You’re right, I don’t think it’s going to be simple. The planet also can’t support us very much longer at this rate of growth. It could be simple evolutionary biology trying to bring us into balance. Or all of these combined. 🤷
Discussion
I don’t think the planet is the problem, it can support more and it will be fine. Our current societal structure maybe hitting the limit 🐶🐾🤷♂️
Another very fine theory. I like it enough I wanna add it to mine. 🤣
We are seeing the evidence of that in the US for sure. Too many people for one government to truly represent any of us anymore. Everyone frustrated. We’re not rowing the boat the same direction.
True! Democracy is not really a democracy when you have so many layers of abstraction 🐶🐾🫡
When the economic model is based on the idea that “in the long run, we are all dead”, I’m not sure why people get surprised when the future doesn’t look bright.
Definitely not an issue with the planet though.
I’m not a doomsayer, but our planet is not infinite is all I’m saying. And we absolutely are damaging the ecosystem in ways that will take 1000s of years to recover from.
And I say that owning an ICE car, and burning the shit outta this LP has to stay warm.
We have brains and we can use them to figure shit out. We’ve had it much worse in the past, and we are still here.
As for everyone will die, everyone will die for sure. I am yet to see anyone who lived forever and consider it a good thing. I can’t imagine future generations listening to my bullshit, or god forbid, following my advice 🐶🐾🤣🫂
Me either. I’m a cat on the internet. Certainly not Plato or Sun Tzu. 🫂🤣
Wen can I preorder iTheSameCat's Art of the Republic?
Hahaha 😂
It’s titled “Ravings of a Half Crazed Purple Pussy on Governance” and it’s due any time now… I’m only a few hours of watching CSPAN away from fully cracking.
Let's get that book out! We need to get you some VR so that way you can feel like you're right there when they're making the decisions 😂
I’d love to live forever!
Sounds like hell to me 🐶🐾🤣
I used to think this. As I’ve gotten older though, I’ve realized that it’s no longer true for me.
The cyclical nature of life is very important. Already, I’m looking forward to having kids and passing the torch to them. It cannot be rushed, but we also cannot stay here forever, nor should we aim to ❤️
I understand what you are saying but I’d still love to be here forever!
Seeing the planet and people evolve.
As long as you promise not to intervene, your wish is granted! 🐶🐾🪄🧞♂️🤣
I knew it. Tanuki.
You’ve outed yourself.
LOL! 🐶🐾🤣🥷🥷🥷🪄🤐
Who or what is Tanuki?
https://japanhouse.illinois.edu/education/insights/tanuki
This article is basically what I knew, but nostr:npub137c5pd8gmhhe0njtsgwjgunc5xjr2vmzvglkgqs5sjeh972gqqxqjak37w would have to speak to its accuracy. I certainly meant it in the benevolent trickster spirit dog sense. 🤣
I just wanna sit back and watch it!
Plus I could never imagine not ever seeing another sunset or storm again!
Fair enough! I appreciate your perspective.
I don’t think death is necessarily the end. We take a temporary form, but we are ultimately energy which cannot be destroyed or created, and there is an interconnected nature to everything.
I’m the universe experiencing me, and you’re the universe experiencing you, and that makes us very much the same. So I don’t think new experiences will ever end, but we will never quite experience the same thing again.
Societies have crashed and burned frequently in the past, jus' saying. On every inhabited continent, too.
Sometimes abrupt (but usually drawn-out), traumatic decomplexifications of society, with consequent falls in energy use and population.
The popular explanations these days revolve around limits and ecological instability, but older theories of cultural and political instability are also valid in many cases.
We probably have similar perspectives, but there are a few fundamental differences.
I don’t think there is any “recovering from” human impact. I think that human impact is not only hopefully irreversible, but ideally a beneficial thing where we make the world a better place for us to live.
There are some practices that we need to cut down on as a species. There are ways we can be more efficient, and conserve resources. But the vast majority of waste is fueled by government and an inflation based world, and could fairly easily be reduced by individuals if left to their own means.
We have the land, natural resources, and human ingenuity to sustain upwards of 50 Billion people in my mind. After that, we will probably need to make the great leap towards being interplanetary. But the ultimate truth is that we should find that equilibrium ourselves and act on it according, not allow others to dictate what the correct number of humans are and population control us.
Also, more humans is always better than less, as a moral principle.
Yes! The more humans, the greater chances of a greater mind 🐶🐾🫡
Humans can be the most beneficial organisms for the entire planet look up permaculture
Nate Hagens has a podcast (The Great Simplification) just about these ideas. Looking at the system itself, its not sustainable but we also can't solve it with a simple "let's remove x"
Reduce/stop consuming oil and go to fully electric? Well electric cars are heavier and will cause more wear to the road at a higher rate, meaning we will need to repair our roads more often. What is a major contribution to the material that makes roads? You guessed it - oil 🙃
I particularly like his episodes with Daniel Schmachtenberger
If only life and balance was so simple. I understand the desire to simplify things for the sake of understanding, but remove X do Y approach is rarely a solution, almost statistically impossible 🐶🐾🫡
I've become sanguine about it. There seems to simply be an evolutionary bottleneck caused by urbanization, digitalization, feminism and contraception.
Traditionally, gaining a wife was hard and men without wives had few or no children. It is now like that, again.
I think the earth could support us, but not at the living standard we've become accustomed to.
People aren't willing to have their living standard drop below a certain level, so fathers' income sets the paternal floor (and that floor is relative to the living costs of the country or region).
It can absolutely support us. But too many people have been convinced that they deserve, in excess, more than their current necessities. Humanity has an inherent addiction to what they want and not what they need. Consequently, far too large a portion of the global population seemingly adapt to this type of mentality without any consideration of the cost in terms of resources.
"To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable - the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth, or heal our sick planet, is evidence of our immense capacity for self delusion. Rather, we need to protect ourselves from ourselves." -Lynn Margulis
She is brilliant. Love it. Absolutely loved how she recognizes the limits of knowledge for example.
And I totally agree. Even as long as we are mostly earth-based, we can still support immense numbers with much increased technology and some humility in consumption, as opposed to what we have now. Just imagine the carrying capacity of earth and the effect on poverty if people could be as economically productive as FAANG management and live on a budget only a few times higher than poverty. I mean AI makes that thought moot but still.
nostr:note1qhtnmfy9s40zw3m7c9rlfdr4j7vdj4e57mrxqz0va3h5cr8ppy4qamz64e
I've watched pretty much all her interviews. 😁 I agree. She is absolutely brilliant! I highly recommend this book.
Awesome. It’s now on my list. 🫂
#bookstr
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It's quite fascinating to observe it play out, in my opinion. Humanity's (or at least the past few generations') seemingly intrinsic need to embrace an overconsumption-based culture has had some very strange and contradictory effects on society. What I find mildly amusing is that no one (or very few) ever seems to want to blame themselves for the state they're in. Social media/technology addiction, laziness, an obsession with the lives of the ultrawealthy, and a continuous rise in the cost of living—and those are just a few things—have created this bizarre culture of narcissism, overconsumption, and victimization. To be blunt, now they're all getting bit in the ass! So many individuals within the 20-35+ age range are broke, can't find employment, or have given up looking for opportunities. There are always opportunities if you look hard enough. For the record, I don't want any of this to sound like a generalization in any way. I know this is not the case for all, but what I described above is quite rampant today.
"Humanity has an inherent addiction to what they want and not what they need."
Yes, but that is sexual selection. Women won't reproduce with men who don't make the cut. They'd rather stay childless. Which leads to the next generation of men being more-likely to make the cut.
We're just taking notice of this dynamic now because the environment has changed so dramatically, that about a quarter to a third of men won't make the next cut. That's brutal. Evolutionary pressure on par with the Bubonic Plague.
I used to lecture women to "get married and make babies", but my "If they have no Prince Charming to marry, let them marry Pookie and Ray Ray" days are over.
I was drinking wine and preaching water, as they say in German.
I was referring to resources as a whole. Not just sexual selection. Sorry, I didn't read the whole thread before I wrote all that. Whoops.
Yes, I agree with you. 🤷♂️ But, oh well. This isn't the first time this has happened throughout history. The Silent and Boomer generations were able to afford taking care of larger families due to lower living costs, then as time went on and as living costs increased at a significantly faster rate than wages and salaries, fewer and fewer people were able to afford having a family. No one said evolution was a merciful process.
We're all suffering from normalcy bias, I suppose. We look back 50 years and assume that's how things have always been.
Could be the case. That's what complacency gets you. 🤷♂️
Here's a funny story. The short version, that is. I had a discussion with this 19 year-old kid not too long about what he wants to do when he gets older and his response was "I just want to help people." No doubt a nice sentiment, but then I said towards the end of our convo "That's nice. But, if you don't have the capacity to care for your own well-being, how do you expect to care for the well-being of others?", and that kinda lost him a bit. What I mean by this is that the priorities of the newer generations seem a bit different in comparison to those of previous generations. Of course, I don't mean for this to sound like a generalization in any way. A big portion of them seem a bit lost, is all.
They're taught to be helpful, but not ambitious. Ambition is seen as "toxic masculinity" because basic resources seem to just fall from heaven, due to the welfare state and cheap credit.
They don't realize that male ambition had a purpose.
Just another part of the states indoctrination program. 😮💨
It's not the state's program. The state is just the means to do the thing, not the originator of the thing.
I know.
So be more precise in your speech.
Or perhaps don't overthink everything.
Most women actually also dont make the cut.
They have absolute zero evolutionary prowess because they were mostly too busy trying to show men that they can be men too.
They are further down the line, closer to the checkered flag of being evolutionarily obsolete than most men because of it.
And let's face it, whoever (male or female) owered themselves to being a labrat not 2 years ago, and now has developed the attention span of a fruitfly while they seemingly live like a potato bug (can't hear or see shit) have already failed natural selection. They are now dependents. Leeches on a cyst and angry at people like me for rupturing that cyst because the FIAT poison within it is not their lifeblood.
The truth hurts.
Most men and most women are not childless. That's "the cut".
Men are significantly more likely to be childless than women, in most countries.
Is this more the case in first, second, or third world countries?
Which nations are leading has changed over time, tho.
"Men are significantly more likely to be childless than women, in most countries."
I was just referring to this part.
Hmm... I don't know.
I assume that a welfare state geared towards women perhaps increases male childlessness, as it functions as an ersatz-husband, but I've got no source.
Reduces the fitness costs of both hypergamy and promiscuity.
Hmmm.
Could go either way, prima facie. Does anyone have trend data handy?
"Does anyone have trend data handy?"
Lol. I gotta go. I have a busy day. I'll check back in later. 😎👍 nostr:npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl You're up! 🤣😅
1.4 reproducing women for every reproducing man, averaging over hundreds of generations in Europe and West Africa. But only 1.1 in East Asia, and middling numbers in West Asia and East Africa. I'll chase up the paper if anyone wants it.
No, I have no idea why the regional differences. Culture, and marriage customs, but in what ways...?
I suspect more variance in the partners in more difficult environments, perhaps? Europe and West Africa have been particularly difficult places.
Very possible.
But the effect is in an unexpected direction - more monopolising of mating opportunities by high-status males, at least in the form of high remarriage rates.
Yes, that's what I meant.
In the West, at least, men are more likely to remarry after divorce, which would increase the number of men with children from more than one woman.
Western women are also probably more likely to have children from more than one man.
Yeah, no shit
Because they can't give birth.
100%, but, before sulfanilimide and penicillin, as many as half of men didn't make the cut, every generation. Childbearing-age women just died in childbirth all the time, to the point that men outnumbered women 2:1 in many age brackets (if there hadn't been a major war for a while). Hard to comprehend these days, but that's the environment our cultures evolved in...
Yes, evolutionary pressure used to be immense. That's why we're all so closely-related.
The idea that "society owes men a wife" is the modern thing that doesn't hold up to examination. If women no longer have men to choose from, they can't select for positive traits. Society has no vested interested in overriding womens' ability to choose a partner.
On the positive side, potential wives have gone up in value. When I was young, that was very different.
Expanding time horizons past the next 100 years the vast majority of all humans will never step on Earth. 🫂