Humanity becomes more untilitarian with time

This idea reminds me of Robin Hansons Dreamtime Sequence:

• This is the Dream Time
• DreamTime
• Layers of Delusion

Given a similar freedom of fertility, most of our distant descendants will also live near a subsistence level. Per-capita wealth has only been rising lately because income has grown faster than population. But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10^3000, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10^70 atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes we have seen a remarkable demographic transition, wherein richer nations have fewer kids, but we already see contrarian subgroups like Hutterites, Hmongs, or Mormons that grow much faster. So unless strong central controls prevent it, over the long run such groups will easily grow faster than the economy, making per person income drop to near subsistence levels.

So for one there might be physical and economic reasons for this trend to continue but also shows how we shouldn't confuse this period, which will be considered to be so close (in time) to the big bang that it might as well be part of it, with ages to come. This might simply be a transitional phase from which we can draw no particular conclusion for how things will settle in the long run.

This would be the most lasting legacy of this, our explosively growing dream time, when what was once adaptive behavior with mostly harmless delusions become strange and dreamy unadaptive behavior, before adaptation again reasserted a clear-headed relation between behavior and reality.

There is an evolutionary pressure on media to be shiny and distracting.

Being closed to media is not an option, there is lots of useful stuff within the shiny and distracting. If humanity ever figures out a way to be open to media but filter out the shiny and distracting cruft then a subgroup that adopts that technology would do a lot better.

Creating this technology is like trying to create a spam filter but harder. It is one where you don't have a good way of determining what is shiny and distracting vs useful yourself.

It's such a cliché it almost pains me to mention it, but humans seem to be doing a lot of memetic rather genetic evolution nowadays. Mormons spawn more, but how many stay Mormon? Their memetic transformation ends up giving other, less-reproductive segments of society a larger number of descendants in some sense.

"untilitarian"?