Top
Best
New

Posted by James72689 5 hours ago

We've made the world too complicated(user8.bearblog.dev)
63 points | 61 commentspage 3
sweetheart 2 hours ago|
I felt this way VERY strongly last year and into the beginning of this year. I was definitely burned out, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t right in noticing a lot of the same stuff described in the blog post. I was dangerously close to trying to talk my wife into liquidating our 401ks to buy an off grid cabin and resign from modern life.

What helped in the end was seemingly some sort of combination of acceptance + commitment, plus a looot of reflection on the nature of mind/mindfulness. Basically, understanding that our planet is a roiling ball of material simply unfolding over billions of years, and any apparent boundaries between “me” and “everything else” (including all the stressful stuff!) is an illusion caused by my silly limited human capacity to understand and perceive.

Sounds woo-woo and silly, but it has changed my life and provided me a framework to hold both “modern society is a chaotic train wreck” and “the only thing to do is be present and kind” at the same time in a way that’s free of contradiction and completely obvious in hindsight. I hope you feel better soon, blog post author! you deserve to.

kortilla 2 hours ago||
“I have not witnessed mass starvation and disease first hand so I wish to discard all of the technologies preventing that.”
lordkrandel 4 hours ago||
What is this luddite rant in 2026. Let's just have no medicine, no society, no police, no welfare. Let's be primitive again and drink the rain. 7 billions monkeys that ignore each other and that's it. Aaah, Paradise finally, no more complications. No more wars, no more oil and laptops. Let's be decimated by whatever fever comes in next year, and bat ourselves in the head with branches off a tree like the good old times
nkrisc 3 hours ago||
As opposed to now where millions of people die from whatever disease comes along, or kill each other by the thousands with weapons, or drink poisoned water.

The more I think about it the more I can’t see the difference between what we have today and your sarcastic example.

The highs get higher but the lows get lower and it all averages out the same in the end.

bspammer 2 hours ago|||
Child mortality rates have dropped off a cliff in every country in the world in the last 100 years. More people than ever have access to clean drinking water, to toilets, to doctors.

Fewer people die in wars. Fewer people die in pandemics. The Black Death killed half of Europe.

This purely pessimistic, nihilistic view of the modern world is as widely inaccurate as a purely optimistic one.

j_maffe 2 hours ago||||
The lows have literally been getting higher consistently for millenia. There are new types of lows, sure, but not equal in magnitude. The solution is to fight and fix them in sustainable manners.
chr1 2 hours ago||||
There is effectively infinite space up high, and low is bounded by death, so it never can average out.
kortilla 2 hours ago|||
This is an extremely privileged take that completely ignores the improvements the world has made in lifting people out of absolute poverty.

Making enough food to prevent starvation is literally a solved problem. We make more than the world needs and the only people starving are in that state because of government conflicts.

_heimdall 2 hours ago|||
This is an absurd strawman. Effectively all of modern history had no modern medicine, though that doesn't mean there weren't treatments and remedies for ailments. Drinking rain water is a pretty damn good alternative to drinking city water if you have the option, remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it. Welfare should never be a goal, its a sign that something is wrong when a subset of the population is completely unable to make ends meet for the basics of life. And though the black plague was particularly bad, humans survived it and we weren't being decimated by fever every year.
kortilla 2 hours ago|||
That’s not how city water works.
_heimdall 39 minutes ago||
Correct me where I was wrong then My understanding is that sewage, including toilet waste, goes through the sewer system to a treatment facility, and is cleaned as best they can including using amounts to bleach as part of the process.

That obviously isn't a complete detail of how it works, but what is inaccurate?

scotty79 2 hours ago|||
> remember that we all poop in the city water before they try to get it all back out and bleach it

Is there any place in the developed world that treats mixing sewage into your water source as a viable strategy of providing municipal water?

whatisthiseven 2 hours ago||
Yes, there have been standards for years already. It was proven in s US city some time ago when it faced a bad drought.

Las Vegas is a 100% closed loop system. All grey water is recycled back into Lake Mead fur reuse.

Modern sewage treatment is a modern miracle.

_heimdall 39 minutes ago||
It is a modern miracle, though the miracle is in part that we can now drink poop water.
scotty79 2 hours ago|||
I think it's cognitive overload. Everyone, every so often, exceeds their momentary cognitive capacity and wants everything to go away to reduce complexity. It might be that due to rapid pace of development in 2026 more people experience that than usually and as always, percentage of them are eager to write down their thoughts at this moment of weakness. Usually a good night's sleep helps. But in modern day where people are chugging coffee every day and due to that haven't slept well in months, that kind of weakness might persist.
simianwords 3 hours ago||
yeah lol. if only tech stopped existing we could achieve world peace and everything would be fine and dandy
scotty79 2 hours ago||
In history there were countless men that promised paradise, if only we destroyed something.
r0ckarong 3 hours ago|
Sounds like a control fetish to me. I'm a meat sack controlled by an organical electro-chemical controller that I'll never fully understand; which doesn't even obey me most of the time but that doesn't keep me from doing things.
cloogshicer 3 hours ago||
What a reductive world view that is.
scotty79 2 hours ago|||
Nothing ever was solved without reductivity.
lstodd 2 hours ago|||
At least it shows some attempt on reflection/introspection which is rare.

As for the OP - life is negenthropy. It is by definition a complication. I don't get the complaint - if you want max simplicity just convert yourself into least possible energy state. You will lose agency but that is the point, right?

balamatom 2 hours ago||
+1 for the original insult ("control fetish") from the disembodied spirit that broadcasts bitflips at your electro-chemical controller ;-)