Introduction: The World We Are Living Into ...

 

Image from here.

(Although this series is tagged as my "theory of everything" it is not really a theory of "everything."  What I intend is "everything within human experience.")

In February 2021 Pew Research asked a random sampling of over 10,000 Americans how many days out of the last seven they felt nervous, anxious, or on edge.  38% said less than one day, basically none at all.  31% said 1-2 days.  20% said 3-4 days and 11% “most of the time,” up to all seven days.  The interesting thing here is that 62% of Americans feel some form of anxiety on a weekly basis.

When asked to rate their level of personal distress as high, medium, or low, two-thirds of people over 65 haven't a care in the world.  But only about one-third of anyone aged 18-29 feels that way.  Moreover, 32% of 18-29's report high distress and 31% medium distress.  It is interesting that this younger demographic spends more of their lives immersed in technology than any previous generation, except for those under 18, which the Pew report did not survey.

This unease isn't because of the pandemic, although I'm sure worries over a global virus running amok contribute.  This is reflective of a trend that began before COVID-19.  Perhaps it has always been this way, we just haven't had the capability to measure it before.  Back in 2000, the American Psychological Association concluded that there was a significant increase in anxiety among college youth and school children since the 1950s.  

In 2019, the National Institutes of Health reported that one-third of children between 13 and 18 currently experience some sort of “anxiety disorder.”  Further back, in 2012 the Nuffield Foundation reported: “The proportion of 15/16 year olds reporting that they frequently feel anxious or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years.”

Those 15/16 year olds of that older study now show up in the 18-29 category in the Pew study.  It does not appear that they are escaping their anxiousness brought on, according to some of the above research, by changes in family interaction, substance abuse, greater peer pressure, helicopter parenting, and the internet.  If not the full picture, these elements are at least part of the foundation for anxiety among America's youth.  And you don't look so terrific yourself.

Do you ever feel unease for no apparent reason, like something is not quite right about the world?  Are you ever frustrated or even angry because of “the way the world is”?  Because of “how those people are” or “how that system is”?  Maybe you are different.  Perhaps you find the world exciting and full of blue ocean possibilities.  If you experience any existential anger or frustration it is usually directed toward those people and institutions that are failing to “keep up” with the pace of change.

Don't worry.  These are two sides of the same coin.  Either way, you are supposed to feel like you do.  It is a healthy response though the anxiousness itself is categorically unhealthy.  What worries me most about the Pew numbers is how blissful many Americans seem to be.  They worry so little that they are bored and boring.  They worry so little that they don't see what has already happened.

We are living in the most challenging and potentially life-changing time since the Enlightenment began around 500 years ago.  Parents spend more time watching television and with their smartphones than talking to their children, who are supposed to be off excelling in sports or arts or crafts of some sort.  Kids, living with such compressed expectations, are even more immersed in technology than their parents.  Meanwhile, more people than ever before choose not to be parents at all.  Instead of kids they have pets and technology.

The virtual world has wide appeal especially among the young compared to the bullshit of the “real” world.  There is no more “play time.”  There is only the internet of things.  Change and challenge often cause unease among a significant portion of the population, while inspiring others here and there.  It is natural if you feel any distress.  It shows you are paying attention even if you cannot articulate why you feel this way.

No one really knows what to do about all this.  Almost no one knows exactly why they feel the way they do – inspired or anxious or both.  No one knows why because religion, healthcare, academia, government, entertainment, the news media and especially social media are clueless about all this.  In some sense they are all accountable for it.  There is nowhere for us to turn to get any meaningful and applicable explanation.  

This is Nietzsche's manifestation of nihilism, which deeply troubled him.  The traditional and scientific explanations no longer seem relevant nor give us what we require to find meaning.  In the absence of a “revaluation of all values” we are left with a void filled by “the advent of nihilism” in all its many forms.  Personally, Nietzsche was not a nihilist, but he predicted its coming.  He also predicted it would influence humanity for 200 years.  If his reckoning is right, we are a little more than halfway past our anxious season of no meaning.

You might feel that the reason for your unease comes from living in the world and the strange behavior of people living in it.  But that's not it.  Right now the human brain is on the verge of a dramatic cognitive transformation and many people intuitively sense this.  Since this is human intuition, it seems to defy concrete definition, like anxiety itself oftentimes.  There are multiple competing intuitive explanations, with multiple intensities of advocacy, depending on the person.  

On the one hand, some of your brain's neurons are hardwired, fixed and familiar, seeking definitive reasons for everything while maintaining a psyche of recognizable terrain.  The classic saying in neuroscience is “neurons that fire together wire together.”  Your brain is hardwired in random ways and instinctively seeks further hardwiring (hard-brain).  On the other hand, your brain is dynamic, imaginative, innovative, curious, made for learning new things – in neuroscience this is neuroplasticity.  Your brain is made to grasp new things that happen along the way and to create new things (flex-brain).

Hardwired neurology and flexible neurology are two traits (see note at end) inherent to the human brain.  Everyone is born with part of their brain already hardwired and ready to go.  Everyone is born with the ability to apply novel experiences, to learn from them.  For hundreds of thousands of years these two aspects have guided human behavior.

But for the past 10,000 years the demand placed upon the flex-brain has become ever greater.  Most of us have “rewired” our brains to keep up with the changes.  Generally, we have handled this very well.  So well, in fact, that, through innovations, we hurried the pace of change itself.  We have now leveraged technology such that technology itself will transform everything about the world and humanity in ways unfathomable just decades ago.

With the acceleration of change, however, neurons of our hard-brain experience an ever-expanding disconnect from the world.  Old firing patterns don't fit the strange new way.  Time for an update, the Great Reset, the Singularity, whatever you want to call it.  It is an exhilarating world for some, but a strange world for most people.

Here's the basis for the strangeness.  The world we are living in is not the way the world actually is anymore.  That world we believe we are living in is already in the past even though, as Nietzsche might put it, its shadow remains long.  In its place we have a world we are living into.  

This is a slight semantic game but it can reveal a lot.  The difference between living in the world and living into the world is staggering.  In the former you know the world and are situated within the world as it is, for better or worse.  In the latter, things are much more uncertain.  You are learning the world and are situated within the world as it changes.  

The lives of Americans under 30 are more invested in this world of change than prior generations.  Particularly, early and mid-teens are experiencing the leading edge of what has already happened.  This can be psychologically traumatic to all age groups.  This is the fundamental reason for a myriad of biological, cultural and spiritual crises you and I are experiencing and witnessing globally today.  For most of us, our brains are hardwired in ways that don't fit the changing world and this results in behavioral issues: denialism, terrorism, fundamentalism, anarchy, magical or conspiratorial thinking, and a host of cognitive biases.

There is no stopping the future, nor slowing the accelerating pace of change.  That makes a flexible brain better equipped to live into the future than a hardwired brain is equipped to live in the “present.”   Those of us who can rewire our brains through neuroplasticity (which can be cultivated) will thrive within the unfolding novelty of the world.  The rest of us will languish, becoming ever more confused and frustrated, struggling to keep up with the strangeness of it all.  As our hardwired brains panic at the pace of change, at the strangeness, our behavior becomes more volatile.  Which is a dangerous fact.  We might do anything to ourselves or to each other.

Technology future-shifts the human experience of time.  But, nevertheless, most people live in the past, drawing upon former experiences within the present.  For humans, the present is normally composed of past experiences we apply to new situations.  Throughout most of human history and pre-history reality has been largely about “what did I do the last time I was in this situation?”  Traditionally, the human present is past-shifted.  

In physics this is called Time's Arrow.  Sean Carroll (2016) discusses how the universe has evolved from a state of low-entropy into a higher state of entropy.  This is evidence that “time” is rather like an arrow shooting through space.  “The arrow of time plays a crucial role in how those contexts relate to the underlying time-symmetric laws of physics.  And the origin of that arrow is that we know something specific and informative about the past (it had low entropy), but there is no corresponding statement we can make about the future.  Our progress through time is pushed from behind, not pulled from ahead.” (page 66)

Only that isn't what's actually happening in human reality right now.  Which is quite strange.  Clearly the future, as perhaps never before, is contributing a great deal to the present.  Technology is an amazing attractor, pulling humanity into the tomorrow that is already here, to be lived into.  Amazingly, this, too, is grounded in physics.  Carroll says this soupy mix of present workings pushed along by the past often gives way to something completely new – emergence.  “..human behavior emerges from the complex interplay of the atoms and forces that make up individual human beings...Emergence is ubiquitous.” (pp. 94-95)

We are living during a historic emergence and it is freaking people out.  Human behavior is emerging in new ways.  Technology is controlling more of our lives.  We are training the algorithms but in service to whom?  Convenience and consumption define our humanity.  Human control over gender, identity, health, climate, life, race, value, freedom, community and the Earth itself, seems unparalleled.

But these forces have only recently held such power over us.  For hundreds of thousands of years we did not live like this.  In those long years that everybody either does not consider at all or considers merely in lump-sum passing, we were hunter-gatherers.  We lived in clans. We had to struggle not to be eaten.  All knowledge had to be remembered orally.  Writing was not invented yet.

Each generation had to teach the knowledge to the next and the primary means of doing that was as a story that rhymed.  In this immense span of time, the stories themselves (or aspects of them – Jung's Archetypes) became hardwired into the brains that learned them and taught them.  Most of us have a neurological need for stories.  That's why facts do not usually matter.  If something is not part of "the story" then it must be refuted, censored or ignored.  To understand this strange but rather obvious fact and how it relates to our present crisis, our quest for meaning, we have to first acknowledge the power humans once universally invested in telling stories.

(to be continued)

(Note: Obviously, there is a lot more to the human brain than how it hardwires and rewires itself.  The brain controls all bodily functions, emotions, sensations, language, social skills and rational thought, among many other areas – imagination, sports etc. etc.  But for our purposes human behavior is founded upon the degree to which human beings can accept change (live into).  Or, conversely, the degree to which the hardwired brain is capable of rewiring itself.  Or not.)