why humans aren't great rn, but we'll get better

hey guys - thanks for reading, subscribing, and giving me continuous feedback. Sorry for the break here. I’ve had a rough couple of months, but we’re back in it. Let’s ride!

This one was originally about AI, but I realized it slowly morphed into something larger. Society, its norms as a whole, and the direction we’re heading, which I think is a slippery slope, but ultimately, I think we’ll find our way. check out my thoughts and maybe you’ll see what I mean.

let’s start with some bad news

There’s always been so much negativity nowadays in the news, and I think personally, negative news sells, but now it’s more existential than ever. Nobody has an attention span, we’re all fat, we’re past peak inventions, intelligence, and creativity. is that all true?

I think about a tweet I saw almost everyday, and it resonated with me deeper than I expected:

Everyone can learn whatever they want from an infinitely patient and impossibly intelligent teacher in their pocket 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Everyone’s apparent IQ seems the exact same with no major changes in your daily interactions.

Why is this? nowadays, you can learn almost anything you want from chatgpt… but this was actually true years ago. Maybe since the first iPhone came out. You could google almost anything; learn about it on wikipedia, youtube, khan academy, or reddit, and yet we haven’t really gotten smarter. we’ve actually regressed! of course, the root causes to this problem (why aren’t we, on average, getting smarter?) are usually pretty nuanced, but we can take occam’s razor and apply a simple answer: humanity is pretty short sighted. we’ve seen it time and time again: we get too addicted to dopamine (doom scrolling, summaries on everything, too much stimulation); we’re too capitalistic (that mcdonalds dollar menu? fast fashion? 55g of sugar in a coke that some americans drink daily?); we don’t get enough oxygen (get a co2 monitor). our attention span is too short and getting wired for quick hits.

so, I originally didn’t use gpt because it has so many frustrating use cases as well - I didn’t want to lose my ability to google something, look for it, spend time finding it, synthesizing it in my brain. I don’t want to be that guy sending all his emails with AI. I don’t want to use AI to become the next wall-e human.

in reality though, it makes sense why we’ve hit a plateau. it’s the way life goes - we always want more and will do less. there are interns now that send every single email using gpt or just using automated responses from google. people just look for summaries of books, movies, and tv shows. there’s an alarming lack of critical thinking and attention. ultimately, you’ll see it’s a constant feedback loop. a chaotic system with so many roots that it’s almost impossible to fix them all. bad food gives your brain poor nutrition and thus you aren’t at your peak. scrolling too late gives you bad sleep and it makes you not do anything the next day - we eat the donut to feel better (dopamine). so on and so forth. the slope starts to become slippier. the humans start to rot.

want to know the craziest stats that show we’re on a slippery slope?

1990’s most obese state (Mississippi) had at the time a lower rate of obesity than what the least obese state (Colorado) had by 2010.

this is true for almost any 20 year gap you want to check. 2025 vs 2005? the math maths. isn’t that scary? I WAS 10 YEARS OLD IN 2005. poverty rates haven’t gone up, we know more about nutrition, you can cook almost anything in a $40 air fryer. why aren’t we healthier? why isn’t life expectancy going up?

more than 75% of americans in a given week don’t go on a walk that is longer than 10 minutes.

most above the age of 30 never go on a full on sprint again in their life.

… are we going to actually become the wall-e humans?

but you’ll see me dead before you see me hopeless

Ultimately, if you know me, you’ll know a lot of the time, I take a pretty positive view of most things, or believe in the more hopeful path of things. I think it makes sense to think these ways - aren’t you buying the dip when the stock market goes down? how about real estate?

why don’t you do the same with humanity? with your own country when they elect a president you don’t like?

buy the dip in this moment of western civilization.

ultimately, I think that we will bounce back. we’re in an age of information exploration - social media is 20 years old, the effects of smartphones are just barely starting to be fully understood, and AI is brand new. here’s the thing - we can just resist the human-rot with a few guardrails. and guess what - the guardrails are free.

students are starting to use pencil and paper for tests again. we’re starting to socialize how bad being sedentary for 14 hours a day is - not just understand, but socialize. health is rapidly becoming a status symbol - it’s not something you can buy (maybe Ozempic gets you halfway there), but something you have to earn. Apple popularized just getting off your butt with standing reminders and activity rings, and now Oura and Whoop are leading the charge on helping people understand healthier habits. your phone, whether it’s a $99 android or a $1000 iPhone, tracks your steps, can estimate your calories burned, and with an $80 fitness tracker, you can track your general heart health and sleeping habits. influencers like Bobby Approved and Andrew Huberman are rapidly making people understand and take in healthier habits - myself included!

simple habits have made me sleep better - no food 3 hours before, relatively consistent sleep timing, a colder room, and no screens for 30 minutes before (I fail at this a lot, but we’re trying out here).

these aren’t things that cost money - maybe the AC for the room in the summer - but the others are literally just discipline. resisting the late night insomnia cookies. you’re not an animal, you can resist your cerebellum’s call for food and your brain’s urge to check instagram.

here’s the trick

Knowledge makes the world so much more beautiful.

I’ll combine that adage by Andrej Karpathy, add my own hopefulness, optimism, and experience, and make my own philosophy:

Knowledge is the fuel for a more beautiful, colorful, emotional world.

I guarantee you reading a summary of Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography won’t make you appreciate him like reading the biography did. Leonardo didn’t appreciate the world by summarizing things - he appreciated it by diving as deep as possible into understanding things - how a bird’s tongue worked. How light reflected off surfaces. Then it made him make more beautiful paintings, and thus, more emotional paintings. It’s why when you learn something, you have more of an emotional sentiment. Knowing how much work some people put into things - whether it be art, science, writing - just makes me appreciate it more. Why shouldn’t you put in similar work? let’s not summarize it all - dive deep into a subject. have an opinion / initial view. be okay with changing it if you have new information. it’s what makes life worth living.

I don’t get why acting so non-emotional about everything is so cool, or trying to read a summary (just compressing everything into one small medium) is all that, or being negative about everything is so cool.

I support a soccer team that has been total dogshit for 11 years (Manchester United Football Club). Does that mean I won’t be excited about the future of the team? no.

Why not take the long way? it adds color to your life. Use AI to learn a little bit about things, then watch a nerd on youtube explain the beauty of it to you.

lmk what you thought!

if you liked it - if I mansplained too much - if it was shit - if you have any cool AI usages - let me know, I’d love to learn and incorporate!

sneak peek

I’m already writing my next posts, which will be how I use AI to learn, and how I learn. if you don’t like AI, I guess skip it. If you like AI, and learning, it’ll be a fun one. See you soon!