Pay Cuts, Ketamine Addiction, And More
5 sick ideas from January
Hello there,
I hope you enjoyed last week’s piece on what the poor want.
If you’re reading this newsletter from the toilet, I’d recommend you stop right now. Shit-scrolling is bad for you. But I also understand your POV- this newsletter is so addictive you can’t help reading it even if you’re involved in other critical activities.
Shitty introductions aside, Jan was a good month for learning. I read a lot of new stuff, and here are 5 cracking ideas that’ll make you think:
Ketamine: This is a heart-rending suicide note by an AI researcher who, after years of mental torture, decided to end his life. He began experimenting with Ketamine to solve his depression issues but it ultimately did him in. Here are some of his poignant last words: “Make the most of the world. I was fortunate to see quite a lot of it, and it’s an incredible place. Keep tabs on your ambition, be kind even if you are drunk, and don’t take ketamine without a doctor. If you are having difficulties, talk to someone. Alcohol, drugs, mental illness, or just grief. If you are feeling suicidal, please, for your friends and family, try all of the help that I tried, however hard it feels. Even endure the pain of hospital, at least once. Hospital itself is an even greater hell, but telling professionals how you are feeling may be worth the risk. Keep talking and keep going. These things work for a lot of people, and you don’t know they won’t work for you until you have tried. I know the pain makes doing this incredibly hard. But before acting, you owe yourself the external evidence that you won’t get better.”
The End Of Writing: Paul Graham made a thought-provoking prediction: that in 20 years, most people would lose the ability to write. Writing is an extension of thinking, which is why writing well is so hard- you need to have clear thinking to be able to put it down on paper in a structured and appealing manner. But now that we have LLMs to do that for us, we’ll no longer have to hone the writing muscle. Just like there are people today who go to the gym to train their bodies (since our jobs no longer need physical effort) and those who don’t, the world after a few decades will be divided into two camps: those who continue to write to train their minds and those who don’t.
Future generations won’t understand this image (except that it contains a hot woman) Pay Cuts: We’re entering a world where the conventional career paths (where your tenure and salary kept going up in lockstep) won’t exist anymore, and “Guys, we’re in it together” speeches will become extremely common (coming right before a ginormous layoff of course). Thanks to constant tech disruptions, we’ll have to re-skill and pivot many times- more so because extending lifespans (and the devil that is inflation) will ensure you can’t retire after doing just one thing for a few decades. In such a scenario, it’s okay to leave behind old-school models of a constant trajectory upwards, and be completely okay with pay cuts and sideways movements in your career: it’ll allow you to do what you want, the time and space to re-skill, and explore multiple career options when the future is maximally uncertain.
Wealth Limit: I’ve been thinking about an idea for a long time, and was pleased to see an article about it: what if we just create an upper limit for the maximum wealth an individual can accumulate? Say 1 or 10 billion dollars? The exact number doesn’t matter, but what matters is that if something like this is explored, the redistribution can easily improve millions of lives, encourage re-investment, and prevent so much of the collusion between politics and big business that is wrecking the world. But just how this will get passed into law is the big question. The only way is a bottom-up, large-scale international movement- but thanks to big companies’ stifling of unions, anything of this sort seems hard to pull off.
Middle-Class Woes: The Indian middle class is in dire straits. Their incomes have remained flat for over a decade and they’re bearing the brunt of automation-led job losses. To rub salt in their wounds, they also lack the cohesion to make demands as a unified political unit. Politicians, who are increasingly originating from smaller towns, are more keen to address the needs of the poor (which is reflected in the massive money transfer schemes in almost a dozen states) and the rich (who fund their campaigns). Where does this leave the MC? Nowhere.
That’s it for the day, folks. What are some new things you learned? Respond to the email/comment on the web article and let’s start a discussion.
If you want to read some more mind-blowing pieces, try these:
The Future of Sex [An obvious hit]