[ExI] The meaning of life revisited

Samantha Atkins sjatkins at mac.com
Sat Jun 14 23:23:18 UTC 2014


On 06/14/2014 02:39 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> BillK<pharos at gmail.com> , 14/6/2014 4:49 PM:
>
>     How much of life is housekeeping?
>     i.e. just surviving can take up a lot of time and resources.
>
>     Possibly it is only in fairly recent times that humans have had the
>     luxury of spare time to wonder about the meaning of life. Even now I
>     suspect a quite small percentage have this luxury. 
>
>
> Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good approximation: meaning-searching
> mainly happens when we got survival, safety, and social network fixed.
> We certainly have moments when we think even when scrounging for food
> or trying to impress people, but active pursuit of deep meaning is a
> bit of a luxury. Of course, really religious people actually skip the
> other parts to focus on the things they think are important, becoming
> monks and whatnot.

What worries me is being given or driven by externalities for too long,
so long one forgets or never really knows what one *really* wants or
doesn't believe it is remotely possible to get any such thing.  We are
told to "be sensible", to "go along to get along".  We get stuck in our
routines and "responsibilities" or what we feel we "have to" do for so
many years that we forget what we want to do or even what that might be
or how to find it. 

You see it in retirees a lot.  The routines of education, family, job
have kept them busy for decades.  When the job is done and the children
have grown up and perhaps the life partner died or has left, many a
person feels utterly lost.  They have forgotten what it is to want to do
anything just because they want to do it.  

As and if we reach ever greater abundance, more than enough to fulfill
all the needs and many of the desires of everyone with a fraction of
productive capacity regardless of where they have a job or not,  more
and more people will be in the situation of the retiree.  Left with very
little they have to do, little routine they need to follow.    They will
need to find what they want to do and enjoy doing - perhaps for the
first time in their adult lives.

I worry a bit about the scene in the Matrix when Agent Smith says that
the first matrix was a paradise of everything humans had said they
wanted from a utopia.  Humans suicided by the hundreds of millions.   

- samantha


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