Efficient how? Ants are extremely efficient and successful, second only to humans in biomass. Turns out making good global decisions is hard to impossible, so you see decentralized decision making pop up everywhere.
Efficiency, trust and cooperation, what an amazing place it could be.
Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me. What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in front of a screen and programming, that I began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just gotta live with those bugs.
> began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy
I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it off in the future. It's definitely an occupational hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of global thought). There are definite upsides to technology and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.
Thank you for ripping it off - I call it sharing :)
> at our own peril.
I always like to quote the frog in water. As the water is heated to boiling point, apparently the frog doesn't spring out. That is, in fact, an urban legend - the frog does spring out. However we are the frogs that don't spring out.
It is exceeding difficult to sacrifice yourself for someone you barely know even if you know it is for the betterment of everyone. Ants have 0 problem with this.
You should consider that you might be the one wrong here. What you think is efficient is just an individual perspective.
I’ve come to accept this after years of fighting “the system”.
The system doesn’t care about you or what you want. It is a ruthlessly collective thing and it makes short term mistakes you will pay for but long term builds foundations you benefit from.
Also over and over efficiency in many cases proves to be maladaptive as it kills flexibility.
Especially people in the West laud how great Japan its collectivist society is, how streets are clean, relatively little gets stolen, personal responsibility is still a thing, etc; But they completely skip over the other side of the coin: collectivist societies crush much of the independence out of a person.
So, in this one sense, you can trade independence for social “efficiency”. I imagine it is much the same for humanity. We could become more harmonized, at the cost of becoming more drone-like.
An interesting book that deals with this exact dilemma (among other things) is “A Deepness In the Sky” by Vernor Vinge. Worth a read!