An Essay on Modern Complexity: When Technology Stops Making Sense

A personal essay argues that modern life has become incomprehensibly abstract, with people surrounded by technology, laws, and infrastructure they neither understand nor control. The author frames this as a source of chronic, unnoticed stress—clenched jaws, shallow breath, a background hum of confusion—that has become so normalized we no longer recognize alternatives.

The piece pushes back on the techno-optimist worldview exemplified by Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, which positions AGI as humanity’s ultimate savior from problems technology itself created. The author suggests this is self-deception: we are skilled at constructing narratives that justify our participation in systems causing environmental harm and social damage, while our early-life moral intuitions quietly erode.

Rather than building more, the author lands on a quietist conclusion—that the best contribution may be to do less, observe the natural world, and resist the impulse to keep adding to the machinery. Walking away entirely would mark you as a lunatic, but the urge to do so is treated as a sane response to an insane arrangement.