Really, why do we? It seems the more we know, the more stupid our choices become.

Why can't we just be happy living in little tribal villages, with the shaman curing buboes and infections by waving a feather around ones face? Life would be simpler, and a helluva lot happier.

Why do we complicate our lives with all this technology when happiness is so easily attainable?


I must admit, i want to know. I seek knowledge. But why do i seek knowledge?


Thoughts?

It's sexy

It's sort of like gambling, place your bet (your best guess) on whatever you think you know about a thing/s and read books until you win (you were accurate) or lose (you were wrong). Either way you still assimilate it like the borg.

OP tends to suggest that tribal style does not correlate with knowledge?
They're into knowledge as far as I can see, just differently. A shamans apprenticeship is all about gaining knowledge (of certain sorts) imho.

Why is technology the opposite of happiness to you? To me there's no relation. One can be perfectly unhappy in the jungle too and a happy in a lab doing high tech.

Being unhappy/happy can be done anywhere anyhow. Don't blame knowledge/technology is my take on.

Although not entirely, I used to have this way of thinking as well. I have always embraced technology, but for the longest time I would put some primitive cultures up on a pedestal. Then I visited one of these cultures in the Amazon. I had insomnia and was given a blessing/prayer to get better. One of the girls there was having really bad menstrual cramps and was given the same treatment and zero improvement.

After this I became hyper aware of all the misery at the retreat and in the neighboring village that could have easily been solved by the most basic of technology. A bottle of Advil, some antibiotics, a lawn mower/weed wacker, concrete, running water and sanitary sewers... I could go on and on and on.

The one thing that us westerners take for granted the most is housing. A modern house is so loaded with technology and we benefit greatly from it. Just the fact that we can stay comfortable while it's -10F/-23C outside without burning down half the forest is a testament to modern technology and then on top of that, you can take a dump in this same comfort without the threat of spreading fecal bacteria and an awful stench. I mean you could alleviate all this by moving to a tropical place, but then you have a whole new set of problems that also are improved by technology.

I'm not being dismissive of tribal cultures. I believe that we have a lot to learn from them and would benefit from adopting some of their practices. But on the other hand, technology should be celebrated. That's not to say that technology is all good. Technology is a tool that can be harnessed for benefit or detriment. The challenge is to use technology to make our lives, others lives, and the world around us a better place and to do all of this while embracing social practices that integrate with technology, our corporeal existences, and our spiritual beings in a harmonious fashion.

And remember, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Always give thought to the big picture and get input from those who are effected before taking action on their behalf.

One huge thing that technology has provided us is nearly three times the life span to take in all that this existence has to offer so long as we make the right choices and embrace medicine as a tool rather than a crutch.

I would say that properly seasoned wood from a sustainable source is a better form of heating than electrical, coal, gas or oil fired heating. I am not anti technology but i think that it can be disempowering and deprives people of knowledge if all they have to do is flick a switch to get warm or flush a toilet to get rid of their waste.

I totally agree. Knowledge and technology help us overcome physical and mental barriers imposed on us by our physical and genetic environments. Partly, we evolved in a way that smarter and thus more strategic monkeys survived whereas ones that were not smart and maybe just sat around did not. I am not making a value judgement of course - I strive to live a low-tech simpler lifestyle - but valuing knowledge and strategy allowed us to survive.

Technology allows us to lead more comfortable lives, like with toilets, medication, and heat. We can also travel and move to different places if we are unhappy where we are. It might be a good idea to decouple technological advancements and happiness as well, as believing that more tech leads to less happiness can be detrimental to your emotional state because it can be hard to control how tech evolves within our society.

People being nicer to each other and the environment would make a lot more happiness in the world than technology or the lack thereof, I believe.

So, seeking wisdom (rather than knowledge maybe) is a great idea ; we just got a little bit misleaded nowadays, thinking that we should seek "knowledge" in the form of Science and Technology, always outside of ourself. So here we are, on this tragic race for it. But in fact, it's originally a drive for Wisdom, the Wisdom that liberate us, make human being ascend to his full potential : to be an aware, mature being, an observer of his inner world (his body, his sensation) and find, throuh this constant observation, an insight about the "outside" world (that exist only though our body receptors).

We seek to know ourself, to tame ourself. But we got lost into the messy Quest, and now we want to go to Mars (what a symbol, guys...).
Technology is great. But we got unbalanced. Maybe Tesla did found Free Energy. He didn't got shut down. He shut it down by himself : we not ready for this, we are mindless fools; our quest of knowledge will seems as ridicule as medieval beleives nowadays, once we realized how much unaware we are... of ourself.

To answer all of our questions

Questions such as: why do I seek knowledge?

I would agree that there are some basic skill sets that all people should have for survival purposes. I tend to be a jack of all trades, but I also understand the importance of specialization. All of this technology that surrounds us comes from a society that utilizes specialization to allow people to ignore 99.9% of knowledge and focus on their specialty. Without specialization, the vast majority of this technology would not exist. You could say that the cornerstone of this concept is farming. When you have a small portion of a tribe that can feed the whole tribe, This frees people up to focus their efforts on things like smithing. Now the plow is invented and food production goes up... and so on.

Essentially idle hands create a better world because idle hands cannot stay that way.