Drake, in all of his centuries-old wisdom, promised us “more life,” but when you think of the future, doesn’t it sometimes feel like we’re heading toward a world of Wall-E-levels of numbness? Paradoxically, and perhaps contrary to popular belief, we’ve achieved remarkable progress with sustaining human life, but we’ve seemingly become much worse at living it. It’s like we've perfected the machinery essential only to our survival and not our experience and connection.

In all of human history, it’s never been easier to birth and sustain human life. We’re less violent than ever; child mortality has never been lower; on average, humans have never lived longer; and maternal mortality has never been lower, on average.

We've made such huge strides in safety that the highest rates of interpersonal aggression among age groups now come from toddlers.

Experiencing humanity seems to be much harder for a lot of people these days. Moreover, despite all of our progress with safety and lifespan, nobody seems to want kids.

Yes, it’s true - across countries, as people move from the farms to the cities in search of more money and a better quality of life, kids transition from economic assets to financial burdens. Raising kids may be harder, just in a different way. On the farm, a five-year-old could feed chickens and gather eggs, while in a city, that same child would require daycare and education.

In terms of risk-taking, older generations used to live shorter lives, so maybe that's why they took more risks, like experimenting more with drugs, alcohol, and adventure, in an effort to fill their fewer years with more life (at least, by their definitions).

Humans have always developed tools as a way to outsource and scale strenuous functions - mobility, hunting, farming, building.

Now, with AI, complex creation is easier than ever to outsource, but as a result, this means it’s never been easier to just perform humanity. When synthetic content floods every platform, what’s really human ends up murkier, harder to distinguish. Now you have to exaggerate your human-ness to prove your humanity, leading to this sensation of performative humanity: human-ness now has to be performed more theatrically because the baseline (ads with friendly fonts and a conversational tone) doesn’t convince anyone of your human-ness. Humanity is so easily replicable in the digital world that we don’t even know if video evidence is sufficient anymore, like proving whether or not Epstein killed himself!!

It’s never been easier to find and communicate with others - your friends, loved ones, and even complete strangers, but our digital communication has never felt less meaningful. Back in the day, the letter you sent home from the warfront signified everything to your family: proof of life, connection across vast distance, and words, ink, and paper carefully assembled because of scarcity. Now, if you were fighting, like in Ukraine, your mom gets your text notification - of course, this probably elicits the same sigh of relief, but oddly enough, it’d probably feel less substantial, less human…

No shade to him, but Bryan Johnson seems to embody this paradox: he’s a much healthier-than-average life but apparently less-lived lived, inhabiting a perfectly optimized body that may be starving of life’s excitement and capriciousness, at least by “traditional” standards.

One of our most valuable assets, dopamine, has managed to be perfectly extracted by Matrix-like machine gods (phones). Derek Thompson’s “Anti-Social Century” and “Monks in the Casino” capture the essence of this: we've built incredible systems for sustaining humanity and material abundance but now struggle to create genuine human connection and invest sustained effort into anything difficult.

“Technology changes, but humanity stays the same.” - Daniel H. Wilson

People have always been attracted to daredevil stunts and performances, but maybe this explains the enduring appeal of demigod feats of physical exertion in a more digital world: Tom Cruise’s stunts in the latest Mission Impossible movie, Alex Honnold’s freesoloing, the David Goggins hard-things movement, and Spartan races. We’ve outsourced creation to AI, dopamine to phones, and connection to platforms, but we still haven’t managed to outsource, or “prompt”, physical competence. Beyond simply entertainment, physical stunts are proof that something, in our virtual sea of content, can't be faked, generated, or automated. This kind of physical mastery remains defiantly, undeniably real to us.

As life becomes more abstract and digital, our craving for the concrete, like physical feats, spikes. Although our attempts are by-and-large drowned out by our digital world, there are even several attempts to revive analog experiences, or what we might as well call "humanity premiums." People hunt for vinyl records, pull out their Polaroid cameras, write thank-you letters, open board game cafés, and increasingly ban phones in schools. “Touch grass" became internet advice for a reason, a cheeky reminder to engage with physical reality.

Despite all of our attempts at analog revival in an age of peak lifespan, the biggest threat to our humanity may not even be digital abstraction and outsourcing as we move forward, but rather our most primitive human impulses dragging us backward into the Stone Age.

The things that differentiate modern society from our authoritarian ancestors—civic duty, democratic institutions, rule of law, property rights, free speech—are increasingly under pressure from the same tribal, zero-sum thinking that dominated us for millennia. Even since 2020, we've shifted from virtue-signaling to vice-signaling: attempts to gain status and favor through public, online displays of aggression, cruelty, and dominance, spurned on by the man occupying the most powerful position in the world.

When Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale calls for the return of "public hangings," when political figures celebrate cruelty as strength, when dunking on your opponents becomes more important than governing, we’re egging on politics’ drift toward spectacle. This so-called brutal spectacle justice aesthetic appeals to our worst, most tribal impulses, the same exact ones that filled Roman Coliseums and medieval execution squares. Our societies abandoned these practices because we learned they simply sanitized and normalized violence, while teaching us nothing and deterring very few. Yet here we are again, flirting with regression in the guise of "strength."

We seem to be oscillating between two competing failures: outsourcing our humanity to machines and algorithms on one hand, and reverting to our most primal, violent instincts on the other. Neither path leads anywhere good.

Our humanity is simultaneously easier to preserve and harder to experience and feel meaningful, so whatever “being human” means seems to be getting harder to define.

A byproduct of our increasing digital interconnectedness also seems to be leading to a Great Homogenization, as our tools optimize every interaction, broadcast every moment, and communicate every experience, all in the same way.

"Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!" Dostoevsky wrote. We adapt to both our technological conveniences and our dehumanizing systems with equal ease.

Yet we can't simply return to the past of medieval life expectancy and infant mortality - nobody wants that, and that shouldn’t be acceptable. But we also can't keep sleepwalking through an existence where we're extras in our own lives, watching our humanity happen at arm's length through screens, algorithms, and AI.

I don’t think this has to be the price of progress, rocketing us into the reality of Brave New World. So maybe Daniel H. Wilson was only half right - yes, technology changes, but humanity can to.

So maybe we can march into the future as excited as Anthony Joshua was when he smacked Jake Paul around live on Netflix.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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