To Know The Difference

On Serenity, Eventually

Something that strikes me, in the way that a slap in the face might strike me, is how most modern movements are extremely negative. Some people think the planet is boiling and this will destroy human civilization. Some people think those people are chumps, but AI will destroy human civilization even faster. Some people think that the government is so corrupt and evil that blowtorching it is the only solution, and others think that the people blowtorching it are so corrupt and evil that it’s the end of America.

I find at least one (but not all four) of these plausible, so I’m not even commenting on overheated rhetoric as such. But rather, all over the multidimension spectrum of political thought, the major camps are constantly blowing the trumpets of doom. Outside of beautiful little enclaves like progress studies, to accept any coherent mainstream narrative is to fear the end is nigh.

This is super weird! Looking back at the past decade, I personally haven’t experienced many gigantic disruptions, of the sort that I might expect under apocalyptic conditions. Freak tornados hit my town and strewed wreckage everywhere, and things were back to normal within, like, a week. There haven’t been any large recessions, and nothing like a dangerous riot has happened anywhere near where I live. Covid was obviously a trip, and indeed it delayed my getting married for a while since embassies were closed, but even then we got a vaccine pretty quickly and life went on. In terms of my day to day experience, civilization feels like it’s going strong. Nor do I think it’s just me - when I think of my family, friends, etc., it’s very difficult to think of anyone who has been personally and majorly afflicted by world events. Nobody fired, or shot by cops, or proximate to a mass shooting, or… the list goes on.

I can think of two obvious objections here.

1. Cool brag, Mr. Privilege. But lots of people really are suffering badly, all the time.

2. My flavor of impending apocalypse happens suddenly, so it’s unsurprising that stuff looks fine now - it’ll look fine until it’s too late!

These are both totally reasonable objections. Let’s take them one by one.

Mr. Privilege

I agree that I’ve had a lucky decade. As a human being I’ve obviously had various personal misfortunes of varying magnitudes, but overall, yeah, things are going well. I also agree that many people have had a much worse time, for a wide variety of reasons. Some people’s homes have absolutely been destroyed by weather phenomena plausibly attributable to climate change, for instance. Lots of people have been deported from the country where they’ve lived for a long time. Various scientists across the public and semipublic sectors are suddenly in a terrible job market, despite high social demand for the outputs of their science.

Still, the mere existence of extremely unfortunate events doesn’t imply that the world sucks. And in fact, many of the biggest classes of extremely unfortunate event have been going down sharply over time. Child mortality is way down worldwide, in a way that’s totally unprecedented for the history of the human species. We have antibiotics, dishwashers, Roombas, microwave ovens, washing and drying machines, math meme pages, Warcraft 3 (again), breathable and comfortable clothing at extremely low prices, social standards that somehow actually permit wearing these even in semiprofessional situations, indoor plumbing, birth control pills… I don’t know. I could go on forever. Most of these things aren’t extremely new, but they do continue to spread throughout the world over time, along with things that are more relevant for the poorest parts of the world, but are very relevant there, like antimalarial nets and medicines.

It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any kind of principled way to form a ledger where there’s good stuff on one side and bad stuff on the other, and adjudicate an attitude about how well or badly stuff is going in the broadest possible terms. Some things just sort of end up more salient than others, through various mysterious processes. And for every major political bloc in the modern era, the salient stuff is what they think is terrible. Again, I don’t know. Seems like no way to live.

Any Day Now, We All Explode

Ok, yeah, sure. After 2am especially, I suddenly become sympathetic to this one. AI is actually spooky, and while I can’t get enough of the stuff, the arguments are pretty good that it’s a threat to the human species. Nor is it just AI. It’s perfectly plausible that nuclear war will suddenly break out, and 20 years ago before we had better data runaway climate change really did seem like it might make the planet uninhabitable (and it will, in fact, make the planet a worse place to live, not to mention uninhabitable for many other species). Maybe stuff is fine for now, and the end is nigh. But even if that turns out be true, well, there’s a famous quotation (by C.S. Lewis) for that:

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

If the world is great right now, but in peril, it’s probably better for most people to focus on the “it’s great” part most of the time, and for some people to try to reduce the peril, too. I try not to worry.

I’m not great at it.

Surprise! It’s Malaria Nets

Anyway. Obviously, this post has been much sloppier than my usual fare. The reason is the emotion behind it. Like everyone, I get swept up in the prevailing mood of the day, and it feels like the prevailing mood of the day, for everyone all the time, is bad. Or to be more precise, it feels like everyone’s walking around feeling like it’s appropriate to be feeling bad, like an underlying badness is apposite to the circumstances of existing on Earth in 2025, and they may or may not, at that particular moment, be living up to their feeling bad potential.

But again, I don’t know if there’s any sensible way to arrive at this conclusion rationally, and suspect there isn’t. Nor is there a sensible way to determine that the world is excellent and totally fine, using only reason. Rather, it strikes me as a matter of vibes, of choosing what to focus on.

So I am writing this, as a reminder to myself, that anyone passing by can read as well. It’s my own belief, free to be taken or left, supported only by the fact that, to me, it seems self evident.

It’s probably better to feel good about the world than bad about it, all else equal. It’s probably better to focus on lovely and interesting things, than boring and awful ones. It’s probably better to just be happy when you’re happy, without “be upset” as a lingering item on the day’s to do list.¹

And as for the world’s problems? As for the horrors, too numerate to name, always a brief leap of algorithmic service or quiet contemplation away?

Well. Pick one. Work on it. For me, it’s malaria nets. If you’ve got nothing better to do, join me. Now that I’ve got a child under 5, saving the life of one such child per approximately $5000 sounds like an even better deal than it did 10 years ago, when I started. And if those numbers don’t turn out to hold up, whatever. Bed nets keep people from being bitten by mosquitoes. If that’s the only evil I’m preventing, as a born-and-raised Floridian, so be it.

1. I’m not even saying that feeling bad is bad in general. If you’re feeling bad about your own life or own pain or anything like that, sure, reasonable, the calculus is different. But the weight of the world simply is not a good long-run target, I think, for this sort of thing.