Comment by subhobroto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subhobroto | Hacker News Reader

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> 1000% agreed. Everything about current life has done a good job siloing and isolating people to be nothing but worker drones. There is no sense of community, no sense of belonging to something, or even being allowed to be human.

It's not something that happened by accident.

People like it and gravitate towards it.

Doing one, and preferably only one thing is really comforting.

When my friends who live in the city complain that their sink is backing up and how hard it is to get a plumber even after offering $350/visit, I listen to the symptoms, figure out the tools needed, pay a visit and fix the problem.

When I tell them how easy it is to diagnose a plumbing problem, and how next time they don't need to pay me in beers or even the plumber - they are just. not. interested.

Writing the same React application a 100 times is far more enjoyable (and profitable).

People really like to say they want to do more things in life, but when push comes to a shove, doing the same old thing, repeatedly, is extremely comforting.

Doing different things is risky and non-comforting.

That takes deliberate practice and planning.

Personally I find I gravitate towards what your friends are like when I am tired, or stressed or pulled in too many directions. I just want a problem solved and not another thing taking up brain space.

If I'm feeling chill, and not tired then I'm much more interested in learning something new, and solving my own problems.

>People really like to say they want to do more things in life, but when push comes to a shove, doing the same old thing is extremely comforting.

Your react app example is an interesting one because it touches on the profit motive. Yes, it's easier to be disinterested in say, your plumbing example, but how much of that is due to genuine disinterest and how much is due to the constant implicit pressure to produce produce produce?

General Personal growth (including being able to diagnose issues with say your plumbing) takes a back seat to personal growth that can net you the most amount of money and the constant grind of needing to prove your monetary value to society.

Simply put, yes there is a bit of the human condition to being interested in what's safe, and what you know, but there's also the implicit need to be hyper-specialized in an unhealthy way in order to maximize your output, to the detriment of everything else and for me personally, the latter is definitely where I fall to the absolute detriment of my own mental health. And that is where I think we are failing as a society.

> And that is where I think we are failing as a society.

For sure!

I would love your inputs on my thoughts on this topic but I'm in a conundrum:

1. If I put a link to my thought, people flag my post as self promotion

2. If I copy paste my thoughts more than once on the same thread, people flag my post as adding noise, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961683

So I guess the only thing I can do now is kindly request you to look at my recent post history on this thread.

I agree that one can learn many things in life, and that there is some level of basic knowledge and skill that's very healthy for everyone to have.

One of the cornerstones of modern society is however specialization; there simply isn't enough time to learn everything.

I'm not sure how plumbing charts on the scales. Probably it's just something people usually avoid if they can find someone else to do it.

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