Does the world feel "normal" to you?

When Edward Snowden spoke at Bitcoin2024 last week, he asked a question that lodged like a tumor in my brain. To paraphrase:

“Does the world and the U.S. election feel normal to you?”

When he was a kid, he said, presidents were people you looked up, people you admired and aspired to be like.

Do these candidates fit the bill? Do they represent the best of us? If so, wtf happened to us?

Something’s off, he argues, and he points to the algos that subtly manipulate us on X, TikTok, Insta, FB and beyond.

For all their benefits, they’ve ultimately pitted us against one another in a competition for likes. They’ve isolated us and turned us into dopamine addicts who can’t see beyond the next 5 minutes of outrage and shock.

I could talk for hours about this broken world because I see signs of it everywhere. We speak of financial nihilism in the crypto industry. But that’s merely a symptom of a broader, more insidious nihilism that pervades nearly everything.

The inequality gap widens. Misinformation reigns, and we stand on the very brink of World War. 

Meanwhile, technological revolutions beget more technological revolutions across virtually every field (AI, genetics, finance via crypto, pharma, robotics, etc.).

The Great Acceleration has arrived.

We call these sorts of changes “revolutions” because they are. They upset the world’s current order. They rob power from one entity and bequeath it upon another. Some of us are ground like meat beneath the wheels. Others rise to perch on thrones.

It’s destabilizing (both for our finances and our psychologies). And we can’t help but begin to question our places in the world.

The questioning only grows louder in the face of AI.

I can feel it myself.

If we achieve AGI, what’s my purpose? Will I have a job? What will it mean to be human? Is the next rung of evolution leaving these biological bodies behind?

AI lies at the heart of it all. And some have taken to calling these fears and existential questions “AI anxiety.”

I like calling it “desynchronization.”

We’re out of sync with the world. Technological change is forcing us to break with the past. And that means we literally have to rewrite/reconceive our own places in the world.

That’s especially difficult for the world’s increasingly secular population.

Part of the reason humanity has relied upon church/religion for millennia is that it forces you to take at least one week a day to look inward, to ask yourself hard questions, to attach your feet to the ground, to be here now, to stare into the unblinking octopus eye at the very center of the grand mystery that is life.

In other words, we’ve ditched religion, but we haven’t replaced it with anything that matters.

Sure, you can believe in evolution. You can say everything’s a meaningless cosmic accident, but humans require a value structure nonetheless. We require goals and beliefs. We require something that unites us with other humans.

I’m still trying to find my way, but one thing that’s helped is building my own “religious/spiritual book.” Whenever I read something profound, something that would be helpful to remember, I take a screenshot that lands in the screenshot album on my phone. Now, I flip through that album of collected wisdom regularly.

I ditch the church, but I don’t ditch the spiritual practice… the ongoing pursuit of wisdom, grounding, meaning and purpose.

I strive to erect inside myself a foundation of spiritual backbone… a personal philosophy that gives me strength to stand in the face of all of life’s wonder, mystery and tragedy. 

It’s time for you to build your own framework.

Maybe you’ll do what I do and mash up Buddhism, Christianity, stoicism and techno-futurism. Or maybe you’ll go “off-the-grid Amish.”

More likely, your answer’s entirely different.

The point is, no one is going to hand you an answer to society’s growing nihilism (or as I like to think of it: society’s lack of philosophical frameworks).

The answer must come from within. But it can’t be found if you’re not willing to spend some time every day/week/month confronting the mystery.

You don’t need a new car, new job, plastic surgery or more money… you first need a philosophy.

You need a reason for being here.

You need to believe some things are worth fighting for… and some are beneath you.

You need to know precisely what it is that makes you you.

If you don’t, others will determine it for you.

✊

Watch Edward Snowden’s speech now. It’s unsettling and powerful, and it helped convince me that his voice is among the most important voices of our generation. Pushed to the margins of society, he can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves.