Cool!
A philosopher shares his perspective on what we should do now to ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed.
The summary seems pretty reductive—I think most of the book is about other things, like making sure civilization doesn’t collapse at all or preventing negative moral lock-in. I wonder how they chose it.
You cited a Gallup poll that said that 1 in 25 adults said that high school was the “worst period in their life.” You presented this as positive evidence, but this seems to me like a strong point against your thesis.
To illustrate this with a simple model, we can imagine that the average survey respondent is 40 years old and that they split up their life into 10 4-year “periods.” If the quality of people’s lives are about evenly distributed across time, we’d expect high school to be the worst period for 10% of respondents, which is way more than 4%.
More importantly, 54% of respondents to that same survey said that high school was a great period in their life, and 7% said it was the best period. This makes me skeptical of the rest of your argument.
To steelman against this contradictory evidence: it seems reasonably likely that people look back on their past with nostalgia, biasing them towards believing it was better than it was.