by stego-tech | 2026-02-10 19:17:15+00:00
Man, I used to think exactly like you do now, disgust with humans and all. I found comfort in machines instead of my fellow man, and sorely wanted a world governed by rigid structures, systems, and rules instead of the personal whims and fancies of whoever happened to have inherited power. I hated power structures, I loathed people who I perceived to stand in the way of my happiness.

I still do.

The difference is that as I realized what I'd done is built up walls so thick and high because of repeated cycles of alienation and traumas involving humans. When my entire world came to a total end every two to four years - every relationship irreparably severed, every bit of local knowledge and wisdom rendered useless, thrown into brand new regions, people, systems, and structures like clockwork - I built that attitude to survive, to insulate myself from those harms. Once I was able to begin creating my own stability, asserting my own agency, I began to find the nuance of life - and thus, a measure of joy.

Sure, I hate the majority of drivers on the roads today. Yeah, I hate the systemic power structures that have given rise to profit motives over personal outcomes. I remain recalcitrant in the face of arbitrary and capricious decisions made with callous disregard to objective data or necessities. That won't ever change, at least with me; I'm a stubborn bastard.

But I've grown, changed, evolved as a person - and you can too. Being dissatisfied with the system is normal - rejecting humanity in favor of a more stringent system, while appealing to the mind, would be such a desolate and bleak place, devoid of the pleasures you currently find eking out existence, as to be debilitating to the psyche. Humans bring spontaneity and chaos to systems, a reminder that we can never "fix" something in place forever.

To dispense with humans is to ignore that any sentient species of comparable success has its own struggles, flaws, and imperfections. We are unique in that we're the first ones we know of to encounter all these self-inflicted harms and have the cognitive ability to wax philosophically for our own demise, out of some notion that the universe would be a better place without us in it, or that we simply do not deserve our own survival. Yet that's not to say we're actually the first, nor will we be the last - and in that lesson, I believe our bare minimum obligation is to try just a bit harder to survive, to progress, to do better by ourselves and others, as a lesson to those who come after.

Now all that being said, the gap between you and I is less one of personal growth and more of opinion of agency. Whereas you advocate for the erasure or nullification of the human species as a means to separate yourself from its messiness and hostilities, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to remove yourself from that messiness for as long as you like in a situation or setup you find personal comfort in. If you'd rather live vicariously via machine in a remote location, far, far away from the vestiges of human civilization, never interacting with another human for the rest of your life? I see no issue with that, and I believe society should provide you that option; hell, there's many a day I'd take such an exit myself, if available, at least for a time.

But where you and I will remain at odds is our opinion of humanity itself. We're flawed, we're stupid, we're short-sighted, we're ignorant, we're hostile, we're irrational, and yet we've conquered so much despite our shortcomings - or perhaps because of them. There's ample room for improvement, but succumbing to naked hostility towards them is itself giving in to your own human weakness.