When the masses pick up a new layer of skills, everything above that on the stack gets unstable. In our household, we've done so many things we never did before, that are now permanent skills. And our instrumentation has evolved to match. Like, we own a pulse oximeter now.
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But it's not ALL bottom-up. Many people make that mistake when there is a groundswell of Big Bottom-Up Energy going on changing the canvas. Bottom-up tends to run out of steam at the level of larger patterns.
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Left to itself, for example, if "make your own breakfast burritos" is one of the big shifts, will not bootstrap into a new supply chain for burritos. It will take higher level more deliberate actions like an entrepreneur recognizing it and (for eg) starting a meal-kit business.
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Stewart Brand pace layering idea is good here. The bottom layer has shifted. With different time constants everything above it will shift. Some shifts won't be complete for a decade or two.
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Some big second-level things already happening. Secular shift towards WFH for example, is a key enabler for locking in many of the new habits.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1296130746130653185 …
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Others have acquired weird new optionality and time constants. I now own hair clippers, and wife has mastered giving me a decent enough haircut that even if I go back to hair salons, it may be less frequent, and the option will last at least as long as the clippers.
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And don't underestimate the factor that many people are having 3 simultaneous realizations: 1. There IS an alternative to X 2. They can master the skill for X 3. They actually like alt to X better Preferences are shifting, not just habits.
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This particular effect has the psychological quality of dozens of small red pill/enlightenment moments in every lifestyle. It's not a single big false consciousness/learned helplessness pattern breaking down. It's a lot of little ones acting together.
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It's not scales falling from your eyes in one big Aha! moment where you jump up and yell "the premium mediocre lifestyle emperor has no clothes." It's more like lots of little nudges and shifts together knocking you into a new lifestyle equilibrium that is radically different.
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My buddy
@keithmadams once called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of small optimizations" and that's what we're all doing right now. I wrote a newsletter about that idea several years ago. It's a very powerful ideahttps://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of …Show this thread -
The biggest (and frankly, most exciting) aspect of this is that there is a secular "grain" to a LOT of the habit shifts that is already evident: away from consumer culture, and towards diy/maker/hacker/prosumer/producer culture. Also reuse, repair, repurpose, etc.
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This is not being driven by sustainability and climate activists, or driven by concern for the the toxicity of consumer culture or the moral superiority of a stronger diy type culture. It's being driven by necessity, will stay out of preference, but will have a bigger effect.
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The thing about all this diy stuff is that it shifts preferences at a hugely important meta-level: time vs. money and the quality of life equation.
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When people discover that their time-money tradeoff curve has more elasticity than they thought, because new skills make the time-cost of things much lower, and supply chain vagaries make the time+money cost higher, preference for more money over more time shifts significantly.
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This is the home edition of the build-vs-buy decision-making that all businesses are very familiar with. It is the consumerization of build-vs-buy decisions. For most people, for most kinds of domestic consumption, build-vs-buy decisions were not even available. You had to buy.
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So all the business process skills that businesses learned in the last 40 years -- outsourcing vs. insourcing, build vs. buy etc. and unwittingly taught a lot of their employees, are now being applied at scale in homes.
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All these are kinda good from the pov of a lot of values/mission-driven perspectives (climate, sustainability, retreat from financial productivity/yield as the driving legible metric of the economy), but it is important to note that it doesn't actually "belong" to any mission.
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So a key mistake you will be tempted to make is to interpret the shift through just one values lens. Do that and you'll be disappointed. Maybe 70% of the shift will align with climate action, but 30% won't and you'll be tempted to knee-jerk fight that or eliminate it as noise.
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The changes are at what I call the log level, and are a shift in phenomenology of lifestyle variety at population scale. Supervening narratives will necessarily reductive. The idea of supervenience is good to get comfortable with for thinking this through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience …
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People's habits are changing --> their identities are changing --> how they fit into any story you craft will change
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End of conversation
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