MODERN LIFE IS COMPLEX. WHY? IT'S... COMPLICATED.
Over-the-top book analyzing the complexity that caused the Meaning Crisis. It also explores how people focus their attention in a world overwhelmed by superficial meaning and complexity. Fittingly, the book is made of scattershot essays.
First, the book explains how the world became more complex.
Second, it explains how we simplify things to deal with that complexity.
Third, it showcases how those simplifications end up making the world more complex and making it harder to assign responsibility. In short, interpolation inhibits investigation. By the time you figure out what someone meant, they are no longer in the room. That makes dialectic solutions quite difficult—if we can't agree on rough definitions and basic facts.
The book also introduces a new psychological framework for satisfaction called The Fulfillment Games, based on a see-saw dynamic between control & release.
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Eclectically inspired by a wide variety of books:
Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter
The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco
The Seamless Web by Stanley Burnshaw
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
The Crisis of the Lonely Atoms by Alex Hagen
Meaningness + In the cells of the eggplant blog by David Chapman
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
Incerto book series by Nassim 'Sir Flâneur' Taleb
Surrogation blog series by Suspended Reason
A world of symbols blog series by Patrick D. Farley
Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes by Jurgen Schmidhuber
Meaning in Life and Why It Mattersby Susan Wolf
Unflattening by Nick Sousanis
Data and Reality by William Kent
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
The Divine Within by Aldous Huxley
Rethinking Pluralism Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity by Adam B. Seligman & Robert P. Weller
