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points by articulatepang 11 hours ago | 0 comments

This argument ignores sexual selection and people's desire for status (the two are closely related). In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.

What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.

Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.

[–] somesortofthing 10 hours ago

People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.

Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.

[–] OrangeDelonge 2 hours ago

I feel (and not saying it to upset people) that this perfectly describes playing time-sink MMOs like WoW or Runescape.

[–] 0x1ch 10 hours ago

To a lesser extent, myself and others already are in the 'simulation'. I go to work, go home, play some games or muck around in my lab, repeat. I don't really have aspirations or an outside presence, just focused on ignoring every manmade horror that has been shown to us over the past four years.

[–] digitalsquare 9 hours ago

The movie The Congress explores the ideas of control through society-scale simulation and the loss of one's real identity when immersed in that setting, much like what you suggest. It's a visual trip, thoroughly thought provoking, and I highly recommend it

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/

[–] creata 8 hours ago

> Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force

But why would you even want that? They like it in the simulation, and nobody really wants to deal with them outside the simulation.

[–] archimedes237 5 hours ago

Because if they check out into the simulation then the people formerly above them are now the lowest on the totem pole and maybe they dont want that.

[–] creata 25 minutes ago

They've already "checked out" in reality (NEETs, etc.) but they're still "lowest on the totem pole". The people who feel superior to them seem content to do so from afar, to belittle them from the comfort of social media.

[–] articulatepang 8 hours ago

My math brain is immediately broken by your irrefutably correct induction argument!

[–] Apocryphon 10 hours ago

I don’t fully agree with your thesis, but good prospective future model version names.

[–] SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago

Why do you need to drop to some kind of simulation and memory suppressing? It seems like it would be sufficient to do what many subcultures do today - come up with reasons why my hobbies are the coolest and it’s actually the normies playing their status games who are missing out.

[–] lurk2 9 hours ago

This was Nietzsche’s chief criticism of Christianity. It is also a good summary of Reddit morality where social rejects build an inverted status pyramid. It’s amazing how Google made a few bad decisions on Search and it led to some of the most maladjusted people on earth becoming the internet’s point of reference for what is normal.

[–] andai 6 hours ago

Wait, how does Google fit in with it?

Also, Nietzsche's Last Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man

> The last man is the archetypal passive nihilist. He is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security. Therefore, the last man is unable to build and act upon a self-actualized ethos.

[–] zmgsabst 6 hours ago

There’s a less cynical take:

We create new hobbies and niches because human scale arenas are important for us psychologically — so we branch culture to accommodate the necessary number of role performance arenas.

Everybody is playing status games, but we’re avoiding Calhoun-style behavioral sinks by not all playing the same game at the same table.

[–] SpicyLemonZest 55 minutes ago

That's fair, I meant it in a more loving way than it came across. One of the great things about human culture is that we're happy to form impromptu hierarchies like that. You even have friend groups where people are happy to win an n=1 status game by being "the jeans guy", and everyone happily tells them how cool it is that they're so into selvedge denim.

[–] bambax 10 hours ago

> and to have highly desirable mates

The younger generation doesn't seem to date much, and this appears to be true in most countries.

[–] boogieknite 10 hours ago

personally i think pursuit of highly desireable mates has changed culturally. i feel like several generations of children of divorce driving media makes it so many young people know to second guess their instinct to pursue "trophy" mates

[–] notabee 9 hours ago

The objects of status are quite flexible culturally, though. Cultural anthropology shows us a huge variety of ways that different cultures handle status competition. People will definitely still compete for status but what that entails could look very different from our current toxic grindset culture. Much like sports often serve as a substitute outlet for the same instincts that lead to fighting or war, that social selection will find different outlets that don't have to be literal survival battles for much of the population if we can create different material and cultural conditions.

[–] andai 6 hours ago

The last part reminded me of this story. "Screen time is a lower class problem."

Covered in the first 2 minutes of this video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=e9wUam96eH0

[–] abraxas 11 hours ago

But in the absence of any human driven task that meaningfully improves well being the way to signal status will likely devolve into some form of fighting. The display of status might be narrowed to demonstrating who can kill more. Either literally kill or at best partake in some arbitrarily conceived games or intrigues designed (by AI?) to flag status.

[–] jjk7 11 hours ago

Hunger games vs. MeowMeowBeenz

[–] zmgsabst 6 hours ago

Humans still successfully compete in chess status because other humans like watching humans compete.

I suspect it will be similar.

[–] DeluluDon 11 hours ago

I spend most of my day alone at work reading HN comments while women at work want to talk to me.

Nah, I'd rather read comments like yours.

[–] bluefirebrand 7 hours ago

> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of.

They might be right now, but for most of us they aren't next month. Or next year. Or for the years after retirement

"We convince ourselves it's not enough" completely misses the fact that for most of us it isn't, past the very short term!

[–] dominotw 10 hours ago

> In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.

Almost no one is usa has 'enough' to pay for healthcare. My daughter's nicu bill was 750k, which would've easily bankrupted me.

[–] articulatepang 10 hours ago

Hey, sorry to hear about that crazy bill and hope your daughter is doing well. I agree that your example is a basic need that I ignored. Many of us work to make sure we’re able to pay for healthcare if things go badly wrong.

However, even in countries with socialized healthcare, or even among people who easily have enough wealth to pay for healthcare, we see that they continue to work, beyond what can be explained by a desire to take care of basic needs.

So I think my original argument still stands: it appears that humans have a desire to accumulate status and exclusive goods, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Let me know if you disagree!

[–] mrguyorama 8 hours ago

No, your understanding isn't correct. The vast majority of "average" people cannot stop working and cannot survive off their income.

The cost of somewhere to live has gone up so much that even people like me, with an absurd amount of cash in the bank account, can't leave work and try to survive because it would be wiped out by 3 years of rent.

How many average laborers in a country with fully socialized medicine can afford a decade of rent off their current savings? How many could do that even if they magically found a way to cut other expenses in half?

I could eliminate my electric bill, my internet bill, my grocery bill, all my bills other than rent, and the money saved per year would pay for an extra month or so of rent. That is the entire problem. No amount of frugality can paper over this systemic problem.

When my mother raised us in poverty, it was necessary to play games with utilities, which ones you cancelled which months, to make ends meet. This was actually worth doing, because skipping the $20 cable payment one month was about 1/10th of the monthly house payment. A year of skipping cable could pay for a month of rent. If I skipped a year of much more expensive cable internet, I could not use that to pay even a single month of rent. There's a lot of dumb money being spent, with my personal pet peeve being cell phones, but if a person "doesn't need" the newest iPhone and went without to be frugal, often they haven't even gotten back a single month's rent. What the fuck is the point of living in serious poverty just so that you can extend your rent runway by less than 10%?

The only people in current society who can actually afford to survive off the wealth they have accumulated are called capital owners and you will find that indeed, they are rarely doing things they don't "want" to do, and no, the time they spend really shouldn't be considered "work" since they sign their own paychecks most of the time.

Running a business is work, but if I get to decide what my business does, I don't get to then insist that my side hobbies that I've started doing under the name of my business are also work.