The Self-Fulfilling Half Full Glass

 Another letter to friends:

Hello Gentlemen,

It seems that a number of us are circling around a similar theme -- Is the human condition hopeless?  Should we therefore give up on humanity and just worry about our narrow corner of the world and the small sliver of time that we have left before we pass on?  Alternatively, we can reject nihilism and make our own purpose and meaning as recommended in the podcast that Glenn circulated (see transcript here):

Chabon understood why a person would feel that way about the world, and, in particular, about the world right now. Chabon had felt that way himself once, too. But he also knew, having lived here on Earth for a while, that nihilism is a dead end — no path out. The alternative need not be false hope, or even the belief that the world is not essentially broken and absurd. The alternative is to make your own purpose and meaning, whatever the situation.

I'm right now in the middle of another article with a similar theme -- Sneer if You'd Like, But Engineered Solutions Are a Lot More Plausible Than Behavioral Change in 2022.  This is reminiscent of Jerry's writing on transhumanism -- i.e. we've got a better chance of solving problems technologically than politically.  Excerpt:

I have become, against my will, quite fatalistic about solutions to social problems that require any kind of widespread public buy-in. And though I’m somewhat antagonistic to the cultures that tend to advocate for engineering solutions, such as those of Silicon Valley or the finance industry, I feel drawn to such solutions because social change seems so impossible. We’re riven by partisanship and internet-fueled culture war, we don’t trust institutions or each other, and in my anecdotal experience the rise of casual nihilism - the bitter, I’m-joking-but-not-really insistence that everything is broken and can’t be fixed - is rising fast. All of that in a winner-take-all socioeconomic system that incentivizes being selfish. It’s not a combination that lends itself to a lot of hope. So I dream of moonshots.

Reasonable people can have differing opinions on how best to proceed.  Personally, I sense a rising consciousness of the need to be more constructive and less nihilistic.  Let's call it the doctrine of the self-fulfilling half full glass, or something like that.

Hugs,
Dan