Overall I mostly agree with all these points. Like @Dustin said, most of it isn’t (trying to be) original, it just concatenates a lot of useful, sometimes contrarian ideas in one place.
The first and the hardest step is to see that we now find ourselves in a desert, and not in an enchanted forest.
This one I keep coming back to. I agree with it, for all the reasons Thiel lists and others. I also see that the people in my generation who I respect the most are often also the ones who take seriously the ideas you find in meditative traditions about accepting the present moment, whatever it is, and being at peace in it, or who point out that even still, my many metrics we are way better off than almost everyone who ever lived. Every December Nicholas Kristof publishes a NYT column on how it has been the best year ever for humanity, and it’s really hard to disagree with that, too. There’s a pure land/charnel ground kind of duality in how we choose to look at it.
But I’d still rather also have all the cool things I *know* we have the basic science knowledge necessary to invent, but don’t direct resources into as a society. And, you know, live in a world where we don’t waste so much of our life going through the motions of things that don’t help or that actively harm people, including ourselves.
Overall I mostly agree with all these points. Like @Dustin said, most of it isn’t (trying to be) original, it just concatenates a lot of useful, sometimes contrarian ideas in one place.
This one I keep coming back to. I agree with it, for all the reasons Thiel lists and others. I also see that the people in my generation who I respect the most are often also the ones who take seriously the ideas you find in meditative traditions about accepting the present moment, whatever it is, and being at peace in it, or who point out that even still, my many metrics we are way better off than almost everyone who ever lived. Every December Nicholas Kristof publishes a NYT column on how it has been the best year ever for humanity, and it’s really hard to disagree with that, too. There’s a pure land/charnel ground kind of duality in how we choose to look at it.
But I’d still rather also have all the cool things I *know* we have the basic science knowledge necessary to invent, but don’t direct resources into as a society. And, you know, live in a world where we don’t waste so much of our life going through the motions of things that don’t help or that actively harm people, including ourselves.