Scarcity is our natural mental state, but this all changed once industrial civilisation handed everything to us on a silver platter. In fact, we are happiest when resources are in short supply. Anthropologists and volunteers in third world countries never fail to mention how some of the biggest, widest, longest-lasting smiles they’ve ever witnessed were … Continue reading The Happiness Trap: How Humans Became Terrified of Scarcity
Although society at large will never find the courage to acknowledge its existential descent, there is a growing unspoken feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with “The World”: it has simply stopped making sense. Today I pose the question: did it ever make sense? Many try to rationalise today’s state of the world as a … Continue reading Finding Meaning in An Increasingly Absurd World
Genuine forms of happiness have been exchanged for counterfeit versions originating in the world of machines: goods owned, GDP units earned, number of holidays left. Happiness is being measured in numbers and quantities instead of moments and feelings. Of all human generations who have lived before us, we are the least capable of answering the … Continue reading Happiness In the Machine Age
Yesterday at the beach I saw a dog that reminded me what it feels like to be a healthy human. It was a tiny brown poodle with an aqua-green sweater that more than made up for its size in sassiness, sexiness, energy, and as Iggy Pop would say, lust for life. The sad part in … Continue reading The Happiness Report: Zombies At the Beach
The sooner and harder the global economy crashes, the faster we can transition to a social transformation where the people own the economy, rather than the economy owning them. The more of us realise that modern civilisation has failed us, the bolder our imagination will gallop in envisioning new societies based on the human and … Continue reading Ten Things You Can Do to Help the Economy Crash Even Harder this Christmas
Along with relinquishing much of our freedom to technology, we have exchanged true happiness with counterfeit versions which only make sense in a machine world: we quantify happiness based on the number of consumer goods we buy and on GDP rather than on meaningful existence, exactly because we emulate machines: focusing only on the numbers … Continue reading Happiness In the Machine Age: An Exclusively Human Problem
George Tsakraklides 