

Leisure, Excellence, and Happiness - jlipps
http://www.jonathanlipps.com/blog/2015/02/blogging-borgmann-tccl-chapter-18-leisure-excellence-and-happiness/

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heurist
Happiness can be induced chemically. I imagine future societies will have
clean drugs to enable safe perpetual happiness in an existence where humans
are to machines as dogs are to humans, humans don't have to labor for
resources, and existential depression is the main cause of death.

I don't think people look out far enough when projecting the future. Or maybe
I look too far out.

~~~
civilian
> I imagine future societies will have clean drugs to enable safe perpetual
> happiness

I was going to argue this point, but you solved later in the sentence: " and
existential depression is the main cause of death."

The easiest way to resolve this inconsistency is that there are multiple kinds
of happiness. I like this description: [http://sensophy.com/the-holy-trinity-
of-happiness/](http://sensophy.com/the-holy-trinity-of-happiness/) Happinesses
are Pleasant, Good and/or Meaningful. Your imagined future wouldn't contain
anything meaningful.

~~~
kazagistar
Meaningful might be a finite resource.

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otakucode
>say to make more money and pursue a higher standard of living

There is no evidence that increasing the amount of labor a person engages in
can have any effect upon improving their standard of living. Since 1980,
compensation of workers has been totally divorced from the value of the work
they provide to their employers. Whether they earn their company $100,000 a
year or $1,000,000 a year, they will be paid mostly the same. It is more
valuable to companies to suppress the 'market rate' of valuable positions than
it is to lose individuals due to underpayment.

It seems to me that very few people realize the consequences technology has
had upon daily life. It has radically increased the productivity of
individuals - and guaranteed they see no benefit from it. It has expanded
their work life to encompass more and more of their total life. It has
contributed to workers being seen as interchangable, disposable cogs. It has
destroyed economic mobility entirely (on the national scale).

It has also inspired in the whole of society (so far as I can tell) an
unreasonable faith in a sort of thought process that I've seen best described
as 'systems thinking'. People are willing to lie down and accept as immutable
any sort of 'process' or 'policy' that is ever defined. If it is 'policy' that
you must sit in an uncomfortable seat, well then you simply have to accept it.
You can't hold the person who provided you with the seat responsible, they're
simply following the policy. And policy is formed by, supposedly, very well-
informed beings of wide understanding who could not possibly explain
themselves to regular people. When someone suggests that people should not be
restricted in a particular way, the very first question they will hear is "Why
should people be allowed to do X?" Restriction is the assumed norm. Each
action a person can take, whether in their work life or personal, must be
justified as a useful and integral part of the overall 'system' of society.

I fell in love with computers when I was 9 years old. But I studied philosophy
alongside CS. While I still spend both my work and personal life working with
technology, I try to do so in ways that do not cause me to fall into those
philosophical tar-pits that seem to have ensnared nearly everyone else. I was
a teenager in the 1990s. I still hold on to some of the hopes for technology
ushering in a better future. Hopefully we're simply suffering from some
growing pains and before long we'll look back at this time period and say
'what was wrong with those people? Why did they let employers yolk them like
slaves and wring profit margins out of them simply because they used a
computer to generate titanic amounts of value for the company?' We would think
it very odd if an employer proposed paying someone less because they were
going to use a hammer to build a chair. But if someone is going to use a
computer to do 300x as much work as someone doing a thing manually, we find
the idea that they should be paid 300x as much similarly nonsensical. Why?

~~~
civilian
For wages, it's a supply and demand thing. It's not just that a few people are
300x more productive, it's that most people are now 300x productive. I don't
hold anything special by being able to login, type, email, and use Word and
Excel.

I share your outrage at people's willingness to follow rules, but I've always
thought it was because of our autocratic education system and the
fearmongering media. People are discouraged from taking risks (even risks with
probably beneficial outcomes) everyday, and sometime they let it get beat out
of them. I don't think that computers are responsible for that, it's a just
generic psychological conditioning. And in my more pessimistic moments, I
think that some people just don't care.

~~~
omalleyt
I completely agree with you. Our primary education system is in no small part
based on the Prussian system, which was developed after losing a battle to
French, with the purpose of raising children into troops that would hold the
line even in the face of certain death. This autocratic system of education is
sometimes cited as enabling the rise to power of the Nazi party.

