I have been staring at a screen for over twenty years now. Only recently have I realized what this is good for. I would like to share my tips with you.
I would like you to do two dangerous things:
First, assume that humanity exhausts the finite resources of oil, gas, radioactive material, etc. without either going extinct — which I find highly unlikely — or figuring out how to indefinitely capture immense amounts of energy from the Sun in a way that could continue to give us all Internet for centuries to come — which, if you investigate this closely, is also really unlikely.
Now, based on this assumption, consider what the world will look like 500 years from now.
I have done these two things and this is my consideration.
Consider a perfectly spherical, frictionless human being stuck in an empty teacher’s lounge with nothing but a laptop and an Internet connection, which approximates my situation pretty well right now. Okay, you can use the Internet to buy a birthday present for your mom, search for a less boring job, or figure out where to hang out with friends this weekend. Don’t forget to enjoy the fruits of modernity with everyone else, but when you’re done with that, come back to the “fun challenge” of (6). The Internet has lowered the floodgates of information, even information about traditional truths which have been obstructed by modernist media. The highest value the Internet has for the long-term good of the human race is to enable access to people who are thinking about the long-term future.
This means getting acquainted with writers who can educate you about how tradition works: Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, G.K. Chesterton, Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, René Guénon, etc. Make this into an education that you never received in school. Talk about these writers with like-minded people and grow from other interpretations. Try to adapt their ideas to your personal and local situation.
As time goes by, I assume, you will want to settle into one tradition or another, to improve it and shape it towards the future. You will leave the world where you stared at a screen, and move into politics, finance, farming, religion, bartending, or any number of things more directly relevant to solving the world’s problems. But this is the education you must go through first, so that when you are asked to answer for your judgments, you can be confident in your responses.
The Internet is a product of late oil age society. It will be available for a very short amount of time in human history. Please don’t waste your screen-staring years looking at cat videos.