Essentialized: Attention. Complexity. Hyper-Coping.

MODERN LIFE IS COMPLEX. WHY? IT’S… COMPLICATED.

Over-the-top book analyzing the complexity that caused the Meaning Crisis. It also explores how people focus their attention in a world overwhelmed by superficial meaning and complexity. Fittingly, the book is made of scattershot essays.

First, the book explains how the world became more complex.

Second, it explains how we simplify things to deal with that complexity.

Third, it showcases how those simplifications end up making the world more complex and making it harder to assign responsibility. In short, interpolation inhibits investigation. By the time you figure out what someone meant, they are no longer in the room. That makes dialectic solutions quite difficult—if we can’t agree on rough definitions and basic facts.

The book also introduces a new psychological framework for satisfaction called The Fulfillment Games, based on a see-saw dynamic between control & release.

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Eclectically inspired by a wide variety of books:

Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman

The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter

The Shallows – What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco

The Seamless Web book by Stanley Burnshaw

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The Crisis of the Lonely Atoms by Alex Hagen

Meaningness + In the cells of the eggplant blog by David Chapman

Incerto book series by Nassim ‘Sir Flâneur’ Taleb

Surrogation blog series by Suspended Reason

A world of symbols blog series by Patrick D. Farley

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes by Jürgen Schmidhuber

Meaning in Life and Why It Matters by Susan Wolf

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Data and Reality by William Kent

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

The Divine Within by Aldous Huxley

Rethinking Pluralism Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity by Adam B. Seligman & Robert P. Weller

© 2025 Kevin Focke (Ebook): 9798223617846

Release date

Ebook: 9 January 2025