> I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future.
One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems.
An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much.
In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did.
Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.
One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems.
An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much.
In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did.
Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.