There's a reasonable chance that you're seriously running out of time

April 2025

I.

Health is much more difficult to deal with than disease.

Donald Winnicott said that, according to Adam Phillips. I've never been able to validate the quote myself.

If real, he is of course very right. This is the essence of all psychology. Or at least all the parts that matter.

Flip the frame. Managing a disease is much easier than managing good health. Your next action is always much clearer. Less questions. Narrower goal. Every move is meaningful.

Such an asymmetry is also part of the basis for Prospect Theory. Kahneman and Tversky observed participants feeling losses more strongly than equivalent gains - we want to avoid losing more than we want to win, at least in financial bets. Just as disease (a loss) commands our attention and action more clearly than health (a baseline state), losses motivate us more powerfully than gains. This is loss aversion.

In his explanation of why humans might be like this, Kahneman's best guess is a survival mechanism of times gone by. In our ancestral environment, losses (like losing food, shelter, or social status) could be life-threatening, while equivalent gains were merely beneficial. This asymmetry made it adaptive to be more sensitive to potential losses.

Awesome, how come it's not true?

Loss aversion varies intensely by culture, and is empirically much higher in Western, rich countries compared to third world African countries. As a logical extension, loss aversion based nudges tend to have no effect at all in countries like Tanzania and Uganda. It would seem to me that the question isn't why humans are naturally loss averse, it's how has the development of the West potentially caused this kink in human rationality?

(note: there are also studies that cite the opposite finding i.e. that loss aversion peaks in the third world, and is lowest in a country like the USA. my personal view is that the proxy dependent variable they are using across every nation is essentially useless, so these results don't really mean anything. i think this might also be why it's so hard to find the actual details of it in their papers. some in the same series also only manage to compare North America and Europe. ah yes, the two most widely differing cultures on the globe.)

One thing Wang and team spotted in their data was the connection between loss and aversion and a country's economic status gets severely weakened once you also consider the role of individualism. Individualist countries are more loss averse on average, and the authors make this note on collectivist countries:

according to the "cushion hypothesis," social support from the in-group network provides a cushion for losses, inducing lower perceived risk

Whereas in individualist cultures, we don't cover for each other like that. You're kind of on your own. Hence, being more scared of losing what you have weighs heavier than the excitement of getting more.

(I've covered the rise of individualism before. TLDR: technology means you don't need other people as much, increasing % share of GDP coming from discretionary income, much more life spent on the project of 'you'. Pretty straightforward.)

But what I think the papers above fail to cover is that the real effect of individualism is not to completely remove the 'cushion' the authors speak of, but more to move it to a different seat. We still have some trust that we'll be caught when we fall, the trust is just at a different level. We have much more belief that the system is looking after us. So you don't need your family/neighbours to.

Rules and norms are made clear, one follows them, one leads a safe and happy existence. If I don't change anything, I get to stay safe. And we end up with loss aversion again.

But this is where you realise that loss aversion is nothing compared to the bigger bias you end up with.

I once heard this thing about zebras and human behaviour, that annoyingly stuck with me as quite true for something so contrived. Here we go. Why do zebras have stripes? They're a form of camouflage, right?

Well then how come it makes them stand out more than any other animal I've ever seen? I could spot a zebra a mile away, that's hardly effective. Turns out they're not camouflaging against nature, they're camouflaging against each other.

This matters, because when the lions turn up and the zebras run, the zebras all blur into one another. The lions have the power to target and kill any single zebra, but the blur makes it harder for them to communicate to each other which one to go after.

As long as you look like all the other zebras, you'll probably be fine.

Which is mostly a good idea in life, right? You know nothing about education, send your kids to a regular school. You know nothing about economics, have the same portfolio as everyone else. You know nothing about what you're actually supposed to be doing with yourself, pick a well-trodden path. The normative way must be the normative way for a reason.

Put it this way:

When you fall in a collectivist society, you land on people. When you fall in an individualist one, you hope you land on policy. Staying in line is safe, because the system is built to keep you safe.

Consequently, nothing could ever be worth panicking about. There's just no way the world would do that to me. That, friends, is the social contract.

II.

I'm becoming less and less convinced that the invisible hands are going to catch you when you fall next time. Because the system's going to get caught off-guard too. At least in the short to medium term.

I've been reading a lot of well-thought out work recently.

Scott Alexander and Dan Kokotajlo (& team): AI 2027 (a median forecast):

December 2027: AIs are the best employees...better than any human at explaining and finding strategies to achieve goals.

Late 2029: Humans realize that they are obsolete...Everyone either performs a charade or collects universal basic income.

Dean Ball, the new White House senior AI policy advisor - Where we are headed:

Corporations adopting agents will have far greater capacity for intellectual labor...Teams of thousands will accomplish work in far less time than conceivable before.

Junior-level humans only hired where legally required, requiring physical labor, or candidate is extraordinarily exceptional...average is over.

I am aware of very few good policy proposals to deal with labor market turmoil.

Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member - Long timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short:

Most likely human-level systems between one and five years...AGI by 2027 is popular...It's obvious we are not ready to handle this soon...most people think we have more time.

Bear in mind the first quote is from the median prediction from the most heavily researched forecasting project I've come across. Bear in mind the second quote is coming from someone now leading AI policy in the White House. This is not a thought exercise.

Which means I am now on board with the last quote's accusations of unseriousness levelled at the 'AI is hype' crowd. You are blindly believing in the safety of status quo.

I always thought this blog would be most useful to young people. It's hard to change yourself or your life when you're older. I don't blame anyone for not really wanting to. But young people now need some serious honesty about their situation. It's probably long-term amazing, short-term extremely stressful.

The meta is changing. You should probably act as if it has already changed.

If you're a student, the signs are right in front of you. I saw Ted Gioia say this the other day:

But let's give tech companies credit. They improved one skill—cheating, reaching epic proportions. More than 40% of students caught cheating recently—in an ethics class!

But what he and everyone responding to his post get completely wrong is that this is not a sign that schools need to tighten down and un-zombify their students. The correct conclusion is that college is dead. Flatlined. Over. Pointless.

People who want to learn can learn in new ways. If you are one of those people, go and do it. If you're not, understand the system no longer has your back by forcing you through this. You are very likely doing it for nothing, if not worse than nothing. And the key point is this: college will never admit to you that it is worthless, and no greater entity will replace it to tell you to follow it instead.

As Dean Ball said earlier, the only reason a person could get hired within a few years is because "The candidate is extraordinary, of a level of obvious quality that firm managers wish to cultivate" them. But what college, i.e. the system, produces is the average. That is the point. To be a zebra. But that is no longer a good survival mechanism, and the sooner you stop acting like it is the better.

This is true even with slower timelines and even if AI progress stops altogether. Ethan Mollick recently collected some papers showing how o3-level models already lead to major changes across industries once people work out how to use them.

Zach Exley - The obvious — and unthinkable — solution to the coming AI crisis:

How will societies deal with firing professional-managerial classes? UBI won't work...even ardent supporters gave up after experiments proved it impractical...The new intelligence will make it effortless to do half society's work...but our economy has no mechanisms to redistribute this load effectively.

So I'll tell you straight: do not expect the system to save you. The meta has changed. You must be willing to save yourself.

Maybe you have 2 years, maybe 5, maybe 20. But if you are under 30 then even the longest timeline still really matters to you to a level beyond anything else you've had to face when it comes to imagining how your life is going to go. Do you want to get to 40 and have no way to get paid for the thing you've identified as for two decades? Here's a sneak preview of what that might feel like (it's not pretty).

The answer is relatively simple, you have to go it alone. Alone can also mean with friends, but you have to go without the old omnipotent guides of education and safe salary jobs.

Do stuff, create stuff, build stuff, sell stuff. Prove yourself. It's going to be way more fun. But you need to want to do it.

And hopefully once the stressful period is over, you can settle in for the show:

2030: The rockets start launching. People terraform and settle the solar system. AIs running at thousands times subjective human speed reflect on meaning...A new age dawns, unimaginably amazing.

III.

There is an unfortunate kink in a call to action for young people to pursue their dreams as a response to the system failing them. Modern young people don't seem to want anything.

I was watching clips from Coachella the past couple weekends. It reminded me a lot of something I've noticed at festivals and gigs the past few years. A lot of people weren't dancing. It barely even seemed like they were having a good time.

If you really like the music you're listening to, dancing isn't really optional. Which suggests something strange is going on here.

What's funny is that this a time where everyone is writing about how young people are desperate for connection, to feel something, to go out, to meet people, to break boundaries. And yet given the opportunity, they stand still.

See if you can pick up a theme in the biggest responses to the question "what do you want?": not 'I want to spend more time with my friends' or 'I want to make more friends' or 'I want to fall in love'. No actions at all. Just identities.

I want to be the person with lots of friends. I want to be the person that is lovable. I want to be the first choice.

If this happens - if people start defining themselves through desired identities rather than desired actions - a peculiar paralysis sets in (it already has). You end up wanting nothing specific, liking nothing in particular. The desire becomes abstract, un-moored from actual experiences or tangible goals.

When you want to 'be the person with lots of friends' rather than wanting to spend more time with friends, you've created a gap between desire and action. You're no longer pursuing something concrete; you're chasing an image. And unlike dancing to music you love, where the body responds almost involuntarily, pursuing an abstract identity provides no clear path forward.

This shift from wanting to do things to wanting to be things creates a void. You can't practice being popular the way you practice piano. You can't work toward being chosen first the way you work toward finishing a novel. The desire becomes about perception rather than experience, about appearance rather than action.

(It is truly only this way that a generation can even manage to make sex unsexy)

And so young people find themselves at festivals, surrounded by music and possibility, standing still. Not because they don't want to dance, but because they're busy wanting to be the kind of person who dances - forgetting that such people become that way simply by dancing.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the view that this is a serious generational pathology, I've even made this point before. The issue isn't the lack of socialising, the prevalence of screens, the decrease in sex, the pressure of self-curation, the anxiety, the depression. These are just symptoms.

The issue is the disease. And the disease is a lack of desire.

So if you are a young person, and you want to start making up for lost time, I'll end with some good news:

Managing a disease is much easier than managing good health.