#63 - The Next Chapter
Completed it, progress, and tricky
84% of the World’s Population owns a smartphone. That’s 6.64 billion people. The next chapter for humanity is well and truly here.
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Completed it
Every technological advance in history has changed us. Clocks made us experience time in units. The written word enabled a depth of reflection not previously available. Smartphones have changed the game again.
Phones are great. Let’s start there.
They’re a wonderful agent for equality. Musk, the world’s richest man, can’t do much more with his smartphone than a teenager in the slums of Mumbai. Both have access to an abundance of tools and information. It’s about to get even better. The internet increasingly means a smartphone is now all one needs to change their situation.
That’s not all. In drizzly London I can now see the day’s weather with a couple of taps. Life changing.
Our lives have become frictionless. What’s not to love?
Well, a few things.
Progress
“Progress” is a funny thing. Look back at human history and farming stands out. It’s when we crossed the Rubicon. We settled down. A big move for a roaming species of Hunter Gatherers.
Farming changed everything.
Like the smartphone, it helped reduce the friction of life. For the first time in human history we gained complete control of our food chain. We grew crops. We raised animals. We settled down.
Life? Completed it.
But did we? In the wonderful Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari argues just the opposite.
Farming was the worst thing that ever happened to us.
As hunter gatherers we spent the days roaming. We ate a vast array of foods and lived in harmony with nature. As hunter gatherers we were content. We know this as today hunter gatherers still live in native tribes. Research has found they’re the happiest people on earth.
Once we settled down our days changed.
Turns out farming is hard work. Hunting, resting, and playing, became many hours of ploughing. The variety in our diets disappeared. The new settlements turned out to be breeding grounds of disease. We became unhappy.
Tricky
Fast forward 12,000 years to today.
Progress has skyrocketed. Smartphones took just 20 years to reach most of the planet. Imagine what the next 20 years hold.
It begs the question: What are we optimising for?
We’re optimising for easier. We’re not optimising for happier. It makes sense. We’re hardwired to do so. Who survived on the plains of Eastern Africa 50,00 years ago? The human focused on easier or the one focused on happier? Happy doesn’t catch the day’s food.
But at some point we won the game. We cracked feeding ourselves. We cracked surviving predators. But the drive for easy never stopped.
So where does that leave us? For the privileged inhabitants of the Western World survival is much easier. Food is abundant and society has many of life’s perils covered. What’s really tricky, in 2021, is happiness.
Happiness was never supposed to be a problem. Put a human in their natural environment, like the Waorani people of the Amazon, and they’re happy. But somewhere we broke the circuit. Now, more than ever, happiness is what we seek.
Smartphones make so many things easier. But they do make it harder to be happy.
We have access to billions of people but are lonelier than ever.
We have more answers than we could ever consume but have lost sight of the question.
We’re living in the age of connectivity. But we’ve never been less connected to ourselves and our loved ones.
Who knows what happens next. It will be fascinating. I, for one, am optimistic. We’re not so bad at solving big problems when we put our mind to it. The future is bright. And in the meantime? One can always disconnect to reconnect.
My Week in Books📚
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
A wonderful book. How Stalin became Stalin. The shadowy leader of the Soviet Union in WWII. His reign was bloody and terrible. A true villain of the 20th century.
But he was a product of his upbringing. Abused by an alcoholic father. Embroiled in daily warfare on the streets of his hometown. It’s hardly a surprise he developed such disdain for human life. It doesn’t make his actions any less terrible. But who am I to judge him from my sheltered upbringing?
Niche Down by Christopher Lochhead and Heather Clancy
An easy read. The idea is great. There’s so much value in going niche. “Fall in love with the problem.” It is, thought, one of those books where if you’ve read the title you’ve read the book.
I’ll be updating the books I’ve read this year here. Any recommendations? Let me know! See 2021’s books here.
A Final Thought 💡
“The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy—it’s all that matters.”
― Audrey Hepburn
that audrey quote! as i resign from a job i’ve grown to hate next week 🙂🙏🏼