“It bends space. Zod’s ship uses the same technology, and if we can make the two drives collide, a singularity can be created.” – Man of Steel
Bemused means to bewilder, but what if I’m already Wilder?
After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office.
“Man, it has been a long year,” I said.
“Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.”
This really made me think. I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year. It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on. All the time.
I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur. For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor.
I mean, propane, right?
What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas? Car.
I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts. If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants.
Really.
I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof. Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives. The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip. If they were lucky.
In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty. And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today. I mean, they love ice dancing, right?
They told me I couldn’t be a stand-up comic, but no one is laughing now!
This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate. Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before:
“Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em”
It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.
Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history. I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results. This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems. I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.
Why is insulin expensive? It’s not called liveabetes now, is it?
There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet? It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information.
But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily. However, it certainly has sped up the world.
When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait. Stop. Look at the board. Think.” It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight. But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.
Magnus Carlsen was disqualified for using a computer to look for potential mates. Stupid Tinder®.
Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker. Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour. The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity. Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.
Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable. I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers. I think, in part, it is. But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.
It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement. An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high? As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content. In a year or two? Maybe it surpasses human-generated video.
Yeah. The amusement is accelerating. Until it can’t.
I guess her children were born with carpet burn.
The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation. The next time I have a problem? I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane.
Long time reader here.
Your posts always leave me rewildered.
Why, thank you! More rewilding on the way!
“…It turns our perception of time into an eternal now…”
I think a lot about the concept you are discussing here. We have turned ourselves via Skinner operant conditioning into mice endlessly pushing the bar for pleasure treats…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/smartphone-stress_b_2617335
…only the bar we endlessly push is the return key and the treat we get are stimulating dopamine hits in our brain.
Sometimes I zoom my mind out into a hovering third-person out-of-body experience looking down on myself at the keyboard and literally think to myself the specific words, “You don’t get to do this forever”. It used to be that the metaphor for mortality was counting heartbeats. Neil Armstrong (supposedly) said “I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.” Now, instead of heartbeats, I think in terms of links – an apt metaphor for our society. How many (or few) links do I get to click on before I die? I wonder what the very last one will show me?
“The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation…”
Wise words, John. Thanks for reminding me.
Oh, that’s perfect. I don’t wait in lines, unless absolutely necessary. I do everything in “off” times because waiting wastes those heartbeats. Good stuff.
When I founded my business back in 1989, my “tech” was a typewriter, handheld TI calculator & a BellSouth phone card that allowed you to dial an 800 number to access voicemail and charge long distance calls. It was OK to call back the next day to quote a potential job. People understood.
Cell (“bag”) phone & thermal paper fax came along in 1990.
Today?
If you don’t call back within the hour, no, 15 minutes, it’s “Sorry, you weren’t available and have someone coming by in an hour (BS).”
I’m tiring of the everyday steamroller crap. Plus the travel. SC (and Charlotte) has been overrun with poor-mannered transplants forever. Beaufort (SC) is about the only place that hasn’t suffered from the onslaught.
That’s why we live there, far from the madding crowd. And it’s pronounced view-FERT, not BOW-fort.
Yes – expectations have increased, and people have become more coarse. Small towns are better, because it’s harder to yell at your neighbor that is the softball coach.
You’ll know you are over-stimulated when you try to read a book and can’t focus on what you’re reading. We’re now a bunch of Labrador Retrievers, only existing in the now and… OH! LOOK! A SQUIRREL!
SD – Squirrels are our sibling Maltipoos big entertainment, along with flushing Mourning Doves under the bird feeder. It’s always a hoot.
Agreed on your observation. USA = Pavlovian Nation.
Yup. The number of books I read has gone down, so I make it a point to sit down with a book every week, at minimum. That makes life better.
Several things that have helped me slow the world down:
1) Sunday is my church & relax time. If I’m tired, I don’t ‘power through it’ – I take a nap.
2) My husband and I are carving out more time ‘just for us’. We watch the same show together, we turn tech off and talk, we attend a class together.
3) I only answer my phone when I want to. As my dad once said, when someone asked why he didn’t answer his phone, “I installed that thing for MY convenience”.
4) I limit my time with email. Twice a day, in the morning, and sometime in the afternoon. I also spend some time with the Unsubscribe link – it does take a little time, but I get less junk mail.
5) I start each morning with prayers. I’m slowly (very slowly) working my way through a Bible in a Year course online. And I signed up for Angel Studios movies and shows – family friendly for the most part, the exception being The Shift, which is VERY dark, and about the struggle with demonic forces. Good, but I wouldn’t suggest it for those less than teen age.
Great list. I do email three times a week. Seems to work. I end each day with my prayers.
“They can’t stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal.”
Au contraire.
As kids, we were all going to be “ruined” by television, with half a dozen different channels to choose from (plus PBS). When video games appeared, the youth of the land were doomed to be turned into Asteroid-smashing, mushroom-stomping, Mortal Combatants, unable to separate fantasy from reality. Then the Internet showed up and said, “Hold my beer” at 19.2 kbps between service outages. AI is the newest bogeyman leading the children off into the ether like some virtual Pied Piper.
In my opinion, all of this is leading up to a great, cathartic reset, following which children will emerge from their darkened basements, blinking in the sunlight, to rediscover the singular joys of catching tadpoles, playing tag and skimming stones. Young lovers will connect the old-fashioned way, through awkward face-to-face interaction. Bicycles will once again become the primary mode of transportation for the under-18 set. And at least for a time, the signal will go silent.
Seventh-Eighth grade is when the cells take over. Removing them creates depression.
When I started in construction, some projects required a trip (sometime for miles) to a pay phone to order concrete. Material orders were from the office, and delivery was sometimes a well orchestrated disaster. Finding certain materials required pulling down the Thomas Register and spending a long time looking through the pages for the item. Then came cell-phones.
My first cell-phone was a bag phone. Heavy, rarely carried around, and many times useless for a lack of a signal, it still was better than looking for a pay-phone that worked. The cell-phones became smaller, and then the smart-phone appeared. It was wonderful. The entire internet, with all that can be found, was at my fingertips. I could contact my suppliers, keep an eye on the weather, and many times could call the truck drivers delivering my materials.
The comedy of errors became astounding. With few willing to actually talk to me, the texts could be ignored with impunity. “I didn’t get the text” was a standard excuse, and caller ID’s led to mistaken texts for someone other than me. Drivers using aps might find they entered the wrong address, or late due to not taking into the consideration of traffic.
Surveying instruments became computerized electronics, which meant an almost complete elimination of a field party. One man could place control points, and many times the data was loaded from a computer by someone in an office. That led to a conversation with a worker wandering around with a GPS rod and trying to figure out why his control points were not coinciding with the plans. I asked if he kept log book for confirmation of what he already placed. He didn’t, and wondered why that was important. I explained to him whoever in the office creating the data could find a mistake, fix the mistake, correct the data, and all the blame would be on whoever was in the field. Of course, it was too late. His “incompetence” allowed a few more year for an incompetent office worker and he was fired.
Jess – See my “bag phone” comment above. Before I jettisoned all employees and went to “1099 Land” in 2012, there was a real problem with college grads (yes) with lack of detailed log book entries. Hey, I have my old ones from 1989 forward. Roughly 250 or so. FYI…
Got a call from a guy buying a property in Mt. Airy, NC (yes, Mayberry) that was my 4th job. Told him I could document gasoline tank removal & sampling (NC-DEQ had purged that file), but it’d be $500. He refused. Two weeks later, he sent the $500 and reported me to the BBB after the check cleared. I won my appeal.
And still use a Day Timer®.
Without the Internet and instant communication? We needed to plan. Alaska was wonderful for that – you had to plan to get anything done because nothing was “just there”.
This just occurred to me: Any relation to Laura Ingalls?
When I moved to Alaska, I titled one blog post as “Little House In The Big Woods” by John Ingalls Wilder. A blog aggregator picked up the name and called me “John I. Wilder” and I fancied it.
My basically theological foundation today is that the world and everything in it has been put here primarily for my amusement.
Bravo.