Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/showerthoughts

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I've just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)

Man, this isn't a world I want to live in. I'm so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.

Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I'm only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser's game...

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[–] theunknownmuncher 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The technological progress is what is not normal. Modern humans have been walking around, living their lives for 300,000 years. Agriculture is less than 12,000 years old, basically still brand new in comparison to the span of time that people just like us have existed for.

For nearly all of human history, generation after generation after generation for thousands of years lived very similar lifestyles with marginally improved, but familiar technology.

It is only in the last few hundred years, a tiny tiny sliver of the human timeline, that we have seen rapid technological progress that has completely changed the way people live their lives from one generation to the next. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations now are seemingly happening several times within an individual's lifetime.

We have barely even had any time to adapt to agriculture, let alone capitalism or air travel or instant global telecommunication or AI, etc. So don't be too hard on yourself about feeling fatigued. I feel it too. We are living in an alien world that we aren't really "meant for". You're "supposed to be" a hunter-gatherer.

[–] theunknownmuncher 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Shit, forget phones and AI, let's go even more basic. Your brain still has essentially the same neocortex that people around 250,000 years ago had, and it is evolved to only be capable of processing/understanding a maximum of around 150 interconnected social relationships, the number of people that a hunter-gatherer 250,000 years ago could expect to know and interact with over their lifetime.

We haven't had time to adjust to meeting and knowing more than about 150 people total in your lifetime. How many contacts are in your phone right now? I had like 500 facebook friends as a teenager and they were all people I knew outside of social media... Our current lives are extremely different than the life that our brain is equipped for.