"I'm kinda proud of you"
My wife said this to me a couple nights ago in regards to me sticking wit Hive for over four years. While she doesn't read most of my posts, if any, of late, it is her who has the most visibility on what I have put into this. She also knows first-hand why I started in the first place and why I have put so much effort in. "Whys" are important and I think that for me, family has become the biggest reason to do anything that requires a great deal of work and by extension, this connects my work to many others.
Community is built around family and the family is built around individuals who opt-in to be part of that unit. Blood means very little in the grand scheme of things, even though we tend to have a cultural narrative that says, blood is thicker than water. However, it is of course natural to spend more time and energy on one's own family, than that of another, but I think that the energy spent ends up creating future bonds, new families.
Back in the day, people used to ask children, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and they would answer things like, nurse, doctor, vet, pilot, firefighter, teacher... I don't know what child would answer these days, an Instagram model?
I often think about what kind of world my daughter is going to grow up in and there is a lot of blur, as so much of the traditional work of the past is changing, with some of it going to disappear altogether. I do not expect that there will be many professional driving jobs twenty years from now, and I think that a lot of the traditional office jobs will disappear too, as AI manages more and more tasks with increasingly greater efficiency than any human can ever manage, let alone the average human.
I figure that the only way to prepare for the future is to try and make sure there is access to opportunity and while increasing opportunity for people in the future should be part of a community's model, I do not think it is wise to rely on it, as mostly, we proxy the responsibility to governments and corporations, that work in their best interest, not that of the community. I think this is why I am so keen to be a part of building a new framework for society, underpinned by a working economy that values community work, as well as that of individuals.
Rather outsourcing the future to others, I think more opportunity is created through developing and participating in community work that enables the creation of more opportunity. While there are inefficiencies, there is potential for value to be captured in those areas, by people who may just love working in those areas. Like most parents, I want my child to have a quality life where she is content and I think part of this is ensuring she has something to do, something that she finds meaningful - I don't know what that will be, it is too early to tell - but when the time comes, that is up to her.
While I know a lot of people are happily making the decision to not have children and for them that might work, I do think that having children can work as a connector to our community, one that traverses generations. I think that someone with children is more likely to take an interest in the future and the direction the world is taking, even if they do not help it improve. And, if we think that the future family health is correlated to the health of the family today, healthy children with healthy psychology will more likely gravitate toward similar to themselves, meaning that there is an evolutionary progression.
In the past, the strongest survived and this was largely based on physical condition, as much of the tasks done were physical and didn't require the same level of cognitive complexity as today. I think that in some way, we will regress toward that as practical skill that AI can't accomplish becomes more popular, but this will also require a high degree of understanding for planning and implementation. What it means to be "strong" has been evolving as we evolve and what is valuable at a given time is dependent on transitory conditions.
Sometimes, a person's skills can align with the times to be considered highly valuable and a decade later, redundant. This means that the skill to be able to flex with the conditions, identify the changing landscape, relearn and retrain skills, add new skills, having resiliency to support the need for change and the emotional demeanor to be able to take responsibility for personal development is part of what is required to be strong. But, in order to be able to use strength, there needs to be the space to flex, and part of this is the opportunity to utilize skills. If there is no reason to act, why act?
Coming to terms what our life means is part of maturing, but it doesn't mean that everyone is going to create a meaning that is helpful to the community or even themselves. A lot of us find meaning in the harmful and irrelevant, even though it feeds us a why condition.
For me personally, I couldn't have done most of the work I have done on Hive without the support of my wife, who gave me the space to act, the opportunity of time to apply to it. If she was a different person, I would be subjected to a different set of conditions, which might not have been conducive to having the time and space. And I think that this is what is important about family, as without it, we might not work in each other's best interests and as a result, limit our capabilities. In the case of children, this gets projected across generations.
Like it or not, our future opportunities are tied to our current actions and if we aren't working toward increasing our capabilities and that of the people around us, we will limit ourselves more and more, until we are completely isolated and incapable to make space. Conditions will change to the point where we are unable to move at all. Strength isn't only the ability to stand ground, it is also knowing when to move.
The future is not set in stone.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]