Hello, I’m Pine Sap and I want to help people prepare to face adversity and grow strength through developing the skills needed to survive in any position you may find yourself in.
Society seems to be cyclical. Polybius discovered this through his study of the Roman Empire leading to his theory of “Anacyclosis”. It would appear civilization is on a repeating bell curve of progress, but its difficult to discern when and how the peaks and slumps will occur.
Our desire for novelty was an evolutionary advantage up until very recently. The dopamine hit we receive from new experiences is being preyed upon by corporations to maximize the “attention economy” they’ve constructed which helps bolster gathering data analytics they can use to target advertisements to your niche interests.
The most pertinent example of this is the short-form, endless scrolling content popularized by TikTok. The algorithm quickly learns what content engages you and serves you more of it. This can lead to being caught in an echo chamber of agreeability, or being served content that enrages you to boost engagement.
All of this seems to be culminating into an economic model that has been called “techno feudalism” by Yanis Varoufakis. This is the digital equivalent to feudalism in the Middle Ages where land owners had serfs to tend their land for them. In technofeudalism, the general public are tending to digital growth with their attention, time and energy being given freely, without any real ownership over what they produce or consume.
This was evidenced by the complete lack of repercussions for giant tech companies using innumerable copyrighted sources when training their artificial intelligence models. Rules for thee, not for me… any fine they may face would pale in comparison to the potential profit that could be generated.
We must realign our values and priorities in the long-term if we are to see a sustainable future. The Phoebus cartel came about in the 1930s, composed of various light manufacturers, with the goal of making lightbulbs less efficient. They intentionally made their products worse so that they could sell more of them as they went out faster.
That idea spread like wildfire and has now become the basis for “planned obsolescence”, where companies try to minimize the time between consumer purchases. Henry Ford only made vehicles painted black initially, but then General Motors realized by selling cars in various colors they could capitalize on our desire for novelty. They released a new color each year, and it worked. The average car ownership span in 1934 was 5 years, and in 1955 it was down to 2 years.
The seven deadly sins seem to indicate the primary character flaws in humanity. I believe they are the main reason that the actual Latin translation for the word “utopia” is “no place”. Overcoming the character flaws we find within ourselves can help lead to self-actualization.
In Ecclesiastes, there is a mistranslation regarding the phrase “life is meaningless”. The last word in Hebrew translates to “hevel”, which more closely means something like a vapor or smoke. Therefore, it isn’t that life is meaningless, it is that it is hard to make sense of.
Whether or not you believe in any particular religion isn’t of any concern to me, but I’m sure we can all agree that there is a considerable amount of human understanding and experience transmitted to present day through these materials.