Yep. While. Below the age of 16 can be potent, some of the most impacted people I have ever meet were well over that age when social media came along. This is not an age thing, it is the very core of those businesses.
While old style mass media could move in lock step, the lacl of that mechanism seems to just produce a flood of counter narratives to counter narratives. It provides the illusion of being informed but actually being more confused.
As they say, I would rather be uninformed than misinformed.
It is Taoist/Buddhist translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) who once said something along the line of; if the Taoists and traditional Buddhists where in charge, we wouldnt have built the world like we have today. It would be angled towards happiness and satisfaction rather than growth of the machine.
Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring.
I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch.
But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater.
There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.
In this case, we might not have an advanced civilization with modern medicine and technology. Herbs for healing, candles for lighting, letters for communication. (Perhaps I wouldn't be alive without modern medicine. I suppose it's not easy to be dead and happy.)
Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.
While they have the right idea about not leaning in to hard on the progress narrative, if it basically became a movement of apathy and non-science, it is basically regressing back to the stone age.
There is a possible middle ground but how we get there is anything but clear.
Buddhism was never intended to be the way you organized societies. It was a monastic tradition where you practiced outside of society with the support of people who had to live in the real world and do the dirty work of progress and civilization.
The goal of Buddhism is not happiness anyway it is the total cessation of suffering. If Buddhists are scoring high on happiness surveys they are doing it wrong.
While I want to agree with you, my critical mind finds flaws in this. The idea of a taoist in charge is an oxymoron: "would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones honored, or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail through the mud".
And the idea of a buddhist doing anything to change the world is also impossible to me, isn't it all about accepting reality as it is?
There is now practically a cliche saying in Zen. When hungry eat, when tired sleep. But in that exact same sense there should be, when something needs to be acted on, do it.
It isn't about total passivity, but trying to not to excessive force a position. If you fall in a river, to be passive is to float with it. But the smart move is to swim to the side. Don't try to swim against the flow but with it.
I am not an expert, but I think 'accepting reality' is not the correct term. It is 'seeing clearly the way things are'. That does not imply passivism, but it will enable more 'skilful action', not clouded by greed, hatred etc..
Looking at long term Buddhist societies I don't really see a difference from the disappointment of long term Christian societies when it comes to expecting the over all outcome to reflect and be overridden by the priorities in the base belief of the original thinker. I think people confuse those who go through the motions to move within a system with the original thinker who is probably incompatible with the system and would be unable to be a leader in it.
Tim heidecker summarised their thinking wonderfully.
"I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity”.
It is a combination of publisher lock in and folks attempting wild new stuff that breaks out of what AI stuff typically produces.
Earlier this year with a lot of luck, the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine suddenly got discovered because they are doing stuff that falls outside of conventional music styles.
They aren't unique in the experimental nature they are exploring but it has highlighted an hunger from audiences to find stuff outside of the median. Folks like Frank Zappa had to relentlessly advocate for themselves as they figured there was a middle ground between these two thing.
Walk into any library, book store, second hand shop or wherever they sell media. Look at the hundreds of thousands of book, albums, DVD and I wonder how many of those folks were doing it trying to make it big, grab attention or turn it into a career?
And that is a very VERY tiny slice of the entire pie. For everyone successful artist you find, there are hundreds or thousands that never got lucky or had the skills to make it. I put luck first deliberately.
A good example, based on the IBSN listings there are currently 158 million unique books. That is one unique book for every 53 people on the world, how many can you think of?
I love going to old book stores and pulling out something random, usually some paper back from the mid 60's/70's on a topic you probably never even thought of. How much time and effort went into writing that, editing, producing, marketing it? I look up the authors to if they ever made much of it all, about 99% of the time, their name doesn't turn anything up. Despite their published works, they could still be alive, they are already forgotten under the sheer volume of works out there.
There are TV shows I remember, they had whole crews working on it, actors, writers and producers. The only proof they exist online is about a paragraph or two, didn't even get a wiki page. To be appreciated by those close to you, that should be more than enough, but for some it has to be broader, I do not know why.
I think a part of it is that many people come into this world thinking it is a race. I say, IF and that is a very big if; if life is a race, it is a 100meter race and it doesn't matter what position you come in. Saunter your way, take the long way. And yet when you get to the finish line there are loads of people racing past mocking you and desperately trying to convince that "You think that is the finish line? Nah, this is marathon and the real goodies are there!". And so they keep running as fast as possible, wearing themselves out and getting exhausted to no end. The joke being that there is no other finish line.
You can be content in you, content in now. Just be chill... damn it!
I feel a part of this is that in any creative endeavor, you can never exactly capture what you want and thus have to leave something out. There are those that try to get it perfect, they never finish.
Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
> Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
That's basically where I landed. The idea being that making art is something I should do if I'm just trying to relax. Once the hobby starts looking like a second job, I know it's too much.
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