Unfinished — still a work in progress

What Comes Next?

Navigating the unthinkably wide-open

Masts and rigging of sailing barges reaching up into a starry night sky

Contents

Introduction

Let’s be fair.

The ferocious speed and scale of big-picture change that we’re currently living through can be terrifying. Frankly, it probably should be—like the kneecap test that proves we’re still functioning normally.

As we barrel towards the fever dream of AI being better than us at almost everything1, our organic human abilities begin to look very outclassed, glacial and meagre. Furthermore, the sheer magnitude of the financial support backing this change can make the endgame feel inevitable. It’s a lot to take in.

Most importantly: what becomes of us?

In this post, I’d like to offer some thoughts toward one of the big existential questions I see people wrestling with: “what will we do with ourselves now?”

Amid the din of hype, visionary proclamations and controversy, I’ve not seen much in the way of practical, everyday advice on how to address our role in a world that no longer strictly requires us.

And I believe this is really important.

A lot of people will feel rudderless when they don’t have a direction to exert their efforts towards. Maybe forty-something extra hours per week. That’s a lot of life to suddenly have on your hands.

What would we do with it?

Honestly, probably a lot more sleeping. Scientists are increasingly saying that’s good for you anyway, so there’s an easy win. But, beyond that, it can feel like a gigantic, nebulous open question with no great answers.

My goal with this piece is to (hopefully) inspire you, and remind you that we haven’t completed the game of life just yet. In fact, the good news is that there’s an embarrassment of side-quests left for us to finally engage with, now that we have the time. But we could benefit from some new mental tooling to make the most of this transition.

Hosing ourselves down

How we frame this situation matters; it’s commonly observed how my exceedingly-corporatised generation (Millennials) has an unusually hard time separating their self-worth from their professional achievements2. If this is true, it’s a lens we’ve been seeing our lives through and one we’ll need to learn how to remove.

How did we become this way?

As Millennials in the West, we grew up during an unusually calm and stable societal period. By the time we reached young adulthood, the path to success, wealth and glory was well-established; ours to take should we choose.

The grand-picture struggles of previous generations (e.g. civil rights) didn’t really apply to us; we knew of them as historical events, sure. We were thankful that they happened. But our reality was that we grew up surrounded, coddled, by almost-legendary institutions, rich with historic significance. Unlike prior generations, we didn’t mind this situation and so we never really learned to rebel.

For ourselves, the game plan was logical:

  • Work hard, get good grades, be admitted into and graduate from a prestigious university.
  • Find your way into one of these elite institutions and slowly grind your way up the ladder. All of the good things would surely follow.

It seemed like a good deal. But along with this almost pre-packaged life path, we slowly learned to bend our will to that of the institutions, becoming, ourselves, institutionalised.

You don’t need to work a job in high finance or law to have felt the impact of what I’m describing. It’s more subtly pervasive than that—a shift in the Zeitgeist itself, the way we understand, act upon and gauge the value of things.

Our workplaces, and even our personal lives, began to bend towards the immense black hole gravity of the institution. With this, we began self-policing the thoughts and opinions we’d share during times of real moral crisis.

We’d silently poll ourselves before speaking up: “how could this impact my job?”. We’ve all heard about people being cancelled for posting the wrong thing. And high power often expects us to stay on-brand and on-message at all times.

Another place our commercialised nature most clearly surfaces is during our leisure time. The instinct sits in the back of one’s head, slowly sapping away any joy or passion from our hobbies.

I’ve witnessed friends in London follow new interests, investing their time and energy before eventually—almost reflexively—confronting the familiar creeping thought… “how can I make money from this? Is there a business here I can grow?”

Who could blame them. Under big-city competitive pressures, the idea of spending our precious leftover time on a leisurely pursuit for the sheer joy of it can seem audacious, even irrational, like moving against the herd:

  • Should I take on a new sport? Will it make me hotter? Will it help me find a suitable partner?
  • Shall I start drawing or painting? Can I begin exhibiting and selling prints so I can afford a larger mortgage? Maybe even a second home?

Our generation became very value-literate, transactional and end goal focussed. We mastered deferred gratification. We know all of the personal finance ‘hacks’, learned about risk-aware stock trading strategies and achievable tax loopholes. To some degree—and despite knowing better—we became quite superficial and materialistic.

Sometimes, we’d be rewarded for our efforts with a new job title, a podcast interview or even winning some kind of prize. Perhaps we’d be featured as a successful alumnus in our university magazine, or host a panel discussion full of renowned industry talking heads.

As this progressed, the once-sulfurous smell of a corporate rat race job became normalised, even aspirational. Sure, Patrick Bateman was a bad guy… but at least he could afford the monthly mortgage payments, right?

Lifestyle anxiety can be a darkly-convincing force for those lying awake in the middle of the night, slowly drowning beneath serious financial pressures.

Personally, I know four architects who moved into fintech; in any healthy society this should surely never be possible. In many fields, MBAs became almost obligatory as the price of entry to being taken seriously.

It’s worth clarifying that I have nothing against people’s ambitions or in striving for a better life. My axe to grind is that the central equation underlying these life strategies doesn't seem to be adding up any more. Overproduction of the elites is a well-documented phenomenon, and a timebomb our generation has yet to reckon with.

Our top universities diluted their good names, transformed into investment vehicles and started flooding the global cities with a deluge of new graduates. Almost overnight, they transformed into a hive full of quietly desperate queen bees. Each having rightfully earned their throne. Each having put in the hard work, strategic research and developed an almost obsequious level of obedience to the institutions which, in turn, would elevate our toil.

In parallel, these institutions—the very bones of our culture—began to atrophy and visibly rot before our eyes. Between the endless leaks, the scandals and exposés, public trust in media and political institutions is at an all-time low. In the UK, our beloved BBC has been exposed as a bustling haven of paedophilia, stretching back for decades. Even our royal family can’t escape the tarnish.

Where did our good work leave us?

In serving the machine, we slowly became more machine-shaped. We pinched our noses and signed the Faustian bargain. It was either that, or see the dreams of our youth (home ownership, exotic holidays, financial freedom) accelerate away from us. Hell, most of us would settle just to have what our parents had.

Again—I’m not here to judge (I really mean that!).

This is a perfectly rational response to the set of circumstances we were given. It certainly beats becoming a NEET or a wastrel. We were young once and had time and energy to chuck towards something anyway. And the perks and treats were sometimes fairly nice.

To varying degrees, we became comfortable with living to work; an imbalanced and imperfect relationship, sure, but it was still better than nothing.

And then work left us.

Working to live

Ok. This hasn’t happened just yet, of course—but we’re plenty able to read the room.

Like any relationship that becomes imbalanced, it will carry on through momentum for a while before the inevitable happens. Our worklessness is a scenario we need to plan for, or at least consider.

At least, here there is some good news.

After a quick dip into history, it seems that life hasn’t always been about the endless, awful grindset3. Oddly, our current moment might be less daunting to someone from the 1700s.

Back then, the average person would have seen life through a fundamentally different lens to us: believing that their place in the universe was divinely granted, never needing to be justified through hard work or achievement.

Productivity as a virtue within itself was something that arose organically through the course of the Industrial Revolution and—with it—came those familiar dreams of entrepreneurial success, wealth and status. Those antiquated ideas still haunt us today.

A few years ago, in search of alternate life lenses, I read Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness. I researched the Luddites and the dark Satanic mills4 they rallied against. I wanted to get a sense of the life that these people (correctly) feared could be lost; my instinct was that I could find some useful starting points there.

My reading is that these people enjoyed a slower pace of life, one which we’d probably describe as ‘wholesome’. People’s on-paper lifestyles mattered less; quietly living well every day mattered much more. Social media posts and personal branding seminars were a long-distant dream.

These people paid more attention to their communities, the values they collectively upheld, and nurtured their relations towards each other. They engaged with and reinforced their local traditions and practised religion, with family being the most important social unit of all. Big cities granted us anonymity in exchange for alienation, but at our cores we fundamentally remain social, simian creatures.

People of the past focussed more on local problems within their grasp, instead of hyperfocussing on random new atrocities springing up anywhere on the planet. The 24-hour news cycle made us aware, but didn’t make us any happier—it just kept us anxious, miserable and addicted to bad news (conveniently so, if your business happens to be ad-supported).

Finally, these people observed nature and the passing of the seasons more closely. They were able to name the native plants, trees and species around them. They knew which mushrooms were edible, or which plants could make for useful remedies or ingredients.

This is all quaint and Oldey-Worldey, I know. What I’m selling you here is very much old, reheated goods.

The timeless answers to the timeless questions are nothing especially fresh or original. Nevertheless we’ve done our level-best to discard every one of them throughout the 20th century. Maybe it was hype, maybe hubris. And now we’re searching through the scrap heap to try and find remnants of the comfort and stability we grew up surrounded by. The 1990s feel a long way away these days.

These timeless things begin to matter a lot more once our terminal-stage careers decide to up sticks and disappear forever. And I believe they contain part of the answer to our burning question (“what shall we do with ourselves?”).

There’s another shift in framing coming.

Ending soft slavery

Our species has very rarely been without some form of toil. We’ve always had, to some degree, a love-hate relationship to our labours.

Work greedily helps itself to our waking hours, to our time and mental energy. Sometimes it feels like we’re forced to live our lives in the precious slivers of time between clocking off and sleeping.

But for many people, it also defines us. What we do is one of the first things we talk about as we get to know someone. Our job can provide a part of our identity or broadcast our social value within a community. This can have its upsides.

But, ultimately, our work has been obligatory.

Almost everyone is implicitly forced to work in order to provide themselves with food, shelter and accommodate their everyday needs. Under this implied duress, it is possible to make the argument that this arrangement amounts to a form of soft slavery.

Perhaps, here’s where that obligatory aspect starts to change. And if we choose to work, we do so with total freedom.

I’d like to introduce yet another unoriginal idea; using our spare time to pursue something that truly interests us, with the commercial pressures off, and as a purely joyful, playful and creative exercise. We’ll put our profiteering mindset off to the side.

Geeking out for the sheer bloody hell of it

Let’s briefly look back in time again.

The Industrial Revolution brought about an unusual concentration of wealth and power, from which emerged the phenomenon of the middle class. No longer were we purely serfs and aristocrats; a small number of people began to occupy this novel middle ground.

Given the Victorian social hierarchy, much of this spare time and wealth wound up congregating in the hands of the clergy. In this context, something unusual happened; a scholarly class began to develop.

This is significant because people often seem to unconsciously follow a fairly standard playbook when we acquire substantial wealth or power:

  • First, we gather a harem.
  • Then, we abuse drugs.
  • Finally, we declare war on our enemies and generally make foolish ‘fuck-you money’ type decisions.

We’ve done this since time immemorial; I guess it’s our path of least resistance. From Genghis Khan through to the Tates.

However, this clergy class had an unusually strong moral backbone and work ethic (they were Victorians, after all). They dedicated much of their spare time to scholarly pursuits: reading, engaging in correspondence and conducting experiments.

They tinkered and they toyed, and they recorded. From this, we entered a Victorian age of intense curiosity and scientific discovery, seeing fundamental leaps forward in our understanding of biology, physics and mathematics5.

We owe them a great debt. They did this all for love of the game. Many of the aforementioned glorious institutions were founded during this period.

Of course, such periods of discovery have happened before. Just think of the ancient Greek scholars, poets, philosophers, the famous Arabian mathematicians or technology of ancient China.

Sure. Good for them, I guess…?

Ok, yes, it can sometimes feel like everything’s already been discovered. The old boys with the impressive-sounding surnames figured it all out before we were born, right?

Fortunately for us, this is merely an illusion. We actually have so much yet to discover. Instead, I’d argue the reality is that our overly left-brained corporatised lives have caused us to forget how to be curious or creative.

But you need not look far to see through the illusion; one example is we’re currently living through a golden age of curious, competent, hungry and well-funded content creators. Any cursory reading of their channels will show that they’re genuinely onto something good and almost all of these creators began more or less from scratch.

In fact, I think it’s only a matter of time before a YouTuber will uncover some genuinely new area of science. It’s just one example, but it shows that we can learn to get curious again—it’s not even that hard.

Beyond curiosity lies competency, and beyond competency comes fun and creative play — even virtuosity. I believe unlocking our curiosity and embracing our inner geekery forms the second part of our answer.

We’ve covered a lot already, so here’s a brief recap:

  • I’m arguing for us living a slower, more wholesome and local existence.
  • I want you to embrace some form of geekery for sheer love of the game.

And just to keep you on your toes, I’ll address the second point first.

Part One: An Age of Discovery

I suspect we’re long-overdue another new age of discovery.

We’ll soon have all the necessary ingredients gathered together: spare time, energy and access to the latest research in our fields (whatever that may be). All that’s needed now is the spark of passion to set the whole thing off.

Two things give me hope in this regard:

  • Humans naturally tend to be better at the bleeding edge of our knowledge than machines: Large Language Models are largely introspection machines, unsuitable for truly pioneering extrapolatory tasks.
  • We’re seeing content creators emerge from all around the world with breathtaking levels of expertise and seriously lofty ambitions for their pioneering projects.

To this end, I’ve tried to assimilate as many loose threads, directions and potential sources of inspiration as I can muster.

Discovering the scientific fundamentals

Directions in which we can still make in-roads towards our understanding of our world, our universe and the deep fundamentals which seem to subtly permeate everything.

It’s been a surprisingly long time since we discovered any genuinely groundbreaking science. Beyond padding in gaps at the edges of our models and theories6, our generation has been notably lightweight in this regard. Hawking was probably our last great scientist who changed the way we see the universe.

Please note, I’m intentionally ignoring technology—the application of science. We’ve lived through an absolute deluge of new and impressive technologies.

Below, is an incomplete list of open fields. Some of these you can engage with as a personal hobbyist, while others would require a team of thousands. Either way, I’ve lumped them all in together.

Uncovering a unified model of physics

The Unified Model is one of the oldest Holy Grails in all of science. Despite centuries of effort, nobody has ever managed to successfully unify Newton’s physical laws with those that rule quantum mechanics.

And yet, we’d surely like to think that both of these are just subsets of one grander suite of laws that determines everything, regardless of scale.

Understanding such a mechanism, if it exists, could potentially unlock whole new suites of technologies that change the way we live.

Space stuff

Our understanding of space is still incredibly young. It was only a few hundred years ago that we fully embraced heliocentrism. Pluto was a planet only yesterday.

While deep space exploration remains the sole preserve of ultra-billionaires and national governments, there’s still a surprising amount you can enjoy from even your back garden.

Up in the sky, several recently launched new satellites are helping us understand both the near and the far in greater detail and across a wider spectrum of information. The JWST launch back in 2021 was a huge moment for this field and it’s already called our current best understanding into question.

Closer to the ground, several new telescope arrays have been constructed in recent years, in China, in the Chilean desert.

One space hobby that is surprisingly accessible to anyone with a lot of time and patience is astrophotography. You won’t need your own satellite or observatory, just access to an area without too much light pollution, and probably a semi-decent camera. There’s a thriving community on Reddit that is able to capture incredible phenomena from their back gardens.

Meanwhile, go outside and spot the ISS with your bare eyes while we still have it! They’re sending it on a one-way trip into the atmosphere in two years’ time.

Bonus side quest: photographing rare atmospheric phenomena such as sprites.

Astrobiology, helping us understand the origins of life, finding amino acid chains on foreign planets and asteroids, seeing whether life was perhaps seeded on Earth by a foreign object.

Learning how to recognise the constellations and navigate using sextants. Learning how Galileo and Copernicus derived the heliocentric model of the universe from first principles.

Material science

Leaps forward in material science can cause a chain reaction; enabling us to build better technologies with which to carry out our experiments and plough forward into the unknown reaches of physics, chemistry, biology and so on.

One huge potential excitement from a few years ago was the (sadly, false) alarm that university researchers had discovered a room-temperature superconductor material, called LK-99. This is the kind of discovery which, if replicable, could potentially pave the way for absolutely sci-fi level technology.

Another area of research that’s seen a lot of current interest is in manufacturing artificial spider silk. Expensive and time-consuming to extract from live spiders, this material has an unmatched strength-to-lightness ratio which, again, if harnessed properly could find its way into our skyscrapers, bridges or beyond.

Biology and biotech

What was once joked about as the ‘unsexy science’ has become belle of the ball in recent decades. We’ve seen an incredible leap forward, whether CRISPR-Cas9 or Google DeepMind using AI to solve the protein folding prediction problem once and for all.

Promising new therapies for old and stubborn diseases are dropping almost every week now.

It’s hard to know what this will mean for us; what does life look like when we have infinite longevity and no disease? And beyond merely curing disease, could we be able to extend our abilities and grant ourselves superpowers? Maybe one day we’ll all be tetrachromats, able to see new colours.

Mathematics

It’s been a strange few years for the field of mathematics: back in May, OpenAI’s latest model was able to disprove a long-established open conjecture; a new milestone for AI intelligence, just as significant as Deep Blue’s victory over Garry Kasparov.

We’re in August now and new mathematical proofs are being published practically every single day. OpenAI just released 10 of them in a single batch.

But maths isn’t just a solvable field; it’s also a vast open area for exploration and play. There is no better demonstration of this than 3Blue1Brown’s recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel. More generally, the entire 3B1B channel is a great source of inspiration, mostly because it’s about playing and having fun with maths, not as something to learn for the sake of toil, so much as an enjoyable and creative practice within itself.

Discovering our world

The oceans

Our planet is overwhelmingly covered in water, and yet our largest expanse is still a mystery to us. We don’t even have to leave earth—we only need sufficient curiosity, money and willpower to start exploring the oceans. That is remarkably close-by for a genuine frontier.

I’ve been enjoying watching Gabe Newell (yes—the founder of Steam) building out his $815m research fleet to explore them. You can follow along on YouTube. I’d like to see others with similar means get in on the action as well.

We barely even have decent maps of the sea floor. The lower we seem to dive into the oceans, the more extreme the life becomes. Creatures that exist in underwater volcanoes. Jellyfish species that resemble a mobile disco.

Glacier ice

The earth’s freezer drawer is continent-sized and full of historical riches. Arctic and Antarctic drill samples act like time capsules, giving us a rich understanding of a wide slice of time that no other medium possibly can.

Furthermore, historic ice ages mixed with our contemporary deep glacial melts mean that artifacts, plants and bodies (human or animal) that have been frozen in time for thousands of years are resurfacing—before quickly degrading. We have a rare opportunity to capture and study these specimens before they are lost to science forever.

Geological history

The planet has its own history and it’s something we can learn about from samples such as arctic drill cores.

Recently, a controversial geological theory has emerged regarding an impact during the Younger Dryas period. There seems to be decent geological evidence for this in soil samples; we can trace historic fires (such as the Great Fire of London), volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts through layers in the dirt.

Besides this, what other grand geological events could we uncover evidence for?

The deepest forests

Even now, there remain a few remote forests and jungles where animals have no memory of ever seeing a human. In these deep wildernesses, several species are reported as having no fear of people, often not afraid so much as curious about us.

It sounds too magical to be true. But perhaps it’s a reminder that it’s not just our oceans which could use some deeper exploration, but our jungles as well.

Discovering ourselves

Paleoanthropology

The story of humanity is still being written. Our ancestry is becoming clearer by the decade, but it’s not the simple picture we once knew. Discoveries in recent years have extended the dawn of Homo Sapiens to several hundred thousand, if not a million years ago.

Recent decades have helped us uncover new branches of our evolutionary tree, while newer techniques in DNA analysis indicate that our sub-species often interbred or faced evolutionary dead ends.

The greatest mystery here that I can’t wrap my head around is that of the Peruvian cave mummies. Their white bodies are clearly hominid, but seem to belong to a wildly different branch of our species.

With three fingers and three toes, elongated heads, but still definitively human, what could they have been like? A dozen genuine specimens, complete with their full CT scans have been published online. And as far as I’m concerned, even in 2026, no one can fake a CT scan.

Archaeology

Archaeology is a big one; the treasures are practically everywhere we care to look. Right under our feet are countless significant and beautiful artifacts that could potentially tell us the stories of different lives and worldviews. Perhaps not just objects—towns, villas, fortresses and even cities.

Equipped with the latest in LIDAR scanning and drone technologies, I see a future coming in which we’re practically inundated with new insights into our pasts and the billions of dead that came before us.

Here, I’ll list out a few related ongoing projects that give me a moment’s pause:

  • I’ve been enjoying watching Chris of the Clickspring YouTube channel machine the Antikythera Mechanism using period-correct tools. He first builds himself the tools, then chips away at the incredibly complex and fascinating mechanism piece by piece.
  • Not to be outdone, the medieval castle of Guédelon has been under constant construction since the 1990s, also using the tools and techniques of the Middle Ages. It’s a live archaeological experiment that you can visit!
  • Meanwhile, Primitive Technology has spent the last decade exploring the bare-basics of human shelter-building from scratch using nothing but his bare hands. With near infinite patience, he’s uncovered ways of smelting iron from riverwater or turning his surroundings into brick and terracotta huts.
  • Other outlets, such as Tasting History carry out impeccable historic research into ancient recipes, before attempting to recreate them; such as the carbonised bread of Pompeii.
  • Meanwhile, the Vesuvius Challenge has recently announced its breakthrough moment, using AI to read the ancient scrolls that Vesuvius carbonised—without ever unrolling them. There are vast libraries of ancient, carbonised wisdom that we’ll soon be able to rediscover.

From metal detecting through to amateur archaeology courses, there are a range of ways to begin learning how to engage with the rich and hidden history of the ground.

A few areas that I’d love to see more exploration in:

  • Deep in the Black Sea, the water essentially has no oxygen, meaning shipwrecks dating back for thousands of years lie there, preserved and waiting to be discovered.
  • Was Atlantis real? The idea that one (or even more) Mediterranean cities on the coastline were washed away in a flood doesn’t seem remotely farfetched. The same fate nearly happened to Lisbon in the 1700s.
  • We know that humans once settled in (now drowned) Doggerland, just off the coast of the UK. Are there artifacts here which could still be salvaged? Settlements that we could map?
  • There are long-established theories that there were large and flourishing human settlements in the Sahara, back when it was lush and green. Could these be lying in wait for us beneath the sand?
  • Recent papers (this month!) indicate that the Amazon jungle may have once been richly populated by millions of people. The continent is covered in large and mysterious geoglyphs. It feels like there’s a lot left for us to uncover there.

Our stories

How about all the writing and wisdom in our museum archives? It seems like we’re constantly hearing of lost works and correspondence being casually discovered inside of a museum collection.

The truth is, these underfunded institutions have far more on their hands than they can handle. Couldn’t we digitise them all, put them online and have AI find the patterns, make the connections?

With the near-infinite patience and depth of AI, could we not create an intricately-interconnected web of all ancient knowledge?

Our minds

Many of us barely have time, let alone the mental headspace, to take true stock of our internal worlds. With our unconscious being the larger part of our psyche, how might we best start to learn about ourselves properly?

Perhaps there’s now finally time for some real healing and therapy to take place. Maybe it’s time to challenge ourselves, step outside of our comfort zones and confront the many things that scare us or hold us back.

Beyond this, we could see a level of psychedelic exploration as well. If it’s possible to safely dose on hallucinogenic substances, we might all enjoy a brief stint as psychonauts. After all, we’ve just finally identified the Chinese mushroom that makes you see tiny people everywhere. Sounds fun.

Exploring the biggest mysteries

For those with the appetite, we can put the hard-STEM to the side for the moment and consider the larger mysteries of our existence.

I’ve often had the unsatisfying sense that several of our closely-held ideas seem to be explaining away a mystery, rather than reaching the core of the phenomenon in question. Sometimes it feels like society’s best rationalisations don’t fully add up to what we experience.

I’ve collected these together in a separate article—a long list of threads to pull upon for the curious-minded: Mysteries & Magics

Part Two: An Age of Recovery

Beyond exploring the great unknown, there remain legions problems in our midst to which we already know the solutions. In tandem with discovery, what I’d like to see is some kind of Age of Recovery.

What do I mean by this?

The 20th century and decades thereafter have been, it’s fair to say, a pretty wild ride for Western culture. Perhaps that’s understating it. These are, of course, grand narratives that you could spend many lifetimes exploring and still never do them sufficient justice.

I’ll spare you the history lesson. But let’s just say we’ve been rocked; our institutions, our values, our identities and nearly all of our once closely-held traditional wisdom. It’s been tried, tested and largely disposed of.

Our species has a nasty habit of burning our fingers on every possible hot stove before course-correcting; we overdo things, we go to extremes. Some form of common sense often does prevail. Eventually. But it’s rarely been the first lever we reach for.

Reversing societal decline

Perhaps a rebuilding of society—of the norms that suit us as a whole. Respect, a return of public behavioural norms. Restoring trust in authority.

Maybe letters will come back. Real proper ones. Not generated content but that slow, considered and highly personal hobby of communicating with loved ones. Men and women of letters.

How we relate to one another

Do you ever get a sense that in the old days, people were calmer? They were less anxious to butt-in during a conversation, more eager to listen and thoughtfully reflect on what the other person was saying?

Our brains are scambled and we know it. We all claim to have ADHD now. That’s not untrue, in some sense it’s hitting on some real and measurable phenomenon.

It may be worth taking some time for us to learn how to communicate again. It was remarked that people forgot their social skills during the pandemic. I think it happened beforehand; we normalised a lot of antisocial behaviours. We highlighted the abnormal, the extreme among us. We’d regularly descend into histronics. We’d engage in deeply destructive behaviour that would seem to divide our communities, put up barriers, sow distrust and jealousy.

Some kind of return of public shame, public standards of behaviour. Consideration for others. In any democratic society, the needs of the masses still matter.

Many conversations I overhear aren’t as they seem; debates about race or class are often debates about culture or civilisation at their heart. Real concerns are regularly mislabelled and the conversations are almost always deeply unproductive.

We see people tribally, as a collection of labels. Not as people, not as the content of their character. We need to return to a level of public trust, engaging with each other generously and based upon shared values, not tribal identity labels.

Reversing population decline

Almost every country in the world is experiencing population decline, with fertitilty rates well below the replacement rate of 2.1 per couple. The problem grows exponentially; while it’s a fear now, it can quickly become an inescapable and grim reality unless we experience a seachange in public opinion.

It’s not hard to understand. Of course, it has been framed as a political matter rather than what it truly is; a symptom of a financial system that places us under extraordinary pressures. People taking on second jobs to pay for nursery, whereas previous generations could get by perfectly well on a single income.

But when AI starts eating many of the traditionally female-led office jobs, such as HR, PR and communications, I suspect that having children will probably come back into fashion. Perhaps the birth rate returns to something approaching normal.

Raising children gives us a profound sense of purpose, meaning, an identity. We absolutely don’t want robots to raise our children. It’s a beautiful, profound thing and it’s automation-proof.

A news media landscape that people can trust

Faith in media institutions has declined, and harshly. We’re stuck between hyper-controlled legacy outlets and chaotic wildcard journalists whose providence is open to question. Fake AI slop think tanks are now a thing, just was predicted by OpenAI with GPT-2. Everything is bait, everything is an ad.

Even before this, it was always sex, violence and men in suits. The news has never been perfect. But the news is also a manifestation of our inherent human need for gossip. We’ll never be rid of it, so best we learn to live with it—and productively so.

What would the dream of a proper news outlet look like? Would it be more local? Would it contain more of the mundane, but locally important? Would it only explore the local issues that its readers could meaningfully engage with?

Perhaps it’s a slower news landscape. Slow news is a thing. Perhaps it’s about using tech to statistically remove bias—Ground Truth might be a meaningful step in a novel direction here. Perhaps there might be a way to fund news that allows it to have a more stable income, as it once did, and rely less on ragebait, clickbait and addictive patterns of anxiety.

A scientific process that makes sense

I really feel for scientists; from the outside looking in, it seems like they’ve had a hard few decades. The Scientific Method is a precious but delicate thing, and there have been more than a few challenges faced by those looking to practice genuinely ‘good science’ in recent times.

Firstly, the central tension that has existed for science, is its source of funding. It’s an art that necessitates patronage. Working at the cutting-edge is, more often than not, exorbitantly expensive. You’ll require access to some of the most rareified substances, machinery and brainpower in all of existence. This costs money, and no small sum of it.

Therefore, aspiring scientists are left with a choice; to join a well-funded, but narrow commercial operation, or to compete against almost impossible odds for limited private patronage or public funding. You’ve already paid for an completed the obligatory PhD (thanks to degree inflation). You’ve self-selected and bought into this. The only way left is forwards, I guess.

And, regardless of which you choose to pursue, your entire endeavour will exist only at their mercy. Few people are in the habit of giving away large sums of money for free. There’s almost always some kind of bargain attached.

Perhaps this means you get wrapped up in institutional politics, wars of prestige and power games between old and wealthy rivals. We all have some capacity to sell our souls, and it’s here that many will gradually discover their limits.

Beyond this first hurdle, more are lying in wait.

  • Many studies suffer from the infamous Replication Crisis; what value does a paper hold if its results cannot be reliably reproduced? In many fields, the proportion of papers that meet even this basic test is more than 50%.
  • There’s an ever greater number of operations looking to publish their works in the few prestigious journals, such as Nature. These institutions are drowning in a sea of submissions, unable to thoroughly peer-review the incoming slew of work. And of course half of it’s AI slop these days.
  • Finally, many “null outcomes” never get published. Everyone is trying to produce the signals which lead to professional fame, glory, patents and riches. An expensive experiment that resulted in a null (or negative) outcome can be embarrassing. Sure, it’s great science, but that’s not meeting our human needs.

Public faith in science is lowest it has been in a while, an incredible shame. It’s a set of principles that are solid, whose valour has been repeatedly stolen by those less virtued, used as a protective cloak they wrap themselves in.

The problem has never been the method. As is often the case, the problem is that all-too-familiar, icky human side corrupting and rotting everything it touches. As it stands, our process for discovery, selection and publication feel like an antiquated and outclassed system that’s no longer fit for purpose.

Good science often can still get done, but it might be locked down within the IP vaults of a large institution, or only ever partially published (leaving the unflattering parts of negative side-effects out of any PR material). Often, the good science leads to new technology, new products. But the science itself is hidden behind patents, NDAs and other restrictive practices.

Perhaps new science will be practised out in open, as I mentioned in Part 1: The Age of Discovery. Perhaps YouTubers will unlock genuinely new areas of science; mathematical hypotheses, new material potentials, new chemical synthesis processes. The incentives seem to line up.

A commercial competition landscape that works

Capitalism is a good idea “I think we should try it”. The invisible hand can only work when there is strong enough natural (and genuine) competition within a space.

Reversing our environmental impact

Re-wilding projects.

Beavers, wolves, buffalo.

Native plant/tree species.

Conservation - seed banking.

Trees - Britain is so devoid of actual forestry. Incentives to re-wild parts of the UK.

De-extinction projects

Colossal biosciences. Absolutely sci-fi level stuff. Attempting to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. They’ve already created woolly mice. And de-extincted direwolves (yes from Game of Thrones).

Tackling pollution

Microplastics and PFAS.

Part Three: An age of Grief for What Once Was

Mourning the Old World

It’s not unreasonable or unfair to take a moment to grieve the passing of the world we once knew. Like I said at the start of this mammoth post: it’s a lot to take in.

We will see the gradual evaporation of a few jobs. At first, slowly, then rapidly. Work as an idea will be replaced. But that’s not all. A lot of things tied to work will also begin to look hopelessly trivialised:

  • Our job titles and our professional achievements. Already, much of the output of my career now looks deeply average at best.
  • Money. What happens in a world in which the production of most of our goods and services can be delivered almost for free? Does having a large salary (or any at all) even matter anymore? What becomes of those practical relationships of which wealth and riches were the central convincing aspect?

It will take a long time to adjust; some may never quite manage it.

The Brave New World is still taking shape, fresh, confusing and uncertain. Nobody knows where our chips will land once everything settles, nor how far away such a settling may still be. Nostalgia for the world we once knew—imperfect but at least we could understand it—will probably become widespread.

At least there’s some solace in the sense that this is happening to all of us together at once. Nobody is really, truly ahead. Our brighest minds at the center of all of the action also seem confused, worried and bothered by our inevitable trajectory.

If anything, I would suggest reading science fiction. We’ve had close to a hundred years of sci-fi at this point. Many of the most brilliant minds have dedicated their lives’ work to anticipating technocratic worlds that may yet come to pass. At the very least, they may sow a few novel ideas of ways of framing that could serve useful as our species comprehends the unknowable together.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve given you many reasons to have faith that things may yet work out. What is written above can only ever be an incomplete list, written only as a thematic guide and hopefully as a source of inspiration.

Broadly speaking, I remain hopeful and optimistic for the world we’re stepping into. We all have access to an unprecedented amount of information. People are understandably highly anxious right now—you can sense it as you speak with them. But we can also be heartened that so many of us are paying attention.

Humanity is largely not too bad at self-correction in the long term. To me at least, despite everything, it still feels like we’re heading squarely towards the good ending. We can’t take it for granted, but I think that’s something worth taking to heart.

Even if you’re currently in full-time employment (as no doubt you are) it’s probably worth sketching out your escape route now. With any luck, a couple of the loose threads above might sound like a promising direction, something worth exploring.

We only have to fall in love with doing and being and becoming again. There’s all this reality left to explore and encounter. I’ve said it many times before, but it’s worth reiterating:

AI can never climb a mountain or swim in a lake for us.

It’s a big old world and it’s ours to squander—or to enjoy. We never had to earn our right to life or prove our value. That 200-year-old spell has now lifted. The cage door is finally open. Be brave.

Now put your shoes on and go outside.

  1. Anything you can do, I can do better. ↩

  2. McKinsey & Co explicitly state that they seek ‘insecure overachievers’ when hiring. People whose self-worth is explicitly tied to their ability to thrive in the corporate grind. ↩

  3. The Atlantic: How life became an endless, terrible competition. ↩

  4. William Blake’s Jerusalem. ↩

  5. Mendel et al. ↩

  6. Higgs Boson, gravitational waves. ↩