Comment by bccdee

> harbor as many people as possible who have no agency'

> Art, science, exploration. I don't know, take your pick

What's the point of art, then? Consuming art isn't "agentic," and the point of producing it is consumption. Ditto exploration—does discovered land serve any purpose in and of itself? Or is the point to see it and to live in it? And science—consider medicine. The discovery of a new medication itself is not the point; the point is that people take it and become better, which is not agentic.

Agency is a means to an end, and that end is experience. You can't justify life, individual or collective, in terms of agency.

> Still, we're told that hunger and disease must be eradicated before we do anything of importance.

Gee, I was unaware that we "hadn't been doing anything important" for the past 40,000 years of civilization.

> The homeless people i've interacted with [...] don't have some rich inner world

I don't honestly believe you've interacted with many homeless people that closely. I think you see them from a distance and assume they're basically urban wildlife. Mental health issues are not the obstacle to participation in society that you seem to think they are, and anyway, only a minority have mental health issues. And substance abuse—frankly, if I were homeless, I would probably take a lot of drugs too. What else am I going to do?

Homelessness is an extremely fixable issue, and countries that have supplied homeless people with long-term housing have seen their homeless populations vanish overnight. Obviously. What they're missing is homes. It's extremely difficult to get back on your feet without one, and the shelter system is completely inadequate.

> We already have a surplus of pretty much everything, and the result is that we are a society of wireheads

Do you have any idea how much rent costs in a big city? How much groceries cost? What are you talking about.

> I think happiness itself is orthogonal to a having meaningful life, and we shouldn't pursue it directly.

Then what's the point of living meaningfully? It doesn't sound like it's good for anything. "Meaning" gets thrown around a lot to indicate things we want to defend but cannot really justify on their own merits.