# Decadence and Andreessen's Dilemma

![rw-book-cover](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4bfcf0ec-23ec-4244-b098-ca1892fb6f3e_1280x720.jpeg)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Ross Douthat]]
- Full Title: Decadence and Andreessen's Dilemma
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://douthat.substack.com/p/decadence-and-andreessens-dilemma

## Highlights
- If the pandemic taught us anything significant about our future, then, it was that we need a different and more old-fashioned-American sort of culture — one in which “every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?”
- "Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges." A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also all of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege -- their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.
- I don't think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build -- and we are building -- online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.
- the less normative and more eccentric you are, along any dimension, the more the internet seems to offer that plain-old-embodied reality didn’t, whether your reality started in the suburbs or slums.
- stuff. But thus far in its history, all that digital technology has been a serious disappointment in terms of raising economy-wide productivity and living standards. Applying digital advances to solve big physical problems is what could change that.