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183 sats \ 2 replies \ @Scoresby 12 Sep \ on: Do We Already Have Too Much? AskSN
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.
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.
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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.
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