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038 – what I see around

ricvolpe
May 1, 2022
229 Comments

Today I want to journal about two questions. In attempting to answer these two questions I want to reflect about what I value and is meaningful to me. Often I feel disconnected from meaning for me, which links to a feeling of not wanting to do anything and just be passive. Often I feel too impatient of getting things done that I get disconnected from meaning, then nothing matters again and I want to just do nothing. This is confusing and sometimes concerning to me.

I am open to the idea of just doing nothing, but I do feel in my heart an energy that wants to do things. I feel it is more a matter of preserving and directing it correctly. Therefore, today I don’t want to answer these questions in a very analytical way, but rather more following my intuition and forming answers as they come. Anyway, the two questions shaping this journal entry are:
1 – What do you see around?
2 – What do you want to see more of?

What do you see around?

In a way, this is a tricky question because there are so many things that we do no see, which are going to shape our environment tremendously. For example, Visakanv talks about the next 3-5 billion people that are going to come online soon and shape the internet culture and its discourse. This is something we cannot see around, because it is not there, yet it is going to happen soon, because all the fundamental building blocks are there.

Something that I see around, is a fairly strong self-referential attitude towards life and thinking. I see many people asserting, claiming and pushing forward their worldview fairly strongly. I see this on Twitter and I see this on real life. Intellectually humility and regular acknowledgment of all the things that we don’t know and that are outside of our control doesn’t seem to be particularly popular nor rewarded in our culture and society. It is an attitude that gets cornered, because once you start interacting with the world from that position of ignorance and humility, you get bombarded by tons of messages trying to persuade you to believe and act on their idea and principles. Arrogance, I see a lot of arrogance. That’s one thing that I see. And also, I feel like some of it is useful to push people forward, but much of it is misleading and pushes people backwards.

Another thing that I see around is a great preoccupation with short-term trends. What is going to happen tomorrow about this thing? What are today’s news? Twitter’s obsession with trends reflect exactly what’s happening in the moment? I see us being very short-term oriented. We want to feel productive and meaningful today. We want to feel successful and achieving our goals today. You can manipulate people pretty strongly towards what you want them to do by finding ways of making them feeling great in the short term, especially feeding their momentary belief about their identity. I make you feel special in the moment and we don’t care if that’s an illusion.

What else do I see? I see a world where the wise, those with common wisdom and knowledge, are silent and sometimes act instead of speaking. I see a world where the loudest are the most anxious and there is a of talking that is urged, shouts, disrespects and over-represents certain categories of people in the world. I see a world where people that don’t do, have more time speak. I see a world where speaking is rewarded more than doing. And to some extent is important to engage with others rather than isolating, but I also see a world where we engage with each other very shallowly. We throw claims and stereotype at each other and don’t acknowledge different points of view. It is like we are a bunch of people all standing on towers of the comfort of civilisation

I will, for now, end answering this question with a footnote. This was not at all what I was expecting to write. These are very sociological answers and I was expecting something a little more object-level about hardware, technology and infrastructure. I think I was expecting that because it feels something that it is easier to validate, in a sense. But I guess it is interesting that once I went by intuition and listened to my intuitive mind I came up with things that are more subjective and less demonstrable. I think that’s okay.

Actually, I changed my mind just now. Instead of moving on to the second question, let’s dwindle a little more on this one. Just 10 minutes more. Then I will answer the second question in the next journal entry. What else do I see around?

An interesting follow up on this question is asking what do we mean by around. Which leads to an interesting consideration. What are the “places” around me that I observe and from which I can derive conclusions? They are

  • Twitter Inc the company, which I work for
  • My family living in Italy
  • My wife I live with in Glasgow
  • My wife’s classmates studying Psychology at the University of Glasgow
  • Twitter the platform, on which I hang out from time to time
  • Friend I met in the past, scattered around the world, whom I chat with from time to time, mostly on WhatsApp and sometimes I meet in person
  • Some scattered online communities like the School for Social Design, the Interintellect, the Bluesky community, the Shamanic Coders Guild, which are mostly on Discord

By far, the space that seem spanning the widest is Twitter. Which, as Jack said, it is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness. Still, the people I follow on Twitter are a limited bunch, which strongly shapes my views of what is going on. But this is far less limited than any other of the spaces I listed, with the only exception perhaps being the spaces in the Discord servers.

Which leads me to the reflection that if I want to see what is around, I may need to look a little more broadly. I may need to broaden my twitter following and find a way to observe what is going on in different communities and slices of society. This ain’t easy, especially as something continuous that can inform conscious and subconscious awareness of phenomena. Travelling could also help, as in being nomadic and meeting people in different places, perhaps people met on Twitter to go more in-depth with knowing and acknowledging their reality and linking them to what they present online.

What else am I seeing? I see a constant technological development, that is, however, more oriented towards creating great solution rather than solving problem. I see people a little disconnected from solving problems, especially problems around them and in society. Surely, they solve the little problems with their devices and the solutions that they are building. But I see so much effort going into local endeavour, whose goals and purpose and direction and set impatiently and in isolation from a society who is confused and self-conflicted recursively at all levels.

2 minutes to go. Let’s do some quick rapid fire of what else do I see…. What else, ric? What else do you see around?

  • I see at least 40% of people busy doing meaningless jobs and perhaps also spending most of their time in meaningless way
  • I see a bunch of people living by social norms, having things that they believe in and trying very hard to make these into norms that guide and dominate society
  • I see sunny weather and it is so beautiful and make me so happy
  • I see people feeling lonely, hopeless and depressed
  • I see too many things going on that aren’t explained, digested and informed
  • I see disconnections, everywhere
  • I see huge opportunities and changes in the sphere where inter-subjective, soft meaning meeting the hard technology infrastructure of computing and bits sending

🤷

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