Morning musings on the state of the world.

I've been working on my most recent book the last few weeks; I look forward to pulling it together, collaborating with Scott David, and the folks at Narrative Ink.

It's called The Great Irony of Technology - the thesis is that most people are far better off than we or our people were 20, 50, 100 years ago, but we feel worse off. Others, like Easterbrook, Rosling, Diamandis, and Pinker have come before me on this topic. My take is that we are creating technologies that are eminently powerful - it amounts to a powerful magic wand. It can give us anything we wish for. And we wish for the wrong things. The book details that case; I won't make it here.

But lately I've been thinking about the solutions. James Nestor wrote a great book on breathing that contains a lot of good research and practices to improve our breathing. But everyone seems gravitates to one outlandish simple idea with potentially big impact - you should tape your mouth closed when you sleep.?(See the great Men Talking Mindfulness interview Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider did with Nestor, to learn a bit about breathing, and why you might consider this breathing hack.)

What's my equivalent - simple, effective, and sufficiently provocative that it will get people's attention?

I don't know. The current ideas I've been thinking about are simple, but not provocative.

1) I think we should want the right things, and adopt technologies that give us that.

For example, since I write about how good things are, but how we perceive the world to be very bad, I curate my media diet carefully. I still check a few news sites, but I know they will feature "if it bleeds it leads" stories. So I make sure to balance that by browsing science sites, and consciously seeking out good news. I really enjoy goodnewsnetwork.org, for example. I think JJ Snow has a similar habit. I read local news, which tends to be far a far more accurate lens on news that is more impactful to me and the people in those communities than the big megaphones we usually attend to.

I try to use technology daily to interact with thoughtful people around the world, in forums created by Atlantic Council, People Centered Internet, and several other orgs which I am honored to be a part of. That also includes personal email correspondence, and some occasional musings like this, posted to my only social media platform, and the feed LinkedIn provides me.

These habits, I hope, give me a more balanced accurate view of the world, which is what I want my technology to do for me.

2) We need to be more grateful for our current life. We are on a hedonic treadmill enmeshed in a culture where success is the next smartphone; not the amazing one currently in our pocket. It's about the people and experience of our lives, not the things. I had fun thinking through this yesterday with Ken Harvey over coffee. (For the record, I had a manly black coffee, and he had some kind of caramel, whip cream mocha thingy; but he still managed to pull of the look of a real man drinking coffee way better than me ;)

3) We need to actively work on making the world a better place. We can't sit back passively and hope it will work out for us and the others in this world. I like this quote:

“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.” – T.S. Eliot?

Working on the world will give us a sense of purpose, and importantly a sense of agency.?Perhaps even some dignity and self respect.?It may not gain you many followers, but is that what really need??Churchill said -

“After all, this material progress, in itself so splendid, does not meet any of the real needs of the human race.”

4) We need to see the good in the world, have hope, and make the best we can with what we’ve got, where we are. Yes, times are hard, for many people. A quick look at CNN or Fox this morning will show you the remains of Hurricane Ida, Afghanistan, hospitals stuffed with COVID patients, or the far away rape/murder of a young girl. But last week I drove through the Henri storm, and I passed hundreds of bucket trucks driving into the storm, to keep up the electric grid we all so depend on. I haven't seen a single news story on that kind of positive mobilization in either Henri or Ida. Yes, we have our crises, but Rebecca Solnit, in A Paradise Built in Hell shows us that people put aside their differences during crises, to help their neighbors and strangers.

I know many of us wish that income inequality, racial injustice, technological unemployment, the opioid epidemic, the Covid epidemic, and our polarized American culture… heck the last 5-6 years…never happened.?We sound like Frodo, who said to Gandolf:

“I wish none of this had happened.”

Wise Gandolf responded:

“So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

It’s important to remember that Tolkein, who barely survived WWI when he was sent home sick from the Battle of the Somme in WWI (the rest of his battalion was slaughtered afterward) wrote these lines in the midst of the turmoil of WWII, when tens of millions were dying, whole countries, industries, cultures, institutions and civilizations lay in smoking ruin, and his own son was deployed in the British Royal Air Force (which itself had massive casualty rates).

So what is my 'tape your mouth shut when you sleep’ life hack that fits not into a 300 page book, but into 144 characters??Right now all I’ve got is a seemingly banal personal motto I’ve been adopting:

“Life is hard, but good, and getting better, especially if we intentionally set out to make it so.”

But this hack is so mundane that I suspect it will get lost in the noise. Hans Rosling, in his powerful book Factfulness, opined on how we consume information in faulty ways. We are overlooking “fundamental improvements that are world-changing but are too slow, too fragmented, or too small one-by-one to ever qualify as news.” We miss -

“the secret silent miracle of human progress.”

But, naively, I'll keep plodding away, writing tl/dr books, hoping some day I will stumble into some drop dead simple but provocative solution that will help others. I could try blaming the unethical social media platforms, politicians, big business, news or the Russians...oh wait...those positions are already taken. Instead of taking the easy road, I guess I'll just stick to my MO of massive goal-oriented research on hard important problems, until I find my own "taping the mouth" trick. Sigh.

These are the things I’m mulling over, this morning, as I sit here reading, writing, and drinking my coffee.

I’d love to hear some thoughts from a few folks on this, if anyone has time and interest. Perhaps from some of the powerful constructive hopeful voices which I try to tune into in this world, including the folks above and people like Daniel Hulter, Eric Sapp, David Bray, Melissa Flagg and SO many others, for whom I am eminently grateful that technology has given me the opportunity to know.