Howdy. I’ve been writing these posts for a couple months now and have enjoyed chatting with some readers about these topics. Talking with people has helped me gain more clarity on what I’m aiming towards with this substack. On that note, if you have any friends that might be interested in these ideas, I’d appreciate you forwarding them the substack. More feedback is v helpful. xo.
This post will be a bit different from the others. This is a “check-in” to take stock of what’s going on here. “Hello rubber, meet road…what are you doing here Michael?” I suspect I’ll do more posts like this one to keep my exploration on track.
Here’s an 84-word summary of where I’m at, then below I go into more detail. If you’re having a busy beaver Sunday, you can just read these 84 words to get a vibe for this check-in: Humanity does a bunch of stuff. Every day, week, month, year that goes by, our 8-billion person species does so many things. The sum total of these things is what? Is it a meaningful sum or did we do a bunch of worthless stuff? We can 1) know if what we’re doing is meaningful by measuring the “existential relevance” of it and 2) we can leverage technology to build better incentive systems including economies, governments, and religions that keep us on existentially relevant tracks.
So What’s Going on Here?
My interest in this "existential relevance" idea is around what is meaningful. More specifically- how does a single human, or how does our 8 billion person species, pursue something meaningful? The painfully obvious answer to that question is "do meaningful stuff." Duh.
So then the question becomes: what is meaningful stuff? Not such an easy question, but an answerable one.
My high-level answer is "meaningful stuff is also existentially relevant stuff." This idea of "existential relevance" is definitely a bit of a weird premise. What I'm trying to do with the concept is to use existence or "all there is" as the context to decide what's meaningful. I find that method of deciding meaning compelling, for what greater context could we use to make a decision than everything? And while we don’t know everything about existence yet, leveraging the fullest extent of our current knowledge to interpret meaning is the best we can do and therefore good enough.
So the project of deciding meaning for an individual human and for human society turns into deciphering what is relevant to existence.
While it’s not a straightforward task, I believe we can decipher actions that are relevant to existence. To support that belief, I’ll borrow some thoughts from the last post as examples: we’ve observed this trend towards separation, or entropy increase, which could lead to some sort of universal ending. However, we also see ourselves and the 3 billion year long chain of life on Earth as part of the same story. Since we humans like to survive and entropy goes against a survival plan, there’s an existential tension at play between life's interests and the "predetermined" trend of existence towards separation. This is a very curious dynamic we find ourselves caught in the middle of. This dynamic seems to say that actions that go against a universal separation would be meaningful to life. While this interpretation of existential relevance is dramatically incomplete, it shows that we can use the happenings of existence to derive meaning.
Implicit in the above paragraph is the decision to side with life vs siding with entropy increase. That choice may be a personal bias, but luckily it's a personal bias shared by all life on Earth, and quite possibly all life not on Earth...so that decision is made in good company :).
Applying Relevance
As far as actually applying any of these thoughts, the current dream scenario for this project would be to help create a more relevant society. The path towards doing that would likely include upgrading the incentive systems that our society relies on so that they drive more existentially relevant, or more meaningful, decisions. That means upgrading our economies, governments, and religions to motivate more relevant actions. Upgrading these systems is obviously a lofty and difficult to accomplish goal, but there are certain technologies that have come on the scene in just the last few decades that might make such a goal achievable.
I'll use a basic example from the economy as to why I'm thinking about our incentive systems. If a person is influenced by the economy to work a certain job, say optimizing advertising platforms or selling cigarettes, and those jobs are not existentially relevant, then the incentive system could be improved.
The prevailing incentive system is a patchwork composition of economies, governments, religions, non-profits, media outlets, and academic institutions that decide our actions at the collective level. If they motivate meaningless actions, then our species is doing meaningless stuff. Since each of our individual futures is so interconnected with what our fellow humans do, living in a society that has a clear vision of what's meaningful and a path to pursue that meaningful stuff is a critical feature for me to feel good calling myself a member of human society. That said, it’s important to note that it's not a binary thing, that is to say that our current society is doing lots of meaningful stuff, I just think we could be doing much better.
From a high-level, a handful of technologies- computers + the internet + web3 + artificial intelligence- could be leveraged to create a system that decides and pursues meaning better than our current one.
Exactly how an internet-native system could decipher meaning and then translate that meaning into an incentive system is an answer I don’t have yet. I plan to use this substack to explore what that could look like, landing this conceptual plane on the ground. Through these posts and associated research and feedback, the goal is to determine a project that could start small and represent a path towards upgrading our incentive systems to be more meaningful. I’m viewing this substack like an epically informal phd program and on the other side I’ll end up with a complete thesis that can be acted upon. I’m not sure how long this research / writing / feedback portion will take, but I think in ~1 year I can have a completed “thesis,” with a 6-month margin of error being acceptable :).
Next Up
The next post will explore collective vs individual meaning. How do the two relate to each other? Could a framework for determining collective meaning also determine individual meaning? If what feels important to me conflicts with what the majority of people say is important to them, what do I do?
Any system that effectively deciphers meaning will have to confront these questions.
Thanks for reading,
-Michael
I like the idea of looking at my own life through the lens of existential relevance. Like, what will I find relevant 100 years from now? Helpful!
Interesting to think that each of these entities (economies, governments, religions, non-profits, media outlets, and academic institutions) have a role in advancing a more "existentially relevant" or "meaningless" society - the results of which are based on their incentives.
A project like this would invent a new path to offer a clearly defined compass with transparent incentives, which I like way more than trying to redesign the incentives of the incumbents.
Reminds me of the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."