Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
They say it just repeats, over and over.
This is not just civilization’s rise and fall, but the engineer’s dilemma. Which is, more accurately, Man’s dilemma. We invent problems in order to solve them, with or without technology, or capitalism. It’s the creative impulse, and in most cases it boils down to idleness, or too much time to think.
The human brain is designed to solve problems to avoid pain, toil and sorrow. All the while knowing deep down in our primeval unconscious that suffering is central to life, and may even contain the meaning we seek.
But with time, problems can be both solved and invented.
Maybe you’ve experienced this. When you’re no longer blessed with extra time, after having children, or during a busy time at work, or in a crisis, many problems and tasks are forgotten. By the time you get back around to remembering, they’ve lost their urgency, maybe even become obsolete, or solved themselves.
Why is that, you wonder?
Why do we invent wars to fight? Yeah, greed, hatred… but it’s also just a bias toward change, and an addiction to novelty.
Now that we have time to think about it, there must be something here we can improve upon…
Maybe a sex change would help.
Maybe you could build an enemy to fight.
Or find someone to blame for your failures, or the way you feel.
Maybe you could write some code that saves the human labor of writing, or drawing, maybe you could find a way to write code that has ideas of its own.
Or… simply write the code that writes the code!
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You can find more Hope & Change episodes here on Substack, or on Apple Podcasts:
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