Serious narratives, serious cultures

Man's maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

From the scale from 0 to 10, how seriously do you think you treat your life? Similarly, is our culture as serious as it should be? Just note it down mentally and continue reading.

You don't need to be interested in politics or history to feel that we live in a frivolous, carefree culture.
There are many examples, just to name a few:

• impasse at political level
  • despite all the COVID-related financial stimulus in trillions of $, what are we building?
• unaffordable housing and everything that stems from this (rent-seeking, people having less children than they would like to)
• lack of technological progress and resultant zero-sum game
  • flatlined GDP in the Western European countries in the past 15 years
• switching off nuclear reactors in a middle of energy shortage
• a lot of TikTok
• general social stagnation, lack of social experimentation ergo no new social technology

But also on the personal level - are most of the people forming relationships just because they don't feel uncomfortable with being alone? Are we ourselves oases of meaning or quite the opposite, oases of nothingness?

My thesis is very simple - we deceive ourselves a lot and we don't treat others’ lives seriously.
For instance, how many people lived suboptimally their entire lives despite all the societal and technological solutions that could have been implemented? To me this culture doesn't get a passing grade - life shouldn't be just about holding onto life and slow decadence. Why do we go into introspection mode instead of fight mode?

Just for the sake of biased comparison, let's compare the output of contemporary culture to the one of Italian Renaissance.

To me, this art looks deeply unserious, like a last man culture, devoid of any meaning

Compare this banana to the Medici Chapel in Florence and ponder for a second of what we could have built:

How did we get there though? I have no answer - history is overdetermined and in my opinion we shouldn't waste too much time on this.

The question I want to ask again and again is about the present and the future as opposed to the past:

• Do we really care about performing suboptimally compared to what we are capable of?
• Do we treat our defeats in life with enough gravitas, whether it is at an individual level or collectively?

The answer is a clear no: we are not as determined as we should be - we downplay our own agency, the power to execute and improve ourselves and the world around us.

In my mind the antidote starts with a narrative: serious cultures stem from serious narratives and currently we don't have any. In the Age of Theory, we prefer to find out about life from books, blogs, societal media - and I am not gonna lie, I am dealing with this myself. That's a sign of weakness - there is a lot of wisdom out there that can't be even written down, especially at the embodied level.

I can imagine what the memetic primitives of a culture that takes things seriously are:

• setting a high bar, having a high standard to live up to
  • imagining good future that is significantly better than the present one and marching towards it
  • sense of beauty, aesthetics in all areas of life: clothing, architecture, use of language...
• focus on growth
  • taking the necessary steps to live up to this high bar - essentialy what we now call “bravado” or “risk-taking”
• speed of action
  • not making people wait their entire lives for reforms to occur: opposite of that is debating for years, (e.g. NIMBY) meanwhile people live and die in suboptimal environments
• error correction
  • making social experiments, taking action to find out the lessons
• focus on effectiveness, having metrics

Basically, serious cultures take control theory seriously, once they developed a high standard they hold themselves to.
I also don't want to give the impression here that the goal is to have a serious society - no, the goal is effectiveness and serious culture to me is a set of memes that makes that happen.
We don't want strong governments and institutions - we want effective governments and institutions, so being strong is just a part of the equation.

Serious narratives are about greatness, growth, glory – more victories over hostile Nature, more beauty, more energy, more discoveries, more wisdom, more uplifting, more wellbeing, etc. etc…
I distinguish between two inner narratives:

• holding onto life narrative: vegetative state, end of history, this is the best we can do
• conquest narrative: every day looks different due to action, reality is the best simulation attitude

To a first approximation, a serious conquest civilizational narrative would be:

We are going to conquer the Universe and find out what Universe is about. If we experience stagnation, it means we are doing something wrong and it must be overcome.

Similarly, on the personal level, I imagine a 10/10 serious narrative to be like:

My plan to conquer the world will be a thrilling and chaotic journey. If it doesn't feel like a roller coaster ride, I must be doing something wrong.

Our civilization narrative is surely not at 10/10, but what about your personal one?

Ultimately, I compiled a table to distinguish serious cultures from unserious ones: