Comfort, Meaning, and the Fragility of Modern Life
Published:
Author’s Note:
I have been developing thoughts and ideas for the last four and a half years.
The catalyst for my thinking began when my personal interest in philosophy met the realization of the impermanence of the presence of my parents. Since then, I have started reflecting on observations made on my environment, people I interact with, and media I consume online (articles from reputable new sites, scientific journals, and highly biased social media alike). These reflections have been jumbled in my head for a while, and as I collected more, I started to notice trends. This is my attempt to organize them and to hopefully express them in a way that conveys them effectively and in an articulate manner.
I tried my best to tie everything together with overarching ideas, so please keep reading until my conclusion. The last two pages are dedicated to important conclusions that formed the basis of this essay as well as media that heavily influenced me.
I did not originally intend for anyone else to read this, but as the piece developed, I became increasingly proud of what it had become and more willing to share it. Take what you will from my ideas, if the result is pessimism, hope, or reflection, I’d say I achieved my goal.
What follows is deeply personal and inevitably shaped by my own experiences, values, and biases. Even so, I believe many of the experiences described here are broadly relatable, and that the conclusions I have drawn extend beyond my own life.
Perspective, Meaning, and Impermanence
I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why parts of modern life that seem unrelated keep leading me back to the same few ideas. Across personal life and society, we have become extremely good at eliminating friction and optimizing for immediate results. That has produced extraordinary comfort, but it can also weaken the patience, competence, relationships, and long term views that make people and systems resilient.
We optimize the present and borrow from the future. (1)
That trade works extremely well until the future arrives.
Happiness is subjective because it depends heavily on perspective. Give one hundred dollars to someone who has nothing and it can change their week. Give one hundred dollars to a billionaire and they may barely register that anything happened. The quantity remains the same, but its meaning comes from the person’s baseline. The same principle applies to almost every emotion. Rest feels better after exhaustion, seeing someone after months apart carries more weight than seeing them again after five minutes (“Distance makes the heart grow fonder!”), and success matters because failure was possible. The highs require lower reference points. A person who experienced maximum pleasure every second would eventually stop experiencing it as a high. It would become the baseline. For that reason, I think the modern obsession with eliminating every unpleasant emotion works against happiness itself. Obviously, there are forms of suffering worth preventing. Starvation, abuse, severe illness, poverty, and cruelty do not need philosophical justification (imagine that!).
I am talking about ordinary discomfort: boredom, disappointment, frustration, longing, failure, uncertainty, loneliness, and struggle. Those feelings belong in a complete life because they create contrast and motivation. If I am dissatisfied with something, dissatisfaction gives me a reason to change it. If I fail at something, frustration gives me a reason to improve. If I miss somebody, that feeling reminds me that the relationship matters. I first noticed this when I would go on summer break, a time where I would see my girlfriend once or twice a week. Compared to during the semester when we would see each other every single day for hours on end, the time we spent together over summer felt more precious, and I prioritized time with her over other things instead of vice versa during the school year. A life stripped of negative emotion would also be stripped of much of the mechanism that gives positive emotion meaning.
I do not believe life arrives with an assigned purpose. The universe has not mailed me a syllabus yet (the thought of that makes me laugh). My own view sits somewhere between existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. I see no objective evidence that every person was placed here for a predetermined reason.
Meaning emerges from whatever we decide deserves our time. (2)
For one person that might be family. For another it might be discovery, art, religion, knowledge, competition, service, achievement, exploration, or building something that outlasts them. (One interesting note is that all these things tend to revolve around the idea of legacy!) That freedom is important because it places responsibility back on the individual. If meaning is not assigned, then I have to create it. I also have to accept that the things I choose to value are temporary. So am I. That fact initially sounds depressing, but I think it eventually becomes liberating. We have the power to perceive everyday life as a treasure even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. Things feel enormous when we are living through them. A failed exam can ruin an entire week. A breakup can feel like the destruction of a future that had already been imagined. A mistake at work can replay in someone’s head for days. Then time passes. Years, months, maybe even weeks later, an experience that once occupied every waking thought becomes one sentence: that semester was rough, that relationship ended badly, or I had no idea what I was doing back then. Months of anxiety can eventually fit inside six words. The event stayed the same while perspective changed its scale. This is one of the most useful things time teaches. Problems that appear all-consuming from inside the present can become surprisingly small when placed inside the length of a life.
Perspective works in the opposite direction too. Things that feel permanent are usually only familiar. We define normal using the tiny window of history we personally experience. If something existed before we were born and continues throughout childhood, we instinctively treat it as part of the permanent structure of reality. Countries, institutions, technology, climate, relationships, and parents can all feel permanent from inside a single lifetime. History shows otherwise. Governments change, borders move, technologies become obsolete, social norms reverse, languages change, cities rise and decline, and entire professions disappear while new ones become ordinary.
The only reliable constant is change. (3)
Even something that remains stable throughout our entire lives can be temporary on the scale of a society. Familiarity should never be confused with permanence.
Family, Relationships, and Inheritance
Parents are probably the clearest example of this because they exist before memory begins. My parents were simply there. My dad is now almost sixty-four and my mom is sixty. For most of my childhood, their age had no real meaning to me. They were adults, and adults seemed finished. They knew what needed to be done, earned the money, drove the car, maintained the house, made the important decisions, and knew the answer, or at least were very good at convincing a child that they did. When I was in high school, my own life did not feel completely real yet. I worked hard, earned (kinda?) good grades, swam competitively, worked a part-time job, and tried to succeed. A lot of that motivation came from outside of me. I knew my parents valued academic achievement, discipline, work ethic, and preparing for college, so I did those things mostly because it mattered to them. The larger implications and the true reasons behind those actions remained hidden behind the veil. The connection between those choices and the rest of my own life still felt abstract.
Then my dad started talking differently. He would mention that his eyesight was getting worse, yardwork exhausted him more than it used to, his back hurt after long days of work and took longer to recover, and his memory was becoming less reliable. Growing up, my dad would always test my mental math whenever a situation where a calculator would be needed arose, “15% of 350, 19 times 19!”. Then, he began asking me math questions not to test me, but because he hadn’t worked it out yet. I remember one specific time when he asked me what 6 times 90 was and I was dumbfounded because it was such an easy problem. That moment really hit me hard, and I think about that moment a lot. He began talking about creating a family trust so that if something happened to him, my mom and the rest of us would be taken care of. Those conversations changed something in me. For the first time, I could clearly see my parents aging. The people I had subconsciously treated as permanent were moving through time just like everyone else. My dad had always been the person standing between me and the difficult parts of the world. Once I realized he would not always be able to stand there, my motivation changed. The grades I received became connected to my future instead of only my parents’ expectations, and building technical or leadership skills became part of preparing for a time when nobody older would automatically step in to save me.
My parents had spent years creating stability around me; adulthood meant learning how to create that stability myself. Independence is responsibility. (4)
Parenthood follows a strange arc. A child begins helpless, and a parent spends years making that child less dependent; eventually time reverses some of the practical relationship. The child grows stronger while the parent slows down, and help begins to flow in both directions. The parent never stops being the parent emotionally, but the shield changes sides. This is also why the death of a child before a parent feels so deeply wrong. One of my favorite movie quotes comes from Interstellar. “No parent should have to watch their own child die.” It breaks the expected direction of the generational cycle. Normally, each generation stands in front of the generation behind it. When someone’s parents die, they move forward. There is no longer another generation standing between them and the front of their family line. They become the shield, and then another generation grows behind them. A child becomes a parent, a parent becomes a grandparent, the people who were protected become the protectors, and the people who once depended on others eventually become the people others depend on. I find a lot of meaning in that pattern.
You inherit something, exist for a while, add to it, and then pass it forward. (5)
That exact feeling became stronger when I entered a serious long-term relationship. A long-term relationship changes how the future looks because the future stops being exclusively mine. I can picture a life built with another person, created through thousands of decisions neither of us would make alone. Eventually that life may include people who depend on us. Children completely change the direction of responsibility. At that point, my partner and I would become the providers, protectors, decision-makers, and source of stability for ourselves. We would become what our parents were for us. I can picture a life built with another person through tens of thousands of decisions neither of us would make alone. If that life eventually includes children, responsibility shifts again; my partner and I would become the source of stability that our parents once were for us. My dad once told me that the most important quality in a relationship is that both people make each other better, and I think he is right on the money. A strong relationship creates upward pressure without requiring either person to be unshakable all the time. There will be periods when one person is struggling and the other carries more; eventually the roles reverse. That capacity to redistribute weight is another form of resilience, and it follows the same principle as the earlier discussion of highs and lows:
A good life is not one that never dips below the surface, but one that can survive the submersion without losing its structure. (6)
The importance of cooperation becomes obvious when looking at humans as animals. Physically, we are not especially impressive. Other animals are stronger, faster, better armed, better camouflaged, or equipped with senses far beyond ours. Some animals even have brains larger than ours. A human dropped alone into nature without tools is not exactly the final boss of the food chain. What separates humans is our ability to accumulate knowledge across generations. Here’s an interesting analogy: Imagine all of human knowledge as a circle, with each field occupying a different part of it. Primary and secondary education give you a small, well-rounded version of that circle, while an undergraduate degree creates a narrow peak of specialization. Graduate study extends that peak toward the edge of what humanity already knows, and doctoral research may push it slightly beyond that boundary. That small bump represents a new contribution to human knowledge. Of course, people don’t need to follow this specific route of undergraduate, graduate, doctoral studies, but the general idea is that over time, millions of people build on discoveries made before them, gradually expanding the circle. Some people push its boundaries, while others live, work, teach, and create within what is already known. Together, all of these roles sustain and advance the growing body of human understanding. Language is what makes that inheritance possible. Writing lets knowledge survive its creator, and reading lets a person absorb an idea without rediscovering it from scratch. Individual intelligence becomes collective intelligence because minds can build on minds across time. Civilization is essentially a gigantic shared memory system. A modern engineer does not need to rediscover the physics or math beneath a computer before designing one. They inherit generations of understanding, just as I inherited the stability and lessons my parents created before I was old enough to recognize them. Knowledge and family are different kinds of inheritance, but both depend on something being carried forward instead of repeatedly rebuilt from zero.
Convenience, Connection, and Attention
One of the most useful exercises I encountered in a stress-management course happened during a “mindful eating” activity. It involved holding an orange and thinking about everything required for that specific fruit to reach my hand before eating it. Someone grew it, other people moved it through a network of labor and infrastructure, and eventually it appeared in front of me looking completely ordinary. The orange did not change, but my perception of it did. I was holding the final output of a system involving people I would never meet. As I peeled the orange, the smell of citrus seemed sweeter, and somehow that first slice of orange tasted juicier and tangier. That experience exposed a contradiction in modern life: we depend on more people than ever while being able to feel almost completely self-contained. Convenience hides the human relationships underneath the things we use. I can pay for food, electricity, water, transportation, or repairs without ever meeting most of the people who make those services possible; money translates one specialized contribution into access to thousands of others.
Money is one of the most successful abstractions humans ever created. (7)
Its efficiency allows enormous economies to function, but that same abstraction can make contribution and consumption feel disconnected. The price of an item replaces the chain of labor underneath it, and most of the time, we never really understand the true “cost” of what we consume. We become extraordinarily dependent on one another while experiencing that dependence as a series of numbers in a Capital One iPhone app. Older communities often had fewer ways to hide that dependence. Lower convenience forced more direct interaction, whereas modern life allows many needs to be handled through a single transaction or platform (an apple pay tap takes one second and does NOT require eye contact). That does not mean the old way was automatically better though. It means efficiency has changed what dependence feels like. We have more connections and, in some cases, fewer relationships (think of the superficiality of LinkedIn).
Text messaging makes this especially obvious. Text is incredibly useful for transmitting small pieces of information, but it becomes much worse when people try to use it as a replacement for serious conversation. A fully developed thought that might take thirty seconds to explain verbally can become several paragraphs of typing, so most people simply do not type the several paragraphs. They compress the idea. Tone disappears, timing disappears, facial expressions disappear, and immediate clarification disappears. The listener is also less likely to interrupt with a question because there is no natural conversational rhythm. The same amount of information can take dramatically longer to exchange while containing less meaning. People become accustomed to expressing ideas in smaller pieces, asking fewer follow-up questions, and abandoning thoughts that take too long to type. Reactions become emojis. That works fine when discussing what to eat for dinner. But, it works poorly when discussing fear, conflict, relationships, politics, philosophy, or anything else requiring nuance. Humans developed language to transmit complicated internal states, and we increasingly compress those states into bubbles on a screen (WHICH SUCKS!).
My eldest sister, Judy, told me at a young age that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with (how wise). I do not treat that as a mathematical law, but the underlying idea is obvious.
People absorb the habits of the people around them. (8)
Language spreads through friend groups. Motivation, ambition, cynicism, fitness habits, work ethic, spending habits, and even the way people talk about their future begin to converge. Humans learn through imitation. That used to mean the people physically around us had enormous influence. Now some of those “people” have been replaced by social media feeds. Someone can spend more time listening to strangers on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, or (god-forbid) Truth Social than talking to their closest friends. Those strangers are not selected randomly either. An algorithm selects them after observing what holds attention and then serving more of it. If the five most influential voices in someone’s day are partly algorithmically selected, those voices gradually move toward whatever keeps that person watching. The modern version of the saying may be that you become partly the average of the people around you and partly the average of whatever your recommendation algorithm thinks you cannot resist.
Smartphones also eliminated something people never realized they needed: empty time. People used to wait. They stood in lines, rode in cars, sat in waiting rooms, walked somewhere, ate, or lay in bed with nothing happening. Now almost every empty second can be filled. The instant boredom appears, a phone can remove it. That looks like an improvement because boredom feels, well, boring, but I think we lost something important.
Boredom creates the space where thoughts continue developing after the external stimulus stops. (9)
It encourages curiosity, gives experiences time to settle, creates anticipation, and forces people to invent something to do. Constant entertainment removes those gaps. There is always another video, post, argument, notification, or tiny stimulus available before the previous one has even finished registering. I call this kind of reward “dirty dopamine.” I am using that as shorthand rather than a literal description of anything biology or chemistry related. The important distinction is between stimulation and fulfillment. Scrolling delivers stimulation almost immediately. Real accomplishment usually takes work. Learning something difficult might require hours of confusion before you even start to understand it. Building a relationship takes years. Developing a skill requires failure. Finishing a substantial project may require months or even years. A short-form video provides a reward in seconds, then another, then another, and another. The competition is stupidly unfair. One activity asks the brain to tolerate frustration now for satisfaction later while the other offers stimulation immediately. After an hour of scrolling, though, I rarely feel fulfilled or satisfied. I often cannot remember what I watched, and sometimes I opened my phone for a completely different purpose (I am too young to have this kind of short term memory loss, sorry Mom and Dad). The stimulation happened and almost nothing remained. That is why I think of it as a dirty reward. It scratches the itch without solving the need underneath it.
This becomes ironic because humans reached our position through communication and cooperation. Social media was supposed to improve those things, and in some ways it has. People separated geographically can stay connected, ideas move rapidly, and small communities can form around interests that would be impossible to support locally. However, the dominant social-media experience still removes many of the best parts of human interaction. If I say something stupid face-to-face, I immediately see the other person’s reaction. They can stop me, ask what I mean, or tell from my voice whether I am serious. Online, I can .50 Cal BMG blast a sentence into thousands of strangers and leave. This sentence could cause outrage, prompt responses, receive likes or dislikes, but who says I need to respond or even acknowledge all that? Either way, the platform still gets what it wanted: engagement. An angry comment counts. An insult counts. Someone correcting misinformation counts. A person staring at a screen because they are furious counts the same as a person staring at the screen to learn something constructive. The algorithm has little reason to care whether an interaction improved anyone’s understanding. Attention and time are the products.
The structure of social media also rewards extreme communication. Truth usually contains uncertainty, and complicated subjects require a lot of context. A responsible answer often includes some version of “it depends.” Outrage has no such handicap. A person saying, “This is complicated and I need more information to properly develop my stance,” will rarely compete with someone saying, “THESE PEOPLE ARE DESTROYING YOUR LIFE.” One is intellectually responsible, and the other has a better thumbnail. Algorithms learn what gets reactions, and people naturally prefer information confirming what they already believe. The two mechanisms reinforce each other until two people can live in the same dorm building and experience completely different versions of reality. Each side sees the most ridiculous examples of the other because ridiculous examples generate engagement. The ordinary person disappears and the zany caricature becomes the representative (always knew the meaning, but this was my first time using zany in a sentence “Yay!”).
Most people contain contradictions and moderate views, but platforms prefer divisible categories. (10)
The internet also rewards confidence far more efficiently than knowledge. Education often makes people cautious because deeper knowledge exposes complexity. The more somebody learns, the more edge cases they discover. When interviewing for Arm for an engineering intern role, one of the most emphasized skills was the ability to search and deal with edge cases for verification in design. These kinds of people learn where assumptions fail and recognize what they do not know. Meanwhile, someone with very little understanding can watch one biased, false video and confidently summarize the same problem in fifteen seconds. Online, confidence often wins. The person with enough knowledge to fear being wrong hesitates while the person with no idea how wrong they might be posts immediately. The algorithm sees which one generated more comments and continues from there. How sad is that?
Education, Competence, and Artificial Intelligence
This is why I care so much about education. The most important thing school teaches is not the information itself. Most specific information is eventually forgotten or becomes irrelevant in a person’s career. What matters is learning how to learn. A good education develops the ability to approach a problem that has never been seen before, break it apart, find reliable information, communicate with other people, and continue after the first attempt fails. That capacity matters more than memorizing every fact because real life rarely arrives in the same format as a homework problem. I study electrical engineering. During my internship at SRP in transmission planning, I knew nothing about large-scale power delivery when I arrived. I was surrounded by engineers who had spent years understanding systems I had barely encountered in school. But I knew how to learn. I could read documentation, ask questions, connect new information to concepts I already understood, and use programming skills I already had to create tools that helped the engineers around me. The same thing happened later during my internship at Intel in process integration and yield engineering for advanced packaging. I had very little material science background going in, so I read. I learned enough to understand the vocabulary, read papers, asked questions, and connected what I already knew to the new field until I could contribute. That is what school actually prepared me for.
Most jobs contain specific knowledge that can only realistically be learned while doing the job. Education creates the person capable of learning it. (11)
That is also why some of what I see in college worries me. College should contain the most concentrated populations of people deliberately pursuing education, yet I regularly interact with students who struggle to articulate a complicated idea verbally or in writing. I cannot personally measure how the average college student’s eloquence compares with someone attending thirty or fifty years ago, so I won’t try and pretend my own experience proves a historical trend. I can see the direction that our communication environment pushes us, though. We communicate in shorter fragments, read fewer long-form arguments, outsource more writing to generative AI, and avoid conversations that require sustained attention. Then sustained communication becomes harder. I believe that writing is thinking made visible. When somebody learns to write clearly, they are learning how to organize an internal mess of thoughts into a structure another mind can follow (which is literally what I’m doing right now). That skill matters far beyond English class. Engineers need it, scientists need it, managers need it, partners in relationships need it, and citizens need it. If someone cannot clearly explain why they believe something, productive disagreement becomes much harder.
College students also occupy a strange position. They are legally adults but are still developing the identities they will carry into adulthood. They are surrounded by thousands of peers, many are away from their families for the first time, and most want to belong somewhere. Social media intensifies that pressure by exposing students continuously to whatever opinions, lifestyles, aesthetics, causes, and social behaviors appear most in their environment. That makes campuses attractive targets for political movements across the ideological spectrum. Young people have energy, time, and beliefs that are still developing. They want community. Those qualities can produce serious civic engagement, but they can also produce conformity disguised as independent thinking. I saw so many MAGA hats being passed by frats around campus prior to the 2024 election, but when asked about reasoning behind specific political standpoints, no constructive answers were given. (true of both parties, but seems to be more prevalent in the extreme right wing than extreme left wing). I got a lot of “just cuz” though (bruh).
People want to believe their opinions are entirely their own when often they are absorbing the language of whichever environment accepted them first. (12)
I’ll admit that I am guilty of this fact too, but what matters is your ability to give reason for your opinions while staying open to new ideas, even if they are contradictory to your prior beliefs.
The same search for belonging appears socially. Alcohol and drugs can provide quick relief from discomfort, while hookup culture can provide intimacy without requiring the vulnerability and work of building a durable relationship. Out of everyone I could consider a friend since starting college, at least a third of them have dabbled on dating apps (even if they made a profile as a joke or to stalk people on the app). My concern is not that every late night party is destructive or every casual relationship is immoral. People are free to enjoy themselves how they please. But the same trade appears here that appears everywhere else in this essay:
Short-term stimulation begins substituting for long-term fulfillment. (13)
Artificial intelligence makes the education problem more serious. I use AI, and it is useful. (Heck, I used it to reword parts of this essay!) Used correctly, it can remove tedious work, accelerate research, organize information, help debug code, improve writing, and make someone more productive. The danger appears when a tool intended to extend thought replaces thought. A student who already understands how to construct an argument can use AI to improve one. A student who never learned how to construct an argument can ask AI to produce the entire assignment. Both may submit something polished, but only one developed the underlying skill. School assignments are valuable partly because they are inconvenient. A bad first draft has to be fixed; broken code has to be debugged; a wrong calculation has to be understood before the right one means much. The friction is not an accidental flaw in education, because some of the learning exists inside the struggle itself. The mind adapts to problems just like how muscles adapt to lifting weights. I like my brain and my biceps big and bumpy (actually, maybe not a bumpy bicep, but you get my point). If AI removes every frustrating intermediate step, students may become excellent at producing outputs while losing the ladder that once developed the ability to produce them independently. Technology should increase the ceiling of human capability without removing the ladder used to reach it.
The same issue appears in the way social media sells work. A constant stream of content advertises shortcuts to financial freedom, but civilization still requires boring competence. The power grid does not care about personal branding or selling a self-help course, and neither do the physical systems that keep food, water, transportation, and shelter available. Someone has to understand how the world underneath the interface actually works. The physical world remains stubbornly unimpressed by vlogs and the latest fast fashion releases.
Efficiency, Resilience, and the Environment
There is another contradiction in modern convenience. Technology has made enormous portions of life cheaper and easier while the fundamental components of a stable life have become much harder to afford. Housing is the clearest example. In 1980, the median price of a newly sold home in the United States was about $64,600. By 2025 it was more than $417,000. Income rose too, but the relationship between earnings and housing changed dramatically. The federal minimum wage has remained $7.25 since 2009, while housing, education, health care, transportation, food, insurance, and other necessities continue demanding larger amounts of money. Millions of people work more than one job, and even among people with only one formal employer, side work has become normalized. We have access to luxuries that would have looked miraculous several generations ago while people struggle to afford the basic foundations of adulthood. A person can stream almost every movie ever made from a device in their pocket and still have no realistic path toward buying a house. In my humble opinion, that is a weird ass definition of prosperity.
Convenience can also separate people from the work that produces their lives. Specialization creates enormous productivity, yet the more tasks we outsource, the narrower our practical competence can become. Take Japan for example, their software development is so unbelievably weak because all the work is outsourced to third party vendors both within the country and out. This system leads to shoddy work with no real way for the requester to verify the efficacy of the software (I researched this when searching why Toyota make cars lag so far behind American and Chinese brands in terms of built in software capabilities).
There is a different satisfaction in making or repairing something yourself because capability creates a relationship with the world that purchasing alone cannot. (14)
This echoes the ultra delicious orange: convenience is not fake, but it can hide the work that makes convenience possible. The same principle scales from individuals to systems. Modern systems optimize aggressively for efficiency, while resilience often requires capacity that looks wasteful until it is needed. The last intern project I undertook was making configuration files to test load conditions under failure for power islands on SRP’s grid. The goal was to find where there was a possibility of failure if a major line were to go down, and how we could redirect power in order to maintain system stability. A power grid with no margin can perform beautifully under normal demand and fail during an extreme event; the point is not that efficiency is bad, but that optimization and resilience are not the same goal. Removing every buffer makes a system impressive right up until conditions leave the assumptions it was designed around.
Climate change is one of the clearest examples. People hear that average global temperature increases by a few degrees and think the change sounds small. Living in Arizona has made the flaw in that intuition obvious to me. I have experienced a week where the high reached around 115 degrees and then another week where the high was around 81. Thirty degrees of ordinary weather variability can occur quickly. So why care about a few degrees of global average warming? Because:
We have pushed the earth, and we now are bound to live inside distributions instead of the means. (15)
Infrastructure, crops, ecosystems, bodies, and water systems operate inside ranges. Move the center of a temperature distribution a little and the extreme tail changes significantly. Conditions that were once rare begin occurring more often. That distinction is what I think of as living in the mean versus living in the standard deviation. The mean tells you where the center sits while the tails are where systems fail. A city may tolerate normal summer temperatures perfectly well and struggle during several consecutive extreme days. Take Europe for example, many citizens within large, developed cities do not own their own air conditioning. Heatwaves during record breaking summers caused many deaths simply because of the heat. A crop may handle the seasonal average while failing during a short heat event at the wrong developmental stage. An electrical grid may function for 360 days and still fail during the five days when everyone needs maximum cooling simultaneously (Big Uhoh in Arizona, importance of transmission planning!!!). The average matters, but the deviation often determines survival.
El Niño is another good example of why climate cannot be understood as one temperature number. Under normal Pacific conditions, trade winds push warm surface water westward toward Asia and Australia while cold, nutrient-rich water rises near the west coast of South America to replace it. During El Niño, those trade winds weaken or even reverse and warm surface water spreads eastward across the central and eastern Pacific. That enormous rearrangement of ocean heat changes atmospheric circulation, shifting rainfall patterns and storm tracks across large portions of the planet. A change in Pacific water temperature can alter weather thousands of miles away because the atmosphere and ocean are coupled systems. In 2026, a very strong El Niño is developing. Current forecasts place very high confidence on El Niño continuing through the coming winter, with some modeling indicating that the event could compete with the strongest events in the historical record (2015-2016). A strong El Niño adds natural short-term warming on top of the long-term warming trend created by greenhouse gases. Those effects stack.
Recent Pacific hurricanes provide another reminder that unusual events matter because infrastructure and populations are adapted to what normally happens. Southern California rarely experiences direct tropical cyclone impacts. The eastern Pacific usually sends storms westward into open water or toward Mexico. In August 2023, Hurricane Hilary traveled north along Baja California and entered Southern California as a tropical storm, which was highly unusual for the region. More recently, several powerful eastern Pacific systems developed close together. Hurricane Marie remained offshore rather than making landfall in California, but still generated dangerous conditions along the Southern California coast, causing significant flooding and property damage. The point is not that California is suddenly becoming Florida or Southeast Asia; the point is that systems are designed around historical probability. When rare events become less rare, places encounter problems they were never built to handle regularly. Climate also contains feedback loops. Ice reflects incoming sunlight, so when warming melts ice, darker land or water becomes exposed and absorbs more energy. Permafrost creates another feedback because frozen soil stores enormous amounts of organic carbon. As permafrost thaws, microbes can decompose previously frozen material and release vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. These kinds of feedback are why changing a complex system can create effects larger than the original push. There are thresholds, delays, feedbacks, and interactions. If you ask me, I don’t want to live inside the apparatus of an experiment with the possibility of disastrous outcomes (We’re all just a statistic to someone :( … ).
Climate change is therefore not only an environmental issue; it is a systems issue. Stress in one area can spill into another, and several simultaneous pressures can reinforce each other. The expectation of constant convenience intensifies the problem because modern abundance requires enormous infrastructure and energy, even when everyone’s individual expectation seems harmless. Environmental damage often emerges from millions of individually reasonable choices that become unsustainable in aggregate. Food waste illustrates that contradiction. Abundance is maintained partly by producing more than will be used because nobody wants empty shelves; car dependent cities produce a similar pattern, where individual transportation decisions make sense inside a system that collectively consumes enormous resources. The problem is not that people are irrational. It is that:
A system can reward rational local decisions while producing a harmful collective outcome. (16)
Incentives, Institutions, and the Future
Our economic system also struggles with conservation because extraction and destruction is easier to monetize than preservation. A resource can have enormous ecological or future value without producing immediate revenue; once it is sold, the value appears neatly in someone’s account. Markets are extremely good at coordinating exchange, but shared resources expose limits when the cost of depletion is distributed broadly or delayed. That is why individual and collective incentives so often conflict with each other.
If everyone benefits from a shared resource remaining healthy but each individual gains by taking slightly more, restraint becomes difficult to maintain without trust or rules. (17)
I got this idea from seeing the toilet paper and water raids in grocery stores during the COVID-19 pandemic. The rational individual decision can produce an irrational collective result. Humans did this long before modern capitalism; industrial systems simply increased the scale of what one decision can affect. This returns to morality.
Cooperation allows society to exist, while self-interest continually pushes against cooperation. Civilization is the ongoing attempt to manage that conflict. (18)
The conflict becomes especially important when basic necessities are involved because food, water, housing, electricity, and transportation occupy a different category from optional consumer products. If a game becomes too expensive, I can skip it. Unfortunately, I cannot stop eating. A person living in Arizona cannot casually opt out of electricity during extreme summer heat. Markets behave differently when the consumer has almost no ability to walk away. That is why concentration in agriculture and other basic industries concerns me.
American agricultural production has moved toward larger operations over decades. Federal agricultural programs and crop insurance also distribute much of their support according to production and acreage, meaning large operations receive a large share of the total dollars. The original purpose of agricultural support makes sense to me because farming contains enormous risk. Weather can destroy a small farmer’s annual income, and supporting those farmers helps preserve domestic food production through bad seasons. The problem appears when a system intended partly to preserve stability increasingly favors the operations already large enough to absorb shocks. Small farmers disappear, larger operations absorb production, and the food supply becomes more concentrated (Ever played Monopoly? This sadly doesn’t work out for everyone). Efficiency improves while resilience can decline. Again, the same trade appears. Government exists partly because individuals and markets struggle with long horizon collective problems. No household can personally maintain national infrastructure or scientific institutions, so some forms of resilience require collective investment. Their political weakness is that successful prevention often looks like nothing happening.
Prevention has terrible marketing because the success story is an absence. (19)
“The bridge remained standing” is a crappy headline. This is one of my major frustrations with democratic government. Politicians work inside short election cycles while many important problems require decades of planning. Infrastructure, climate, education, scientific research, water, energy, and agriculture do not obey election calendars. This was a major problem with the two consul system of ancient Rome where both consuls had one year to achieve as much “dignitas”, or glory as possible! A politician receives immediate credit for a tax cut or visible project, while the political reward for maintaining an invisible institution whose failure might occur twenty years later is much smaller. Campaign finance and lobbying create another layer of distortion. Businesses, trade groups, unions, ideological organizations, and wealthy donors spend enormous amounts trying to influence policy and succeed. That access creates a persistent question: whose interests receive the most attention when the people affected by a policy have dramatically different amounts of money and institutional power? Isn’t it ironic? The government’s purpose is to provide collective service and prevention that individuals cannot, yet it serves those who have the financial means for mobility, not those who rely on it.
I do not think every politician is secretly taking an envelope of cash under a table. The real system is less cinematic and more boring, which actually makes it much harder to notice (I know this contradicts what’s been going on during the current administration, but I generally believe this is the case). Political campaigns cost money, organizations fund campaigns, organizations lobby, and politicians need coalitions that keep them in office. Those incentives shape what receives attention. Democracy also places enormous responsibility on ordinary voters. Nobody can master every issue the government touches, so the system depends on citizens being able to recognize credible expertise, compare claims, tolerate uncertainty, and distinguish evidence from emotional rhetoric. Democracy only works if everyone is educated.
If people lose the ability to read carefully or explain why they believe something, the ballot still exists while the decision making underneath it becomes easier to manipulate. (20)
Social media intensifies the problem because policy is slow and conflict is entertaining. A complicated proposal is harder to consume than a short clip of a politician embarrassing an opponent; incentives shift toward performance, identity, and outrage. Political disagreement itself is healthy, but disagreement becomes much harder to resolve when people no longer share a basic account of reality. If two people agree that a bridge is about to fall, they can argue about how to repair it. If one party thinks the bridge will fall while the other thinks the bridge itself is a conspiracy, negotiation has nowhere to begin. The same platform dynamics discussed earlier then turn political opponents into the same zany caricatures (Zany x2!). Once the most outrageous member of a group becomes the representative image of everyone in it, compromise feels like betrayal instead of governance. Long term problems suffer most because future people cannot vote, donate, lobby, or complain; they simply inherit whatever remains. Every generation has enormous power over people who do not yet exist. That relationship reminds me directly of parents and children.
A responsible parent spends years preparing a child for a future the parent can not fully control. They save, teach, maintain stability, and develop the child’s independence. Society should operate the same way between generations. Instead, we repeatedly consume resources now and leave the consequences behind us. At the individual family level, we understand inheritance. At the societal level, we frequently behave as if history ends when we die. This is why I believe my generation has a real possibility of experiencing a great loss of life or a substantial decrease in quality of life. I am less concerned about one cinematic nuclear apocalypse than a domino effect of interdependent failures.
Climate stress affects food and water. Food and housing costs create economic pressure. Economic pressure increases political anger. Political anger increases polarization. Polarization makes coordinated long-term policy harder. Poor long-term policy weakens infrastructure. Weak infrastructure makes climate events more damaging. Misinformation makes agreement on every step harder. Then the loop repeats.
Civilizations rarely need every system to fail to collapse. Enough systems only need to become unreliable at the same time, human nature does the rest. (21)
Young people growing up inside all of this are exposed to an absurd amount of information. A phone can show somebody at war, a pornography video, then someone younger than them making millions by dancing for views, then an advertisement, then somebody dying from an autonomous drone, then a meme, then a climate disaster, then a friend’s vacation, then political outrage, then a gif of an explosion green screened over a cat. (All from personal experience by the way, yes even the porn. Let’s be mature.) The emotional context changes every few seconds.
Humans evolved to care intensely about the people and events around them. (22)
Now “around them” can include billions of strangers. At the same time, social media creates endless comparison. Someone is richer, better looking, more successful, in a better relationship, traveling somewhere more interesting, or living a life that appears more complete. A situation 1000x worse than that cliche of your parents comparing you to that “oh so successful” cousin of yours. The comparison pool has no upper boundary. There will always be somebody doing better. That environment naturally produces dissatisfaction, and then the same device offers distraction from the dissatisfaction it helped create.
Feel bad, scroll, feel temporarily better, stop, feel empty, and scroll again. The machine has a solution for the problem the machine partially created. Very efficient. (23)
Once I place these ideas together, I keep seeing the same structure.
We exchange resilience for efficiency, fulfillment for stimulation, relationships for connectivity, literacy for compressed communication, learning for output, competence for convenience, community dependence for monetary abstraction, environmental stability for consumption, and future security for present comfort. Each individual trade can appear reasonable. The accumulated system becomes fragile.
Modern civilization has extraordinary capability. We understand genetics, split atoms, communicate across the planet instantly, manufacture structures at nanoscopic scales (I work on this currently! Exciting stuff for sure), predict weather days in advance, land machines on other planets, and access more recorded knowledge than any human civilization has ever possessed. Yet we are building systems that increasingly depend on everything functioning correctly. Food arrives, water flows, power remains available, supply chains remain open, the internet works, political institutions function, the climate remains inside familiar limits, and people continue trusting enough of the same information to cooperate.
Everything feels solid because it worked yesterday. My parents felt permanent because they were there yesterday too. That is the mistake. Stability is temporary unless something actively maintains it.
Complacent people are saved by the ones who worry. (24)
I understand that more clearly now than I did in high school. My parents were never permanent structures in the universe. They were people working extremely hard to create the experience of permanence for their children. That is what a good parent does. The stability I experienced as a child was constructed. Bills were paid, food appeared, the house was maintained, and problems were solved before I understood that they existed. My parents absorbed uncertainty so I would not have to. Now I am old enough to see behind the structure. The stability required work, and eventually it will become my turn to perform that work. That realization is one of the reasons I care so much more about building a career, developing skills, maintaining relationships, and using my time well. I want to become capable of supporting the people who supported me, and I want to be capable of building something stable with the person I love. If we eventually have children, I want them to experience the same illusion I had. I want them to believe for a while that everything is fine because the adults know what they are doing. Hopefully by then I actually will, but I know I won’t.
Such is the nature of relativity, yesterday’s solutions balk in the face of today’s problems, never mind tomorrow’s. (25)
The solution to all of this is not rejecting technology, markets, comfort, money, or progress. Those things created enormous improvements in human life. The mistake is maximizing them without considering what they replace. Engineering provides the framework I keep returning to. Important systems are not designed exactly at their theoretical operating limit. We leave margin, include redundancy, consider failure modes, test conditions outside the nominal operating point, and prepare for variation. Civilization needs the same mindset, and so do people. A resilient person can experience sadness without collapsing. A resilient relationship can absorb periods where one person carries more than the other. A resilient student can encounter a problem they were never taught directly and learn how to solve it. A resilient community contains people who trust and help one another. A resilient economy can survive disruptions without basic necessities disappearing. A resilient government invests in institutions whose value may not become visible during the current election cycle.
A resilient civilization leaves something behind for people who have not been born. (26)
Perspective eventually reduces everything. The problem that feels enormous today will change, and the achievement that feels enormous today will change too. The body changes. Relationships change. Parents age. Children grow. Careers end. Governments change. Technologies disappear. Civilizations eventually become history. This should not make life feel pointless. It makes time more valuable. My parents will not always be here, and neither will I. The stability of the world I know is temporary.
That means the people around me deserve attention now. Skills deserve development now. Relationships deserve work now. Problems worth solving deserve effort now. There will never be a point where everything is finally complete and permanent. Life continuously moves. Stop trying to stay in the now. The goal is to move through change without losing the things that actually matter. That requires perspective, competence, and most importantly, people.
Crave connection, fight for opportunity, thrive on collaboration. (27)
It requires remembering that the comfortable world we are inheriting was built by people before us who eventually had to step aside.
Someday we will too.
Until then, we are the ones holding the shield.
While writing this essay I reflected more on what all parents provide for their children.
Thank you, Mom and Dad, for providing a stable, sheltered, loving environment to grow in. The freedom, reason, and patience you granted me shaped the person I am today.
Note 1: I cried heavily while writing the parts about parents…
Note 2: After thinking and collecting for 4.5 years, I wrote this in one, 6 hour session.
Main ideas and conclusions I reached:
We optimize the present and borrow from the future. (1)
Meaning emerges from whatever we decide deserves our time. (2)
The only reliable constant is change. (3)
My parents had spent years creating stability around me; adulthood meant learning how to create that stability myself. Independence is responsibility. (4)
You inherit something, exist for a while, add to it, and then pass it forward. (5)
A good life is not one that never dips below the surface, but one that can survive the submersion without losing its structure. (6)
Money is one of the most successful abstractions humans ever created. (7)
People absorb the habits of the people around them. (8)
Boredom creates the space where thoughts continue developing after the external stimulus stops. (9)
Most people contain contradictions and moderate views, but platforms prefer divisible categories. (10)
Most jobs contain specific knowledge that can only realistically be learned while doing the job. Education creates the person capable of learning it. (11)
People want to believe their opinions are entirely their own when often they are absorbing the language of whichever environment accepted them first. (12)
Short-term stimulation begins substituting for long-term fulfillment. (13)
There is a different satisfaction in making or repairing something yourself because capability creates a relationship with the world that purchasing alone cannot. (14)
We have pushed the earth, and we now are bound to live inside distributions instead of the means. (15)
A system can reward rational local decisions while producing a harmful collective outcome. (16)
If everyone benefits from a shared resource remaining healthy but each individual gains by taking slightly more, restraint becomes difficult to maintain without trust or rules. (17)
Cooperation allows society to exist, while self-interest continually pushes against cooperation. Civilization is the ongoing attempt to manage that conflict. (18)
Prevention has terrible marketing because the success story is an absence. (19)
If people lose the ability to read carefully or explain why they believe something, the ballot still exists while the decision making underneath it becomes easier to manipulate. (20)
Civilizations rarely need every system to fail to collapse. Enough systems only need to become unreliable at the same time, human nature does the rest. (21)
Humans evolved to care intensely about the people and events around them. (22)
Feel bad, scroll, feel temporarily better, stop, feel empty, and scroll again. The machine has a solution for the problem the machine partially created. Very efficient. (23)
Complacent people are saved by the ones who worry. (24)
Such is the nature of relativity, yesterday’s solutions balk in the face of today’s problems, never mind tomorrow’s. (25)
A resilient civilization leaves something behind for people who have not been born. (26)
Crave connection, fight for opportunity, thrive on collaboration. (27)
References
Media I was heavily influenced by outside of my personal experiences and observations:
García-Carreras, B., & Reuman, D. C. (2013). Are changes in the mean or variability of climate signals more important for Long-Term stochastic growth rate? PLoS ONE, 8(5), e63974. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063974
Nolan, C. (2014). Interstellar. Paramount Pictures.
Nolan, C. (2023). Oppenheimer.
Planet Earth. Narrated by David Attenborough, BBC Natural History Unit, 2006.