[uoaei]

If it feels obvious, you may be missing the point. Or else, you may simply be rationally contemplating the existence of the lesson without actually considering the lesson itself.

If the document is "supposed" to be anything, it is as an entryway into contemplative empathy with the full-scale complex system we inhabit, the wonder that a civilization can be organized to the point where this is possible, and the explicit recognition of what experiences a loss when you want a gain. It is to understand that the comforts we've come to feel entitled to are built by extractive processes, whether material (mining, etc.) or otherwise (labor exploitation, opportunity costs, etc.).

[kelseyfrog]

The real point of it for me is the framing. It's the idea that any object, tangible or intangible, and be analyzed in this way because everything has multiple dimensions of relations linking it to every other thing eventually. It's the equivalent of being able to pick up the graph of human relations by a single point and letting all other relations branch from that point like a tree. There's obviously root nodes that are more interesting than others just as there are more spanning trees more interesting than all the others.