*The “better future” thing is jam-tomorrow and jam-yesterday talk, so it tends to become the enemy of jam today. You’re better off reading history, and realizing that public aspirations that do seem great, and that even meet with tremendous innovative success, can change the tenor of society and easily become curses a generation later. Not because they were ever bad ideas or bad things to aspire to or do, but because that’s the nature of historical causality. Tomorrow composts today.

*Also, huge, apparently dispiriting disasters can burn off the ground for profound new growth, so the glum and morbid bad-future notion is just as false and silly as this kind of socially-engineered forced-optimism.

 

[…]

*This is not a counsel of despair. It’s atemporality, it’s like an agnosticism. People don’t really require any “better future” per se. Nobody ever receives such a thing. There’s no possibly utopian arrangement which is better for everybody, since society is composed of radically disparate elements with orthogonal needs. People can’t even permanently content their own personal selves. If a guy longs for an X-Prize and wins it, he doesn’t stay permanently happy. A guy with that personality type is gonna look around in near-desperation for something else to radically over-achieve.

Chairman Bruce.