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Comment by shanusmagnus | Hacker News Reader

One (of many possible) ways to characterize the article is that social media, and our online lives, have restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones. This resonates with me. A related phenomenon I've been thinking about -- or maybe it's the same exact one -- concerns limited emotional range.

Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents, as they did to the full gamut of emotional experiences that people were built to deal with, but which modern life rarely elicits.

The implications of this hypothesis are unclear to me, but one candidate is that small and relatively unimportant issues that would hardly have been recognized in the past, become magnified so greatly that they can bring a group to the point of civil war or dissolution.

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> restricted our emotional repertoires the way junk food has restricted our dietary ones.

/me wonders if you've read a little book "Digital Vegan" [1] :)

> Hypothesis: people still apply all their emotional machinery to the very restricted emotional universes that modern life presents,

Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise. Perhaps the intensity has gone up, but the range and nuance has shrunk?

Interesting development I saw; Royal Marines started introducing "emotional intelligence literacy". Unsurprisingly the recruits hated it and thought it was "politically correct sissy stuff". Upshot was a measurable decrease in losses and incidents resulting from hot-headed decision making, poor judgement in the heat of anger etc. Emotional Intelligence now features highly in selection.

It may be that the highest "EQ" self-exclude from social media.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net

The digital vegan idea is interesting and I hadn't heard of it -- thank you. I think physiological metaphors have much to offer in thinking about online life. A sort of 'emotional hysteresis' akin to insulin resistance is another one I reach for frequently; and, like with IR, fasting seems to be a surprisingly effective intervention for the digital version of the pathology, though of course you have to apply it repeatedly to counter the 'dietary' excess.

> Is modern life flattened with respect to emotion? Incendiary Twitter traffic and torrents of "hate speech" everywhere would imply otherwise.

Maybe an example will be helpful to make this less abstract.

Most Westerners are far safer, physically, than they have ever before. They are less likely to starve to death, get eaten by a bear, be murdered, die of exposure or of an infected hang-nail. And yet, I suspect that even in the midst of this relative luxury and safety, we are just as miserable as when danger from all causes was drastically increased.

Put more mathematically, I suspect that people react emotionally to a problem of magnitude 4 as people 200 years ago reacted to a problem of magnitude 9, because progress has skewed the distribution of modern hazards so radically that the far ends of the scale are almost never experienced. So in a world of small problems, the largest small problems feels large because the brain is bad at absolutes.

> people react emotionally to a problem of magnitude 4 as people 200 years ago reacted to a problem of magnitude 9

A most interesting thought that I'll reflect on. Thank you. Anecdotally, I've seen adults turn pale, silent and shaky at the prospect of a lost smartphone.

200 years ago the western world reacted with magnitude 9 to the thought of an independent woman or African American, or a homosexual. Shockingly some westerners still do. While we've moved further towards a post-scarcity world, forced artificial scarcity to prop up 200-year-old economic models has become problematic. Perhaps you now have this potential access to more "luxury"(education, healthcare, housing, transport, communication), but no way to actually afford it without massive debt. You end up with a lot of people feeling insecurity about their future & the end goal of society as a whole.

There's something to be said for what you're saying. It is for sure legit that a pretty consequential risk today -- saying something dumb on Twitter and becoming unemployable in your chosen career for 5 years -- is not a thing that had to be worried about before. I acknowledge that this really does happen and it is a real thing for some people. In order to make a comment that was not completely larded with disclaimers, I didn't mention this kind of thing in my original remark.

However.

I don't care how much it hurts to be canceled, or how ponderous your student loans are, or how sad you are that you can't afford a house. Shortly before my own lifetime, my parents worried about being ruined for good when an industry moved out of our Midwestern town. They wondered how they would literally eat if that were to happen. Where could they go? What could they do? Even in the midst of current uncertainties, these worries are laughably remote for almost everyone not on the far tail of the socioeconomic distribution, a membership that includes far fewer people than ever before in history. I volunteered at a homeless shelter during peak COVID. The state of those homeless folks, vs the state of my family from the rural Midwest a few decades earlier, would be unfathomable to those who had not personally witnessed both.

Progress is real. That it doesn't _feel_ real for some is exactly my point.

Was your family being threatened by bears? Why do you mention 200 years ago initially, but your anecdote is from the 90s? Do you think they were crying wolf or overreacting and not appreciating the 170 years of progress that preceded them? Perhaps progress isn't as swift or tangible as you think it is?

I think appealing to the past generations being "a tougher breed" to undermine the current concerns of now is a weak argument. A lot of people were just told to shut up and know their place or literally die.

I use the example because I can speak to my and my family's experience directly.

I think life or death -- the prospect of starving or being homeless without recourse from relations or from society -- is different from the prospect of being stressed for other reasons. That people mistake more benign stressors for "life or death" these days is the hypothesis I am proffering.

And while I expect that you intend it as a dunk, I'll grant the point unreservedly: I very much _do_ think people were tougher in previous eras. When I read about the lives of our predecessors, and what they endured and how they bore up under it, I feel disgusted with myself. They were not perfect moral gods, but tougher? Jesus, yes.

Obviously you can speak to your family's experience, but your argument seemed to suggest they would have no room to complain compared their predecessors from 170 years ago. I don't know your exact family's story, but 30 years ago was not that long ago, and the problems faced then, many still face today. Homelessness and hunger are still major issues. Medical debt is still the largest contributor to bankruptcies. On top of this you have a major pandemic, re-stoking of cold war tensions and women's rights being rewound to the 70s.

When I look back at history I am more disgusted with the rampant exploitation that occurred, which made lives harder, an issue yet to be solved in the modern era. Sure people survived, but living a hard life is nothing anyone should aspire to, nor a reason society should be telling someone to "suck it up and stop whining".

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