When I was younger, I used to think personalities and philosophies were immutable. That when I learned or stumbled upon the answer, that I would find happiness and that it was “one true philosophy” to provide meaning to my life.
The older I get, I think our personalities and philosophies are answers to our situations as much as they are causes.
It’s a yin-and-yang, an ebb and flow between how we behave that causes our social changes and how we are treated that cause our personality changes.
When I learned HyperText and later HyperText Markup Language (HTML), it was like learning math (the language of the universe). I thought HyperText was the answer to social communications and shared knowledge. I thought that the World Wide Web (WWW) would unite us in ways unimaginable to our forebears and usher in a new era of knowledge and enlightenment.
And maybe that is true. It accelerated our shared knowledge, access to information, and the creation of Large Language Models (LLM) that form the basis of our current Generational Artificial Intelligence.
It also accelerated our ignorance, our radicalization to adopt and accept completely inane ideas espoused by others. It gave geniuses and village idiots alike a megaphone with which to shout their ideas.
So, my current desire to withdraw from the news, from social media, and from the clamor of angry and divisive people who insist that political violence is the answer if they don’t like the outcomes is my “ebb response” to the “social flow” of their behavior.
Sufis in Conclaves and Hermits on Mountains might not be universal answer to the human condition, but they are a sane response to irrational or excitable human behavior.
I thought the same about the internet when it first began. I composted it to Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica. More fool me.