Luxuries
Luxuries of Modern World – Swimming Pool, Adventure Park, Visual Simulation, Gold… and the list goes on. A part of it is about overstimulating out senses and then kicking on our monkey wirings.
Most sensorial and adrenaline based luxuries, if you think about it, was out there in nature always– rivers, ponds, big hills to climb, beauty of nature. You could still build your family, have kids and always had plenty of time and the freedom to chill.
After all these efforts to earn money over these years, we just go back to these luxuries in a modern way - pools, adventure parks, jumping, dancing and talking. The only difference is that we have made all of them a little more safer and predictable.
The real (myth of) luxury of the modern world is novelty. You get to experience more combinations, and more versions of the repeatable stuff. You can enjoy a waterfall in treks of Himalayas and also in Niagras. This really goes back to our slackness to go in depth and instead seek novelty in breadth of experiences.
But going back - packing the old luxuries in the new skin, what were we trying to achieve? We have made our journey of novel experiences more safer and predictable.
All for the fear of death and pain!
I am not telling these two fears are nothing or worth fighting for. But you should always go back and remember why you are living a life you are living today. We should think why we are in a world which is designed in such a way to hedge against this fear at scale.
You could have still did 90% of the things. May be everything will not be done in the same manner - a lot of things will loose it’s last mile improvements or that slight incremental benefit which we now have. You would have still sat somewhere, but without a cushion - if I am putting it in simple words.
But in simple words, the modern life is in a way a constant run away and hedging of our fear of death and pain.
If you flip this, and grow really comfortable with these two at some levels, then you are escaping this reality to enter a different mode of life.
This is just a thought starter to think why we live the way we are living today.