~
Most everyone was also certain the world was going to end any minute during the Cold War, but people decided to just get on with living rather than worry about that. It was out of their control anyway. For each thing that worries you analyze (1) "how does this affect me, as an individual", and (2) "can I do anything about it". If they fail either test, stop thinking about them right now. Being worried about such things is the problem.
Focus on things that affect you. If you can't do anything about it, avoid it, pass it off, or ignore it until something changes. If you can think of something, then focus on gradually improving what you can. Channel your worrying into that space. Overweight or unfit? well you can start lifting weights and research better nutrition you can do quick and cheap. If you hate exercise, find ways to combine it with something fun. I combine something I dislike (exercise) but need to spend time on, with something I like but don't have time for (anime). This gives an extra nudge of motivation, since if I slack off I don't get to keep going with the story. Also, fitness and nutrition research is a wealth of information to discover.
But, really, that automation thing is the least of any of our worries. Are you immortal? I'm not. None of us are. We will all die one day. Even if they invent immortality treatment before we die ... then we have the even worse problem of what to do for eternity. That's a possibililty but should I waste more than a couple of seconds worrying about this outcome? Life is pointless because we will die one day, but if we don't die one day things will be even more pointless, except forever, until the sun explodes in 5 billion years, and destroys all of us, except those who escape into space on arks to lead even more pointless lives for another 20 billion years until the universe either collapses into a singularity or heat death freezes the remaining immortal humans.
You can see how focusing this far in the future isn't healthy. Plan a few months ahead if it's a problem thinking about the end of the universe.
(1) I need jobs because of my debt accrued in attempting to procure a job.
(2) Maaaayyybbeee? If so, it'll be a matter of who I know rather than what. The real question, I guess, is if I even
should. That really doesn't have anything to do with my problems, but I guess it's good general advice. And with a bit of thought and ingenuity I could turn it into something that's useful to me, I'm sure. Thing is, I kind of already have. I know where I need to improve and where it's better to just conserve my energy.
No, no, no. I've accepted the grand cosmic fates, they don't bother me. What does bother me is the idea that I did do anything of positive impact in my life, facing austere human cruelties that may or may not be further accentuated by the abuse of technologies for not their intended purpose ( as we've seen before in chemical warfare, for instance. Only a few dozen out of the hundreds of millions of chemists throughout forever meant to do harm), and worrying about much more "recent future" total annihilations. The cosmic death of the universe is a matter of a grandiose homeotherm essentially (my apologies to the cosmologists for this drastic oversimplification, I'm not trying to make light of your work) and I wouldn't be surprised if humans find a way to keep pushing it back if we're even allowed to live that long. And I do say "allowed", because ultimately it comes down to a conscious choice of something or
someone, human or otherwise. Besides that, as you've pointed out there's a long lineage to follow our epoch, I'm more concerned with their fates and my own, and even then only a few generations into the future. My problem, is I see the bad things happening
now and I'm worried about the ones that will
soon be. If I took time to worry about
everything, I'd be catatonic. And even, if I can acquire support or ability or somehow better myself beyond my meager abilities, which I've already stated that I believe to be very stunted indeed, I
could perhaps do something to affect these generations I worry for. Scope of a millenia is not really that unfeasible. To this day we're still talking about Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Archimedes, Hammurabi, and thousands of others who to this day have an impact on society and will likely continue to do so for long to come. I want to do something like that, but without the stresses of fame. Heh. But no, beyond unrealistic ambitions which I don't really much pay mind to, cos I know I'm not one of the greats, I worry that nothing will get done to counterbalance those that would improperly abuse technology and their human resources, because even looking at a narrow scope of history, we're still not over things that happened a two hundred years ago, and many new complications - in all senses of the word- have been heaped upon us all since even as recently as I gained cognizance. For now, however, you all have helped me to not feel so bad about it. I'm still apprehensious to be sure, and that's not unreasonable. If you stand a man on the edge of a cliff and tell him to jump and he'll fly, he's going to be skeptical, afraid for his life, livelihood, and, if he's got any sympathy, those he is related to (by blood, community, or friendship). He won't see how it's possible, and will be quite certain he's going to meet a bad end in this endeavour- and all sensible reason dictates he's right, but if you could convince the man to jump, or much more probably push him off the cliff, then if he
did fly, he'd be quite amazed and surprised and happy about it, and if he's got any ingenuity or curiosity - he'll be trying to figure out how to use this to better himself and those he cares about or trying to figure out how the heck he flew in the first place.
<snip>
^Pretty much this.
Take a step back, focus on your immediate surroundings and find your own comfort zone there. Then -maybe, and only when you feel comfortable enough with the idea- expand your view a bit.
To quote a good friend of mine : "C'est pas grave" ("It doesn't matter", a motto that gets him through life with a smile, despite suffering of multiple sclerosis)
It does and it doesn't. You can't just say "It doesn't matter" about everything, and there are many things that you
shouldn't say it about.
tl;dr - Yeah, I'm feeling better already. And yeah, robots can't take over all production, but they do make it harder to compete for some, in an enviroment that is alerady hard to compete in. What's the point of using robots for the arts, for example? Just because you
can doesn't mean you
should. The whole thing that makes art so successful, in my opinion, is the meta-narrative and/or the artist. Even Dwarf Fortress, which is arguably the Monolith of procedural generation, can't provide that, which puts player in a very unique position to
be the artist and provide that meta-narrative. Art is so important because it represents something ( even when it doesn't) and resonates with some facet of the human experience. So yeah, problem resolved. I just came here in the first place so I wouldn't wallow in despair until the point where I
did ruin my life. Thank you all, you were great.
Semi-related: surqimus: I disagree and would say that Existential Angst isn't the essence of being human. What is that Angst but a driving force to provide meaning? To make a simple analogy meaning is to existential thought as heat is to cold. The angst is the pain of having insufficent significance, which is a human psychological need. Just like cold and the lack thereof are emergent traits of the universe, so are meaning and the lack thereof. Too little meaning and human minds shut down, too much and everything starts to destabilize. And just like a cold human is attracted to the warmth so his body continues having what it needs to function, so is the human mind attracted to meaning so it can continue having what it needs to function. And it works in reverse, thus is the appeal of things that absorb or take away meaning when there is too much of it. ( Also, I've been saying "meaning" a lot in this paragraph, but it's not actually meaning, it's significance/importance. Everything has a value, everything has "meaning", but not everything is important to humans. )If you look at human behaviour, this
does seem to hold water: people who need more meaning tend to flock to those things that are symbolic or of historic importance, or even math, as strange as that may sound. In my need for it, I've addressed one of the paradoxes that one of you brought up, the one in which it seems new technology is spontaneously generated, when in fact it emerged through a long creative and evolutionary process, to an extent reflecting humanity itself. I don't know all of the history, but I take in the puzzle pieces as I can find them, and I can trace back the history of the technologies relevant to my profession(s) back a ways with a pretty decent amount of accuracy for not having been there and not having the complete picture. That itself might some day prove useful, but for now it seems to just be growing more irrelevant. I'm not worried about that, redundancy is the best way to protect information, so by existing with any knowledge at all, I'm part of a weird failsafe system in case our information technologies should fail, for whatever reason. And so are all of you, and that is something that really counteracts the existential angst, doesn't it?
Also, consider I couldn't have come to these thoughts on my own, nor is it very likely I could come to these by aid of a machine. In that regard, I have much to thank you all for and much to be hopeful about in terms of the purposes of humanity.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9788568 times)