> I'm writing this with technology I will never fully understand in a building with rooms I can never enter, living in a country dictated by laws I can't control. We spend the majority of our waking hours and lives in an abstract world of compressed life. The moment I walk through my door I'm in a zoning area on a city-owned sidewalk, flanked by ugly metallic monsters, floating through a sea of strangers.

This has been true through literally the entirety of human civilization. It's the basis of civilization to collectively contribute and influence in each others lives through means that no one solely fully comprehends.

I think this feeling of everything being too complex is a natural consequence of work that is done for long-term abstract ends, rather than immediate and local ones.

At least I think it is for me. Working remotely for an international software company is great for its lifestyle flexibility, but sometimes I just want to be a baker, chef, bike repairman, etc. that solves an immediate problem for a real person standing in front of you.

The loop of work opens and closes in a very short period of time, And every system you need to interact with is basically local and entirely defined.

This is unlike the typical white collar job where the loop opens and closes quietly, if at all, months or years later. That leaves a feeling of incompleteness and thus a perception that you don’t really understand or control the systems you’re interacting with.

I won't guess at the age of the author, but this feeling seems to creep over people as they age, and always has. Today's complexity seems simple for fresh minds that have grown up alongside it. Meanwhile the simplicity that tired, bewildered older minds hark back to as a golden norm appalled the older minds at the time.

Almost universally, the response in older generations seems to be to look for simple solutions and explanations. They're almost a comfort for them - as if the world has gone wrong in some way but a real fix is possible in what they remember from the past. It's our tragedy - the world moves on from us, even in our lifetimes.

Well that's how you get convenience and comfort. That's how you build civilizations. Specialization started many millennium ago, when people probably didn't know much, if anything, about other careers.

I'm sure we all want to throw away working laptops, get out and enjoy nature sometimes. But no, LIVING in the nature is completely a different thing. Camping for a few days or even a month might be fine, but most people won't suffer longer than that.

I'm only worried about how we distribute wealth, TBH, the only important question.

> I used to want to do many things. Make great art, build great machines, solve important issues.

Another pretentious man who thinks he could be a great artist. Great artists are born artists, and they devote 100% of the time and cognitive resources that society allows them to their art. They have no choice, it’s vital for them.

Jack of all trades, master of none. If you are an engineer and you truly love art, do artists a favor by designing goods and services that don't steal time and cognitive resources for a change.

I think this is essentially Heidegger’s commentary on technology but reengineered from first principles

this just sounds like an engineer realising for the first time that the world has more complexity to it than anyone is capable of learning in their lifetime.

You always have to take _some_ things on trust, its just about choosing where you place that trust. Personally, I trust food vendors, I just close my eyes and point at the menu, instead of thinking about what I want to eat. I trust hardware and managed software environments (e.g. GC), my code sits above that in a reliable space. Its very rare that lets me down, I rememember one time where a USB issue correlated with temperature and the issue was some soldering, the hardware guys eventually caught it after I ruled out our software layer.

We all have to choose what we specialise in and learn about. It's sad we cannot go back in time and teach humanity how to do it all from scratch all by ourselves. Instead we're forced to have foggy areas in our understanding and we have to rely on each other to form a knowledgeable whole.

I don't see what is wrong with what the author is describing or why it would be causing us stress under the surface. We understand the things around us to the depth that we need. They arent ugly metallic monsters driving down the road, they're cars.

With the internet we are free to learn what we want. We can enjoy the complexities of life and go where our interests take us. Thats a good thing. I learn what I find interesting, others do the same and all of us together can help to build a well rounded resilient society. Its pretty cool actually.

There is just the tiniest space between feeling bored and feeling overwhelmed. Finding exactly the right amount of stimulation is a challenge. The natural world has a ramp of available information that the brain has evolved to navigate. The modern world wants to fill every every moment with something distracting and the reaction of the author is the inevitable result. The impulse to do nothing is the natural reaction, but that is not a healthy balance either, it is the onset of depression.

The challenge is finding a limited set of interests to become the main plotline of your life and engage with them in a meaningful way. Do not become closed off to new interests, but curate them carefully.

Just as it has always been.

EVERYTHING you use is complicated. The goddamn ATOMS and electronic shells around them are so absurdly complicated that they require quantum computers to even simulate them without approximations.

Everything is complicated, and all humanity has ever done is to try to reign in that complexity (you think about macbook GUI, NOT transistors beneath it).

So, yeah, I fully disagree with what this blog is trying to say. World is infinitely complex - and we are trying our best to make it make sense.