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glennonymous • yesterday at 6:18 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I'm a self-employed knowledge worker who recently moved from Silicon Valley to a new town far away. I'm an introvert, so I already had a pretty small group of friends. Shortly after I moved here, I found out about a cribbage meetup a short distance from my house. These are people with whom I have very little in common. They don't like the same movies as I do, and there's certainly not anyone in this group with whom I'm going to be able to have deep discussions about Pale Fire or Infinite Jest. Neither do we talk very much about our accomplishments. Yet we we do find plenty to talk about. We joke around and laugh and have a great time. And I'm pretty sure computers got better at cribbage than humans a long time ago.

I'm always deeply skeptical of the idea that life's meaning is determined by the struggle for survival, and therefore a post-scarcity world will inevitably be an ennui-saturated, meaningless dystopia. It may be hard to imagine what a good life will look like in such a world, but that's a limit of imagination, not an inherent limitation on the possibilities of life in a post-scarcity world.


Replies

lazide • yesterday at 6:37 PM

Why do you think it would be a post-scarcity world? Normally, those in power turn the screws to force others into scarcity to ‘induce’ compliance.