Broken World

[!Note] This piece of writing is a bit broken too.

What if the world is broken?

So, humanity’s come pretty far.

With all that said, here’s a thought.

Often when working on projects, or even just developing a small fragment of a larger project, I realise partway through that perhaps the way I’ve been doing it this whole time isn’t the best. Maybe the reason the code wasn’t working wasn’t cuz of logic errors, but down to being poorly structured. In these cases it could be better to just screw it all and restart from scratch, overhauling and restructuring everything.

Now imagine if all of human life – as in, the history of our existence, from the very start to wherever me might find ourselves in the future – were just one huge problem. What if we’ve been on the wrong track this whole time? What if the world is broken?

And so, if that’s the case, is what we need just a total fresh start?

I look at all the stuff, specifically the human constructs, that exist around us – cities, laws, economics, social hierarchy, even language – and I’m both blown away by how we’ve managed to come up with such intricate and broad systems, and yet immensely questioning of whether it’s all… right. We’ve had so much time, generations upon generations, to build upon and tweak all of these things, but perhaps it just wasn’t right from the start, and there’s a better way that we just haven’t realised.

This can happen with anything. A piece of writing (yeah, the irony), typed – constant tweaking, deleting huge chunks at once, relentless restructuring. That part doesn’t flow quite right… right, let’s just wipe it all, and try a different approach. Or a [~].

It’s that thing, a tunnel vision of sorts, where fixating on one project for too long restricts your thinking, binds you within a box of your own creation, until everything starts to lose focus and perspective.

Like when making a tier list. It’s unbelievably difficult to remain consistently fair and perceptive, since the more you fill in, the more your future choices are influenced by your existing choices, and the meaning of each tier starts to break down. So of course, you’ve got to go back, reconsider and revise your choices – and you end up doing that so much until you’re not even sure if you’ve really placed everything where you actually wanted them.

Now in the case of humanity, we’ve been doing that… for everything… for millenia… granted, it’s not one person binging at their computer for half an hour, but hey, I think it’s certainly possible that the hive mind of humanity might have closed off windows for itself, by relying too much on tradition or taking things for granted.

Imagine if some fundamental axiom of mathematics turned out to be untrue – or rather, flawed – that’d probably be pretty devastating, and would require an entire update to cascade throughout various areas of maths as we rethink how we… think. Now, this has happened, happened plenty, in science, what with all the atomic models and elementary particles. And it’s been fine – we just update our science, and gradually it becomes second nature as everyone accepts it. But doing that with something like society? Surely that’ll be astronomically more difficult. Think of what it would take to

But above all, the one I think about the most, is technological development.

We talk about mathematics, electronics, processing power, space exploration, intelligence (natural and artificial alike) and all, and we rank the development of hypothetical galactic civilisations depending on their ability to harness energy. But here’s the thing – who’s to say these things are universal? This comes down to ‘everything being a human construct’ again. How do we know what applies to us applies to other civilisations; in fact, why should anything be alive or intelligent? These are all concepts we’ve ourselves defined, but there’s no guarantee they’re applicable or even significant to other civilisations.

Apologies for all the questions, but this is what I mean – we don’t, and really we can’t, know exactly what constitutes ‘development’ on a civilisational level, since we only have ourselves as a reference. And so how do, how can we know that we’re on the right track? As with anything, it’s when you don’t know what you don’t know that’s most terrifying.

All of this is only a showerthought. One that lurks ever-present in the corner of my mind, but yeah. It is of course hard to say – if anything, impossible, since we have no way of knowing, or even verifying, what we don’t know. Overthinking again? Most likely. Regardless, hypothesising is fun, and I would say certainly worthwhile. Also, bear in mind I’m quite lacking in life experience, so I imagine my understanding of human existence is fairly limited – apologies for any wild inaccuracies or assumptions I’ve made.

A way I rationalise it is that with the billions upon billions of humans that have ever existed (to our knowledge of course, always remember that), we’d have had enough radical thoughts and perspectives and revolutions and reforms to cover everything significant or important, and ensure that what’s stuck must’ve stuck because it’s good. Evolution and natural selection and all that. But who knows.

Even so, our world is still broken :v