[college_physics]

I don' think there was ever a time when people would wax lyrical about their condition, so the current era too seems full of people lamenting their life experience.

What seems to be different as we plod along the human development journey is the feeling that nowadays we should be doing better. That we know enough, have built enough, have de-risked and controlled enough to be more at ease with ourselves and the environment.

[rektide]

More and more reality has effervesced up into very high levels. Wave after wave of corporate buy out, of labor being sent to the cheapest labor.markets (touched on at the beginning) have lead to an erosion of belief in ourselves & our communities, all while costs of living spiral ever higher.

I agree there's feelings we should be doing better. There's a feeling that we should have developed towards a more sustainable & maintainable way of living. It's hard to remember how recently emerged so much of the world really is, how recent at-scale industrialization began. And it seems to be happening under it's own schemes- the author talks about the technique* evolving itself, a memetic system of self-preservation where negative-externalities are all too often someone else's problem, where human existence amid what is wrought is left for others to figure out. And there's just not many great examples of people at the helm, able to move us towarss better.

[college_physics]

One consequence of the broader scientific, technical and economic development is that humans now dominate practically every nook and crany of the planet (at least at their own physical scale).

I think the consequences of that development are by far not fully internalized yet by our vast and dispersed numbers that indulge a bewildering variety of legacy mindsets and pre-globalisation cultures.

The term globalization is typically used in rather narrow context (trade exchanges between countries) and we even consider that it is reversible. In fact its really useful to highlight the "globe" aspect of the term (the finite sphere). This changes the boundary conditions in which societies evolve.

We have moved from flat, open, expandable cultural islands where negative externalities can simply be ignored, and the social dynamics admits unstable (exponential growth) solutions, to enclosed, finite and deeply interconnected societies where the only viable solutions are harmonic oscillations (sustainability)

Assuming we don't head into collapse due to our mental inertia, it will take a couple generations for legacy mindsets to get crushed by the new reality and new paradigms for social governance ("technique") to evolve.