Jin+Guice wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 3:51 pm
I think, as a society, we are bad at storing, maintaining and organizing. We bias the new. I know I do.
As I make my way through WL6, I'm realizing I have a poor concept of maintenance and storage. I was taught to buy everything, with the expectation that everything could be thrown away. It's very difficult for me to envision maintenance and storage costs when acquiring.
Consumer-society only pays attention to the producer and consumer part while ignoring the abiotic (a technology-driven belief that resources are infinite, very cheap, and substituteable) and the decomposition (out of sight, out of mind, the world too is infinite and so we can just throw things away).
Once aware of this loop, there are two solutions (maybe more) to solving this.
The first is to become increasingly self-reliant to the point of self-sufficiency. Have enough skill to creatively make nearly every product ... and take it apart again in order to use the ingredients in new solutions. Ultimately, this requires very little money, and is the foundation for ERE WL7-8. At thus point, money is seen as the lube to resolve any remaining friction in the loop. This can also be seen as the individualist's solution. At this point the dependence on others and society at large converges on a low number.
The other is source and sink in the "used goods" market for as long as possible, thus cycling back from consumption by selling on a product so that someone else may use it. This avoids producing a new one. It also avoids having to decompose it ... or turn it into storage-entropy. (Imagine how much never-to-be-used technology is sitting around in drawers and boxes in people's attic. It's a de facto dispersed landfill.)
Jin+Guice wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 3:51 pm
I bias activities that are "productive" and have output I can show off, rather than [...]
Interesting bias with the "showing off". I've definitely noticed how such a bias leads to connecting with a wider part of the public cf. being biased towards "it takes one to know one" or "it takes one to appreciate something". It's the difference between "I'm sure this is very interesting, but I don't understand any of it" (spending a year researching something arcane and publishing a paper on it) to "This is so awesome. Tell me more" (buying a plane ticket to a scenic tourist destination and posting pictures on instagram).
The different effects should not be underestimated in terms of serendipity and random human connections. It's way more likely to connect with someone over e.g. football than it is to connect over e.g. mountain bike bog snorkeling (yes, that is a thing).
I often wonder whether people who are almost exclusively into "popular topics" do it deliberately or whether they just lack imagination. In all likelihood, they take their cues from their surrounding humans instead of generating them internally. Or?