Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling.
And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.
Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.
One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
> One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization of cultures which seems impoverished.
Yes--- . The problem is that there are massive economies of scale and interconnection driven by trade and global markets. In turn, the large scale of the marketplace doesn't leave much room for labor or capital to not be allocated "optimally". In turn, the amount of ability any given entity (individual people, businesses, or even nation-states) have to experiment with significantly different systems is very limited.
For experiments on the smaller scale, there's a big chance they are not applicable to broader groups. And experiments on the larger scale (revolutions, massive policy changes, etc) tend to have unintended consequences and a massive body count.
We're in a stable-ish equilibrium, but it's completely unlikely we're near any kind of global optimum on material wealth, or quality of life, or any other given chosen axis.
> of cultures which seems impoverished.
This is an interesting one, too. There was a certain threshold of wealth reached just before industrialization which allowed a massive growth in cultural expression and we have wonderful things from many cultures that emerged then... that then, with global media and global trade we've been able to enrich further-- we've played off of and learned and enjoyed the riches (culinary, musical, artistic, literary, ....) thereof. But in so doing we've strip-mined this heritage and permanently weakened the nation-scale incubators of new ideas.
Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
Yes-- that's exactly what we've done: mostly selecting for efficiency. And now we're so locked into a local optimum of efficiency, diversity in business culture and mainline economic practices is difficult.
> minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
While capital markets try to optimize return on investment, and happiness is one component of economic preference that drives ROI... they hardly try and optimize happiness, per se. They are also relatively short-sighted, don't foresee all consequences and externalities, and tend to fall into local rather than global optima.
