The street I used to live on in Cambridge is part of a pleasant local history project. On each house's front window is a sticker saying who lived there in the late 19th century. Up and down the street are names of the residents of 1891, and occasionally the building's former function too. Apparently my cramped quarters were once a laundry.
What those people in 1891 had was less expectation inasmuch as they didn't have a measure of happiness or personal achievement that they measured against people they didn't know but were expected to ape. In 1891 your blacksmith knew who he was, what he did and what he expected from his life within the boundaries of his life - he didn't wonder whether he was a woman or whether he was practising the wrong religion or whether his job was emitting climate changing pollutants or whether his children were gay or depressed or autistic. Consequently he could live more in the moment, especially as he could catch a nasty proper virus and die at any moment! So his problems were realistic and related to what was around him - break his arm at work and his kids would go hungry, take a day off work to go to the seaside and lose a day's pay. A totally more "real" sort of stress I feel.
We seem to be confined within a topsy turvy looking glass world: hitherto accepted and acceptable norms and boundaries abolished and censured: national borders, biological and sexual differences, rational debate, freedom of thought ,speech and beliefs and convictions consigned to the woke lost and found, to be replaced by obligatory and superficial symbols and postures: masks, rainbow flags, PRIDE badges, Ukrainian flags, noisy diktats about climate change and the green dystopia which awaits us, open borders, hashtags, sexploitation of young children as ideology and frankly repellent indoctrination replace education as we used to know it, a growing list of unacceptable phobias.
Will we ever regain sanity, maturity, decency, wisdom and accountability, or will we just sink into the commodified tech world and stop thinking?
During my engineering degree the maths professor shared this view:
Greed, not capitalism, drives individuals to seek the bigger / better 'machine', to control more, to get more profit. The 'machine' complexity soon exceeds the understanding of those who command it's creation and with each successive machine there is increasing reliance on specialist creators until they too become superfluous. Connection (i.e., understanding) by those who seek to control and the devices they use is essential - simply relying on others is dangerous.
Now those who have simply sought profit at all costs face their own imminent redundancy.
The person who prices everything, may not know the value of anything.
Worse - nobody knows how this will play out, except via massive and abrupt financial re-alignment.
Interesting observations. The cost of the house in 1995 is around the same as it is today... but only when you price it in gold. Pricing houses in terms of other real things removes at once all the deception: that is, the continuous and deliberate devaluation of the pounds/dollars/your-fiat-of-choice in our pocket/central bank digital wallet.
What those people in 1891 had was less expectation inasmuch as they didn't have a measure of happiness or personal achievement that they measured against people they didn't know but were expected to ape. In 1891 your blacksmith knew who he was, what he did and what he expected from his life within the boundaries of his life - he didn't wonder whether he was a woman or whether he was practising the wrong religion or whether his job was emitting climate changing pollutants or whether his children were gay or depressed or autistic. Consequently he could live more in the moment, especially as he could catch a nasty proper virus and die at any moment! So his problems were realistic and related to what was around him - break his arm at work and his kids would go hungry, take a day off work to go to the seaside and lose a day's pay. A totally more "real" sort of stress I feel.
We seem to be confined within a topsy turvy looking glass world: hitherto accepted and acceptable norms and boundaries abolished and censured: national borders, biological and sexual differences, rational debate, freedom of thought ,speech and beliefs and convictions consigned to the woke lost and found, to be replaced by obligatory and superficial symbols and postures: masks, rainbow flags, PRIDE badges, Ukrainian flags, noisy diktats about climate change and the green dystopia which awaits us, open borders, hashtags, sexploitation of young children as ideology and frankly repellent indoctrination replace education as we used to know it, a growing list of unacceptable phobias.
Will we ever regain sanity, maturity, decency, wisdom and accountability, or will we just sink into the commodified tech world and stop thinking?
During my engineering degree the maths professor shared this view:
Greed, not capitalism, drives individuals to seek the bigger / better 'machine', to control more, to get more profit. The 'machine' complexity soon exceeds the understanding of those who command it's creation and with each successive machine there is increasing reliance on specialist creators until they too become superfluous. Connection (i.e., understanding) by those who seek to control and the devices they use is essential - simply relying on others is dangerous.
Now those who have simply sought profit at all costs face their own imminent redundancy.
The person who prices everything, may not know the value of anything.
Worse - nobody knows how this will play out, except via massive and abrupt financial re-alignment.
Interesting observations. The cost of the house in 1995 is around the same as it is today... but only when you price it in gold. Pricing houses in terms of other real things removes at once all the deception: that is, the continuous and deliberate devaluation of the pounds/dollars/your-fiat-of-choice in our pocket/central bank digital wallet.