This is something I have been thinking about lately. To what extent is technological progress and economic growth truly useful?
When progress is so ubiquitous in your environment that it becomes invisible, it's easy to forget that people die of easily treatable diseases in places that don't have so much "technological progress", that people still starve because of a lack of "economic growth", and so on and so forth.
People suffer here under corrupt kleptocrats every day, and I will not have people try to deny that suffering by saying stuff like "so called third world countries", implying that the "third world" is actually doing great or something.
Actually I don't see where you did use that term?
Sorry for overreacting.
That is why technological progress and economic growth matter.
I would also argue that specifically global warming is a direct consequence of technological progress and the industrialization of society. Human pollution would not be a problem is it weren't for materialism.
Technology provides comfort, as some expense. Either reliance on a central supply for food, water, electricity. Or in the form of pollution and exploitation of other humans.
In your opinion what is the ultimate value of colonizing mars for example?
edit: I am also from a "developing" country where the struggle is clearly visible.
To me it is very useful and I truly believe that we live in the best possible time, even if you consider the people that have poorest lifestyle (and especially the number of people that are forced to live that lifestyle, which has decreased a lot).
Maybe you will think otherwise? Possibly, but before you decide, please go and actually do it first, live outside the society and not using any of the technology provided by it. It is very easy to discuss how easy it would be and how much saner you would be without the western developments when you don't have to worry about a small cut infecting your blood, dying from a plague, spending days constructing the simplest of tools, fending off bears or simply living through a year with very dry summer which destroyed your food supply.
I do think we live in the most comfortable of times, but that gives me no satisfaction. The lack of satisfaction makes us dwell on mortality. I don't think I would care if I was killed during a hunt or contracted a virus after having lived a fulfilling life. So to what extent is technological progress and economic growth useful if I get no satisfaction from it?
The satisfaction you are talking about is provided by a well-developed spiritual belief system and integrating spiritual truths and teachings, to a point where they get embedded deeply into your body, mind and soul, through a spiritual path, a way of developing the inner structures and deep qualities. This is process of spiritual growth. It is parrallel to the material developments, not directly connected to it.
It has likely been like this throughout the history of humanity. Some people have been more and some less successful on this path. But there are clearly defined ways to do this, teachings that will guide you through the process and quite reliably make you enlightened (or improve your life satisfaction enough so that you will stop midway, but satisfied with your progress). Some of these teachings have been working largely unchanged for thousands of years - precisely because they work! On top of that, for your pleasure there are some new recent systems and teachings which are rehashing the new information and packaging it into new forms of information and forms of spiritual practice which might perhaps be more effective than traditional ones (time will tell), but you are free to try that. On top of that you have the good old "find your own way" of getting spiritual growth by simply meditating nonstop for a really long time (years).
The way I see it, all of those scenarios are inexplicably better, easier and more effective now than ever. The access to information, to teachers, retreats etc is just phenomenal. This was never the case to such extent as it is today. So even here the recent material progress has made it easier for you to get your satisfaction, you simply have to look.
No society progress will do the work for the person, because each person has to do it themselves. Society (or a teaching/teacher/book/guide) can only help out and show the way.
If given all these possibilities, someone still does not follow through on any of the mentioned spiritual paths in order to get their satisfaction, given all these choices and help available - my question is do they really want it then? If not, they would just end up in the same place in any other time in history.
The work isn't necessarily the difficult part, but the baggage to continue to exist and be recognized by the rest of the system is where things go awry.
Seeing as there is astonishingly low pressure to actually keep prices low, you have a maximization function in place that ends up ensuring that you're either having to maximize for capital influx to equip yourself for maximal time efficiency, or you end up having to condition yourself to be able to physically do the work, which tends to cost a great deal of time and regular personal upkeep.
Mind, this has just been forays into agriculture and basic manufacturing (blacksmithing/rudimentary fabrication).
All of this dive has also been done in an environment where most are content to live and let live. So the random interloper deciding to flex muscle to subduct your aspirations to self-sustainability are not a factor; and raw material processing has not hit the top of my research pile yet.
While everything is in reach, efficiency while doing it is always the most hard won fight to win.
On the other hand, you also learn a few warts of the system by doing this type of work as well. Our current society has become incredibly transaction-centric instead of people-community centric. When trivial transportation costs have effectively globalised the world, your ability to forge effective self-sustaining in groups outside the fiscal sense suffers.
I believe this may be a contributing factor to the recent resurgence of nationalistic tendencies. As every member of the market has begun to realize how tightly coupled everything has become, there is a desire to cut out the additional complexity and figure out a way to keep the in-group/culture sustainable regardless of fiscal outcomes.
Furthermore, technological advancement inevitably introduces higher severity and complexity problems, as well as extending the physical implications of addressing those very problems. Take the increasing prevalence of ant-biotic/fungal resistant bacteria/fungi as an example, or the consequences of climate change fueled by shifts in our atmospheric composition and biosphere depletion.
It's not at all a trivial matter, and when your technological carrying capacity is mated with a positive feedback loop, (drive to procreate/attain more wealth) you have a recipe for change that won't be denied.
The only thing people seem to be selectively blind to is The bits and pieces they are willing to accept as being caused by technological progress, and whether or not they can/should be remedied.
Now that I think about it, my memory of Epictetus seems to be really hazy, so I probably shouldn't try to discuss stoicism without doing some re-reading and thinking first.