Perhaps unfortunately for me, my husband and I differ in our attitude to ageing. He perceives it as an absolute loss of strength, whereas I perceive it as a release from many of the aspirations of youth.
It is 30 years since I turned 18, and in another 30 years, I will have reached more or less the end of my lifespan. I was thinking on my run that it’s a wonderful time of life, with stability and security, and a levelling path to a clear outcome. There is still a lot of agonising to come about how the kids will establish themselves, but for now they have not even got on the rollercoaster. They’re just fun humans I love so much. In fact, not spending enough time with them is the only downside of my life right now.
I’m not a fast runner any more, but I never really was. I’ll probably never climb HVS now, but I guess I could have done if I was more committed before I had kids and lost the love of danger. For all that the commentariat talks about the disadvantage that motherhood brings to careers, I think it has significant upside for women’s later years. The physical vicissitudes of childbirth lead to acceptance of physical decline, partly because childlbirth itself did lead to some limitations. I may be ageing, but look, my body made humans! Admittedly, I also feel slightly sad about the fact it can’t make any more humans, but there is a point after which the number of humans mitigates the joy, a bit like having too many Mars bars. Men also become fathers, but there is no physical journey of perceived achievement to fall back on as the muscles fade.
There are no goals I personally had that I feel I didn’t achieve. Of course I didn’t change the world, but I didn’t particularly expect I would. I used to daydream about becoming a famous author, but I knew I lacked the self belief and the talent, really. For all those reasons, I feel nothing but gratitude for what I have in life, and no great sense of grief for what I either never had, or have lost along the way. Things return, children continue their lives and connect my mitochondria to the human future for as long as they carry on reproducing. I sometimes wonder whether this aspect of human biology, the additional DNA passed down only by mothers in the mitochondria is somehow part of women’s different views of family life. I gain more than my partner, because I have invested more than my partner, in many different ways.
Since, apart from a little helix, I was never going to change the world, I’m part of the big machine of capitalism, which is still the least imperfect way of organising the economy. It has brought us abundance.
The other thing I am part of is Technology. A tiny, insignificant part, just working out how to define features that have value, prioritising and explaining them, and testing them. For now, someone else develops them for me, but in the not too distant future, I’ll probably do it myself.
I love Technology, but I also think that Techology more broadly is the most likely route to humanity’s demise. People bleat about how a CEO has earned the average person’s annual wage within the first two weeks of January, but they never talk about why that is. The rate of automation has had a deflationary effect on average salaries, and resulted in increases in executive pay as a function of revenue margins. It is much like the industrial revolution, in which the benefits did not accrue to the workers, but because the standard of living is high enough, a certain equilibrium is maintained. Bread and circuses are delivered by Netflix and Domino’s, and people carry on, using their iphones to complain on X about ‘capitalists’ while they wait for Amazon to bring coffee.
As this continues on, it eventually means that tech leadership has all the money, and all the power. If AI keeps on going as it has been, and it starts to be the driver of nearly all economic activity, then its owners no longer operate as citizens who can be held to account by a democratic government, but as the de facto government. They will eventually be the only ones with the keys to the operating system of our entire society.
Who knows, maybe somehow this is ok, but right now it doesn’t feel like all that great a vision of the future, with Technology eventually destroying the living standards it built up – all the upbeat talk of creative destruction leading to new opportunities ignores the speed with which this is happening, and therefore the lack of time to match education to the skills needed. My job will probably survive, because by now I’m pretty good at working out what people want, and delivering it – so AI only makes me faster and better at delivering. This is maybe not so for 21 year olds who lack any context.
I often read the A16Z substack, because it’s full of enough slightly wacky takes on technology to be interesting. There was some post a while back about “builders” which resonated.
But then a few weeks ago they wrote a post about how far we have come, by looking at what “Technology” was like when America was founded. The post was titled “Technology in 1776”, and it was arguing that for all the doom and gloom about the downsides of the internet, hacking, AI, crashing fertility, the apparent fragility of all those checks and balances on executive power (which turn out to just be conventions) – it’s all relative, because the lack of Technology in 1776 means that life sucked so much more than it does now. Then they rattle off sanitation, refrigeration, energy, vaccines, etc. as engines of progress. Basically, the abundance stuff.
I do get that, and I reflect on it, every day. Too many people pick their pet peeve, rather than seeing what they do have. This quote is apt:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”
I can be grateful for what I have, recognise that other times and places have quite different problems to handle, without switching off any aspiration for something better at all. Yes, my life in 2026 is way better than it would have been in 1776, but it’s also in many ways much worse than it was in 2006.
Twenty years ago, we had stable government, strong institutions, managed immigration, and a high trust society. Most countries in the west have none of those things any more, on top of the fact that American democracy will only be saved by its federal structure. I can’t help thinking that one of the big reasons all of these things have declined is because people have become both dumber, and more divided, by Technology. Stupid people find bad people online, and become both stupider and meaner. Then they attract all the rather bored people who need to find some problems to solve. When it is too late, we all take fright at the seemingly growing prevalence of what we thought were fringe opinions, and hide in comfort bubbles of consensus, hoping it might go away if we don’t look.
In 2006, I had a phone, but it didn’t do a whole lot. I had the internet, but only really on my laptop. I went for drinks in pubs with friends, and talked to random strangers sometimes – some of whom were really odd. But I knew how to identify and manage a conspiracy theorist, as most people did. Sometimes, they at least seemed persuaded by counterarguments. When I took a flight, someone else had a job printing boarding passes and attaching baggage tags for me. If I wanted a curry delivered, I had to go through the slightly awkward dance of phoning up to order it. Going out for dinner was a fairly common thing for someone on a slightly above average salary to do.
Remembering the hardships of 300 years ago feels hollow, because it pretends the arc of progress continue upwards. Janan Ganesh wrote a brilliant article recently about the decline of the old world order, as alluded to in Carney’s speech, and the fact that we fail to acknowledge how exceptional life at the turn of the millennium was. The issue is that technology itself is alienating vast swathes of humanity from each other, and enabling a level of myopia that only feeds a tribalism we all contain.
Although I should dislike the right-wing phrase that says something like “hard times make strong people; strong people make good times; good times make weak people; weak people make hard times”, it certainly seems true that we seem to be trying to make things pretty bad. The “weakness” in question is the fact that we thrive in scarcity, but on these times where we want for nothing, we create problems. We are doomed to forever repeat this cycle of abundance and scarcity.
It’s ok though, my mitochondrial DNA will be out there, and it will change the world, cell by cell.
The resting writer 
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