What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)

The piece opens with the observation that people who believe there is more to life often search without finding, while those who don't are left staring at an abyss. Utopias in fiction, it notes, usually aren't worlds of abundance but our current world stripped of what we'd call work, where no one is truly bereft—only mildly discontented. Modern frustrations, especially in online discourse, stem from institutions growing too large to control and feeling unable to affect outcomes. Degrowth agendas, the author argues, are nostalgic for the simple life: close-knit communities, no middlemen, no bureaucracy, and a visible social good. Today's reality is the opposite—alien structures built by strangers, fleeting work relationships, hyperspecialized expertise divorced from savannah survival, and a sense of being too smart to ignore the abyss but too stupid to cross it. The essay then examines the trade-offs of scaling: education moved from individual or communal approaches to industrialized methods, robbing individuality; work went from apprenticeships and proving your mettle to credentialling and hoops; governance became codified to the point of writing detailed instructions on how a child shouldn't eat a plastic bag atop a sweet box; and medicine shifted from patient-specific treatment to rule-based systems, like spending only 15 minutes per patient. The author suggests we try to make peace with what we had to do to get our space-age tools, even as we dislike how we got them.