Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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> A lot of the world, to me, is just not acting like tomorrow will come, metaphorically.

Not even metaphorically. People literally behave like the time horizon for the consequences of their choices is shrinking. This explains so much of the zeitgeist:

- Hustle culture. Better climb to the top of the hill fast because the metaphorical/literal floodwaters are rising.

- The doom and gloom of progressive culture, which used to be much more positive. If we don't fix these cultural problems right now, it means we'll never fix them because there's no future, and if we'll never fix them, we lost. Therefore, we failed and should feel morally miserable.

- The plummeting birthrate. Who would want to bring a child into a dying world?

- Dropping rates of marriage. Why make a long-term relationship commitment when "long-term" doesn't even mean anything?

- Anti-work. Why work hard now to save up for a retirement or future stability when you won't be there to enjoy it? (There are other entirely valid reasons to be critical of capitalism, of course.)

> It will, though, and to me the interesting implication is that it seems a fantastic time to build new long-term things.

This is an incredible insight. Now is a perfect time for long-term bets because everyone else is undervaluing them.

Also, it's just straight up more psychologically healthy and objectively likely to believe in a positive future.

If you follow Ray Dalio, he hypothesizes a lot of what we're seeing is due to decadence. Specifically, newer generations expect a high living standard but are not actually as rich as prior generations to support that living standard. At the same time, the population spends on decadent luxury goods instead of productive goods (which you can see in deindustrialization and the rapid expansion of low quality goods on Amazon).

If you look at the history of the Roman Empire you see a lot of similarities. Increasing living standards means people aren't willing to work as hard as their predecessors because they already have it pretty good. That leads to a loss of competitiveness, loss of competent political leadership (because why struggle in politics when you don't have to?), and increasing corruption. At the same time, people continue to purchase luxury goods to maintain their living standard rather than re-invest in productive assets that might decrease their living standard.

Ah, decadence is such an interesting word to bring up. It does fit the feel of our times because it implies both having a lot but yet also a certain moral emptiness.

Every time inequality comes up here on HN, someone always pipes up to say, "Consumers are able to afford more goods today than they ever have. We're doing fine." And, sure, I get we can have more shirts, games, a processed food than ever. Yes, definitely some of those material goods are important (clean water, healthy food, medicine, shelter).

But there is clearly something missing in our lives, and "decadence" describes it exactly. We have too much of things that don't mean anything and too little of the things that mean everything.

I think this is why we're already starting to see a shift towards platforms like Etsy rather than Amazon -- people are realizing that goods become worthless when you can just obtain anything. Personalization is going to be big in the next few years.

I can just see some salivating HN startup candidate pitching, "We'll use AI to automate creating personalized products!"

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