Few people I've talked to have had a stable "Why are you here and what is your purpose", and of course you can't even ask this of people who aren't super close to you.

But without that it seems like most people optimize for some form of wireheading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction) through any means possible. I genuinely believe if people could stay home triggering dopamine hits over and over they would. It's as if we read all the philosophers in the world but then went back to the Greek Hedonists.

"dopamine fracking", should enter lexicon

> “ Written by a human.”

Thank you.

Turn it off, then.

I’ve almost completely turned off social media. Realized I’m missing nothing.

All this stuff can pretty easily be ignored.

I would drop the "[do x] instead of listening to me (an idiot) talk about [y]" concept from your brain and all future writing. :)

I think most of us older than 25 understands this. We have seen the development and the war on attention. I guess the term Dopamine Fracking is not bad. I don't think we should be too alarmist though... we are kids of our time.. in that we will arrange the society around us. In essence we are not that different from the Romans. We just have a lot more toys.

Unregulated capitalism is bad. We all know that. I think the automation will ultimately be that thing that brings us past that. Via UBI or something similar... but that is far from now.

When renovating my house and discussing solutions with my girlfriend I noticed that she (but me too to large extent and most of my millennial friends) felt towards Airbnb-ification.

Good taste and style apparently converged towards generic Airbnb-like design of mixing wood lights, furniture, etc in a certain manner.

This is a well known phenomenon and going around the world, whether in Tokyo, Mumbai, Munich or Dallas most of the newest hotels, offices, private houses or restaurants converge to the same design choices. It feels like you're always in the same place.

Music, videogames, movies, hell, finance even politics are increasingly converging to a small subset of choices that seem to be globally neutral.

Relevant: Antidote to the cult of performance, Olivier Hamant.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/tracts-n-50-antidote-to-the...

While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/77884

I don't really think bro dude understands any of the environmental effects of fracking, especially compared to other drilling mechanisms. But it's just a metaphor.