Ok, enough about bets - lets talk about the past 5 years and the poverty of meaning. Man - what a ride! Remember lock down? Whole institutions of our lives were shed, and for many only some came back after lockdown ended. It also caused a lot of our interactions to be directly mediated by technology, with almost all of our connection with loved ones and friends happening via screens, social media, and apps. And we all started binging TikTok, reels, streamers, or some other low intention slop. Amusing, but fragmented, jarring, and undirected. In its wake, I have felt a shift towards naive capitalism - the discarding of real values to which people aspire, replaced by largely capital based status seeking. And on a larger time scale I'm recognizing how much this effect has been happening on a longer time scale. People used to want cool jobs, at the expense of pay! They used to judge those that were obviously status seeking, or greedily taking advantage of others. But now we kind of live in a scam country, where the national myth is not enough to convince everyone to do right by their neighbors/countrymen, and I'd argue its largely because of the looting (literal or second second order) of our institutions at the expense of the rewards for "being a good citizen".
It's tempting to fall prey to naive capitalism, to tell yourself that you don't live up to certain standards because no one does - and you'd just be a fool to give in a regime of takers, right? But that's how institutions collapse, via degrading trust. Much like narrative is a story fundamentally about the future, I am also seeing the renewed need for real values: fundamental ideas that align you with others, and scaffold your understanding of who you are, want to be, and your relationship to the community and world. Many beliefs are useful, but fragile - they are too close to the fickle specificity of reality; but a good value is like a narrative, anti-fragile to new information, and acting as a lighthouse in the increasingly foggy landscape we navigate these days.
I'm curious how this lands with you. Have you experienced something similar? Do you find yourself with more information daily, but less conviction? What are you doing with it?
It's my hope to develop and challenge narratives and values in future writings, to build meaning, to build something more. Hopefully you'll be there doing it with me :)