For some time in my dream I was lost, not sure what my value was as a human being without my skills that I've spent decades refining.

Then I remembered that humans have inherent value, that I am not my work, and went to a park to meditate and teach karate. It made me think, in my dream, how even if a machine could teach karate better, I was not doing it for society -- I was doing it for myself.

Realizing that you are not your work, and are not defined by your work; that humans have inherent value and you have every right to simply be happy when the opportunity arises; that the Puritan virtues of work are an illusion, and that humans should follow their passion; that the illusion of the necessity of work often prevents people from ever discovering their passion in the first place.

It was probably my best dream, and I approach life quite differently now. I think when I feel like I have a closed form solution, it is much the same spirit as an AI that will solve your problems for you.

Personally, understanding the "big picture dynamics" of systems is kind of an intellectual porn for me. I loved doing that for as long as I remembered. It always came with the sense of control - understanding the systems means you could tweak it to your liking, if you so desired.

Finally realizing that the system in which we live is basically uncontrollable by an individual within it has blindsided me. So many interesting things happening, so many interesting things that need to be done still, and yet all you and I get to be are observers and consumers of whatever the system happens to spit out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienatio...

I don’t think “existential angst” fits. As the name implies, you get that just by existing and being trapped by the limitations of being a mortal human.

You’re talking about the specific meaninglessness of modern work. Marx suggests that capitalism affords us some real freedoms, but at the cost of our feeling of purpose and solidarity. And, Marxists would argue, this makes us easier to exploit.

Marx and his inheritors failed to produce systems that solved this problem, and maybe that indicates that the problem is deeper than just forms of ownership and control.

But as a problem description, I think he was onto something.

Koyaanisqatsi - life out of balance - see also the film

You guys talk about boxes. Well there are huge ones for the mind, carefully constructed to be believable for the masses. Too complicated to understand, they require you to put beliefs in people with credentials, who will repeat to you what they found in the books they were given, or the math they got shown.

If you want to understand your purpose here, you have to step outside of scientific thinking to start with, and that's a huge problem for almost everybody. You have to look at origins of the matrix we are living in, the illuminati, the Egyptians, book of the dead, the occult.