Found this gem out there on the interwebs tubes:


You could be suffering from early 21st century syndrome.

You should be happy. You have fulfilled the requirements of a media-driven life. You have your own place. You have a "decent" job. You have a woman. And yet, underneath it all, there is this dissatisfaction. You can't quite place it, but it is there nonetheless, gnawing in your brain.

You flick randomly through internet pages for hours after dark. The TV chatters in the background. Every world developement is known to you a few minutes after it happens. You are the master of an external world that appears and presents itself through text and pics and vids.

You go about the business of living as it has been described to you and you can check all the boxes for relative success. And yet it doesn't feel like success. Not the way it does in the movies or on TV. No orchestral music chimes in when you do something good, no ominous montage depicts things negatively when your performance is not up to par. Life itself is removed from you because consciousness itself does not match up to the way "we" are used to receiving information; that of third person observer through a cam. The first-person view is somehow limiting: It limits us to this space and time, which is not in keeping with how consciousness can effortlessly cross time when "connected" to the internet.

Life today in a modern industrial society has an air of rigidness about it. Everywhere you go, you run up against barriers and rules. Speed limits, parking restrictions, decorum, social rules (unwritten but bearing on the mind), myriad exacting laws. All of them supposedly designed for the collective benefit of everyone. But no individual feels like everyone, each individual feels like you. So you end up being oppressed by the collective rules designed to protect you. This is called the "system".

There is nothing "wrong" with you, brother.

You are merely suffering from the collective malaise of having all that we are supposed to want. Supposedly, human existence today is the best it has ever been. The facts bear this out. Life expectancy today for the average person is higher than it's ever been, right?

And yet you long for the hunt. The risk. The hunter-gatherer life, buried deep somewhere in your hypothalamus, longs for that time when your own ingenuity resulted in food for your group. When you could exploit your human genius for real and direct gain... feeding yourself and your tribe. Going to the office today gains you money to obtain these things. But it does not offer the thrill of the hunt. The risk. The adrenaline rush of the successful raid on the enemy camp, the high of the perfect kill.

*Homo sapiens sapiens* is not a very old species in relative terms. But it is a cunning one and the greatest force this planet has ever seen. But, the amount of time we successfully gathered as hunters (2 million years) is far longer and evolutionary significant in comparison to the existence of human civilisation (8 thousand years). Yet, all cogent information tells you you are better off today than anyone in human history.

And yet, on a quiet walk outside the city, you stare at the moon through leafy glade and can almost touch the truth of a different life. A life you were designed for but no longer is.

There is nothing wrong with you, brother, that is not wrong with all of us.

Meh, go paint balling. Boredom = success.

I only wish I had these kinds of problems.

I feel like I just read a summary of The Matrix as read by Jack London*.


* (Call of the Wild)

Yeah, well, I look at it from a Neil Armstrong kinda perspective.

The evolution of man is not keeping pace with the evolution of mankind.

Okay, I know his quote was a flub (what he meant to say was "One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind"). But I think I can still phrase it as it was said back then and it still fits.

For man as a creature, we haven't changed much in the past 100,000 years or so, physiologically speaking anyways. What has changed dramatically is our modus operandi, the way that we do things, given our intrinsic abilities. What's happened to us is a constant upgrade of utilization of a relatively static capacity, improving efficiency. In so doing, we are also altering our reality, or rather the way we interface with reality, disconnecting ourselves further and further from the risks and hazards that were barriers to our previous prosperity.

I suspect that we will plateau soon, relatively speaking, as our ability to comprehend reality has it's limits for the moment. There's not much further we can go in scientific discovery, at least relative to what we've already revealed, based on what we can perceive in our current state. We might make it to some form of practical interstellar travel in our present evolutionary form, and even master the ability to harness the more powerful energy sources to our benefit. But there's really not that much more left, not until we as a race take the next step up in our physical development, which will most likely allow us to have a direct influence over the physical limits of our existence simply by thinking it so.

My guess is that over the next 10,000 years, we will probably have run into the physical barriers what can be learned, and any further advances in intellect will have to wait until our being can expand beyond those limits. Sort of a Jonathan Livingston Seagull type of transformation I suspect. That may take another 100,000 years or more, assuming we survive as a race that long.

One thing I am certain of, we are not in an end state yet. In fact, I think we still have a long, long way to go. Kubrick probably alluded to our next evolution at the end of "2001" as well as can be I suppose. Our next evolution should give us the ability to function independently of our present needs for things like air, water, food, shelter, society, etc. Time will no longer be a factor in our existence.

In the meantime, we are like the worm in the cocoon. Wiggling, writhing, struggling against the walls of our limited existence. Filling the void within, until at some point we are no longer a worm, but something else, something able to go where no worm can go.

This sounds like the musings of Johnny Nice Painter.

[quote=benjammin] There's not much further we can go in scientific discovery,

I am skeptical. Sometime in the 1890s the head of the US Patent Office suggested that his operation be shut down, on the grounds that everything had been invented. In the early 1950s, the prediction was made that only four computers need be built, because they could handle all the computing necessary.

I thin we have a lot to discover, and that we are about to enter into a Golden Age, that is, if we don't ruin the planet (and ourselves) first.

The meaning was "in our current form".

Although I'm skeptical about that one as well. I remember reading about how early trains were thought to be too fast for horses to perceive, hence exposure to the sight of a moving train would drive the animal insane.

Yeah.

I think the human mind in its current form is greatly underestimated. We can and will continue to integrate new technologies into our lives. Yay for us.

Change is the only consistent thing in human history.

We are not the end product of evolution.

The ratio of the known to the unknown is infinite.

IIRC there is a Lao Tzu saying like,

What the caterpillar sees as its end, the world sees as a butterfly.

Of course there's always the option to descend back into a Dark Age...... :-(