Engineering Euphoria

“Look what we can now produce!”
“Finally, all our constraints have been removed!”
“Engineers have done it again.”

In the story of progress, there’s no denying it. Engineering made the difference. Applied theory, put to practice, maths and physics met imagination and possibility. Engineering Euphoria.

In the mind of the cynics, all progress is dangerous, and so all new engineering is dangerous. Engineering dysphoria.

In the mind of the normie, the average person going about their day, engineering is underneath the tools they use. Things change, they change. They adopt new tech, and sometimes they don’t.

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The author Kevin Kelly likes to say that technological progress is met with pessimism and reaction, but only up to a point. Innovation pushes us, the response pulls us back. The good uses of tech are a plus, the bad uses of tech are a negative. And we’re left with a delta that, when you zoom way out, averages to a number that’s always about the same.

A positive delta of “about 2%” is what is left, the author says, after the tug of innovation and pullback. Strangely, that seems to be the ratio of everything in the universe, at least around here. After all, there is something rather than nothing. Organized matter won over entropy.

So progress pushes on!

There are reasons to be optimistic. Most of all, because you (and people like you) care to serve.

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To properly serve the average person, the user, it takes a big step back. We need to get a sense of their purchase story.

The day they bought the tech, they were doing other things, going about their day, until something happened. They said “enough is enough”, “today is the day”, and they made a decision. They opened their wallet, they thought “this will help me get over there, to where I want to be”, and they paid.

It was calculated, but it was also emotional. There was a tug of the pluses and the minuses. The benefits and the risks. And then there was a real decision made by a real person, putting their livelihood on the line. No Euphoria.

Let’s make something amazing, for them.