[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Anomalocaris]

How many people trouble themselves with meaning when survival is convincingly imperiled but can still plausibly be fought for and maintained?   The dominant priority becomes clear when only one of the two two can sought.  

I guess we just have different feelings about the world. 

I don't feel my survival is imperiled, that I have to fight for it daily. Yes, I agree that if I were under attack by aliens I would stop playing and try to survive. 

There are existential threats, of course. Climate change is real. 

At basic level of reality effecting humans the search for meaning is the idle indulgence  in a set of tertiary urges ultimately implanted by the quirk of the genetics of neurological circuitry whose dominant shaping factor had always been adaptation to the need for survival.

It may be that a strong instinct to survive by manipulating the natural world to serve us is a good and useful thing that remains strong even when it's accomplished its goal. 

I mean, if you have everything you need, maybe it makes sense to stop manipulating the natural world and just enjoy yourself -- appreciate the natural world for what it is, rather than what you can make it produce. The unreasonable continuation of the desire to produce useful stuff means that we go on to produce stuff we don't actually need. And then we'll burn down Brazil in order to have cool leather goods and thick steaks. 

I think that a wise life would be to stop producing once you've got enough stuff, and enjoy the beauty in what there is.

The goal is a moving target, and so can not be accomplished per se.   One could only temporarily appear to have reached or gotten ahead of it.    But no complacency can possibly last because different unpredicted challenges are certain to arise and time spent standing still would likely come at the cost of increased acute effort required to meet the next unpredicted challenge.  

If you think climate change, easily predictable and predicted for a long time, is the major challenge to our desire to avoid large scale immiserating of humanity in the foreseeable future, I think you are far too complacent.    I think it is not excessive to say the most serious threat of widest and deepest immiserating and enormous death tolls we face today we could not have seriously foreseen only 5 years ago.   That is the unraveling of the world economic order which enabled the efficient utilization of skill, resource and competitive advantages through international trade and multilateral security.  That system had been in force and had had led to relative peace, and enormous enrichment of humanity during the last 70 years, and is largely responsible for perhaps half of the world having time and disposable income for middle class idleness and leisure.   Just a few years ago this system has been complacently envisioned to last into a star trek future bringing ever more of humanity into the happy state of smelling flowers.   But it is unraveling before out eyes, and the result could well herald fragmentation and decades of conflict and warfare in a age where nuclear weapon has already proliferated extensively and has few remaining barriers towards comprehensive proliferation to all significant powers.    


If your outlook is merely three generations, one ahead, one behind,  with heavy emphasis on the current status of the one in the middle, then perhaps it seem not too much of importance is risked by being satisfied with what we have and while away in idle indulgence.   But although it may seem we natively try to be short sighted and colloquial in outlook, it appears we do tend to have an noticeable innate urge to also consider maximizing chance of survival over long run by doing more of what had worked before even if there is less need.   So I don't suppose the world in the next decades will be characterized by idle search for beauty and meaning.