Did our ancestors ten thousand years ago, or even a few hundred years ago, feel like nothing they did mattered? Probably not. But their power was similar to ours: they had zero global influence, but they could make a difference in the lives of the people around them.
I think we feel powerless because global high-tech culture turns our attention away from our immediate social circle and out toward the entire world, over which it's not realistic for an ordinary person to have power.
Our immediate social circle doesn't satisfy us because half of it is on the internet, where the connections are thin streams of information and not full-spectrum engagement; and the other half is at our jobs (in Brendan's case, school), which are hierarchical and micromanaged. Paleolithic foragers and even medieval peasants had more autonomy in their hour-to-hour actions than most of us do at work.
Even if these problems were fixed, many people have been damaged by a culture where our time is so heavily structured that we never learned how to have fun. We all have an aliveness deep inside us, and the better a society is, the better it can work with this aliveness instead of crushing it. In this sense our society is incompetent, which is why so many people are in prison for being alive in the wrong way, or depressed for not being alive at all. The challenge for all of us is to learn to find and channel that aliveness in a way that makes the world better and doesn't get us in trouble.
21st century technology throws up new obstacles to this goal, but it also gives us new tools. Our pre-industrial language does not help us tell the difference between obstacles and tools, because they're all lumped together in old categories of "entertainment" or "games" or "drugs". There's a famous line on The Simpsons where Homer explains to Lisa that there's a difference between "drugs" and "druuuuuuugs" -- the former is within the authority structure and the latter is outside it.
But the latest evidence shows that some "druuuuuugs" -- psilocybin, ketamine, ibogaine, cannabis -- when used carefully -- are more beneficial and less harmful than "drugs" that try to do the same thing.
Of course some drugs can be used either way, to expand consciousness or contract it, to learn how to get better at life or to avoid learning. Cannabis is probably the best example of this. But I don't buy the distinction between "recreational" and "therapeutic", because something that shows you how to live better is probably going to feel good.
Will anyone stand up and say that books are bad? "Instead of retreating into an artificial world, you should be engaging with your family." But I know people who grew up in stifling fundamentalist families and books were their only window on a world that was richer and more alive in almost every way. Despite the potential to misuse books, we all agree now that books are generally good and should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Theater, film, and recorded music are newer, so some conservatives still think they're the devil's work, but most of us now see them the way we see books, as tools for mental and emotional expansion.
Interactive multimedia are much newer, so most people still think of them as time-wasters, and we still lump them together under the old word "game." I think the main difference between interactive artificial worlds and books is that the stakes are higher. Now you can really get absorbed in a world that goes nowhere, but you can also get a mental workout with a perfectly adjustable difficulty level, or a really immersive experience of how much better the world could be.
I used to come home from work and play computer games for the same reason that I came home from school as a teenager and played D&D. It wasn't just that the world was better (in some games it wasn't), it was to have an experience that I could never have at school or work: for my moment-to-moment actions to feel meaningful and rewarding. This is important so I'll say it again: Without games I would not even know what it feels like for my moment-to-moment actions to feel meaningful and rewarding.
That's how dismal this world is, and ideally we will go into artificial worlds just long enough to come out motivated to make human society work the same way, starting with our immediate environment and working up. This is really hard and it will probably take hundreds of years, but it might not be possible at all without worlds of imagination to show us what's possible.
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