HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY AND BEHAVIOUR
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Mind construction and confirmation bias
Technology and innovation can not solve everything
The purpose of life and the real danger of AI
- Introduction
This chapter is key to understand everything else, the real explanation of human history, and the reason why any hope of sustainable prosperity is doomed to failure: Our natural human psychology.
Whether you live in Pakistan or Canada, whether you are 60 years old or 10 years old, there are universal human behavioural patterns that apply to all of us. We all follow similar ingrained psychological biases, and the best way to see this is with children around the world: They all behave very similarly in some aspects that I will describe here, even though a child from the suburbs of Lima has nothing to do with a child in Manhattan. And that child behaviour continues into our adult lives, making us all adults very similar in terms of behaviour.
Once you understand the human psychology that drives our decisions, you can understand why the economy is the way it is, why we use fossil fuels and drastically change the climate, and why we prefer to take on unsustainable debt and live the good life now, even if it means sacrificing the future.
You can only connect the dots of economics, finance, climate change and energy consumption if you understand some aspects of human psychology. Let's get into it.
- The disease of more
Whatever toy you give a child, they will enjoy it for a while, then get bored and want something else. This is universally true. We always want what we don't have, whatever we have at the moment. Give a child ice cream for the first time and he will love it. Let him try different flavours: give him a scoop of chocolate one day, a scoop of strawberry the next, and a scoop of vanilla the third. If his favourite flavours are chocolate and vanilla, there is a good chance that on the fourth day he will ask for a scoop of vanilla AND a scoop of chocolate. He wants them both.
And so we are as adults: We take everything we have for granted and we always want more, we want bigger, we want better quality. The size of our home, our car, our food, our comfort at home, etc... we always want to improve what we have.
If you drove a small second-hand car when you were a student, you probably loved your car and thought it was a great piece of equipment that did the job perfectly. 10 years on, anything but a brand new SUV would be unsatisfactory. You want something bigger and better. A small, slow, uncomfortable car no longer satisfies you.
Imagine you live in a small town in Africa and your only means of transport is a bicycle: you go to work by bicycle, you visit friends and family by bicycle, you go shopping by bicycle, and so on.
If one day a motorbike is available for sale in your area and you can afford it, you would naturally want to upgrade to a motorbike: you would be able to go further, be faster, have a more effective day. A motorbike might give you access to better jobs that you could not get on a bicycle. So naturally you tend to upgrade from a bicycle to a motorbike, and later to a car, and possibly several cars. No wonder we consume more and more. Voluntary degrowth is completely unrealistic.
The same goes for a job: people tend to move on to a better position, a better paid job. So you get the point: we are a species that accumulates comfort over time, and we always want more and better. Developing countries aspire to become developed and industrialised countries with better standards of living and infrastructure. This is what drives the economy and what drives us to over-consumption. It is why all the developing countries and the relatively poor people of the world will want to improve their standards and quality of life in the coming decades, why it will require more consumption of material resources and more use of fossil fuels, why it will cause more climate change and more debt. People want more, especially those who don't have much at the moment and live relatively modest lifestyles; these people are entitled to a better life. Nothing will stop the bottom 50% of the world's income from growing materially and getting a better life.
- The disease of me
Imagine a child playing with a simple plastic truck toy. Then suddenly this child sees his neighbour's child of the same age playing with a similar truck toy, but the toy is bigger, more colourful, makes noise and has lights. What is the child's natural reaction? He is jealous and wants the neighbour's toy for himself! If you are a teenager and all your classmates are wearing the latest Nike sneakers, you will probably go home and ask your mum to buy you those sneakers so that you can be socially accepted as one of your classmates.
We are mimetic animals, always looking around and copying the things we think are good for us. If someone else has something interesting, we will become jealous and try to get that thing for yourself, whether it is a decorative item, a great job, or some good food.
Even if we have no need or desire for something, just seeing it again and again on other people makes us want that item or lifestyle. I'll give you an example of how our minds slowly change from satisfied to dissatisfied as a result of other people's behaviour. Let's say you have a 10-year-old small car and you're happy with it, your car does the job of getting you from A to B perfectly well, and you've never considered trading it in for a new one. One day a neighbour comes to you and says: "I just bought a new electric SUV, it is awesome, I love it". Your reaction will probably be "Sounds good, maybe one day I'll buy a new and big electric car, but right now I don't need it, I'm happy with my small and old car". A month later, another neighbour comes up to you and says the same thing: "I bought a new EV and it is so cool". You will probably think something like "OK, next time I buy a car I will definitely buy an EV because it is really good. But it is expensive and I already have a car, so maybe I will buy it in the future, but for now I am happy with my current car". A month later, the same story again, another neighbour tells you how excited he is about his brand new electric pick-up SUV. Now you're probably thinking something like "OK, I've got to get rid of my 10-year-old car, I've got to go to the dealership next week and ask about a new EV, I can't stay with my lousy car. I need to buy now on credit, I look bad with my old and small car".
This example shows why we are in an over-consuming society: The natural mimetism of humans pulls the whole society up to consume higher quality products, to get more of things when we could do without, to consume more, which in turn leads to more material use, more fossil fuel consumption and climate change, and more private debt to finance our upgraded lifestyle. The internet and social networking platforms have accelerated this trend enormously. Now you see models making tons of money in Dubai, your old friend having fun in Cancun, your sister just bought a new piece of furniture, your favourite person having dinner in a 3-star restaurant, etc... and you probably think: "I want to experience that myself, I want that life too". We are constantly psychologically influenced to copy the consumer behaviour of others.
- We only believe what we see
Confirmation bias is the most powerful misinterpretation a human mind can make. The idea is simple: If you are predisposed to believe something, you will tend to look for evidence that justifies the truth of your belief, in order to reinforce that belief, and discard evidence that might contradict it.
Let's say you believe that there is too much construction going on in your town, which slows down traffic and closes roads to cars, and you hate those closed roads due to construction. Whenever you see a crane or a construction truck on a road, your brain will tend to believe that this is a constant, that almost every road is closed due to ongoing construction. Your perception of the city is that 1 in 10 streets is closed to traffic, whereas in reality, statistically speaking, only 1 in 200 streets is under construction. So you have a distorted view of reality.
The same applies to more subjective issues such as poverty or inequality. If you are an engineer working with other engineers, you will tend to believe that everyone in the world is scientifically educated, is smart and has a good income. If you are a nurse working in a hospital and are overwhelmed by the number of patients coming in for care, you will tend to see the world as full of sick people suffering from many diseases, that we are a sick and unhealthy society.
People tend to believe that what they see on a regular basis, and especially what they WANT to see, is the real world, even though their lives are not at all representative of the average human life.
And this is where people make false assumptions that turn into false beliefs: When you see an electric vehicle on the streets of your city, you hear how quiet it is, you see no fumes or gas coming out of the exhaust, so you think this is great and that EVs are part of the solution to the "clean" energy business, so you tend to believe that driving EVs would solve carbon emissions, pollution problems and oil consumption. This is a distorted reality, only one side of the story. What you don't see is the manufacturing and supply chain of the EV, the carbon emissions, soil pollution and fresh water needed to produce the battery, all the oil used to mine and transport the raw materials needed for an EV, all the gas and coal burned to process the raw materials into a battery, or even how the electricity is produced to charge your EV. You don't see all that, so you tend not to believe it, perhaps simply because you are misinformed. Because you don't see this other side of the business, your perception of an EV is completely biased and unbalanced. Like a solar panel, it's clean energy, abundant, cheap, so it must be all good? Sure, it looks great, but when you look at the details of how and where it is made, when it generates electricity and how it impacts on the grid, you realise that in our industrialised world there are more cons than pros. We tend to believe what we see and make assumptions based on superficial first impressions. It would be like making a judgement on a person based on first impressions, if you see that person for the first time drunk at 3am... you are probably completely wrong by making incorrect assumptions.
A few years ago, Europe passed a law banning plastic bags in supermarkets and plastic straws in drinks. These examples gave the false impression that we were well on the way to eliminating plastic. But these 2 items represented less than 0.1% of the total plastic produced. It was purely symbolic, to celebrate a moral victory that did nothing to change the equation. It just gave the public a false sense of accomplishment, that technology and industry policies would save us without massive effort or drastic lifestyle changes.
It would be like a 17 year old running the 100-meter dash in 15 seconds, then a year later running it in 14 seconds, and claiming "if I keep working I will run the 100-meter in 5 seconds when I am 27". This is an unrealistic extrapolation and violates every law of physics. My message here is that what seems obvious to someone's eye hides another side of the truth, and the big picture is often different from what we are shown. Do not trust simplistic answers to very complex issues. Net-zero may seem doable, and rising public debt may seem harmless, but the reality is that over time it will crush our societies.
Most of the trends of the mainstream media and politicians of western civilisation are all foolishly biased, telling only one side of the story: The energy transition, solar panels and windmills. The good moral or bad moral of the war in Ukraine. Our current social security and pension systems. Fiat money. Climate change. Nuclear power. All of these are very complex issues that require hours of research to understand the pros and cons. Politicians and the mainstream media talk about it in a superficial way, only talking about one aspect, distorting the reality and the whole picture. People are either too lazy, not interested enough or not focused long enough to dig deep into issues and make a solid judgement on things. The easy way is to make a shallow assumption, find an argument to support it, and believe that your thought is the ultimate truth.
Politicians actually embrace wars and crisis situations like the Covid-19 pandemic, even if the story is semi-fabricated by the media and fear is instilled in the population. Why did we call it a vaccine when we were still contaminated and able to transmit the virus after the vaccination? Why was everyone under lockdown when 95% of Covid-19-infected patients with severe symptoms and dire conditions were actually over 60 and overweight? Why did we have to take 3 injections of a vaccine that was fast-tracked 5 times faster than average for approval, to be allowed to go to work and public places? To me it sounds like panic measures to serve the interests of some big pharmaceutical company and to instil fear so that the politicians in power suddenly have extra control over people's lives.
War and crisis also strengthen and unite the people against an external threat and divert attention from the real problems of the nation and the people, such as social inequalities, ageing population, deindustrialisation, deteriorating infrastructure and division of opinion or heterogeneity of values. Finally, when the war/crisis ends, politicians can claim the regained prosperity as an achievement in order to be re-elected.
People are usually wrong in their assumptions because they are bombarded with only one side of the story and don't take the time to study things in a rational and scientific way. If you hear all the time that fish can fly, you may eventually be conditioned to believe it, or appear foolish for going against the public's perceived trend. The world is run by people who make snap judgments based on truncated psychological biases. What you see is not what you get. Beware of the reality of fairy tales.
- The easy way out
What do these statements have in common?
"Technology will make everything possible in the future". "AI will make people much more productive and solve the labor shortages". "One day I will stop smoking". "I need this weight loss drug because I am overweight". "I have paid taxes all my life, so I am entitled to a pension". "I've been waiting for 30 minutes to be seen, that's crazy long". "We should stop funding new oil projects immediately".
The common thread here is a classic human behaviour: "Let other people or organisations do the hard work. I don't need to change my habits now". We tend to take the easy way out, we want the easiest solution for us personally. We do not have the discipline or long-term approach to sacrifice now for a better long-term future.
Let's take someone who smokes 10 cigarettes a day or is 20kg (30 pounds) overweight. This person definitely knows that their current situation is unhealthy and that they SHOULD change their habits. But this person is too comfortable in their current lifestyle and the change is too hard to make. The change will only happen if the pain of staying the same is much greater than the pain of the difficulty of the change: stop smoking immediately, or start exercising and eating healthy.
If we did what we should do, the world would be a much better place, but our lives would be much less enjoyable. Instead, we do what we want for our own present quality of life.
What we should do is always eat healthy, no processed sugar and no junk food. We should exercise every day. We should not travel by plane for leisure. We should buy local products, even if they are twice as expensive. We should think about mobility in this particular order: walking, cycling, public transport, train, private car. In the real world, we eat burgers and drink soda because it tastes good. We travel to London for a weekend just to have cocktails and meet friends. We buy a nice, overpriced dress even though we already have 20 of them in our wardrobe. We buy brand new instead of second hand. Etc. What we want and what we actually do is very different from what we should do.
Why do people eat junk food and fast food when most of us know it is unhealthy, fattening and full of chemicals? It's because people value the immediate taste pleasure over the long-term consequences of being fat, unhealthy and infertile. People choose quick and easy rewards over discipline and long-term benefits.
We are not robots. Our lack of discipline, long-term vision and big-picture thinking means that our lifestyle is supported by others, by the system and by technology. We spend a lot for the thrill of the moment, we enjoy, we have fun. It's all great, but it drives the 4 major threats (debt, fossil fuel depletion, climate change, demography) and exacerbates our public systems and planetary boundaries.
Humans are not naturally inclined to prevent, anticipate or act proactively on issues and disasters such as climate change, state insolvency, unsustainable levels of social welfare, public debt or falling birth rates. Instead, humans mostly react to the aftermath when they are already facing dire consequences by imposing new regulations and restrictions, and adapting to the new reality.
This phenomenon is evident in businesses, where much more money is spent on issue recovery than on risk management and prevention; in politics, where public money is mostly spent on pensions and healthcare for the over-60s, with little funding for incentives to have children; in our natural ageing process and age-related disabilities, such as the belief that we can postpone parenting until our late 30s; and in our perception of the world, our values, what is right and wrong, and the laws and institutions in general. Humans react to bad consequences rather than preventing bad outcomes from happening in the first place.
People naturally tend to believe the narratives of the majority, even if they are lies, simply because it feels good to be accepted by our peers and to have people around us who agree with what we say and believe.
When someone says, 'We need to transition to clean energy', the majority of people would agree with that, so they feel accepted and good about themselves based on their beliefs. Now, if someone claims that clean energy is not realistic, feasible or economic on a large scale and will make us poorer and cause us to suffer, they will face massive resistance from their peers, a lot of disagreement, disapproval in their community and it will be very difficult for an emotional human being to continue to swim against the tide. Eventually, many people will abandon their quirky, unconventional beliefs, even if they are based on facts and data, in favour of a pleasing narrative from the masses.
For example, if I claim that we should arrest drug dealers, I will receive 95% approval in my community and feel good and supported. But if I claimed that drug dealers were actually good for the local population, there would be a tremendous and constant backlash, and I would be singled out as the odd one, a position that would be very difficult to maintain long term.
That's why people tend to be convinced by reassuring, optimistic narratives, mostly conveyed by the media and politicians, even if those narratives are unrealistic and very unlikely to happen. They are not economically or realistically viable, but simply because they are feel-good narratives that appease people's fears and fits right into the confirmation bias.
- Blame game
Let's play the same game again. What do these statements have in common?
A citizen/worker: "I need my car to get to work. The car industry must produce zero-emission vehicles". "Politicians are corrupted by fossil fuel lobbyists". "We want to keep our jobs, politicians should raise the minimum wage". "The government should stop taxing us at the petrol station. We should tax the millionaires and the super-profits of the big companies instead". "The government has done nothing for the energy transition before 2020". "Aviation must find technical solutions to become climate neutral"
Politicians: "Citizens have lived in a world of abundance and must now limit their energy consumption"
The industry: "We need government subsidies". "We need political support for our project".
The common thread is: Whatever our position in society, it is much easier to blame someone else than to look at ourselves in the mirror. If you're poor, it's because rich investors are abusing you and the system. If you are an entrepreneur, the regulations, taxes and heavy paperwork do not allow you to grow properly. If you are a politician, industry and technology should improve.
For all the world's problems, it's always someone else's fault. We always blame someone else.
Nobody in Europe ever thinks that if the temperature is 48°C right now in India, it's partly because I drive a private car and fly to Greece on holiday.
Nobody ever admits that if the pension system is about to collapse, it's partly because I didn't have two children by the age of 30 because I was too busy with my career, my dating life and the techno parties.
Nobody ever says: if the debt ratio in Europe and the USA is unsustainable for the future generation, it's because I deliberately took unemployment benefits between two jobs, when I could have worked in the first job until the first day of the new one.
It's easier to blame others and believe that the world should change without changing ourselves drastically first. This is another reason why people continue to abuse the social system, continue to take all the benefits, continue to consume while waiting for "clean" answers from others, instead of painfully restricting themselves. I think it is partly due to our overestimation of ourselves. We think we are better than average, we know better, we deserve better. But if everyone thinks that everyone else should change, nothing will change. We continue to burn fossil fuels for our comfort and prosperity. We continue to overspend on credit instead of saving. We continue to consume for immediate pleasure and satisfaction. Nothing will change until Mother Nature decides otherwise.
- The tragedy of the commons
The tragedy of the commons is the theory that individuals tend to exploit common pool resources so that demand exceeds supply and the resource becomes unavailable to the whole. It is a social and political problem in which each individual is incentivised to act in a way that is ultimately harmful to all individuals. The tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals overuse a resource at the expense of society, when a common resource, such as water or land, is rivalrous in consumption, non-excludable, scarce and a common pool resource. A common pool resource is any resource that provides tangible benefits to users, but to which no one has a claim. Typical common pool resources are freshwater bodies, fishing grounds, traffic congestion, oil and gas fields. Let's illustrate the phenomenon with a few examples.
Imagine a kids birthday party with 20 children and a cake. All the curious children rush around the cake to take a small piece and try it. Most children would probably think at first that there is enough for everyone, it is a big cake. But then, if one clever child starts to take a bigger piece for whatever reason, most of the other 19 children will realise that the cake is going fast and soon there may not be enough for them. So each child starts to take a larger piece of the cake, which exaggerates and accelerates the depletion, and the cake is taken away within seconds. Even if some children are not able to finish the big piece they have taken because they were not that hungry, the rush to secure an individual result has led to massive overconsumption.
Imagine 2 villages separated by a common forest. Each village relies heavily on timber harvesting to build houses, ships and run its economy. If one village decides to over-exploit the forest and increase its timber production in order to gain a competitive economic advantage, the other village has no choice but to cut more trees itself, build a strategic reserve inventory, otherwise it may not even have enough for its own consumption and will be at an economic disadvantage. In the end, both villages over-consume the forest and it is depleted faster than what would be required to meet basic needs..
Imagine that a land owner discovers a new oil field under his land. There may be some organisations or companies that do not want to exploit the resource for environmental reasons, and others that want to exploit it to make a profit and redistribute a royalty to the land owner. The reality of all the companies competing for the resources is that if they don't extract it, someone else will, so even if a company has good intentions to leave the oil in the ground, it will be taken out by someone else, so you'd rather be the one getting it and all the benefits. So in the end, even with some good environmental intentions, it will be extracted anyway.
Last example: Several fishermen are fishing in the same area with a small boat and a small net. The nets tend to get bigger to maximise the catch. Then the boats tend to get bigger, due to economies of scale, so that the cost per tonne of fish can be reduced. Every fisherman sees the nets and boats getting bigger and bigger, so he has no choice but to do the same, otherwise he runs a serious risk of not being able to compete and to survive. This ultimately leads to overfishing and boats moving further away from the coast, even if most of the fishermen wish to preserve the pool of fish and would enjoy smaller traditional boats.
The tragedy of the commons is a phenomenon of group psychology that has led to the depletion of resources or encourages over-consumption. Applied to countries competing with each other, it forces each nation to race for more resources, more weapons, more growth, more technology, to be the first to access a new tech like AI, to rise to the top, leading to over-consumption and all the side effects on the planet. This is called the multipolar trap. If we lived in a perfect world of coexistence, alliances and mutual help, without competition and race to the top, there would be no multipolar trap, but unfortunately the world is divided and is becoming more and more conflicted and antagonistic, which reinforces this phenomenon.
The way to prevent this is through regulation, through government control, but who can ensure that everyone obeys the law when the truth can be hidden? Who can trust his competitor and enemies to obey the rules? Another counter is to find alternatives and/or abundant substitutes, but again, for some key limited resources like oil or fresh water, there are no viable substitutes. And so people tend to over-consume, sometimes against their own wishes, just to survive and maintain an existential competitive edge.
- No world governor
Whenever a small group of people, be it a small minority of the climate-conscious community, the minimalist degrowth community, or any "Fridays for the Future" or "Just Stop Oil" community, be it on a village scale or for an entire country, any decision or action taken in favour of protecting our climate and planet or reducing fossil fuels is countered and rendered ineffective by some other communities or countries. Let me give you an example:
If a community of 100 people deliberately decides to retreat, to live in a minimalist way without over-consumption, there will be a counterpart, a millionaire who travels by plane every week and buys fancy cars for his collection.
If Europe decides to ban Russian oil and gas imports, other countries such as Turkey, India or China will be happy to become new customers of russian oil, so the flow of Russian hydrocarbons will hardly be reduced.
If Europe decides to introduce a carbon tax to incentivise low-carbon sources of emissions, what will happen is that all energy-intensive activities, such as industrial production, will tend to be outsourced to countries that do not apply this carbon tax and thus have a greater economic competitive advantage over Europe. This well-intentioned policy will ultimately have the opposite effect, shifting activity from a low-carbon country in Europe to a high-carbon country in China, for example, because market competition will ultimately force them to go to the cheapest place to produce. You would also have to put in place a carbon tax compensation at the tariff borders, very complex to put in place, otherwise the "business" and the effectiveness of such a carbon tax will only be to emit CO2 not in Europe but somewhere else, and that's because not all countries in the world would follow the same exact law of carbon tax. There is probably another country in a different situation that is happy to carry out the activities that Europe is morally opposed to (chemical and material processing and refining). The offshoring of these energy-intensive activities from Europe to China since the 1980s means that any gains in carbon emissions in Europe are in fact dwarfed by the additional fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions in China.
When European or American law enforces a minimum wage and decent working conditions, profit-seeking companies will by definition tend to outsource labour to countries with less restrictive policies, such as East Asia, so that a $100 pair of jeans is actually made by an East Asian worker working 60 hours a week for $1 an hour.
No matter how 'good' a law or policy sounds, energy consumption and labour will always find a way to go where it is more convenient, more economical, more energy dense, just as water will always find its way to the lowest point. To combat fossil fuel consumption and climate change, we would need a World Governor to impose drastic world policies and laws that force everyone in the world to move in the same direction.
Unfortunately, there is no World Governor to impose a world policy, valid in the entire world, and that's another reason why nothing will change for humanity in the face of the 4 major threats. Looking only at the progress of your own community or country is misleading for the reality of the world as a whole. If Germany has reduced its emissions, it's because China has increased its emissions. If the US has increased its purchasing power, it's because more people from the developing world are being abused in terms of working conditions.
There is no world leader, so there will never be a consensus on climate change policy, degrowth, global energy consumption or carbon emissions that moves the needle.
- Mind construction and confirmation bias
There is a natural and self-defence mechanism that applies to human psychology: We construct in our minds an imaginary story or assumptions that we force ourselves to believe to be true in order to reduce the fear and anxiety that it would cause us to face the raw reality. Especially a fatality, a negative outcome that is inevitable, is pushed out of our brains with an artificial story of our own mind construction, so that we continue to move forward and continue to believe in a better future for ourselves.
An asteroid could hit the Earth and destroy half of humanity, so rationally we should prepare a survival cellar and fear every day that there might be no tomorrow. But it gives us more positive attitude, courage and less anxiety to simply ignore the threat, so we deliberately convince ourselves that it will not happen in the next 100 years, that the asteroid will hit the Pacific Ocean and not Paris, that early detection and current technology could handle the situation, etc... whatever feel good story you prefer to believe, you will believe it.
The same goes for the possibility of an imminent nuclear war, World War 3, oil depletion, public deficit, climate change, the ageing population, the energy "transition" or any other major global threat. We try to convince ourselves with some imaginary construct that terrible outcomes will not happen or will be managed somehow by the leaders of this world without impact on our lives. That's why you hear things like "technology will find a solution to every problem", "energy transition will get us away from fossil fuels", "my children will have a better life than mine", etc....
We want to believe. We need to believe to protect ourselves, our mojo, to reduce our stress levels.
That's why the propaganda about energy transition and how solar, wind and batteries will take us away from fossil fuels without any major change in our lifestyle is a very compelling proposition, a perfect feed for this self-defence mind construct. Why we are sold that not having kids is great to fullfill his/her life with no impact on society. Any news in the media that solar and wind are on the way triggers this mind construct and adds to the confirmation bias that we want to hear. Only the information that goes in the direction we want to believe is filtered into our brain. Any potential obstacle or contradiction to our mind construct is filtered out and either ignored or considered false. This is confirmation bias.
As a result, people cannot tolerate the truth that we are facing the collapse of civilisation, our way of life will be drastically reduced and civil wars will be everywhere. You have to be a madman like me to really believe in this, and still have the strength to go on living, when I am so sure of this terrible near future? It is human nature to protect one's mental well-being by blocking any idea of apocalypse.
That's why the population is buying into this false narrative without questioning, without rationalising. << Renewable energy will make fossil fuels obsolete by 2050. We'll have a 100% circular economy, so we won't need mining at all. Temperatures will stabilise and fresh water will always be available from rain. There will be carbon capture to offset any remaining emissions. Hydrogen is the new fuel. There will be fewer people on the planet, which is a good thing, and the missing labour will simply be replaced by robots and AI, increasing our productivity. EVs are net-zero emissions. >> All these narratives are feel-good stories sold by today's leaders and the capitalist environment to appease people and keep us from rebelling, keep consuming and keep the population under control. All these stories are false or unrealistic. No one wants to hear the hard reality. People want to believe in positive outcomes. They want the blue pill, the bubble of comfort, they don't want the red pill, the cold shower of reality.
- Optimistc bias by nature
Humans are by nature optimistic, very confident in their own abilities and hopeful about the future. If you ask 100 people "Are you above average?" in any area, you will get 60% to 80% yes, whereas the reality is by definition 50%. We usually overestimate ourselves. This may be an evolutionary survival trait, or it may be due to the fact that since the 1950s our standards of living, comfort and purchasing power have continued to rise, while the world has been relatively free of war.
As a result, if you ask the majority of people, they tend to believe that we will be fine for centuries to come. As a result, if you ask the majority of people, they tend to believe that we will be fine for centuries to come. For the last 70 years each generation has had a better standard of living and no world wars, so it is assumed that the same trend will continue for the next 3 generations.
"AI will increase our productivity, we will only work for fun and spend most of our time on leisure. Solar panels, windmills and batteries will make up 100% of our energy mix, we will be net zero by 2050. My children will earn more than me and have better jobs. Politicians will find a way to keep the health and pension systems going. Nuclear fusion will one day give us unlimited energy. There will be robots to do all the work on demand. New technology will open up new reserves of oil and gas. We have improved our lifestyles for 70 years, why won't it improve for the next 70? We've had a growing bed for 30 years, why can't it last another 50? "
This is the mindset of the majority, who are more concerned with their dating life, their new shopping spree, the next football match, booking their next all-inclusive holiday or which electric SUV to buy.
This optimistic view of the world has taken away the sense of urgency and made people believe that technology, progress, innovation and other people will take care of the situation. It's like an alibi. People assume: "Why should I have three children and struggle for 20 years to have children who will take care of me when I retire? There is public health care and public pensions, so the social system will always take care of me.". That's a very optimistic assumption, extremely unrealistic actually. Because it was fine in the past, it will be fine in the future? No, nothing lasts forever. And so no one acts, no one changes, no one makes the drastic choice of sufficiency and minimalist living that is needed to mitigate the collapse, noone makes children for its own future security, no one works harder to save more money.
People want to believe in a better world for themselves and the planet. Perhaps we want to believe because it puts our minds in a safe place and it is a basic psychological need to feel safe, and so we dismiss any potential threat that the world of tomorrow might be unsafe as a psychological mechanism to protect ourselves.
We do small acts and gestures that have no significant impact on the big picture, just to clear our conscience, to feel good about ourselves and to be convinced that the world is a much better place because of our small actions: Buying 2 solar panels and putting them on the balcony, paying 10 EUR extra for a flight ticket to offset CO2 emissions by planting trees, drinking water from the tap instead of buying plastic bottles, these kinds of actions relieve the pressure to do much more and give a false sense of acting in the right direction. We tend to think that we have done our bit for the planet and a sustainable future, when in fact we have only done 5% of what is needed. We would actually need to take drastic measures and stop all fun life, all entertainment and live very minimalist like a poor person to make a difference.
Whenever I bring up the subject of the coming apocalyptic collapse of our society, people tend to look at me as a depressive person, a doomer, who should have fun and stop going on the internet and enjoy the pleasures of life. It seems that people are either too afraid to face reality or would rather continue to live in their imaginary cosy bubble. Yes, the blue pill is easier to swallow than the truth of the red pill. The longer you get used to this unsustainable world, the harder the fall will be.
- Technology and innovation can not solve everything
The belief that technology and engineering can fix our world frees our minds from the burden of realising that things are getting worse without a viable solution. It's like a wild card whenever we don't see a clear solution.
A common problem with technology and human ingenuity is that people look at one part of the system and try to change and optimise it without considering the side effects on the other parts of the system.
Humans tend to believe that any problem can be solved, and we measure the effectiveness of the solution only in the context of the original problem, rather than examining all the unintended consequences.
This applies to social media, AI, electric vehicles, low-carbon solutions, women's empowerment, climate policy, etc... basically any innovation or response to a global societal problem.
Optimising oneself at the expense of others, optimising the human standard of living at the expense of other species and ecosystems, optimising one metric at the expense of other metrics, optimising the price of a product at the expense of environmental impact, etc... it seems that the full range of implications for a given issue is too broad, too complex for our decision-making process, so we simplify by dividing issues into silos and focusing on one silo. Many innovations have had disastrous unintended consequences on another part of the system.
Some examples:
- Asbest was a good material for insulation, but it turned out to cause cancer.
- Social media's original purpose was to connect people, to keep geographically distant people in touch, which is a good thing, but it turns out that the dopamine from getting "likes" and the kicks we get from short videos has a massive negative impact on our concentration, stress levels and anxiety.
- EVs reduce CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a vehicle compared to ICE cars, but it increases material extraction, fresh water consumption and environmental pollution to manufacture the EVs compared to ICE vehicles.
- AI will increase productivity and help address labour shortages, but it will consume huge amounts of electricity and fresh water, which will increase pressure on natural resources and minerals.
- Not having children gives you personally the best life and the most free time as an adult, but because almost everyone is doing it, we now have a bunch of old people, a shrinking workforce and not enough people to care for the elderly and pay taxes for the pension and health system, so the enjoyment of our childless lives from 30 to 60 comes at the expense of a soon coming drop in living standards for retired people.
Systems will only become more complex over time, supply chains and dependencies will become more global and interdependent, and every simple item will depend on many suppliers around the world, making our daily lives that we take for granted very vulnerable to geopolitical and physical disruptions.
New technologies, because they are deployed within the framework of capitalism, the growth paradigm and the quest for more goods and services for all, will always exacerbate the underlying problems of environmental impact, resource consumption, low fertility and new debt.
Technology in itself is an aggravating and exacerbating cause, not a solution, as many tend to believe.
- The purpose of life and the real danger of AI
For the last 150 years we've had fossil fuels doing the physical mechanical tasks for us so we don't have to sweat too much while getting a maximum of cheap goods and services. AI will do the digital administrative tasks for us so we don't have to do the boring or repetitive intellectual tasks. It is a logical and natural evolution, a complement to the current use of fossil fuels, because AI uses a lot of energy to run the data centres and a lot of material to build them in the first place. It makes perfect sense as an evolution: Machines have done the mechanical work for us for over a century, and now AI will do the intellectual work for us.
In this coming world of physical ultra-assistance from machines and robots, and the coming intellectual and administrative ultra-assistance from AI bots, how will humans overcome obstacles and difficulties? if our children grow up in physical and intellectual ease, what will be their drive, their motivation, their source of courage, their ability to concentrate and work hard, their sense of life fulfilment?
Gen Alpha (born after 2010) will be the generation that goes through puberty with the IA well deployed... their stress and workload ability and patience tolerance will be even worse than GenZ in their ability to focus, not to be discouraged, and willingness to work long and hard to overcome obstacles and difficulties.
Gen Z (born 1995-2010), a population heavily influenced by social media and troubled by mental health issues due to the discrepancy of having a virtual profile that does not match the one they wish to project, and with high morals, expectations and demands, is already inadequate to deal with the coming crisis of collapsing living standards.
Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha will also experience a laziness of effort and a general loss of purpose and life fulfilment as AI takes over all intellectual effort, decision making and the sense of reward for hard work. If everyone believes you can press a button and get any kind of service instantly, who will work behind the scenes to make it happen? Who will work to innovate through struggle and valuable learning if everything is taken for granted, fast and cheap?
People under 30 seem less able and mentally prepared to deal with a gradual loss of living standards that we will face in the coming decades, compared to our older generations who lived through two world wars and know how to keep their mouths shut, be content and happy with very little, and feel honoured to work hard to earn a living. The younger generation is unfortunately the less prepared to deal with the coming collapse of our society.
- Conclusions
After 70 years of continuous improvement in the living conditions of our industrialied world, we are coming to a crossroads. The discovery and consumption of fossil fuels has been a blessing, but also a disguised curse. We are now addicted, dependent, weak and energy-blind.
The Roman Empire collapsed suddenly after centuries of prosperity, partly because it no longer had forests and wood in its vicinity to fuel its civilisation, partly because its corrupt government was overspending and unable to operate on a stable budget, and partly because its people had lost some traditional values compared to other stronger civilisations nearby.
Human psychology will not change any time soon. We will only change when forced to by external factors, but we won't change by choice. Only a real slap in the face, an economical collapse of civilisation, or a planetary unviable place to live, will make us change, because there will be no alternatives. It is inevitable.
Human psychology and behaviour is the explanation for all the threats and problems of the world and our broken society.
The nature of human psychology and behaviour has created the world we live in today. Everything has happened for a reason because it reflects how people want to live: Buy on credit, create more public debt to avoid massive loss of social welfare, have fewer or no children to enjoy our personal lives, reach the top 3% of the richest people and vacuum all the money for yourself, creating more inequalities, consume more fossil fuels to have more machines working for our convenience and abundance of goods and services, pollute more elsewhere to get nice shiny complex products in our hands, growth at all costs because we always want more and want what other people have. The world is the way it is because people have made it that way for their own convenience. We have abandoned the future and the unseen places of the world for a better present, here and now.
The future is now catching up.
############################
If you enjoyed this content, please do me a favour: Spread the word and tell people around you about my online book. Thank you for sharing!
.svg.png){kind=icon}
- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025
Comments
Post a Comment