Reflections on Intrinsic Value, Tech, and Variety
Many people enamored with tech fantasize about some new machinery, invention, or capability. Putting fractal bullshit, planned obsolescence, and climate change aside, there are diminishing returns when it comes to the excitement value of new inventions or experiences.
When things go from novel to normal, they become just as mundane and boring as the previous normalcy.
Planes, once novel, are now normal. For many people, flying is as mundane as driving a car.
For those frequent flyers, riding a horse is likely to be as novel as flying is to those who have never flown. For me, doing laundry by hand is more exciting than flying in a plane.
Novelty and variety must be considered when understanding intrinsic value.
Having a beautiful home might be novel at one point, and then completely mundane after a few months. Emotionally, the peak turns into a plain, and you’re at the same place where you started. In “Getting older” by Billie Eilish, she says, “Things I once enjoyed just keep me employed now. Things I’m longing for, one day I’ll be bored of.” Novel becomes normal, and your emotional state is the same as when you started.
Of course, none of this matters unless you’re capable of feeling emotions deeply to begin with.
It’s not one specific thing or another that keeps you happy and engaged; it’s variety combined with the capacity for feeling deeply. And both of which are systematically stripped away by the Extrinsic Motivation Complex in the form of factory schooling and assembly-line style jobs.
One of the most passionate stories I’ve ever heard was by my friend Jason who was telling me how fascinating the sludge from a waste processing center was. He said it was one of the best jobs he ever had.
There are exceptions of course, to the variety rule. Many people like to focus on just one thing and develop excellence in that area. In that case, the novelty comes from the new levels of skill and/or knowledge.
When we understand that variety and excellence are a huge source of value to people’s lives, then we can understand that the factory approach to life — the same repetitive job everyday, or the same forced schooling every day — is a hindrance to a life worth living, rather than an instrument to it.
In many ways, people’s jobs in the EMC are their lives. And this is the result we get when we see material questions as figure, and all else as ground. This is what happens when the question “how do we get people to make all these things?” (Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell) is the center of your inquiry. You get dull lives. This is what happens when you don’t center the deeper question “what makes life worth living?”