Freedom is the only missing piece holding them back from pursuing what they think will make them happy. That freedom makes them happy today, happy with the hope of tomorrow's happiness. But a number of people find that pursuing that thing (whatever it is for them) doesn't actually make them happy. Now they're less happy, because not only are they not happy, but their dream of future happiness has also died.
I don't know about other people but certainly not for me. I was actually earning crypto passive income for 3 years not working and I was very happy. Now that income is gone, through no fault of my own (literally this was the best case scenario how it could have played out), and I now have to work for money again and I'm very unhappy.
I'm even more unhappy now because my life expectations are higher and I can't get to that level again until I'm 65...
Hearing people tell me this nonsense about money and happiness makes me even more miserable because my conclusion is "They don't appreciate money, yet they are given money... I very much appreciate money, yet I'm not given money..."
From my perspective, it seems almost like the system is only giving money to people who are incapable of appreciating it... Meanwhile I know from past evidence how I felt when I had money + time and that feeling was happiness. I knew it then, I know it now.
You are experiencing one of the corollaries of the thesis in the OP. Material loss is experienced as unhappiness, no matter where you started on the distribution of wealth.
Another is that there is no satisfaction to be had in status comparisons. There will be always somebody who has more than you.
". . . but our social scripts telling people to produce social fabric . . ."
The author of the article may benefit from reading "Bowling Alone" by Robert Putnam. Although it's now in a class of books on American history, it explores this topic in depth.
afaik, a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric." Of course, the Internet (or technology), by its nature, is actually collating society while keeping many comfortable through its economics, and thus the script is to keep isolated.
I also believe Jim Morrison, the lead of The Doors, made the prediction of technological music collation some 60 years ago.
"a society needs to face a potential collective crisis to "produce its own fabric.""
Good point - the linked article, and the article it itself links to, essentially, but without realizing it, indicates the American experience of WWII.
The entire country suddenly and powerfully altered to support total war. Every fit man under 40, pretty much, shipped off to be in the military (you can see hints of this in late-war films, where each male actor has a line explaining why they are in an American setting vs being in foreign lands ("I'll be shipping in out in two months, so I have time to solve this murder mystery til then")).
All industry shifted to produce the massive needs of the war, vast swathes of the female populace brought in from being a housewife to become factory workers creating the materiel for combat at a truly astonishing scale.
All of this jarring shock to the entire country creating the novel collective experience of total war that temporarily upended and transformed the society. All this creating that "collective crisis."
What is interesting is that WW1 had a lot of the same elements yet did not produce the same community coming together. My theory is that a crisis is a necessary but not sufficient element. WW1 was ugly but was not existential. But WW2 scared the upper classes enough that they were willing to share part of the wealth for a while.
Oh, the pandemic - that's a great counterpoint you bring up. And I like the distinction you make that the collective experience was quite strange: collective in the aggregate, but profoundly isolating in (individual) practice.
I wonder if the deeply isolated experience of covid actually feeds into and supports the original premise, in its own inverse way.
I feel like there is a certain friction to altering behaviors on a large scale which the pandemic was obviously a significant force for.
I'd be super interested to see some good roadmaps to restore the social fabric that @barry-cotter is chatting about.
There was a neat blog post I read from here a while ago about this couple that began fostering community by introducing a consistent low-friction activity in their neighborhood (in this case morning coffee outside). It was a wholesome read: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simpl....
Yes, and its price law all the way down to the metal, hasn't it always been?
I think this article is stating the obvious. In software, it has always been a requirement to learn the domain, and then capitalize on that in any way the software can be written (by hand, as a tech lead, or managing others, or lately, using ai).
"Is this what the pinnacle of human is? Lazy and greedy?"
Selfishness, too. But if I follow the logic, and citations are added, how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?
> how would one enforce a copyright claim if the creator is amorphous and all-knowing?
I love it! There's a great seed here for a short story about God being sued by a peer of his for copying some of her physical constants and not putting a proper copyright notice about it in our universe.
Probably cheaper to set up and print a proof from KDP per blog. Would have to do the math on this, mainly the basic formatting is the labor (or automating it with AI now, not too bad). Proofs do not require a review per-say, but likely falls outside the user agreement since you dont own the content.
And if you do a good enough job, contact the blog's author. Maybe they would see the intrinsic value, but mainly question how weird it is to receive such an offer.
Yes, I added the editorial insertion because I'm sure that's what he meant.