When posed the question: “what year would you want to reborn, if you had no control over where you are born, or who you are (i.e., gender, race, social status, location, etc.)?” Sam answers with “about 15,000 years ago”. And I think she is probably right.
Our society is amazing for a select few, pretty sweet for a majority, and then terribly broken for billions of people. To roll the dice, and potentially wind up in the broken category, is not a worthwhile risk when the alternative is to live amongst an ancient community, who likely live in far greater equality (albeit, far worse conditions). So much of our happiness is derived by comparison to our neighbours, which leads me to believe the overall happiness of a random person’s life was probably higher in ancient times than today.
Let’s assume I am right, and we are less happy today. What is the cause of this? I think there is a simple-ish explanation:
- In rich countries, basic needs are mostly met for free, resulting in hard to define daily goals
- Work/life balance and daily fulfillment is not prioritized
What is the best way to fix our present? (See message to Sam in fb)
There are 2 sides to fixing a broken system:
- With small incremental improvements on the current system
- Start from scratch
Both of these ways of fixing our systems work, and arguably in similar speeds. However, they are very, very different in their approach, and their outcome. It is hard to argue which is better, starting from scratch obviously allows for greater flexibility, but that can result in lost functionality of the previous model that had been working well.
At the end of the day, I think both of these ways to fix our systems should be done in tandem. This is commonplace at large organizations, where engineering teams often work to maintain the existing model, while a separate team create a complete new solution to the problem, with breaking changes that cause incompatibility. There is a period of time that both solutions are active, but eventually, the old system dies, and the cycle of improvement continues.