This is not exactly the same thing, but a quote from The Steampunk Aesthetic that feels relevant (the context is not quite about me pushing in a direction and getting/losing pushback, but, it was about ending up in a place much more like the ancestral environment and noticing how much easier it was to be healthy).
v. Why can’t we have hard things?
While repairing the boat, I’d spend all day lifting heavy things and climbing around athletically and nothing about it felt hard or obnoxious – and all of it was deeply intertwined with solving interesting problems, and developing my own tools to do so.
It threw into the sharp relief the ridiculous of my default-world life, where I struggled to remember to go to the gym for 20 minutes or do 12 pushups or whatever. For some reason, being able to ‘just lift or climb things like it’s nothing’ requires a context switch.
Spiegelman’s Monster
Kaj Sotala once told the story of what happens when you remove all restrictions from a life form:
In 1967, the biologist Sol Spiegelman took a strand of viral RNA, and placed it on a dish containing various raw materials that the RNA could use to build new copies of itself. After the RNA strands had replicated on the dish, Spiegelman extracted some of them and put them on another dish, again with raw materials that the strands could use to replicate themselves. He then kept repeating this process.
No longer burdened with the constraints of needing to work for a living, produce protein coats, or to do anything but reproduce, the RNA evolved to match its new environment. The RNA mutated, and the strands which could copy themselves the fastest won out. Everything in those strands that wasn’t needed for reproduction had just become an unnecessary liability. After just 74 generations, the original 4,500 nucleotide bases had been reduced to a mere 220. Useless parts of the genome had been discarded; the viral RNA had now become a pure replicator, dubbed “Spiegelman’s monster”. (Source.)
Later going on to say:
As technology keeps evolving, it will make it easier and easier to overcome various constraints in our environment, our bodies, and in our minds. And then it will become increasing tempting to become a Spiegelman’s monster: to rid yourself of the things that the loosened constraints have made unnecessary, to become something that is no longer even remotely human. If you don’t do it, then someone else will. With enough time, they may end up ruling the world, outcompeting you like Spiegelman’s monster outcompeted the original, umutated RNA strands.
There’s a bunch of important philosophical questions packaged together here, that will become increasingly important if we get an Age of Em or something similar. If things go badly, we get Moloch’s endgame. If they go well, maybe someday the whole world can be designed such that the opportunities available to us are more aligned with our physical needs.
But in the meanwhile, how much of this can be applied to day-to-day life?
In the comments here I’m interested in the near-term, practical question: What sort of constraints might be useful to preserve (or recapture) right now, to improve quality of life in the present day?
One constraint that Logan and I have both gotten a lot of benefit out of reinstating is one around artificial light; Logan is stricter than I but we’re both much more subject to natural darkness than the average American and afaict it’s doing a bunch of positive things. Better sleep, more connection with the “third state of consciousness” that is between waking and sleeping, we essentially never struggle to settle Cadence down for bed, etc.
In past eras of my life, I had “don’t drive less than two miles” as a soft rule and would instead walk any sub-two-mile distance, and I think this too was useful.
(This answer feels fragmented; sorry; am still on postsurgery medication and brain is at 40% capacity.)
Better sleep, more connection with the “third state of consciousness” that is between waking and sleeping, we essentially never struggle to settle Cadence down for bed, etc.
I’ve heard Logan’s description of the Third State.
On your end, does this include limiting screens at night? How much Third State do you get?
I have not yet been limiting screens, except insofar as, like, hanging out with Cadence from 6pm to sleep usually means no screens. But it seems like I’m obviously going to end up there, and am sort of just relinquishing my reluctance/figuring out a new flow that still allows me to do the things I need to get done each day.
Currently, I get some Third State in the mornings, actually, when Cadence has woken up and is puttering around but hasn’t come and fully woken me up yet.
This is not exactly the same thing, but a quote from The Steampunk Aesthetic that feels relevant (the context is not quite about me pushing in a direction and getting/losing pushback, but, it was about ending up in a place much more like the ancestral environment and noticing how much easier it was to be healthy).
This is great.
One constraint that Logan and I have both gotten a lot of benefit out of reinstating is one around artificial light; Logan is stricter than I but we’re both much more subject to natural darkness than the average American and afaict it’s doing a bunch of positive things. Better sleep, more connection with the “third state of consciousness” that is between waking and sleeping, we essentially never struggle to settle Cadence down for bed, etc.
In past eras of my life, I had “don’t drive less than two miles” as a soft rule and would instead walk any sub-two-mile distance, and I think this too was useful.
(This answer feels fragmented; sorry; am still on postsurgery medication and brain is at 40% capacity.)
I’ve heard Logan’s description of the Third State.
On your end, does this include limiting screens at night? How much Third State do you get?
I have not yet been limiting screens, except insofar as, like, hanging out with Cadence from 6pm to sleep usually means no screens. But it seems like I’m obviously going to end up there, and am sort of just relinquishing my reluctance/figuring out a new flow that still allows me to do the things I need to get done each day.
Currently, I get some Third State in the mornings, actually, when Cadence has woken up and is puttering around but hasn’t come and fully woken me up yet.