There's a universal experience as a child, the urge to do something grandieous including your friends or family. A great adventure, living in a house with all your friends, working with your family and friends and generally seeing the value in being around your loved ones and collaborating.
It's interesting how we actually spend less time with people as we age. We accumulate responsibilities and work loads, we all find our own goals and discover the reality of the world we live in. Friends are lost all too easily and family is forgotten about just as much.
We settle for a week long break here and there vs the six weeks of freedom we experienced as children. Every gram of time has to be accounted for or it's all for naught. We should value our time highly, after all we are now salaried men. And if not salaried, we are entreprenurial men and so what would Elon Musk do? Lounge around more? Budget our time less effectively? We all read the productivity books, the optimistic desire for more efficiency and better outcomes...
But what are better outcomes? What are we even tracking? When we look at measuring improvement in the economy, we look at the GDP growth. Does that determine if an economy is working well for all participants? Would ourselves in the past or future use the same metrics as we presently do?
I think there's very few truly valuable and important things in my life. If anyone tells you differently, they haven't thought about what they value in their life. The world is polluted with noise for other's gains; not yours.
My list might look like:
If I have time, I will naturally find play or work or loved ones. It is when we starve ourself of time that we naturally do not find ourselves with the capacity to even think about these things.
I think we starve ourselves of time in many ways. In short, I think we suffer from 1000 cuts daily and rob ourselves of the freedom to pursue the most valuable things to ourselves. I don't even think a 9 to 5 is that time intensive other than the expectation to be working week-in-week-out. I think we erode our time far more than that and it's pretty obvious yet still the blunder of our generation.
We consume everything. We watch people do things we would otherwise do ourselves. We text or share memes as a supplement for real communication. We over-value frivilous things like conspicious consumption goods. We seek status above all else, a red herring to self-actualization. We value stability in a world which may offer very little even in the best case scenario.
Our lives are made up of what we spend our time doing, the material constraints are merely minor details at this point. Most of the world has the ability to eat enough food and stay reasonably healthy and well-clothed. But most of the world does not have the luxury of time.
The serfs of richer countries are cultivated into pay pigs every step of the way, so thus they must continue to rent their time to acquire gizmos. The serfs of poorer countries are squeezed of their time because it's valued so little and thus they must trade time for money disproportionately to meet basic needs.
The human psyche requires our basic needs to be met, and if they are, it requires novelty. All the money in the world cannot buy you endless novelty. People are still surprised celebrities do degenerate things. What would compel large powerful figures to impose on the rights of others? For novelty. Power buys novelty. You can do things you otherwise wouldn't. In the past the powerful could acquire new lands, new kingdoms, new material things they would never have thought about independently.
Now you have influencers for any given industry selling the principle of novelty: a new hack you haven't thought about, a new digital nomadic way of living, a new diet (steak and berries) to create a physique that will unlock your potential with the opposite sex, a new video titled "this changed my life" (it never does).
An endless mountain of people becoming "content creators" and an endless sea of said "content". It's a few bytes of data plastered together on someone's handheld dopamine terminal and then the output is thrown into the ever-deepening abyss for the growing apetite of what lies in there to devour it up every single day. We like to focus on the creators, the people who make money doing what we'd all consider a seemingly dream job. We never consider the people spending 8+ hours of their day consuming this stuff while at working, while on the toilet, while on their couch and while in bed.
One thing I forgot to mention during my first iteration of wrting this article is that novelty is implicitly insatiable, the same way you can't eat 100 cakes today and withdraw cakes like a bank account. You cannot store happiness and you cannot store novelty. Say you managed to create a drip feed of novelty (social media) it would become your new baseline and new optimizations have to occur (rage-bait) to spike your neurochemicals above a baseline again (hedonic treadmill). This is why there are few casual gamblers, and yes you might think you know some but you likely don't. The majority of gamblers hide or minimize their gambling problems. We all know the house always wins (ask yourself: why does the house always win), so why would a sane person play and willingingly lose alot of money? Because the industry is constantly finding new ways to reel a new audience in (children nowadays via gaming) and get them playing so that the variable reward mechanism takes over in their brain. The industry makes it's money from turning average joes into "whales" or otherwise known as degenerates, as to squeeze them for every single cent they can. It doesn't care about random OAPs wanting to spin a couple slots in Las Vegas.
The gambling and gaming industries teach you much about the human psyche, as you are effectively trying to craft a product that people will value more than their real life experiences. You want them to spend every available cent and minute on your game, the money to currently fund your bank account and the minutes as to bolster the live population number (network effect) so that others come along and spend money in the future.
See we are creating a divide, a class of people who have time because their time is leveraged so highly and a class of people who have no time because they work real jobs and their time isn't leveraged.
It's amusing because historically we would endulge in the dreams of technology providing flying cars or superhuman intelligence or space weapons. Today, the biggest tech companies are created and inflated simply to keep you entertained as efficiently as possible and extract as much value as possible from you.
Maybe after we move past this, we can then proceed to how the working class is squeezed at every step economically to facilitate the need of income; that buying a home is intentionally difficult or impractical at this stage of capitalism, that anyone who provides value today is just helping those hoarding "value" by "preserving" and "making returns" for them aka providing better stock prices through more revenue and stock purchase demand via pension plans and adding to the demand of housing where the supply is never intended to be met.
Maybe this is baked into human nature, maybe we are all crabs in a bucket and we will always use others as a means to our own ends.
Except now we live in the new era of digital serfdom under the reign of Big Tech.