What Happened to Technological Optimism?

I haven't given up the good fight. I'm just taking it to a more fundamental level.

I started the Technological Optimism blog back in 2022 with the goal of resisting the anti-technology trend in modern Western culture. I wanted to encourage optimism and positivity about industry, human enterprise, and the future.

I still want to achieve these things. But as I worked on this project, I realized that the modern trend away from technological optimism is part of a much deeper social problem: a lack of respect for reason. Our schools don’t teach rational thinking. Our culture doesn’t respect curiosity, science, or productivity. We can’t move the culture toward a pro-technology, pro-flourishing mindset until we fix the underlying problem and teach people the importance of reason in all areas of life.

To that end, I’ve started a new project: Reason for Living. Its goal is to teach people that reason is the way to achieve a flourishing future, for yourself and for society at large. Reason for Living consists of a book, a regular newsletter, social media profiles, and a series of courses and speaking events, all with the goal of turning young people toward a life based on rational values.

My goal with Reason for Living is to offer people a positive value: reason as a tool for living a full life. But it’s also vital to stress the negative. The only alternatives to reason are mysticism or nihilism. You can build a rational system of values designed to enhance human life, you can build an irrational system based on something other than evidence about what’s good for human beings, or you can give up on values altogether. The latter camp is what we’re increasingly seeing in today’s culture.

If you’d like to support Reason for Living, you can sign up for a regular newsletter here on Substack:

Reason for Living

. You can also follow the project on Instagram by following http://instagram.com/rfl_reasonforliving or find out more at http://www.reason-for-living.com.