The Plentiful 20s

Simple Living in A Noisy World

Many share the feeling that the world is getting stranger. There’s a fundamental shift taking place. We haven’t been able to zoom out far enough yet to see it clearly, but we know and can feel it’s happening.

Some will argue we’ve always felt a tectonic shift right around the corner, and this generation’s no different in overestimating future magnitude of change. If I had to make a single prediction for this decade it’s this: those people are wrong and this time’s different.

Already, we’re drowning in noise, complexity, and optionality in a way we never have before. An endless well of information at our fingertips has made cohesive narratives that are both true and useful exceedingly difficult to find. Our trust in big media and social networks decay daily. Progressively complex global systems hold hidden black swan risk. Our markets and technologies are changing so rapidly, young professionals must continually reinvent themselves in order to keep up. Personal lifestyles are now more often on open display than not, and children are being raised to compare their behind-the-scenes reality to other people’s highlight reels. Times are a-changing.

For thousands of years, humans have made sense of the world through religion, community, media, and government. Americans are abandoning religion faster today than ever before. Our president routinely lies without remorse. Local communities are being upended by creative class millennials who are moving to large cities to be among their professional peers. Truth is increasingly difficult to discern in the midst of sophisticated misinformation campaigns driven by black-box machine learning algorithms. Main Street has been replaced by Amazon and Walmart. Sense-making isn’t as easy as turning on the TV anymore. Times are complexing.

Here’s the good news: these are all symptoms of a world rapidly accelerating towards abundance. Two hundred and thirty thousand people come out of abject poverty every day as we get wealthier and war, famine, and disease, the primary causes of human suffering, are well on their way to being totally eradicated. The story of the last 300 years is one of capitalism, science, democracy, and humanitarian values proving themselves as reliable systems for improving the human condition. The data speaks for itself. Things are getting a lot better, really quickly.

It can be hard to look past overwhelmingly negative click-bait and fearmongering headlines and stay focused on this larger picture. While we’re busy debating inconsequential nuances of the tax code - or worse, what Trump tweeted this morning while taking his morning bathroom break - we miss the signals of the tidal shift that will take place as we transition from a scarcity-driven existence to an abundant world.

You can feel it, can’t you? Sheer more-ness. It’s everywhere. Over the last two years, I’ve grown increasingly sensitive to the resulting complexity & noise. I’ve found myself longing for simpler living. Weekly I daydream of throwing everything away and beginning my Waldon Pond lifestyle somewhere in deep Vermont.

But, I love my friends, my work, my city and the wonders of the internet and I’m unwilling to leave these things behind for a cabin in the woods, nor do I think that would be a healthy choice at an individual or societal level.

Still, I know I need less. I’m just not sure what less means…

So here’s a little corner of the internet where we can explore that. In the following months & years, we’ll dive deep into the delicate balance of simple living, without sacrificing the distinct advantages of modernity. We’ll draw from ancient wisdom and cutting edge science to attempt to answer the question that has been keeping me up at night: “how do we reduce noise, complexity, and confusion in the context of abundance?”

So cheers to the new year & the plentiful 20s
And to you, finding signal amidst the noise

Till next week,
Dan