lot of things have to be done that aren't that enjoyable.

Maybe the only one I can prove is here is me, because I think and can observe my thoughts, but that isn't really an excuse for living an individualistic existence. Perhaps the point of life as a social animal is to be part of society, to be part of trying to build something better, to make a positive difference, to decrease suffering. It might not be the fantasized life of a hedonist, but maybe it is a better quality of experience.

And if this a simulation, what does winning look like?

So much of our activities are driven by money, because we have essentially lost sight of our purpose as a community. Instead of just being a marker to track the transfer of what matters, we have made the marker what matters instead. As a result, the activities can be misaligned with what we need to survive, what we need to thrive, and instead be busy work created to keep the numbers ticking up, while everything else crumbles down.

If nature had a preference, it would lead to failure too. Perhaps that is what the big bangs are. Nature previously monopolized itself until there was nowhere to go, no more growth possible, so everything stopped, stagnated, and died. And then, it crashed and started it all again.

Sounds familiar.

Preference economies will always crash. And because they can choose to protect themselves so that they can keep monopolizing, the crashes get more and more severe, until there is no coming back. Why do we hold onto what we have?

Sentimental value.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]