Do We Already Have Too Much? \ stacker news ~AskSN

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Technology gives us more for less, but what if we already have too much?

Endless food and entertainment options are making us sick (physically + mentally), and making more at lower costs won't help.

Those are two domains where you could argue the challenge of "scaling" is already solved.

Now the question is how do we deal with the abundance when we're programmed for a world of scarcity?

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97 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 3h

At least at this stage of human development, hardship is not hard to come by.

I haven't had much hardship in my life, but the two or three serious hardships have usually resulted in growth and good things in my life.

I don't think that over-abundance is too much of an issue really. Most people will have challenges presented to them through the rough edges of life.

Perhaps the thing that our relative abundance can do for us is teach is to see to the challenges we do face as valuable events.

75 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 4h

I think we're making the wrong tradeoffs, more so than just having too much in general.

25 sats \ 2 replies \ @kr OP 4h

What trade-offs should we be making instead?

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 4h

I think it's just a different framing of your point.

We're overconsuming things that make us unwell. There isn't too much food, for instance. Plenty of people go without adequate nutrition and they'd be better off if we weren't bidding it away from them.

Consuming less of those things would allow us to enjoy higher quality goods of the same kind, different kinds of goods, more leisure time, and/or save more.

There's no universal right answer, but properly valuing one's wellbeing would lead to changes like that.

35 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 3h

It seems like we've nearly eliminated famine, probably aided by the popularization of shipping containers in the 1960s.

While there is still substantial malnutrition in the world, it's going to be hard to parse through that data to figure out how much of it is people struggling to find food vs. people choosing to eat food that isn't nutritious.

But looking at the total number of calories the world produces each year, we certainly have enough to give all 8 billion people the 2,000 or so that they need (though distribution still needs some work). This wasn't the case until ~50 years ago.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 2h

Yes

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @2053456d48 41s

Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder. It's upto the intelligent we use to utilizes resources and materials. Depending on the circumstances I think we can decide on scarcity and abundance in nature. Well that's want I believe and it's a great Post!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 1h

I think we need a complete inversion of reasoning, similar to how I rub most entrepeneurs the wrong way because I'm from the "data is a liability" camp, rather than "data is the new oil" or whatever The Economist sold you.

The important number isn't two thousand calories per day; it's how much you excrete, excrude, and expel per financial quarter, and whether the resulting output gets used in any intelligent way. Industrial capitalism profits this problem away by seeing that the firsthand consumer paid for goods this week, and thus producing some amount of goods to sell the next; and urban civilisation copes with the individual productions by providing various waste management services. So I'm not too pressingly worried about industrial capitalism and its future, if you'll excuse the reference...

However, our thinking is still lacks the holistic perspective. We're still chasing the two thousand calories, rather than asking ourselves, "am I giving the world some good shit?"

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @fred 3h

We already at capacity in some industry. So much that scaling will be setting a death sentence but the human mind knows no boundary and the need to innovate and find loopholes is where he excel at is what his good at.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 2h

the human mind knows no boundary

nah we humans are bounded; you must be thinking of Boltzmann Brains.