I've recently (past ~5 years) stopped viewing the world pessimistically. I don't believe it's because I'm blindly optimistic, but because I didn't have the perspective to understand our ancestor's problems and how good of a life I had. It's pretty cool that I didn't die in 6th grade when I put that knife through my hand, that my knee doesn't lock anymore after having my meniscus removed, and pretty cool my wife survived to adulthood with unbelievably poor vision and asthma. It's pretty cool that a large portion of living is automated now by the systems around us, from food to cleaning, and that those systems are affordable enough that they're common place in most households. We've freed our societies up to focus on arts and science which has created a flywheel that keeps paying us greater and greater returns that we keep investing into arts and science.
Humans have done some cool things to conquer our basic nature and environment, and we continue to do cool things. Compared to other species we are absolutely killing it. Yes we suck compared to what we are going to be in the future, but that's the point!
Whenever I get a brief feeling of "this is bad," I remind myself that humans have conquered far worse than whatever "this" is and that we are likely to triumph over this thing too. Taking a second to appreciate what our species has accomplished, and "geeking out" about it, has helped improve my quality of life, thought I'd take a moment and share that with you.
I'm really doing my best to make past/teenage me proud. I know about 5 years ago, I'd probably have kicked my own butt.
Now the lab leak hypothesis is mainstream, with experts supporting investigating the labs in Wuhan and bringing in evidence that the disease indeed originated in a Chinese lab.
Sometimes, it seems the difference between facts and conspiracy is 6 months or another presidential administration, whichever comes first!
Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire. Income disparity seems to be increasing locally and globally. The military industrial complex of the largest nation-states feels eternal, as if it is a fundamental part of neoliberal capitalism.
I can "half-full" almost everything day to day. Financial issues, medical issues, family problems... never easy, but doable. I can handle it, smile on my face, and tough it out. But when I'm left alone with my thoughts, its hard for me not to draw the conclusion that the world my children (or their children) grow up in will be worse-off, and they will live harder lives than we have.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...
More people are concerned about climate change now, and the younger generations are more concerned than ever. Hopefully that leads to people in general making better choices, and more importantly, electing people who aren't deep in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry.
> Our impact on the environment is measurable and the impacts look dire.
Humans are pretty resilient and have been pretty good at mitigating large scale problems. Yeah we are impacting our environment, but we aren't the only species that does this. Many species, left unchecked, go through natural boom+bust cycles where they blast past the carrying capacity of their ecosystem and then bust the next generation.
At no point do deer look around and go "hey, we are eating all the food, maybe we shouldn't do that?" - they just eat and reproduce and nature sorts it out. They aren't morally corrupt for causing a boom/bust cycle, they're just animals like us. However, when it comes to humans, we have blasted past our ecosystem's natural carrying capacity (we've been past it for a long time now). Not only do we look around and go "hey, this is a problem" - something that puts us in a league all our own - but we have repeatedly solved that problem. And now we get to tackle the next set of problems.
Simply being aware that we are responsible for climate change and the ending of the Holocene is a huge achievement for a species, let alone putting together plans to over come it.
That is pretty cool!
What's even cooler is that all of the growing pains we are going through are putting us on a trajectory to literally save all life on Earth. Folks like to kick around the can about how humans are destroying Earth's environment. That's true, and we need to work our butts off to keep everything balanced moving forward. There are very smart humans working very hard to keep our ecosystems from collapsing.
But, no matter what we do to save our ecosystems, we are over 75% through the window of time life can survive on this planet.
A world without humans is a world where Earth slowly moves out of the habitable zone and finds itself in a complete extinction event in ~500m years - with little to no hope of any life bouncing back.
Getting life off this planet is a noble cause. Doing that requires either:
* a biological pathway to interstellar travel beyond the micro-organism scale (maybe nature will produce this in 500m years? find that _exceptionally_ unlikely)
* a species to develop the technology to get itself off this rock and survive the extremely hostile environments in space
Humans are doing that latter, and I have no reason to believe any other species would do a better job than we have getting to "building rockets and settling planets." Not only is our species going to the stars, but we are going to bring life on Earth with us when we do.
That is pretty rad.
At the same time it's important not to forget humans have done some messed up things to the environment that are not easy to clean up or undo. And they still do, all with a paltry goal to make a short term profit. This is what drives my optimism away, though I am not a pessimistic person by nature.
But I’d say:
1) Most humans mean well and these are side effects of solutions to other problems - we can find and hold up examples of people acting poorly but to extrapolate that out I don’t think is fair. Energy abundance has done unbelievably important things for civil rights, quality of life, and the prospect of life being able to outlive Earth.
2) It’s important to remember life on earth is ~75% behind us. We’ve only got another 500m years until there is a complete extinction event with little hope of coming back. If you take humans out of the picture, you don’t save nature, you doom it to complete extinction.
Humans are awesome, all flaws considered. We are the only golden ticket our planet has printed to get life off this rock.
It's a nice sentiment, but I see no reason to think it is true. While I'd agree that in many ways life is nicer and easier, the problems that we do have now are even more complex and difficult than ever.
Of course some people have terrible lives still, some people die at birth, but we are living in a truly astonishing era with endless possibilities in my view.
The things that bring me the biggest anxiety all come from Twitter, and I find they don't much impact my day to day. While the internet shows me the absolute worst of mankind (in addition to the best), I find my IRL world isn't half bad.
I do something very similar, though slightly different.
Whenever I notice something bad i rejoice that I've probably lived through the best times our western society likely ever have
I at least experienced a reality which didn't have [the bad thing] as the norm.
Society is not gonna get more equal from now on, so Gen Beta (people that are currently being born) are gonna have a massively worse life then I've had.
Thank you!
Reminds me of:
> I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.
Then they had another external group of people rate them based off of the same 1 to 10 scale to get an unbiased baseline.
Turns out pessimists had a more accurate and realistic rating around how good they looked. While optimists had ratings that were wildly overblown. There are other experiments that measured other things related to these two groups of people.
It turns out optimists are, happier, have higher salaries and are much more successful in life while pessimists are more likely to be clinically depressed.
This experiment tells us a dark truth about human nature. We lie to ourselves to stay sane. We construct illusions to protect ourselves from fully experiencing the cruel reality of life.
Optimism is a special kind of blindness. It's blindness that blinds you from being aware you're blind.
So look deeply at yourself. Are you happy? Are you optimistic? If so then that is in itself a statistical statement about how delusional and intelligent you actually are. Can you handle the truth?
I wonder how this post will get voted? Down for being depressing and negative? Or up for being truthful?
Likely down for talking about votes.
And for assuming there is only one truth.
> We construct illusions to protect ourselves from fully experiencing the cruel reality of life.
Reality is cruel. Nature is cruel. Existence is cruel. And Humans have overcome a substantial amount of that cruelty and enjoy a quality of life our ancestors couldn't even dream of.
There are many other things to be optimistic about given where life on earth started and how it is going for humans. Our ancestors have come a long way in 4.5bn years, it would be special kind of blindness to write that progress off as a lie we tell ourselves to stay sane.
But you can be amazed at what has happened throughout the whole history and what humans have built, and be optimistic and excited about the future, and that we can handle the problems thrown at us and be completely realistic at the same time.
And even if there was some way to accurately judge whether optimists or pessimists view the World more accurately, it doesn't mean you can't still view the world accurately and be an optimist at the same time.
It might just be that optimists on average are more likely to view things in a better light than they are, but it doesn't apply to every single optimist.
There is truth, but also even bad truth like a problem coming your way you can treat it as an exciting challenge or a nuisance.
Reality is cruel and often sad, and for our own sake our brain tricks us into believing it's all pink, making us optimistic, delusional and stupid.
On the other hand, contemplating all the time just how cruel and vain everything is left us depressed and unmotivated and eventually makes life useless and worthless.
Well, then maybe we could aim for the middle, aknowledge that our brain has a tendency to paint everything either pink or black, but that with some little effort it's not so hard to recognize these trends when they happen and navigate in between, and be realistically satisfied that we can actually achieve to do that and be happy without delusion?
I still do this at the doctor if I'm nervous about the procedure. Try distracting yourself by attempting to work through the details of what's going on. Even if you're wrong, it's a distraction and a good exercise, and maybe you can ask the doctor to clarify later.
Never works at the dentist, though. I can never tell what the heck is going on in my mouth.
Totally agree on the "understand to remove fear" side of things though.
When I was learning stick shift I had a terrible time until, frustrated after I had stalled the car for the umpteenth time, my dad stopped the lesson on "what to do" and instead spent a few minutes explaining what was actually happening inside the clutch system.
Suddenly it all made sense and I understood what I was actuating and why the feedback was the way it was. I became proficient quickly after that.
The kid would then, invariably, be able to hit the ball again. Sometimes all you need is a focused distraction to be able to perform.
Topics I wish I'd never known about
- General anaesthesia and low dose
- General anaesthesia and the idea you are actually awake but forget.
- General anaesthesia stats and possibility of being awake (moreso if you're anxious about not going to sleep - it's happened to me with gas).
- Flying and why the plane needs to dive for certain scenarios.
- Flying and tolerances for wings during a storm (they're good but still!) or lightning strikes (Faraday cage but...).
- Flying and knowing about coffin corner stall limitations/margin for error.
- Flying and survival stats if there's actually a serious incident.
Probably a load more...!
This is such a bad contextualization of the risks if you actually know the stats on the matter, since there are ~600 million passengers per year and <600 (as in, fewer than a thousand) fatalities; you have less that one in a million chance to experience a "serious" incident - in fact, I'm pretty sure the definition of a "serious" incident in this context is "an incident that normally results in a large number of fatalities". Which makes your stat above very nearly a tautology.
My point is that this is very much an example of where internalizing the stats should make you feel safer, unless you're letting a cognitive bias (like anxiety) prevent you from actually internalizing the real risks.
Do you mean that this happens for some people? For me, GA felt like a very deep dream where I didn't notice falling asleep but I definitely remember what I dreamed.
This freaked me out as well. Wouldn't I know in the moment? Do we actually experience something if we don't encode memories for it?
Unless you're already one hell of a pilot you will never be anywhere close to coffin corner.
Pretty fucking sick.
It was pretty awesome, and I left every visit feeling very positive about the experience.
The reenactment in Sully is pretty rad in that regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6HYMpmxdaA
This helped a lot with flying anxiety, once I could put a reason to most of the sounds and movements of flying I could relax a lot better. An unexpected one will get my attention though
But I have basically stopped playing games totally for the past decade, and I am so glad to have gotten all that time back to do other things which build up over time and then ultimately provide me with a lot more happiness, like learning new skills, reading scientific papers on ML/AI, learning how to use tools like Blender, reading biographies/history, etc. There is only so much time in a day, and when I look back on how many hours I spent during my mental prime playing stuff like Starcraft and Quake, I really wish I could have that time back and instead done other things.
Obviously this is just my take on it, and I'm not trying to shame anyone about playing games or saying they are bad. But I think it's wrong to focus on the upsides without at least being aware of what you might be trading off for that short term dopamine hit and fun.
There's periods where I want to learn a bunch of new technologies, and other times when I can't. It's all time well spent just in different areas
Long story short, I realized I wasn't getting into a "flow-state" often enough and guess where you can get an easy fix of that? First-person shooters.. (for me anyway). I don't have 3+ hour-long sessions or anything, maybe just a round or two and it's like that first cup of coffee in the morning.
Caffeine, while increasing focus, ups anxiety and cardio load.
Exercise (HIIT) I find is better at increasing focus and decreasing anxiety.
Once you realize that you can actually achieve anything you set your mind to just by making a routine you will find yourself wanting to shift the time and effort going into games into real world success.
If you're not careful, a game that addictive and time-consuming is a rapid route to weight gain, back pain, maybe even an unhealthy drinking habit...
(To be fair though, for those who enjoyed the game in it's early years, WoW Classic was really good 'comfort gaming' during the Covid period, but it's certainly added to lockdown weight gain)
It's legit made me try to find videogames that are not that addicting, but not that boring, and it's extremely hard to find lol.
Ew lol
I guess I'm wondering more how high up some of these games can be on my bucket list when my time is already booked out.
My mom fought cancer and died slowly and badly. My dad, having lived through that, didn't fight it and went quickly. Some people have the opposite experience. It would be good to have a less expensive way to learn these lessons.
It's great to be exploring ways to help cancer patients cope, but the overall thesis of this article is hardly surprising.
This greatly increases stress and anxiety.
There's a number of games that I either play very briefly or avoid entirely because I feel more anxious and stressed after playing them.
Only non-timed puzzles were chill enough to play as a clinically anxious person.
I got to stop multi tasking...
Imo a far better method than this is to exercise, walk outside, or play sports. These are natural dopamine boosts with little to no real downside.
“This definitely improves my mood” - said no League player ever
