latenightnoir @ latenightnoir @lemmy.world

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606

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12 mo. ago

I think humanity has grown restless due to the granularisation of work. It is no longer necessary to develop an overall understanding of an entire domain for most jobs, as they're based on the assembly line principle - learn to screw that bolt on tight enough, and your job is done. Nevermind the rest of the car, not your assignment.

I suspect this leaves a lot of cognitive bandwidth essentially unused, so the brain naturally seeks to fill it up with whatever else is at hand.

In addition, this has also somewhat stolen the satisfaction of understanding the context of our work, of seeing that it's not just wasted time, essentially. Work/production/creation/generation/transformation used to be far more significant parts of both our lives as well as our overall fulfilment, so we're now basically overclocked PCs left running Minesweeper at 100%, which yearn for meaning and something to fill up all of that available compute potential. And there's cognitive junk food a-plenty, but just like junk food, it rarely satisfies long-term.

This, I think, also spreads ripples across other aspects of our lives - I'm thinking here especially about the seeming death of nuance in general discourse as one of the main such repercussions, so it's yet another existential cascade failure.

I mostly say this and the above solely on an anecdotal basis, but it is a pretty large basis, considering it consists of roughly 80% of all previous coworkers and professional acquaintances in over a decade, both domestic and otherwise.

Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from "real life" - actually, I'd go as far as to focus in specifically on "adulthood" as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.

Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn't relegated just to our nation. I'd suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.

They're literally killing our souls, in so... so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what's actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there's no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.

As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I'm not talking about religion, I'm talking about the fact that we've completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don't admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can't even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don't read, we don't stare at paintings, we don't study the music, we don't play - and I don't mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they're whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.

THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!

The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear... This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.

Thank you! I'm genuinely happy that my "and I must scream" outburst proved useful!

We're already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we're going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it's all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.

Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we've been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American "encouragement," and it was inevitable.

Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I've noticed, it's non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing "the game," noticing that we're playing a game and so we sort of... meta-game with who we are - it's like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it's not us, on a very essential level. It's how we're taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.

So while we've been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external "flesh" which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).

They noticed that we're very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it's basically how the Romanian people have formed, we've been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we've developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of "well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!"

And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we've been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I'm not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I've become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around...

Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.

To add to that, most of us didn't have a say in things. Boomers were kinda' the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We're just along for the ride as it's crumbling.

Edit: I've realised this may sound as though I'm pointing the blame at Boomers - I'm really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it's not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.

Fuck you, Netflix. Seriously, fuck you. And the other streaming services, too. Fucking cable companies were less predatory than this...

It's the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.

What we're seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions

Not many individuals manage to form a stain of shame on their related species. I guess he is, indeed, remarkable in that way.

Why are you booing me, it's Baby Xenomorph saying hello to Mommy Xenomorph!

One looks wholesome. The other looks like a hard time rubbing off artificial tanning lotion.

Very smooth, Mr. Musk! Masterful subtlety! Utmost discretion!

Tarantula, because I have arachnophobia - why be anything other than what scares me the most?

Crows have such a chaotic energy to them, because they're smart, they know they're smart, and they love to use their smarts for mischief. Wonderful burds!

True, especially with the xPressMusic ones. They felt as though they had slightly thinner plastic. Had one of the very thin ones, a friend of mine squeezed it between the door and its frame enough to turn it into a flip phone.

On the other hand, had a 6303i I threw at a wall to see what would happen and what happenes was an uncomfortable gash left in one of our clasroom's walls. Phone was chillin'.

Honestly, this skillset helped me a lot when they threw a QA Project Manager position at me. I had familiarised myself with at least the basics of every process enough to be able to pick up some slack myself when and where needed. Even allowed me to send the team home early at times, when there were tests which I could perform alone (they were tedious, but not extremely complex).

Plus it can lead to a lot of potential optimisation precisely by viewing the top-down perspective and noticing any interactions and dependencies which may be harder to see when in the thick of it, so to speak.

It requires some fiddling around and figuring things out, of course, but it builds upon itself - as I've mentioned initially, every new subject I assimilated built upon my intuition, and it snowballed up to the point where I've managed to intuit my way through everything which has concerned my career so far.

Thank you for the recs, will add them to the list! Maybe it's time to go from one to many...

Excellent, the more options the better! Thank you!

Yes, yes, yes! We have unfortunately snubbed out auteurship with this mass production insanity, it's a great loss...

Hands down!

Also aids in bolstering intuition and the comprehension of nuance! Knowing "a little about a lot of things" means a very broad perspective which covers a lot of contingencies. It's a very good position from which to study the big picture, imo!

Edit: with the risk of getting lost in details, from personal experience.