The name of my podcast is The Great Simplification. And I call it that for three reasons. The first reason is what I just described. We are about to transition from the greatest concentration of energy and resources ever amassed on this planet by a species into something different because we cannot continue to grow. So, it’s a simplifying of human interactions and commerce.
The second reason I call it that is because, for many people, by simplifying from this supernormal stimulus, this smorgasbord of technology and gadgets and deliverable items and fancy food at Whole Foods and other places from around the world, we probably could be happier and healthier. Because we have, as a culture, effectively turned hundreds of billions of barrels of fossil carbon into microliters of dopamine in our brains. And in doing so, we’ve become addicted to the unexpected reward of “What’s going to be my excitement today? What show am I going to watch? What am I going to order? What sort of cool technology can I play with?” We’ve lost sight of the fact that the best things in life actually are free or close to free once basic needs are met.
For many people, simplifying their lives—having less material consumption and more time in nature, more time with normal human timescale activities, and more time in social networks—could actually be a good thing.
The third reason I called my podcast The Great Simplification is because we live in a really complex and nuanced system, the human ecosystem, and I’m trying to help simplify all the complexity that is in geopolitics and energy and anthropology and neuroscience and climate change into bite-sized, mind-sized explanations that make sense.
