Meaningless Progress, Love, and the Gay God (Homo Deus)

Progress, Love, and the Gay God (Homo Deus)

I ended my last post with the absurd, and that’s why I decided to use “Gay God” as the title of this post. It’s a bit absurd, plus it’s just a stupid joke about one influential book I just read.

Decent book

Progress vs. Love

At some point, me and Johannes (my dear nihilist friend) were often arguing about what’s (more) valuable in life - progress or love. He stated that it’s progress, I stated that it’s love.

“Life, humans, every individual should progress in life. That’s how life goes, how we have evolved and continue evolving, so we should embrace it, and push it further as much as we can,“ is what Johannes said. Sort of, I guess. I don’t remember exactly.

(Doesn’t matter, because we always have some banter going on between us anyway and I’ll just deal with his rant over misrepresenting his views in my blog while we play FIFA.)

I just feel that there’s no point to progress on it’s own. Progress applies to progress itself, meaning that it will get faster and faster over time. It seems to me that there will be a point where progress is so fast that there’s nothing to appreciate anymore, because whatever we’re trying to appreciate will already gone the next moment. Or at least not good enough. Many have probably read about the exponential growth of technology. If right now your smartphone may feel like it’s not good enough anymore after a year, then soon it’s going to be like that within a month, then maybe a week, a day, an hour, a minute, second… Of course, it won’t be your smartphone, it will be something better that will replace the smartphone, which in turn will be replaced again by something better.

The point I just explained is unfortunately dependent on time, so it might happen that progress will enable us to tweak with time itself, or at least how we perceive it, so we might still be able to enjoy things for a pleasurable enough time before they lose their value and we replace them with something better.

Anyway, progress accelerating to a point where nothing has value anymore is one aspect of why I stood for love. Without loving aspects of life that we already have - another person or other people, animals and plants and bugs and fish and living organisms, our clothes and phones and computers and homes, the land we walk on and the air we breathe, the planet we live on and the universe we exist in - what’s the fucking point of living this life?

(The other aspect of why I stood for love is romantic love. The happiest moments in my life have been when I’ve been in love, but in my opinion romantic love is more of a sub-category of love, rather than the grand meaning of life itself. Like it’s sometimes depicted as in movies, where love can magically cure everything. Since it’s something that has personally made me happy, I didn’t base my argument against progress on romantic love.)

Gay God

A friend of mine saw that I’m reading Homo Deus and asked me if the content is about God being gay. Stupidest joke ever, but probably caught your attention when you saw the title of this post.

Homo Deus is actually a book by Yuval Noah Harari about the history of humankind in relation to where we are going to go in the future. Harari talks about the relationship between animals and humans, about what it means to be human, and how technology is shaping humankind now and how it will shape humankind and what a human being even means in the future.

This is not meant to be a book review post, but Homo Deus has been one of the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read in terms of the topics touched and the weight of those topics. It was pointed out to me that the author is often simplistic in the way he passes through topics, yet I cannot get past the fact that it deeply influenced my perceptions about the future.

For Harari paints quite a bleak picture about the future when it comes to the division of power. With technology, the rich get richer faster and faster. It’s already like that now, but to earn profits the wealthy currently need other people to produce and consume what has been produced. However, technology is likely to replace most current human jobs (examples: in 20 years, doctors and lawyers, music) in the next 50 years, which means most of us will become useless for doing the shitty jobs and at the same time we will not have enough money to consume the things that have been produced. It might be that a universal basic income might solve the issue for a while, but for how long? If there’s a mass of people who don’t produce anything into this world and just waste resources then what’s their point?

The rich ones who will own technology (or merge with it) will not need a lot of human resource to fulfill their ambitions. They will also probably be more powerful with their technology in terms of destruction or self-defense than the rest of humankind without this technology. Will we upgrade all people? Will the rich separate themselves in a secure and prosperous area and leave the rest of us outside of it in a weird modern wilderness? Will they just kill us? Will we be like pets?

All of these got me to a weird point in my life. I have always felt that focusing on money, goals and a set vision for the future has got me stuck. Focusing on being passionate and doing a good job at whatever task at hand has been much more important to feel satisfied. Yet after reading Homo Deus, I feel I can’t just focus on the now and hope good things come to me. If I don’t make enough money, I won’t be able to influence the ones in power to use the power of technology for the benefit of all humans (e.g. making all of us superhuman cyborgs instead of doing that with the wealthy few). I won’t even be able to at least save myself from the useless mass of people for whom - if there aren’t many nice people at power - there’s a pretty good change to be left out to die in the modern wilderness.

What’s the future with technology like?

Wrapping up meaninglessness

Finding out that life is meaningless was the biggest revelation I had while studying in university. There’s no ultimate meaning to life, yet we exist in this mysterious world and are able to acknowledge being here, so we can appreciate every thought, emotion and moment we have in this world and give life whichever meaning we want.

After being part of a community where people are able to contribute to the world less than most other people (at least in terms of economic value), seeing successful people achieve great things, experiencing the absurdity of life, yearning for love in the world of ever-progressing progress, and getting acquianted with humankind’s future I can say I’m pretty fucking confused about what to go on with.

Any tips?