Does the world feel "normal" to you?
Does the world feel "normal" to you?
It's not just financial nihilism, it's societal nihilism as far as the eye can see. As the pace of technological change increases, we become unmoored and rudderless, ripe for manipulation.
When Edward Snowden spoke at Bitcoin2024 last week, he asked a question that lodged like a tumor in my brain. To paraphrase:
“Does the world and the U.S. election feel normal to you?”
When he was a kid, he said, presidents were people you looked up, people you admired and aspired to be like.
Do these candidates fit the bill? Do they represent the best of us? If so, wtf happened to us?
Something’s off, he argues, and he points to the algos that subtly manipulate us on X, TikTok, Insta, FB and beyond.
For all their benefits, they’ve ultimately pitted us against one another in a competition for likes. They’ve isolated us and turned us into dopamine addicts who can’t see beyond the next 5 minutes of outrage and shock.
“The reason the internet feels broken,” Snowden added, “is because it’s reflecting a broken world.”
I could talk for hours about this broken world because I see signs of it everywhere. We speak of financial nihilism in the crypto industry. But that’s merely a symptom of a broader, more insidious nihilism that pervades nearly everything.
The inequality gap widens. Misinformation reigns, and we stand on the very brink of World War.
Meanwhile, technological revolutions beget more technological revolutions across virtually every field (AI, genetics, finance via crypto, pharma, robotics, etc.).
The Great Acceleration has arrived.
We call these sorts of changes “revolutions” because they are. They upset the world’s current order. They rob power from one entity and bequeath it upon another. Some of us are ground like meat beneath the wheels. Others rise to perch on thrones.
It’s destabilizing (both for our finances and our psychologies). And we can’t help but begin to question our places in the world.
The questioning only grows louder in the face of AI.
I can feel it myself.
If we achieve AGI, what’s my purpose? Will I have a job? What will it mean to be human? Is the next rung of evolution leaving these biological bodies behind?
AI lies at the heart of it all. And some have taken to calling these fears and existential questions “AI anxiety.”
I like calling it “desynchronization.”
We’re out of sync with the world. Technological change is forcing us to break with the past. And that means we literally have to rewrite/reconceive our own places in the world.
That’s especially difficult for the world’s increasingly secular population.
Part of the reason humanity has relied upon church/religion for millennia is that it forces you to take at least one week a day to look inward, to ask yourself hard questions, to attach your feet to the ground, to be here now, to stare into the unblinking octopus eye at the very center of the grand mystery that is life.
In other words, we’ve ditched religion, but we haven’t replaced it with anything that matters.
Sure, you can believe in evolution. You can say everything’s a meaningless cosmic accident, but humans require a value structure nonetheless. We require goals and beliefs. We require something that unites us with other humans.
I’m still trying to find my way, but one thing that’s helped is building my own “religious/spiritual book.” Whenever I read something profound, something that would be helpful to remember, I take a screenshot that lands in the screenshot album on my phone. Now, I flip through that album of collected wisdom regularly.
I ditch the church, but I don’t ditch the spiritual practice… the ongoing pursuit of wisdom, grounding, meaning and purpose.
I strive to erect inside myself a foundation of spiritual backbone… a personal philosophy that gives me strength to stand in the face of all of life’s wonder, mystery and tragedy.
It’s time for you to build your own framework.
Maybe you’ll do what I do and mash up Buddhism, Christianity, stoicism and techno-futurism. Or maybe you’ll go “off-the-grid Amish.”
More likely, your answer’s entirely different.
The point is, no one is going to hand you an answer to society’s growing nihilism (or as I like to think of it: society’s lack of philosophical frameworks).
The answer must come from within. But it can’t be found if you’re not willing to spend some time every day/week/month confronting the mystery.
You don’t need a new car, new job, plastic surgery or more money… you first need a philosophy.
You need a reason for being here.
You need to believe some things are worth fighting for… and some are beneath you.
You need to know precisely what it is that makes you you.
If you don’t, others will determine it for you.
✊
Watch Edward Snowden’s speech now. It’s unsettling and powerful, and it helped convince me that his voice is among the most important voices of our generation. Pushed to the margins of society, he can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves.
When you unplug from the matrix and talk to people in the real world, in your community etc. it doesn’t seem that bad. Remember that the algorithms are manipulating you to think that you’re alone especially if you believe that the government is not your friend, the elites want to de-populate the world, climate change is overblown or a lie etc.
Saw this on X first. I appreciate all commentary that shows depth beyond what is now normal in the world which is a kind of insanity. You are correct I feel in identifying Snowden as actually having wisdom and probably much as a result of the extreme life he has chosen to live.
I have become horrified over these last few years at how fast the US and western culture has degraded into showing the extremes of irreconcilable differences and intolerance. I did not think this would happen in my lifetime.
I'm going beg your indulgence here, as I have been convinced by PHD religious scholar friend to put my thoughts on paper to eventually become a book, so this is practice for me.
I was born at the peak of the boomer cycle (1953) in Detroit which was also peaking as a city at the same time and was raised in an eastern European ethnic neighborhood where everyone knew and understood what was right and what was wrong. My generation, I feel, is the last generation to be imbued with a real prevalent sense (whether we liked it or not, lol) of Christian culture. I attended Catholic grade school and starting from 1st grade would attend a required hour long Mass spoken in Latin every day before class started. It was a much different world back then that was still a religiously anchored culture. After dropping out college my life took an unfathomable radical turn and that is what has me commenting on your post now 50 years later.
I stopped being Christian back then but now I would say the world is suffering from the failure of religion and more importantly the failure to understand why it failed- it is a paradox virtually no one understands.
Everyone in the west has written religion off for obvious reasons and yet literally no one contemplates why they lasted for thousands of years. The naive underlying assumption is that people were either that stupid or delusional or brainwashed- for literally thousands of years! In reality this makes zero sense and yet everyone is happy to not give it a second thought (because I think it is extremely inconvenient). Dr. Jeffrey Kripal has made this kind of argument for years now, especially when it comes to the sciences, which take everything off the table they cannot explain ( ETs, psychic and religious experiences, etc.) in order to make their conclusions work. These conclusions are actually divorced from reality ("Reality") and as Dr. Kripal has found out no one likes someone raining on their parade. In this light, concerns about AGI and "creating" consciousness are unfounded. People no longer trust "Reality" because they and the world has largely lost it's deep connection to it which results in existential confusion (and yes, unfortunately, this can accurately be described as a mass psychosis).
The originators of the world's religions all had LIVING, experiential connections to Reality that was affected, or tempered, by the cultures in which they lived. They sought to pass on to others this very same LIVING Realization and for the few who could truly grasp what was being offered, the essential in-depth practice was necessarily esoteric - there had to be sensitivity to the higher dimensions of the human being. To cut to the chase here, religions failed us because they failed to secure and pass on the LIVING Realization from the Source, thus they became corrupt and only interested in the continuation, power, and survival of the institution. It is important to understand that it took thousands of years for this degradation to ultimately occur and it has occurred, to one degree or another, in every major religion. That does not mean that exceptional individuals with this Living connection to the Source have stopped appearing here- the current cultural and scientific climate dismisses such notions out of hand in much the same way as trying to talk sense to a crazy person (these psychiatric references are, unfortunately, all too accurate).
. It was correct for religions to be cast aside and yet the Living Source has not ceased to exist. The Source of religion cannot be replaced by something else- that is trying to replace Reality, or Truth, with something "else" which by definition is impossible.
Connection to the Living Source is the means of true inclusive human culture and evolution which includes the higher esoteric anatomy of the human body-mind. Without this connection there is ONLY dystopia and that is certainly where we seem to be headed. Science and technology do not create wisdom but they can help create a better quality of life via wisdom. So wisdom is what the world really lacks and wisdom is never acquired for free- it requires an ordeal or crisis. It has been understood through the ages that spiritual aspirants must go through an ordeal that could last decades or more to acquire the secret esoteric teachings because you will not be able to make use of them otherwise. This has been proven in spades in this modern day and age where all secret teachings have been published and it hasn't made any difference. The difference is not in the teachings- the difference is in the state of the people reading them. It is one thing to casually read a Zen Buddhist text and another thing altogether to meditate for 10 hours a day for a week or more in a formal retreat at a Zen Buddhist monastery (and yes I have done this). No pain, no gain.
What will it take for the world, collectively and individually, to be so desperate, to be suffering so much that this long lost avenue will be seriously explored again? One way or another we are going to find out.