wow this really mind blowing for me as i think what you’re calling “flourishing” and what I’ve been calling “living risk” are pointing at the same neglected frontier. We’ve rightly invested enormous effort into ensuring survival into not dying, not being permanently disempowered. But survival is not the same as life, and we risk mistaking the floor for the ceiling.
If humanity makes it through this century but ends up culturally hollow, emotionally arid, or morally locked into a narrow vision, then we’ve technically survived but failed to flourish. That’s the danger of living risk: not extinction, but the quiet erosion of joy, awe, depth, and meaning. And this isn’t a luxury concern. It’s exactly the kind of issue that the EA framework was built to flag massive in scale, profoundly neglected, and worth testing for tractability.
Survival secures the possibility of a future. Flourishing and avoiding living risk secures the value of that future. The challenge ahead is to safeguard both conditions: survive, yes, but also preserve the capacity to live lives that future generations will find truly worth inheriting.
wow this really mind blowing for me as i think what you’re calling “flourishing” and what I’ve been calling “living risk” are pointing at the same neglected frontier. We’ve rightly invested enormous effort into ensuring survival into not dying, not being permanently disempowered. But survival is not the same as life, and we risk mistaking the floor for the ceiling.
If humanity makes it through this century but ends up culturally hollow, emotionally arid, or morally locked into a narrow vision, then we’ve technically survived but failed to flourish. That’s the danger of living risk: not extinction, but the quiet erosion of joy, awe, depth, and meaning. And this isn’t a luxury concern. It’s exactly the kind of issue that the EA framework was built to flag massive in scale, profoundly neglected, and worth testing for tractability.
Survival secures the possibility of a future. Flourishing and avoiding living risk secures the value of that future. The challenge ahead is to safeguard both conditions: survive, yes, but also preserve the capacity to live lives that future generations will find truly worth inheriting.