We have lost our way
We have lost our way
I haven’t written a non-technical blog in awhile, but maybe I’m finally facing a mid-life crisis, or maybe it’s an existential crisis. Deep down however, the feeling can’t be ignored that there is something terribly amiss in today’s world.
Between news about climate change, the rise of strong men, nationalism, populism, the ever growing tribal nature of human populations, and the increasing sense of isolation and inadequacy, it’s hard not to feel a bit of despair. I can only imagine how younger people must feel. For me, two questions necessarily follow:
- What is causing this?
- Is there a solution?
For the first question, I can only offer my own guess for an answer. As to the second question, my answer might be surprising considering my profession.
Separating the symptoms from the disease
It’s often very difficult to tease out the cause from the effect. This is why scientists are very reluctant to provide causal explanations for results of studies. We often confuse outward manifestations of some phenomenal effect and believe this to be the cause of other effects.
What does this have to do with the ills of our world today? Too often, one side or another will point fingers and say “if only people acted/thought/believed/felt like this, the world would be better place”. We are mistaking a symptom of the disease for its cause. This partisanship is not the cause of today’s ills, but is I believe, a symptom of some other ill. Slowly, over the last 20 years, this partisanship has changed to something vastly more dangerous. Now, people don’t just think that others not in their same “tribe” aren’t just misguided or foolish, but downright “evil”.
This is not good. One should ask; why has this been happening more recently? What has changed in the last 30 years or so to have reversed what we thought was the end goal of liberal capitalistic democracy? Indeed quite a few people I have talked to no longer believe in democracy or capitalism. One of my nieces in the Philippines just reposted an article that people don’t need more democracy, they need more discipline. So there must have been something in at least the last 30 years that has made us do an about face.
Technology is not the solution, it’s the problem
One can make many arguments for why we have seen a resurgence in populism, nationalism and identity politics. In America at least, each party will point to the other as being at fault for the rise in identity politics, and this has definitely caused a huge swing in “us vs. them” mentality and a rise in tribal behavior. I would argue however, that we’ve always had identity politics.
One could also posit that “free trade” agreements have created greater competition. While this is great for business, it’s not so great for the common person who now has to compete not just with local job contenders, but foreign ones too. I often wondered why during the 2016 election campaign cycle, no one in the media wanted to ask a crucial question. Trump was claiming that he would bring jobs back to America, but no one really bothered to ask how, or just as importantly, what the ramifications of that would have been even if he could have pulled it off. Walmart is cheap because many goods are manufactured overseas where they only have to pay employees $2/hr with no benefits. Even if somehow many jobs came back home, the prices of goods would also go up.
This competition created a lot of friction, both in economics, and in a rising sense of “the other” taking over. This loop only gets reinforced when the only news you hear purposefully only shows you news to make you angry. Facebook and news sites like Fox or MSNBC know that you are more likely to keep paying attention if you become emotionally involved. And the more you pay attention, the more money they make off of advertising or subscriptions. I miss the days of “old” news anchors who basically just told you the facts. Nowadays, everyone is a talking head.
More open trade agreements, an increasing reliance on foreign skilled workers, and the information that viewers see, have all been driven by technology. The growth in the population and our ever growing technologically driven economy demands more highly skilled workers. Everyone thought in the mid 90s that the web would end racism and bigotry because information would freely flow and everyone would get to understand each other and the problems we faced. There were two problems with this assumption:
- That facts will change people’s minds
- That facts would be transmitted over the web
A secondary problem was that people could listen only to what they wanted to hear. You’re a liberal? Great, you can watch MSNBC all day, or read Mother Jones or Thinkprogress. A conservative? Then you’ve got your Fox news fix, and any number of talk radio shows to keep you filled with that world view. People don’t like to question their view of the world. Ideas and concepts are much more palatable than reality is. Studies have shown that cognitive dissonance is quite literally painful.
But I haven’t even gotten to the worst offense of technology: climate change. People think that technology is the solution to our problems. We almost never think of technology as the source of new problems. Everyone thought Facebook was a great idea, until people realized how they could be manipulated by it, or how it actually increases the feeling of isolation and sense of inadequacy for many of the people who use it.
People will say “but we can use hydro, geothermal, solar, wave generation, etc, etc” to wean ourselves off of non-renewable energy (including nuclear). But these sources have repercussions as well. Ask China about what the 3 Gorges dam did to the environment and how it actually changed the Earth’s rotation. How many rare earth minerals will solar panels require?
Even advances in health care or disease control have its problems. The increased life expectancy and decrease in mortality rates means that there are more humans than ever on this planet. This exacts a cost…a real cost. Nature is brutal in its honesty. It does not care about individuals, but about systems.
Human nature is not natural at all
Humans don’t like nature. Nature doesn’t seem to play fair. Virtually all religions say we must protect the weak. It feels wrong to see inequality or suffering if you think something can be done about it. I believe we can and should protect the weak.
However, humans have lost touch with nature, with reality. In Buddhism, the goal is to see reality as it is, and to end the idea of a separate self: nirvana. I talk with many Filipinos about Christianity, because they are surprised I am part Filipino but not Christian. So, I talk about Buddhism and how it’s not really a religion or belief system. One of the things that surprises them the most is when I tell them that Buddhist priests aren’t really supposed to encourage people to get married and have kids.
They have great difficulty wrapping their heads around that because Christianity says “be fruitful and multiply”, and that life is a great blessing. On the contrary, the very first teaching of the Buddha said that life is dukkha. Dukkha can mean suffering or struggle. Life is hard. The Buddha said that in all our rebirths, we have cried an ocean full of tears. If you feel that life is hard, then bringing new life into the world becomes that much more of a responsibility to bear.
We as humans, have lost touch with nature and therefore with reality. We try to force nature to bend to our will. In Taoism, one strives to seek wu wei, or harmony with the energy around them. Lately, I’ve been watching Li Ziqi’s youtube channel. For those not familiar with her, she is a Chinese lady living in Southwest China and her videos cover all kinds of things: how to cook food, making natural furniture, embroidery, etc. What’s amazing, is that almost everything she does is with simple tools. She cooks in stone ovens or with fire (no gas or electricity). She makes furniture using hand tools (no power tools). She goes out and digs up ginger or bamboo shoots growing in the wild.
While watching these videos, I have had a profound sense of loss. I am not ashamed to admit that tears have come to my eyes watching some of these videos. Wherever she lives, it is quite beautiful with snow capped mountains, beautiful bamboo forests, and idyllic mountain streams. Yes, I know that we only see the “pretty” side of things. We don’t think about the dangerous predators in the woods, or that a drought could devastate her farm. But the fact remains, I feel that something deep and profound is missing in our lives.
A connection not just with people, but with nature.
Nature is our teacher
Nature is the greatest teacher we have. It is brutal and uncompromising. But humans are trying to cheat. We think we can get around things and have our cake and eat it too. Now, when I say nature, I don’t just mean the forest, or the mountains, or someplace outdoors. By nature, I mean “the way things are”.
One good thing about being an engineer is that I have to deal with reality. You can’t manipulate, bribe, coerce, entice, or threaten nature to do what you want it to do. You have to live within the confines of the rules of nature (the Tao). People are much more…malleable. And this presents a problem.
While being an engineer means I have to deal with the constraints or physics, logic and math, it’s still missing something more essential. Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, said that all warriors should learn how to farm. Life is complex, but it also follows rules. I think that people who work the daily grind in cities have forgotten these rules. The “virtualness” of today’s technological world is ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, making us more disconnected than ever.
Ultimately, you can’t cheat nature. Nature will find a balance whether you like it or not. In humanity’s quest to “conquer” nature, or to provide a virtual connection to the real world, it actually sets up an imbalance. This imbalance is what we are seeing today.
We need to listen, not to Facebook, or even the news. We need to listen to each other. To nature around us. When I was a young boy up to my early teens, sometimes I would sneak out of the house at night, and just watch the stars in the night sky. I would imagine that I was looking at the face of “God”. I hadn’t quite realized yet that I only needed to look inside. But by looking at the night sky, just listening to the wind in the trees or the occasional hoot of an owl, I felt both simultaneously extremely small, and yet also vastly huge.
Nature does not care if we are liberal or conservative, black or white. These are sicknesses of the human mind to categorize and label things. We must let go of all this duality, identification and choosing. I can not say it better than Seng T’san.
But what about work?
The fact of the matter is, I am a software engineer. My training has been all about technology. And to be honest, I feel somewhat guilty about it now. What I can do however, is minimize my impact on the world, and to help others see that technology can be both a solution and a problem.
For example, at Netflix, I tried to get our team to use rust for several reasons. One of the reasons was actually to be more “green”. Because we were mostly a javascript shop, I worried about two things:
- You can’t scale out processes on an IoT gateway
- Our AWS services and lambdas were not very efficient
Many people don’t realize that the largest liability and debt for huge companies like Google or Facebook isn’t the salaries of their employees, it’s the cost of powering up their data centers. The energy bill is in fact so huge, that all data center services combined (eg, Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, which are powered by AWS, GCP, Azure, etc) is greater than the aerospace industry.
One of my “pitches” for using rust was to appeal to being more green. Also, the lambdas are billed based on how long your function ran. Since rust is several orders or magnitude faster than javascript, our bill from Amazon would also consequently be reduced.
When you are scaled out to huge amounts of data, you need to start thinking like this. Unfortunately, business demands, and engineers reticence to learn something “hard” makes being able to pivot to these technologies more difficult.
I also realize that there’s no such thing as “Do no harm”. At best it’s “do the least amount of harm possible”. I remember watching a video from Buddhist monks about being vegetarian. And one of the comments I remember more than the others. He said that it’s impossible to not do some harm. For example, do you know how many rodents are killed by farm combine machines to harvest vegetable crops? Also, as plant science increases, we are discovering that plants also have a form of conscious, and might even “feel” pain.
Again though, this is dukkha. Our very existence is struggle not just for our own self, but for those around us. Competition for resources and survival is unavoidable. But, what I hope for is that in my work, I can minimize the harm I do, and counteract it by doing as much good as I can.