#327: Sometimes, Boring Is Good: Finding Meaning in Moderation

Everybody always expects something edgy, something new, something interesting, something not boring. Well, you know what? Sometimes boring is good.

If you like to be bored with political commentary, please like, subscribe, put a comment down there. Thank you.

It’s interesting trying to build a YouTube channel. I see what gets traction. I see what succeeds. You have to be very narrow sometimes to succeed. I don’t want to do this. I like a certain diversity of topics.

You see me having some threads emerge right now. I talk frequently about Ukraine and Russia, but also sometimes about AI and other political issues. That’s not all I want to do here. And you’ve seen me try other things. You’ll also find some music, some poetry, but I also—listening to what experts recommend—established a separate poetry channel and a separate music channel. So if you’re more into that, you can go there so that I can train the algorithm on what’s happening here.

This channel and the blog accompanying it or preceding it actually are called is called Erratic Attempts because that’s what life is. Our life is an erratic attempt to find meaning, to find success, to find love, to find a way to make life worth something.

I mean, we are born, we live, we die, eventually everything around us dies, the universe dies, and you could say it’s all meaningless. The conclusion I have found for myself for that, of course, after reading all kinds of philosophical and theological texts, is that the meaning then lies within how we approach the world, how we or in some ways whatever it is that our soul is, whatever we understand as how that learned throughout life. How it grows, how we grow, and how we have our growth connected to those around us.

It is not important necessarily that in the end we die. That in many ways gives us meaning. It’s our rather short lifespan, although it could be shorter, has been shorter, that our short lifespan actually helps us create meaning because we are still tied more the older we get to us being young. It’s not that many years.

I’m approaching 50, which sounds like a big number. I don’t feel it. And it’s one of the perplexities that most people talk about. The strange thing about getting older is you still feel like, didn’t I just arrive? Am I just not still a kid somehow?

And so how we learn, what we learn throughout life is always confronted with how we grew up, how we became who we are now. And looking towards the end, what we will become by then, what do we leave behind?

Biological children. No, it’s always a combination of gene pools, though. Unless you clone yourself, your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on, generations beyond will have dissipated into the wider genetic landscape of humanity, which is actually a beautiful thought.

Yes, somehow you can procreate your family, but in the long run that’s not it either. You can affect people around you. Your effects may diminish over time and after a while people will have forgotten you unless you really are someone really special. But even then, how long will that last?

It’s always frightening and helpful to see some of those science fiction visions like Foundation or Dune and how Earth is completely forgotten in those visions. How it’s—that’s how it may become. We don’t know anything about pre-literate history of humanity. Humanity’s history is much longer than what is written about it. There may have been exceptional human beings, exceptional states, exceptional works of art that we don’t know.

But one thing I think that is certain is what is exceptional is and can only be how we treat each other, how we interact with each other, how we make life right here, right now better. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? It sounds so easy. It sounds so boring even to make life better. But it is also substantial in some ways I would say.

Some YouTube channels or social media channels grow because people say outrageous things. They deliberately frame issues in a very one-sided way. They let the algorithm guide them to become one-sided, to become outrageous.

I hope that won’t happen to me. I certainly hope I will stay boring in the sense that I want to commit to always give you as much as possible. And it depends on the issue. A multi-sided aspect, a multi-sided perspective, one that is as honest as it can be.

Sometimes it’s difficult. I have difficulties talking about Ukraine and Russia without taking sides for Ukraine because Ukraine is the victim of aggression. There are many issues like that where we have difficulty. But even there, if you watch my Ukraine content, I do shy away of thinking all Russians are evil. I do shy away from thinking Russia is irredeemable. No people are, no country is.

I now boringly have to play the German card. There’s one country in recent history, still recent comparatively, that has really messed up. It has been Germany, two world wars, and executed to utmost brutality and inhumanity. I didn’t do it, but I have grown up in the memory of it, in the institutional and cultural memory of it.

Germans today are not the same Germans as they were back then. The German state is not what it was back then. And that gives me hope also for Russia. And I have to live with this hope. I’d have to see this also in a hopeful manner because all our frustrations to the contrary, the lessons we draw from history can be just as depressing as hopeful.

Depressing if you believe that people somehow magically evolve. We have discovered mechanisms through which we mostly have ended biological evolution for humans. Thank goodness, because biologic evolution means many people have to die for improvements to genetically through survival to come through. So, it’s not a bad thing that most humans get to live and many more than ever before.

If you look at the percentage of people dying from wars nowadays, it’s much fewer than in early humanity. Doesn’t mean that there’s no brutality. Doesn’t mean that there’s no suffering, but it means there can be some hope that we may not be evolving, but our cultures maybe, our institutions, maybe those things that keep us in check.

Cautiously optimistic about the future sounds boring, but maybe that’s a good thing.

Many people talk about an AI apocalypse. Yeah, I think AI is going to have a major effect. I have talked about AI. You can look at those videos. But humans are humans and they will figure out how to correct any of those extremes. If the machines get too powerful, well, humans know how to rage against the machine. If people don’t have work and meaning anymore, they’ll do something about that. That’s been the pattern of human beings in the past. We’ll figure out a way.

There will be some humans that reject that technology, some that use it in moderation, and some that probably want to merge with a machine. Maybe we’ll see three or more tribes like that. Oh well, that certainly is better than an AI apocalypse.

Climate change is real. But we’ll figure that out too. Sadly, maybe a little bit too late and we may have to live through some more drastic consequences. But we have to be hopeful that our technology and also the way we live can be adopted sensibly to fight that too. When it comes to survival, humans have that ability. I have to believe this. I want to believe this. And I want to be boring on that issue, too. Yeah, it’s an issue, but we’ll figure it out.

Politically, we always say we are divided. Well, you know, when has that never ever never been the case? It may seems more drastic now because we have social media. We have even our regular media much more polarized than ever before. That too shall pass because for every extremist there are many more moderates that say we don’t want extremism. We want politics to solve concrete problems of humanity no matter what the ideology is.

Sounds boring. Boring is good.

Yeah, I leave it at that. Hopefully, the kind of boring you’ll get from me is one that elevates or helps you elevate your thinking, that helps me elevate mine throughout the process of this. This is just as much a conversation with you as an exhortation towards me to become better at this. And so hopefully we’ll elevate each other and we’ll learn together and our attempts become a little bit less erratic and more purposeful over time.