Essentialized: Attention. Complexity. Hyper-Coping.

· Kevin Focke
Ebook
100
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

MODERN LIFE IS COMPLEX. WHY? IT’S... COMPLICATED.

Over-the-top book analyzing the complexity that caused the Meaning Crisis. It also explores how people focus their attention in a world overwhelmed by superficial meaning and complexity. Fittingly, the book is made of scattershot essays.


First, the book explains how the world became more complex.


Second, it explains how we simplify things to deal with that complexity.


Third, it showcases how those simplifications end up making the world more complex and making it harder to assign responsibility. In short, interpolation inhibits investigation. By the time you figure out what someone meant, they are no longer in the room. That makes dialectic solutions quite difficult—if we can’t agree on rough definitions and basic facts.


The book also introduces a new psychological framework for satisfaction called The Fulfillment Games, based on a see-saw dynamic between control & release.


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Eclectically inspired by a wide variety of books:


Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman


The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter


The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr


Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco


The Seamless Web book by Stanley Burnshaw


Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari


The Crisis of the Lonely Atoms by Alex Hagen


Meaningness + In the cells of the eggplant blog by David Chapman


Incerto book series by Nassim ‘Sir Flâneur’ Taleb


Surrogation blog series by Suspended Reason


A world of symbols blog series by Patrick D. Farley


Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes by Jürgen Schmidhuber


Meaning in Life and Why It Matters by Susan Wolf


Unflattening by Nick Sousanis


Data and Reality by William Kent


The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch


The Divine Within by Aldous Huxley


Rethinking Pluralism Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity by Adam B. Seligman & Robert P. Weller

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