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Our excess bubbles and blooms | blogjou

Daniel S. Milo

Good Enough - The Tolerance for Mediocrity in Nature and Society

p. 24
01 Oct 2023

Our excess bubbles and blooms


I argue that the future powers a division of labor so thorough that it obliterates all challenges to humanity’s survival, leaving us with a world of free lunches, ease, and boredom. We face no species-level threats except perhaps those ecological ones that are products of unavaoidable excess. This excesss is unavoidable because we have little to do from a survival standpoint. Humans have the ultimate luxury of wasting time and resources in order to divert ourselves. The skills our ancestors cultivated for the purpose of survival no longer serve that purposem yet the skills remain. We have the means to achieve ends we no longer need to worry about, so the means become ends themselves. Our excess bubbles and blooms not because it is selected through a process if struggle but because there is no struggle.