The kids will be alright
Fifteen years ago, it was clear that millennials were irredeemably fucked. They were lazy, entitled, and spent all their money on avocado toast and fancy coffee instead of buying homes. By now though, they are: wealthier than prior generations at the same age, earning more money, the majority of home-buyers currently, and owners of a wider variety of investments than any generation before. Also, last but not least, they are the hardest drinking generation of all time. They ended up being alright.
When it comes to Gen Z and Gen A, they are (obviously) also lazy and entitled. But the real scare was not about avocado toast but about social media and anxiety. A whole book, called The Anxious Generation, was written about it. Now, it turns out that they’ll be alright:
Phone free events are booming. Some friends of mine in the Netherlands went to a festival and, when asked for some videos, didn’t have any because they’d had to leave their phones in a locker.
Young people are bringing back communal tables in restaurants, apparently.
Time spent on social media globally has peaked in 2022 and has been declining since, especially among young people.
Some 9 year olds are apparently starting to use the slang “That’s AI” for anything they deem shitty or fake. Loving this one!
What I’ve been reading
I’ve been slowly reading Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act for over well over a year now. It is not something I can speed read, it is boring in some ways. But I also find it, for lack of a better word, profound. The insights on how creativity is unlocked are, well… profound. Rubin, as one of the most renowned and prolific music producers of all time, is a practitioner. And I always love books written by practitioners. He has actually coaxed brilliance out of artists that were stuck, and he has learned a lot from doing that. Creativity is a tricky topic to write about, but he does a good job!
I’m reading a book called Conscious Accomplishment. It marries mindfulness, and practices around detachment and letting go familiar from Buddhism and Stoicism with accomplishment in the real world. They are often positioned, or at least seem to be, incompatible. Either you hustle or you become a monk. Obviously, that doesn’t work for the vast majority of people. This book is refreshing! I’ve already noticed and better understood a key pattern that’s been with me for a long time, that hopefully now I can handle in a more constructive way.
Recently finished:
I read some poetry, in This Is the Way of the World by Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis is a slightly less high profile version of Richard Branson. A very successful entrepreneur in publishing through the 90s and 00s, he was also a poet. His book, How To Get Rich is absolutely brilliant in all respects, but an unexpected highlight for me were the poems at the start of every chapter. So I read this whole book of poems, and many of them are great. I’d like to read more poetry.
Red Plenty, a historical fiction of economic planning in the Soviet Union. Another very interesting and perspective shifting book. In the early 60s, the Russians were the first to launch a satellite to orbit. The first to put a man in space (and a woman shortly after). They were even the first to slam an unmanned spaceship into the moon, and the first to achieve a ‘soft landing’ of a probe, six months before the Americans. In the midst of all this success, it was sincerely an open question whether Communism might be a better economic system than Capitalism. In the USSR itself, there were a large number of intellectuals and policy makers who were likewise sincerely trying to make it work. The book follows these people and makes it painfully clear how impossible it is to centrally plan an entire economy. When a machine in a factory breaks down unexpectedly, that changes everything downstream from that machine. Now there will not be enough of whatever that machine makes to meet targets in every following node. The shortage cascades through the value chain, causing shortages which stack-up in an exponential way. The planners had the obvious insight that consumers are an ‘end point’ in this cascade, and therefore a ‘safe’ place to absorb shortages. They’ll go hungry or get cold, but at least it won’t affect the production of tanks or ovens. But upstream of the broken machine, everything also gets thrown into disarray. The machine factory now needs to produce one machine more than planned, to replace the broken one. That factory that makes the machine needs more stuff: nuts, bolts, grease, steel, etcetera. How many steps backwards do you now recalculate all production? Even with today’s computers this would be a daunting task. In fact, we still cannot even do this well at much smaller scale. Reading the book reminded me often of corporate budgeting processes where good intentions from managers are also thwarted by the impossibility of accurate forecasting and the various actions and incentives of humans involved in every step. Super interesting read.
Nightswimming. A police novel set in 1970s New Jersey. This was a recommendation from Substack. I read a whole bunch of really weird Science Fiction early in the year, and got quite tired of it, so I went looking for some other genres. This is a very well written book about a police officer solving a murder case.
The Road, a novel about a father traveling in a post-apocalyptic world with his young son. Never would I have read this book before I became a father. But now I actively went looking for some novels about fatherhood, and this one stood out to me. Knowing that it can already be a challenge to get a 4 year old to school on time and get them to eat their veggies, I enjoyed immersing myself into the idea of having to survive in an apocalyptic wasteland with a young child. It won a Pullitzer prize, although I’m not entirely sure if it deserves it. It successfully triggered feelings of despair and hopelessness at times, but it also became a bit repetitive.
If anyone builds it, everyone dies, the new book about AI taking over the world. I wrote about this one in great detail here:
What if SkyNet gets sentient
My last post was a long update on the current state of AI. My conclusion is that based on current capabilities, development speed and adoption, AI looks more like ‘the new Excel’ than an existential risk for society.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for my Microbiome post!