Humanity's Progress (11/29/20)
Hey Friends,
Welcome back to Sunday School, a weekly newsletter to give you a boost in consuming interesting content.
I want to wish all of you a happy holiday season. I hope everyone had a chance to take a break and give thanks this week.
It’s interesting how being thankful works. It has nothing to do with the things we have or the things we don’t have, as it might seem it would in theory. Thankfulness is an attitude, a posture really, of mindfully finding joy and satisfaction with the best things in life, no matter what your life looks like.
2020 has been the oddest year of my life by a longshot, but it hasn’t been any harder to pause and find the things I’m thankful for. In fact, it’s the opposite. Through all the bad things that have happened and through all of the tough realities we’ve had to deal with, I clearly see the things in life that mean the most. And I’m thankful for these things more than ever. My family, my friends, the job that I lost and the job that I found, a beautiful morning in the ocean, an evening spent growing intellectually. These are the things I look at this year amid the insanity and realize that there’s always a reason to be thankful.
So whether this has been the best year of your life or the worst, take a moment to recognize what’s important.
I’m thankful for all of you who read this email each week, it’s an honor to write to you!
Humanity’s Progress
It’s starting to seem indisputable that we’re living during the most rapidly changing time for humanity. Ever.
The important inventions that have come to life in the last 20-30 years are beyond jaw-dropping, they’re jaw-dislocating. Even if you watch a movie from 2010 you’ll see things that seem so technologically dead in the context of 2020.
It’s become apparent that human progress is exponential. We’re building a better life for all, and as a result, we have more humans on the Earth working on more problems that exist. Progress continues to mount.
I recently read a piece by Tim Urban that mentioned some other reasons why it’s an extraordinary time to be alive. Here’s the list he shared:
“For 99.8% of human history, the world population was under 1 billion people. In the last .2% of that history, it has crossed the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 billion marks.
Up until 25 years ago, there had never been such a thing as a global brain of godlike information access and connectivity on this planet. Today we have the internet.
After barely using any energy for the first 99,800 years of human history, in the last 200 we’ve suddenly thrust ourselves into the Fossil Fuels Era, blowing through a huge chunk of stored underground carbon energy, without fully understanding the implications of doing so.
Humans walked around or rode horses for 999 of the last 1,000 centuries. In this century, we drive cars, fly planes, and land on the moon.
If extra-terrestrial life were looking for other life in the universe, it would be dramatically easier to find us this century than in any century before, as we project millions of signals out into space.
With an average of one mass extinction event every 100 million years since animals have been around, we may be currently engineering a sixth one by accident.”
All the evidence is pointing to the fact that we’re in the upswing of a ridiculously steep exponential curve. FaceTime has basically replaced phone calls and when I was growing up I used a flip-phone with t9 word texting. We’re progressing quickly.
This makes me think: where are we going next? One of my favorite questions to ask is: do you think there will be another invention in our lifetime more significant than the internet? I think it’s a 50/50 shot, but if you buy into the exponential curve that seems to be flying high, you’d have to say it’s more like an 80% chance that something will.
My conclusion with all of this is that the historical data we have is increasingly useless. We’re seeing this already with the stock market and we’ll likely continue to see this with other things. We’re progressing so quickly that EVERYTHING has changed, not just some things in a slow and controlled progression, and because of this, basing things on “the way they were” isn’t what it used to be.
Our brains were born in a time when it was appropriate to look backward for a glimpse of what’s ahead, but our brains are going to have to get used to that being inaccurate.
Buckle in for change!
Second Order Effects
As humans, we’ve been considering consequences from a young age. Your parents are always saying things like, “Ryan, think about the consequences of your actions ahead of time,” or something like that.
Once we’re really intuitive we start thinking about consequences further down the line. Perhaps we can begin to think of unintended consequences of decisions that we can avoid before bad things happen.
Sometimes we see some fun second order effects take place, and it seems like 2020 is full of examples of this. Second order effects are basically those unintended consequences, or effects unrelated to the primary point. Let’s take a look at a fun one.
Netflix released a miniseries called The Queen’s Gambit on October 23rd. I live in one of the record 62 million households that watched this show in the first month after release (I highly recommend it). In summary, it’s a show about a young girl who is a chess prodigy and does some cool chess things while going hard on booze.
By all accounts, this is one of Netflix’s most successful shows ever. But the second order effects are making waves too:
The Queen’s Gambit, the book by Walter Tevis which the show is based on, is now a New York Times bestseller 37 years after it was released.
Google searches for “chess” have doubled, while searches for “how to play chess” have hit a nine-year peak.
Inquiries for chess sets on eBay are up 250% companies are reporting increases of 150% on chess set sales.
Chess.com has seen new players increase fivefold.
It’s fascinating that a book can strike good fortune 37 years later to become a bestseller. “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac returned to the Billboard Top 10 this October all because of a viral TikTok video.
If you make great content, there’s always a chance it can come back around and rise to popularity as a second order effect in the future.
Where We Belong and How to Find It
Link: Familiarity and Belonging - Simon Sarris
My recommended read this week is a quick one on the topic of belonging.
As a married adult who moved across the country to a massive city with no friends there waiting for me, belonging has been something on my mind these last two years. In my first year in LA, I was traveling all the time for my job, and my wife was working crazy hours. Now, in year two, work-life is much better, but there’s this thing, you know…a pandemic.
We’re hundreds of miles away from our family and friends, and this has made feeling a sense of belonging difficult.
But there’s this thing about belonging that people have fallen away from, and this is what Sarris explains so well.
“Belonging: To belong is to possess a kind of irreplaceable familiarity. If you love your family, it is clearly not interchangeable with another family. When you love your home or city, or some club or cafe, you cannot swap for any other and feel the same.
People seek meaningful places worthy of calling home. These can be found, adventure tells us, but belonging reminds us that with our own efforts they can (they must) be made. All worthy places were once unworthy, after all.”
There are a few things about belonging that we seem to forget. I know I certainly have.
Family is quite obviously the most natural entity where we feel a sense of belonging. There are no people who can replace those that you love and call your family. This feeling of belonging is great and should be cherished, but this isn’t what I’m talking about.
Belonging can also be created, and this is where we typically miss the mark. Finding a place to belong takes a concerted effort. Think about our lives today and all of the moments we miss out on consistent interaction for the sake of convenience. We go through the drive-thru at Starbucks for coffee, missing out on the opportunity to interact with regulars in a cafe. We get food and groceries delivered instead of going to the store and seeing familiar faces. We connect headphones the moment we’re on a plane or subway car to tune out the world around us.
These are all choices of instant gratification. We choose to forgo the opportunity for meaningful interaction with current strangers in favor of the comfort found in avoiding awkward, difficult first conversations.
As Sarris points out, having a base level of familiarity is what removes the awkwardness in the first place. We just need to be patient enough to establish that familiarity by putting ourselves in the position to belong.
You don’t stumble into belonging, you invite it in by putting in the effort and seeking it with intent. My goal for the post-pandemic world is to seek belonging everywhere I am by inviting opportunities for it into my life.
Quote of the Week
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!" -Larry Niven (sci-fi writer)
That’s all this week, thanks for attending!
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See you next week,
-Ryan Mulholland