After dropping Smallsteps into the first day of her "music camp" where she will be with a couple friends and a larger group of kids, I had a coffee with one of the mother. I am not even sure what they are going to do in the classes, but it will be better than her hanging about the house for the week. Summer holidays are long for kids (about ten weeks) in Finland, so this year for the first time we have signed her up to a few activities, each of which has friends involved too.
So at coffee, I was my usual depressive self, as we talked about the state of the world, educational children's skills (or lack thereof) and opportunities in the future, and how the economy is geared toward the degradation of society.
Fun for me at least.
What was interesting is that the mother, despite her being about as intelligent and educated as people get, is at a loss as to what to do about her own children. For instance, her son who is now an early teen has gone from being social and musical, to being immersed in a screen and unable concentrate to learn a piece of music at the piano - In less than two years.
Her story is familiar amongst other parents I have spoken with.
This is more than teen changes, because it isn't just teens going through puberty experiencing it, as children much younger are facing the same impacts of over consumption and stimulation. Highly addictive platform design, coupled with highly compelling (but ultimately useless) content designed to keep people scrolling, clicking, and consuming like drug addicts.
Her parents are heavily affected by Alzheimer's with one in care already, but we were talking about how the brain works and how it breaks down. But with the daily tasks that have become habitual, the brain has highways of connections so the wide thoroughfares keep functioning the longest. I believe it is part of the reason that so many old soldiers remain mentally sharp, when they have lived a relatively simple, structured, repetitive life. Even as the brain breaks down, the highways still have enough pathways to keep functioning.
As I was saying the other day here, the body is always learning, and the brain is part of the body. It will build the road network based on experience and reinforce based on repetition. From a young age now though, that experience and repetitive behaviour isn't activity, but passivity. The highways are built to consume, not create. To sit, not move. And I believe this means that as the brain starts to cut connections with age, these people don't have wide neural pathways that can absorb disruption, and they will lose what is considered nowadays basic functions quicker, and at you get ages. Early onset Alzheimer's will be increasingly common.
We are undermining the very things that make is human, but we keep building tools to soften the blow and distract us so we don't notice. Many will call for a redefinition of what "being human" means, but what we are actually doing is outsourcing humanity to machines, while turning ourselves into little more than bags of flesh. So many are searching for meaning, but we are making ourselves obsolete and meaningless.
The solution to this is pretty easy, but it means fundamentally changing the way we operate in the world. We'd have to pivot away from seeing the accumulation of wealth as the indicator success and the incentive to create, and instead see the growth of human wellbeing and opportunity as the driving force, and the activity that is rewarded. We work on incentive, we work on reward, which is why those platforms and games are so addictive, because they flood our reward centres and make us believe we are winning, even though the only prize we get is a loss.
But they generate money in the economy, so it is acceptable.
Our economic focus is completely wrong, as we have incentivised activities that harm us, and disincentivised activities that could help us. For instance, how often have you heard that clean tech solutions are "too expensive" to use? Have you ever considered the absolute absurdity of that statement at the macro level? That an economy functions regardless of price or what it is spent on? But this false proposition of "too expensive" keeps us doing what enriches a handful of people, at the life expense of humanity.
Society is crumbling globally, with physical, mental and social health at all time lows. Which is incredible considering how much we know, how much we can treat, how capable we are to improve our wellbeing. We should be deeply ashamed at the state of our world currently, and the majority of us ashamed by the condition we are in. We have so much information at our fingertips to be better as an individual and useful within a community, but what do we do with it?
To each their own?
It just doesn't cut it. We are all in this together and while we can each choose how we behave, because incentives aren't aligned to our wellbeing, we end up choosing what costs us all. We are highly influenced by our environment and it has been designed to compel us to consume to our continued detriment, and to accept it as the only way it can be. It is bullshit. The way we are organised is to maximise resource wealth and control for the few, but isn't the only way we can organise ourselves. But we are brainwashed, suffering, but expecting that someone with authority is going to save us.
They won't.
The only thing that can change the direction we are on, is us through how we behave.
Taraz
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