[vertexFarm]

If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not going to win the lottery of life and be more.

I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.

What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?

[philwelch]

The extreme majority of people might be "mediocre" if you average out all of their skills, talents, and characteristics, but that's not meaningful. If you are an excellent cobbler and I am an excellent carpenter, then you can make me some excellent shoes and I can make you some excellent cabinetry and we are both better off, even though if we average together both of our skills in both trades, we are both mediocre. The world we live in today is a little more complicated than that, but most people can be at least better than mediocre in at least one small part of life if they work hard at it.

[thwy12321]

"specialization is for insects" -Robert Heinlein

[ksdale]

If I remember correctly, the entirety of that quote is really more about being a well-rounded person than about the best way to make a living. I'm betting Robert Heinlein didn't make his own clothes and shoes, though maybe he could have.

[philwelch]

Yeah, even in a world where everyone can, to complete the quote, “change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly”—there will still be some who are particularly excellent generals, butchers, sailors, architects, poets, accountants, stonemasons, medics, nurses, soldiers, officers, engineers, programmers, and chefs; they will simply also be capable of doing a passable (if perhaps mediocre) job at the other tasks as needed. And frankly, merely being that well rounded by itself takes you beyond mediocrity.

[Rescis]

I feel like you're making two different points:

1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense)

2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die

To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers.

To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad.

I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.

[vertexFarm]

Number one sounds about right for the most part, but you may be misunderstanding the second point.

I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire.

It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth.

Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology.

To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here.

We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway.

So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction.

Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.