Surviving the Post-Modern World

A short piece to set the theme for blogs to come

This year is the year we have officially entered the post-modern world. The exact timing is somewhat imprecise, but 2020 as a whole is a fine boundary for when it's obvious to everyone. Surviving the post-modern world is likely to be a good theme for

The most important distinction between now and then:

    You survive the modern world by adapting to the modern world. You survive the post-modern world by rejecting the modern world.

What does that mean? We used to live in the "modern" world, where we used to have systems, which we used to trust. Police, law, media, elections, your doctor, your job being important are all aspects of "systems" that uphold civilization and relying on these systems and being an upstanding citizen was seen as the thing to do. That world is dead now. Everything is failing in increasingly absurd ways.

Things that have actual mechanisms, such as the market or the justice system are the most stable for now, but they are clearly over-fitting their original purpose. Things that don't have mechanisms, such as the media, or the model-free aberration we call science are running wild with output that is beginning to be anti-correlated with truth. Looting is encouraged, running a business is not. Social media has massively over-fit on engagement producing a generation of rage-filled zombies.

How do you live in this new "reality"? One problem of these overlapping systems is that "normality" has become mentally and physically un-affordable.  Without a concerted effort to resist particular forces of today, you will end up destroying your body glued to the screens needlessly refreshing what is happening. That isn't normal, but the modern forces push this as the new normal. Yes, for the sake of your work, it might be useful to pretend that your work is important, but that is cope to be used judiciously. Like, for example, when you absolutely can't quit for legal reasons.

Well, you might say, that you are not "normal," you are very counter-normal, you micro-dose LSD and did another drug or something or partook in some campaign to do stuff. Le sigh. The drug-ification of society is the new normal, whether it is with approved shit like SSRI or wine or the "subversive" stuff like LSD.

My "doctor" tried to push statins on me, my dentist tried to push me to remove my wisdom teeth, which would have likely made my mild sleep problems worse. Car sales-people keep pushing weird insurance on people, software work is a massive pile of errors. Media alternates between coronavirus is a hoax, to scary, to protests can't spread it, to scary again, to "voting is still more important than COVID". Whatever. I hear horror stories of serious psychological child abuse in schools. But the failures are everywhere, in every institution.

At this point the modern maxims of being a "nation of laws," "of rules, not rulers," of "reason" or "science" are completely gone. Your ability to survive is fundamentally dependent on a whole-sale rejection of modernity. This is not a rejection of "society" although it can feel as such. You can try to go hide somewhere far away in another country or state, which can be a prudent option depending on the level of violence in your locale. But that's not necessary or even sufficient. What's more important is a mental rejection of our over-fed, over-sexualized, over-digitized, overly financialized society.

This rejection needs to take place on many levels: frugality, paleo or similar diets, explicitly allocating time for more movement, blocking off social media doom scrolls for periods at a time. God forbid you are still trying to keep track of what the "approved" things to say are in [Current Month] (soon to be [Current Day]).

I find that people looking at this issue but still stuck in "modern" thinking tend to produce or propose "new systems", which do somewhat work, but somehow fail to move the overall needle. Crypto, algorithmic governance, "rationality," some tech movements are in one sense good ideas, but there is a massive tide of brokenness that these alone can't fix. What will? Getting in touch with one's ability to feel, for starters. Meditation, rest, staying healthy on your own terms. New systems will come, they have to, but they need to be designed and implemented with the right people who are still in touch with themselves and reality.