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

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2193 sats \ 36 comments \ @kr 12 Sep AskSN

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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183 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 12 Sep

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.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 22h

Yeah I don’t mean to imply we won’t have hardship in the future, just that the kind of hardship might evolve from “I can’t get enough food to survive” to “I must figure out how to throttle my hard-wired desire for salt, sugar, and fat”.

And that’s a very different problem technology may have to solve for.

133 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 14h

I didn't take it that way (that we won't have hardship in the future).

I was thinking about how it can feel like the hardship has shifted (not running from bears and barbarians, not scrabbling in the dirt for food to avoid starvation) to new hardship (as you define it: how to throttle my hard-wired desire for salt, sugar, fat), but maybe there is still plenty of real hardship, and we don't need to worry too much about these more quotidian things.

There's this term I think about a lot: good fortune wreck. I don't know who came up with it.

In arctic exploration, there was a famous wreck where Edward Parry had to abandon his ship, the Fury, on a beach on Somerset Island. The ship had a large amount of stores because they had been planning on staying in the arctic for some years. While the ship was wrecked, they managed to save a lot of these supplies, which they piled on the beach.

The beach became known as Fury Beach and many other future expeditions used it as a saving grace when things went poorly for them.

Someone in some arctic journal or other called it a good fortune wreck. It's not a pollyanna mentality, but rather a mentality that the disasters that afflict us can often becomes sources of good fortune.

How is this connected to your question? not really, beyond the fact that I think there's still plenty of hardship in life.

103 sats \ 8 replies \ @optimism 12 Sep

Abundance of bad food is like abundance of toxic waste in your garden.

Scaling by sacrificing quality is easy (and profitable, if you can get away with it.) The challenge is to scale without making that sacrifice, in the face of insatiable greed.

We don't have enough of the right stuff.

100 sats \ 7 replies \ @kr OP 22h

Well said, how do we get more of the right stuff and less of the bad stuff at scale?

10 sats \ 6 replies \ @optimism 22h

By facing the challenge and basically, doing it.

Never expect someone else to solve problems for you; if you find something important, be the change.

100 sats \ 5 replies \ @kr OP 22h

Separate question but related to the main idea... what role does technology play in this change?

11 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 21h

Technology is a generic thing. A garden trowel is technology, so if you use that to plant really awesome healthy tomatoes, you're using technology.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @kr OP 21h

I should specify new technology. In the past, new technology was the way we produced more with less. Now, if we are solving a different problem (producing better or throttling desire for more food/entertainment), what kinds of new technology matter most?

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 21h

If you mean throttling your desire for food and entertainment: find something useful to do.

If you mean throttling my desire for food and entertainment: good luck, lol.

No tech needed.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr OP 21h

Appreciate your responses, but each one drifts further from the original topic.

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95 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 Sep

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

25 sats \ 6 replies \ @kr OP 12 Sep

What trade-offs should we be making instead?

10 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 Sep

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.

56 sats \ 4 replies \ @kr OP 12 Sep

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.

92 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 12 Sep

You might be interested in the book Poor Economics, if want to understand what kinds of tradeoffs are being made by the global poor. It's a heavily studied area and it's quite interesting.

42 sats \ 2 replies \ @BlokchainB 23h

Adding this to my reading list. Just bought a used copy on Amazon for $5

62 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 23h

I’ll be curious what you think about it. I remember it as being pretty eye opening.

42 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 22h

I’ll do a post on it once I make my way through it. Currently working on @kepford book suggestion.

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81 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 12 Sep

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?"

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @carter 21h

This is how we get to star trek... we need to achieve post scarcity so we don't have quite enough yet

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @jaspervanderee 22h

We're abundant creating machines, it's in our DNA. Throughout history we've always created abundance from scarce resources. You can see this in every major breakthrough:

Agriculture turned the scarcity of wild food into the abundance of farming.
Electricity turned the scarcity of human/animal labor into abundant energy on demand.
The Internet turned the scarcity of information into abundant, nearly free access to knowledge.

So my argument would be the opposite: we're programmed for a world of abundance.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 12 Sep

People consuming "endless food" is not a problem of there being too much food, but a problem within those people.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr OP 22h

We’re all hard-wired to treat food as scarce, and for most of human history, it was.

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @cryotosensei 12 Sep

I think one must be very clear about his values and priorities. Like he decides what shows to indulge in on Netflix and for how long - and sticks to it and doesn’t feel FOMO about not watching other shows. Remembering the adage “you can do everything, just not all at the same time” might help with grounding oneself. In other words, don’t be greedy!

32 sats \ 0 replies \ @brave 12 Sep

This hits deep. We've solved for more, but now we're drowning in it. I wonder if the answer lies in redefining enough - like, how do we train ourselves to embrace limits in a world pushing excess?

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @88b0c423eb 22h

The things that really matter cost more than ever, like housing and real good food.

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @lunanto 12 Sep

Abundance is a double-edged sword. Food and entertainment overload are real problems. Maybe it's about building new habits, like intentional scarcity, to reclaim balance

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @2053456d48 12 Sep

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 \ 1 reply \ @fred 12 Sep

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.

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @adlai 12 Sep

the human mind knows no boundary

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

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 12 Sep

Yes

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder 2h

i don't think there's such thing as too much per se, but we most likely don't have enough appreciation for what we do have

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingecko 10h

Having less with the right mindset is bliss. Being happy is simple, but being simple isn't easy.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 12 Sep

There is a lot of very low quality food about- and its very hard to avoid it- I have to consciously resist the junk food that is heavily promoted and presented. If you can, grow your own as much as possible. As for entertainment it is more available than ever before for a lower price if not almost free but again an effort needs to be made to consume quality rather than quantity. Yes technology has delivered abundance but also a lot of junk- it takes an effort to a void the junk.