Believing In People

 I believe in people. 

People are amazingly strange creatures. They walk this ridge between depression and anxiety, and walk it with joy.

The world need to be stable enough that they can grow competence and skill. When it's too stable then they become bored and depressed, because it's all easily within their skillset and there is no growth or learning; they've been there and done that. When things are not stable enough that they can develop competence, that's chaos and anxiety. The stress of constant change burns them out; they will often just quit trying and then submit to boredom again.

In many people, chronic anxiety seems to me (a layman without special training) to be defined as being afraid that they might become afraid. It's weird how we can be like that - fearing fear so much. Of course, we tend to fear most overly-strong emotions, and I have to wonder how much other animals fear themselves.

When they do what they're good at, people are beautiful. Watch an expert at work, skilled and focused, all-in on their craft. It may be singing, acting, coding, pottery, plumbing, carpentry, drywall, or just about anything that they excel in. They take on a kind of "light" or "shine" they don't have in casual conversation or on the daily commute. 

People aren't made to park their lives repeating one little skill. They're made to progress in mastery and wisdom, but typically only in a few areas. 

Will Rogers said "Everybody is ignorant; just about different things." Outside of their speciality in this complicated world, brilliant experts are as ill-informed as anyone else. 

Look at the absurd debates where a retired or disbarred chiropractor rants on the "risks" of 5G transmissions, the "deadly" vaccination needle, or the "emasculating effects" of soy products well outside their expertise. Over time, they develop a kind of mastery at convincingly arguing nonsense with made-up statistics and "it just seems logical that..." arguments.

Yes, people are a mess. Logical, compliant machines (and now, encouraging and complimentary AIs) may seem more appealing at times.

I definitely have been seduced by working on software, where every effect has a reason and root causes can be corrected. Every problem you understand can be fixed.

Then I find that the inner life of another human individual is more alien and inscrutable to me than a foreign culture or a foreign language. Maybe things make a kind of chemical "sense" that my intuition is not tuned for or prepared for -- I don't want to be a hack, well outside my guardrails and well in front of my skis. 

But I believe in people. I believe the role of machines and even AI must be to augment and inform us, not merely to sway us (as hack conspiracy theorists and many political activists do). If we can use all the new (in evolutionary terms) technologies of information, social media, always-on "news", LLMs, and dehumanising theories of work, we will turn out just fine. 

Sure, it's taking us a while to get our "sea legs", but in a wider historical context of the human race, the internet happened 12 seconds ago, social media maybe 6 seconds ago, and AI is just happening now. 

We are humans. We need just enough stability to develop competence, and just enough change to avoid boredom or withdrawal. We sail a course between the cliffs of anxiety and depression, and as long as we're sailing between them, we sail in joy. 

I believe in people. For all the mess and oddness we represent, we are machines of survival and change. We will work this out.

And, even if we don't, we'll do better at figuring this out than the flawed machines we've created in our own flawed image.