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It seems like people think this is sad or poignant. I don't, not really. Step by step, choice by choice, we came this way from where we were. You want to go back? You're free to do so: just get a place out in the woods, no running water or electricity, no trade, spending all day cultivating crops or animals to try to make sure you get approximately the number of calories you need.

People know they don't want to go back to that. But they don't want the baggage that comes along with the choices we made to have this situation instead of the old situation. Did you think it was going to be free? It's kind of a utopian streak in people. No matter how good they've got it, they always still think there's something wrong.

Or do you want to change something about the way things are today in order to make a better situation? Then you're just making the same "mistake" that you say people of the past did. What do you want? What would ever satisfy you?

[DorianSinDeep]

I completely agree with you except I don't begrudge the Utopian streak in people. Its people who are never satisfied, no matter how good they have it, that make the slow progress to a better future. I think never being able to be satisfied is simultaneously the worst and best part of the human condition

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I have a movie in my head about how and why "progress" happens, and what its true nature might be. I imagine someone maybe a thousand years ago, living in primitive conditions, holding the body of their loved one who has passed away for some reason. The person is hurt, sad, furious, indignant at God/nature for allowing this thing to happen. The person promises that no matter how many lifetimes, or how much effort it takes, they'll fix the world to be the way God/nature should have done but was too evil or incompetent to make it.

Well, it turns out that the person's loved one could have been saved. All that was needed was what we consider to be a modern hospital. But a modern hospital has quite a lot of technological dependencies, and so do those things, and so do those things, and so on. But let's say you do it. You got copper wire and steel and internal combustion engines and concrete and microscopes and global communication networks and microprocessors and on and on and on and on and on. Now people don't die of that same thing, whatever it was. Via technological magic, we just look inside the sick person's body, see the nature of the illness, and put in the right chemicals, or perform an amazing non-invasive operation via a robotic snake or whatever. Problem solved via vision and the sustained application of brain power.

But it wasn't free. The global communications network you needed for all kinds of things, it's being used to deliver pornography. Pornography addiction is a thing now, a problem that wasn't even previously possible. The same tech you use to make the chemicals that can save someone's life, they're used to make painkillers. Back in the day, drug addiction was something like drinking too much, or maybe smoking tobacco. Addiction to these painkillers is common now, and many people are dying and/or ruining their lives. The same technologies you needed to facilitate global collaboration have made it possible for the first time for governmental powers to do effective mass surveillance. And so on, and so on, and so on.

The point of the parable is to suggest that back in the day, when we were indignant about the death of our loved one, we didn't realize it, but we were kind of at a fork in the road. We could choose to fix ourselves, and accept the death, and see it as just the result of circumstances, and therefore blameless and perfect, or we could choose to try to fix the world. This choice has very very deep implications. When we try to fix the world, it seems like the result might be that we sort out the original problem at the cost of creating a bunch of new problems that are equally bad, or possibly even much more complicated and difficult to solve.