reading this on my vision pro while taking ayahuasca in my homemade ice bath, surrounded by horses that have learned how to use ChatGPT to make their work easier, and I gotta say, I agree
Technology is double-sided. While making life easier/more beautiful, it also distracts us from the realities (miseries?) of self-conscious existence. Eg, porn, video games, mindless YouTube videos, etc. are prime example of this distractive aspect of technology.
Things are always getting better and always getting worse. Confucius didn’t say that, but an astute professor of mine did. Maintaining the balance in order to live a meaningful, examined--dare I say, distinctly human!--life seems to be the main struggle of our bourgeois techno-affluence.
One additional angle on this phenomenon is where one derives their social interaction. In the 1950s, it was plausible you would make friends at work, you would live in the same community, and you could conceivably spend most of your professional life at the same company.
Working backwards, we change jobs much faster, living at the company's fickle whims. Whether you're seeking gainful employment or trying to get a promotion, it necessitates flexibility about your community (and where you actually live is dictated more by housing costs than any other cultural trait). Given these changes, if you desire stable social interaction, you must seek it outside work (and that's before we get into the tools that make it far easier to maintain those relationships with friends and family from a distance). So we arrive at the end of our journey, where especially as the first digital generation ages, we look to work for work, knowing it will come and go, but we only get one life and we'll make the most of it with whatever tools are available.
It's the ability to mute my mic, turn off my camera while someone else is giving a status update that doesn't affect me, and answer my child's math question or listen to her simple pleasure of a trick her kittens just played. It's the presense in two worlds at once. One which demands all my time yet will replace me with two weeks notice, and the other which needs more of my time and yet represents my long term legacy in society and biology.
Totally agree and see this happening, too. Remote work is enabling an entirely new way of working and living, and an associated economic shift that challenges the future of many cities.
I'm Gen X and followed a similar pattern of migration. We grew up in a rural area, left to pursue a career in the "big city" for about 20 years, burned out on that crowded lifestyle, and moved back to a rural area about 7 years ago. I've been working remote ever since (and love it).
Our Gen Z children have no desire for the old model of having a job in the city and spending too much of their lives in a daily commute. Despite being raised in an urban area, they prefer spending time in the wilderness and want to build lives there.
The pandemic opened Pandora's box and set many people free. They don't want to be dragged back into cubicles under fluorescent lights. The urban perks are no longer as appealing, now that they come with incredibly high costs.
Is this also the aesthetic of Star Wars -- where technology is as old as the trees of Kashyyyk, so you might kick a rusty droid, and a hologram comes out -- but it's all coevolved for so long, the droid, the rust, the hologram, and your mindless kick, all of it fits together, and you feel at home among the vast stars, where home could be anywhere? Could it be our mythology of 1977 finally bearing fruit?
Reading this on my screen porch, dogs at my feet, raintops falling on the Koi pond...there is no going back for most people once they've experienced the ability to forest bathe while cell phoning or the wonders of remote work from Barcelona or Jakarta. What do we do with all of that commercial real estate? Turn it into mixed-use housing/retail/office space, ideally.
<<What do you feel at such examples? Annoyance? Exasperation? Attraction? Neutrality? Sadness? Desire? A mix? Should people even be paid for this? some ask.>>
Reading your lush descriptions felt to me like those old videos of 1950's housewives interacting with Fancy New Labor-Saving Appliances! The attitude of the actress is that she's living in luxury, but from the perspective of a future in which none of those devices dazzles us, we can see she's absurdly luxuriating in nihilistic miasma, just a few years away from having a complete breakdown and/or participating in a rebellion / revolution that will upend everything.
The domestic pastoral and the high tech pastoral are both advertisements, and you can only see your real life through the filter of advertising fantasy for so long before you reject it and condemn it for a prison.
A few weeks ago I co-opted "high tech pastoralism" in an email invitation to my 4th of July party. I thought the phrase captured the vibe I am currently living, as a millennial working remote on a few acres in the Ozarks. Cheers to you for expanding on the idea, I can't wait to read more!
Beautifully written current version of how Americans have always hated cities. Rather than every city dweller moving to country, and therefore, wrecking and destroying habitat with sprawl, why not improve compact cities to make them more livable? I live in Northern Manhattan, next to a 67-acre park, which is next to a 100-acre park overlooking the Hudson River with the Jersey Palisades on the other side. My co-op has a roof garden, I am not burdened with the expense of a car. The answer is to improve cities in order to save the countryside.
As a zoomer who recently started my career remote, and transitioned to in person asap, I think this only works for people who are settled. People who have finished growing their careers, met their lifelong partners and friends, and who mostly just want to get their jobs done and spend as much time as possible with their families.
For those sorts of people I agree with this view, but I also think that if a single 20 year old moved to the countryside to do remote work then they would be miserable.
Although I completely agree this is a thing (one I've consciously or not been pursuing) I would be cautious of thinking remote work is a done deal. At the end of the day, management actually *can* order people back to the office. We saw it with Twitter for example. People can quit but ultimately a mass quit just ends up being a musical chairs style reshuffle.
What do I feel? Like a voyeur, a class-voyeur. You are not my people, but such opions are a sublime adventure indeed. On the job, I too feel the wind in my face, share space with swallows raising their young, am serenaded by song birds, I'm bathed in summer rain, my muscles well honed, and certain I'm not about to be replaced by a robot. I shovel shit for cash, there is more than one way to be pastoral, and I talk to bots for fun. So how do I feel? Satisfied. I've peered across the fence and maybe the grass is just as green on my side. Oh, and very greatful, thank you Erik for sharing your wisdom and words to the impecunious likes of me, I do truly appreciate the privelege of reading your work.
Great post, as always Erik. As one of the elusive and strange Zoomers myself I can say I hardly go out - not just because there are much better ways to spend my time, but also because the cost of drinking is insane. Not least because incomes have hardly risen, while inflation increased the cost of everything.
reading this on my vision pro while taking ayahuasca in my homemade ice bath, surrounded by horses that have learned how to use ChatGPT to make their work easier, and I gotta say, I agree
Technology is double-sided. While making life easier/more beautiful, it also distracts us from the realities (miseries?) of self-conscious existence. Eg, porn, video games, mindless YouTube videos, etc. are prime example of this distractive aspect of technology.
Things are always getting better and always getting worse. Confucius didn’t say that, but an astute professor of mine did. Maintaining the balance in order to live a meaningful, examined--dare I say, distinctly human!--life seems to be the main struggle of our bourgeois techno-affluence.
One additional angle on this phenomenon is where one derives their social interaction. In the 1950s, it was plausible you would make friends at work, you would live in the same community, and you could conceivably spend most of your professional life at the same company.
Working backwards, we change jobs much faster, living at the company's fickle whims. Whether you're seeking gainful employment or trying to get a promotion, it necessitates flexibility about your community (and where you actually live is dictated more by housing costs than any other cultural trait). Given these changes, if you desire stable social interaction, you must seek it outside work (and that's before we get into the tools that make it far easier to maintain those relationships with friends and family from a distance). So we arrive at the end of our journey, where especially as the first digital generation ages, we look to work for work, knowing it will come and go, but we only get one life and we'll make the most of it with whatever tools are available.
It's the ability to mute my mic, turn off my camera while someone else is giving a status update that doesn't affect me, and answer my child's math question or listen to her simple pleasure of a trick her kittens just played. It's the presense in two worlds at once. One which demands all my time yet will replace me with two weeks notice, and the other which needs more of my time and yet represents my long term legacy in society and biology.
Totally agree and see this happening, too. Remote work is enabling an entirely new way of working and living, and an associated economic shift that challenges the future of many cities.
I'm Gen X and followed a similar pattern of migration. We grew up in a rural area, left to pursue a career in the "big city" for about 20 years, burned out on that crowded lifestyle, and moved back to a rural area about 7 years ago. I've been working remote ever since (and love it).
Our Gen Z children have no desire for the old model of having a job in the city and spending too much of their lives in a daily commute. Despite being raised in an urban area, they prefer spending time in the wilderness and want to build lives there.
The pandemic opened Pandora's box and set many people free. They don't want to be dragged back into cubicles under fluorescent lights. The urban perks are no longer as appealing, now that they come with incredibly high costs.
Is this also the aesthetic of Star Wars -- where technology is as old as the trees of Kashyyyk, so you might kick a rusty droid, and a hologram comes out -- but it's all coevolved for so long, the droid, the rust, the hologram, and your mindless kick, all of it fits together, and you feel at home among the vast stars, where home could be anywhere? Could it be our mythology of 1977 finally bearing fruit?
Reading this on my screen porch, dogs at my feet, raintops falling on the Koi pond...there is no going back for most people once they've experienced the ability to forest bathe while cell phoning or the wonders of remote work from Barcelona or Jakarta. What do we do with all of that commercial real estate? Turn it into mixed-use housing/retail/office space, ideally.
<<What do you feel at such examples? Annoyance? Exasperation? Attraction? Neutrality? Sadness? Desire? A mix? Should people even be paid for this? some ask.>>
Reading your lush descriptions felt to me like those old videos of 1950's housewives interacting with Fancy New Labor-Saving Appliances! The attitude of the actress is that she's living in luxury, but from the perspective of a future in which none of those devices dazzles us, we can see she's absurdly luxuriating in nihilistic miasma, just a few years away from having a complete breakdown and/or participating in a rebellion / revolution that will upend everything.
The domestic pastoral and the high tech pastoral are both advertisements, and you can only see your real life through the filter of advertising fantasy for so long before you reject it and condemn it for a prison.
A few weeks ago I co-opted "high tech pastoralism" in an email invitation to my 4th of July party. I thought the phrase captured the vibe I am currently living, as a millennial working remote on a few acres in the Ozarks. Cheers to you for expanding on the idea, I can't wait to read more!
This is a fun read.
Beautifully written current version of how Americans have always hated cities. Rather than every city dweller moving to country, and therefore, wrecking and destroying habitat with sprawl, why not improve compact cities to make them more livable? I live in Northern Manhattan, next to a 67-acre park, which is next to a 100-acre park overlooking the Hudson River with the Jersey Palisades on the other side. My co-op has a roof garden, I am not burdened with the expense of a car. The answer is to improve cities in order to save the countryside.
And there will always be some of us who just love the city, period!
As a zoomer who recently started my career remote, and transitioned to in person asap, I think this only works for people who are settled. People who have finished growing their careers, met their lifelong partners and friends, and who mostly just want to get their jobs done and spend as much time as possible with their families.
For those sorts of people I agree with this view, but I also think that if a single 20 year old moved to the countryside to do remote work then they would be miserable.
Although I completely agree this is a thing (one I've consciously or not been pursuing) I would be cautious of thinking remote work is a done deal. At the end of the day, management actually *can* order people back to the office. We saw it with Twitter for example. People can quit but ultimately a mass quit just ends up being a musical chairs style reshuffle.
What do I feel? Like a voyeur, a class-voyeur. You are not my people, but such opions are a sublime adventure indeed. On the job, I too feel the wind in my face, share space with swallows raising their young, am serenaded by song birds, I'm bathed in summer rain, my muscles well honed, and certain I'm not about to be replaced by a robot. I shovel shit for cash, there is more than one way to be pastoral, and I talk to bots for fun. So how do I feel? Satisfied. I've peered across the fence and maybe the grass is just as green on my side. Oh, and very greatful, thank you Erik for sharing your wisdom and words to the impecunious likes of me, I do truly appreciate the privelege of reading your work.
Great post, as always Erik. As one of the elusive and strange Zoomers myself I can say I hardly go out - not just because there are much better ways to spend my time, but also because the cost of drinking is insane. Not least because incomes have hardly risen, while inflation increased the cost of everything.