I keep thinking about how much of our lives is tied to having a direction for it, and how fragile that direction really is.

I do work that I enjoy, and that is an incredibly luxury in modern day life, this waking up and having fun with a keyboard all day, doing work that I find meaningful, helpful to others, and even on the tiniest scope, I feel like I am doing well in life and being where I am makes the world a tiny bit better.

But the moment someone takes my job from me, I would suddenly have eight, ten hours every day that I wouldn't know how to fill. I would be incredibly lost in life, and I doubt it would take more than a month before I would find a new job, even if I somehow won the lottery that I don't play.

Now, imagine a whole population suddenly being thrown into that predicament, and I find the mind game fascinating to think about how that would change the way we see the world. There is a sketch by Bill Burr where he says that the world would be great if there were less people in it, making a good point that if you have a population of 10,000 people, they could all be driving coal-rolling jacked up pickup trucks and Nature simply wouldn't care.

Even today, there is an argument to be made that there isn't enough work to go around for all the people living, and that is something that I think about frequently. The first industrial revolution, there was a space for people to fill that came down to "carrying heavy boxes all day", and similar unskilled or low-skilled labor. But these days, a man with an excavator can do the work of fifty guys with shovels, and in the same way, a single programmer can automate not just the work of fifty people, we can even automate our own work to a noteworthy degree.

I would even argue that in the civilized world, we have the tools, the funds, and the available labor capacity to solve all modern ailments. Homelessness and by extension the housing crisis are complete non-issues if it wasn't for bureaucracy and wealth hording, and there is absolutely no reason for people to go to bed hungry while large amounts of food are thrown away.

On the larger scale of things, modern society's remaining problems are man-made, there is nothing left that we can not control.

So, if you have a quiet moment to yourself: Run this mind game for yourself, think about where your life would be if a large, country-spanning event took your job and existence away, and how you would adjust.