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What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools
Those who are convinced that there is more to things spend their time chasing it and not finding it often as not, and those who are convinced there isn't find themselves frustrated at the abyss.
When you read books about a utopia without material demands on our time, the key aspect seems to be how nobody is particularly bereft, only mildly discontent. The utopia we envision in other words comprises our current world, just shorn of what we’d recognise as work.
But its more than that. Most of the annoyances with the modern world, especially in the more talkative online spheres, seems to stem from its seemingly inadequate efforts to affect the outcomes of us especially as our institutions are growing so much bigger than we can control.
When we look at the degrowth agendas that proliferate, they too seem to be nostalgic for a very specific version of the past. The visions are filled with communities of mutually loving people, the elimination of middlemen from transactions, where everyone knows the true you, the nonexistence of bureaucracy, the existence of a social good that’s identifiable by looking around. Essentially, the simple life.
Instead today we’re surrounded by alien structures, built by people we don’t know, working alongside those with whom you have a passing ephemeral relationship at best, stuck with an expertise that has little to do with savannah survival, doing a portion of a portion of a portion of the work to move the big wheel, detached from your relationships because of time constraints, and generally feeling as if you’re too smart to not notice an abyss but too stupid to find a way to cross it.
So we try to find our way to make peace with the things we had to do to get those space age tools, even as we dislike what we had to do to get them.
We tried schooling people individually, sometimes collectively, occasionally communally, but had to resort to more industrialised methods as the numbers got larger. And in this expansion we also started disliking the fact that industrialised methods take away the individuality.
We tried jobs out by apprenticeships, by walking into offices and finding your vocation, by starting working somewhere and proving your mettle, but as the numbers grew large enough we started to realise that maybe we needed better methods of selection, credentialling, and hoops to jump through.
We tried governing through simple rules applied semi illegibly, which over time had to get more codified and better elaborated as societies themselves grew larger and more complex in their component activities; and the fight between wanton lawsuits and deterrence led us to the point where we need to elaborate exact instructions of how a child shouldn’t eat a plastic bag atop a sweet box.
We tried curing diseases based on the patient and the background and the symptoms and the disease patterns themselves, to the point where with the large influx of patients necessitated rule based systems (spend only 15 mins with the patient, only do a blood test if they demonstrate specific symptoms) which make it worthless unless you’re at the middle of a (supposedly extant) bell curve.