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Comment by rafaelero | Hacker News Reader

I find this subject fascinating. We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative. I still think it's cringe how some subsections of society want to revive the traditional life ™. I mean, there's a reason we went away from that, so that ends up being very patronizing and unhelpful.

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I guess I'm a young person? Ish? is 28 old? I'm not sure.

Anyways its arrogant to say that when "the old ways" were only replaced in like the last 15-20ish years and people got on along well-enough before that without diseases of despair.

IMHO the only reason "the old ways" went away wasn't because the new way is better, but rather we humans have rather lazy, addictive personalities and so its easier and simpler to utilize the new tech-based ways even when in the long run we are much worse off for it. I don't even know how you can say the old ways were worse though, when its only been 15-20 years and society has changed so much. The old ways were around for a very long time.

> IMHO the only reason "the old ways" went away wasn't because the new way is better, but rather we humans have rather lazy, addictive personalities and so its easier and simpler to utilize the new tech-based ways even when in the long run we are much worse off for it.

I think they are clearly better, at least in principle. Extending civil respect to LGBTs, for example, is one of the outcomes of moving away from how things were in the past. We are in general finishing the project of the individualistic society, and any institution that is holding that back (religion, traditional gender roles, etc.) is losing ground.

I am very glad for freedom for individualisn but what we haven't yet done is mend the social web so to speak. We are still all cliquing and severing into groups. Where individualism imagines a community where everyone is themselves but together, comfortable with eachothers differences, what's actually happening is everyone is free to be themselves but they are ending up alone in their immediate communities.

I don't have solutions, I am just noting that we have some loose ends to follow up to make sure we can still have comfortable communities of very different individuals.

It’s worth remembering that the “traditional life” is more or less what’s left after every previous society experimented until it fell. We are experimenting now too, and will probably fall. Some of the experiments will work but also a mean reversion will likely occur.

Such is progress when you zoom out to the century scale.

That’s a common viewpoint of current times v older times on many topics. But it’s not like the 70s people were consciously building a narrative of free love, that’s just how the culture was at the time. Largely the narrative was not assessed and applied until after the fact. We have just as much of a narrative know, we just lack the ability to look at it independently and define it.

I don't know. Competition (be it to accomplish the best career, the best body, the best public persona) seems to be at an all time high. That suggests that we don't have any narrative that binds us and promote some type of cooperation. I could be wrong, but I don't think previous generations dealt with this level of individualism.

Late 40s guy here, I agree competition (for everything) seems much more intense now at all age levels. Wasn't like this when I was younger. As a person who prefers co-operation, I'm not liking it, and since that is my strength, it feels like I'm less able to excel in this environment.

the article cites Gurri’s book, which is relevant to this. you have your own narrative, i have my own narrative; when i strive to find a shared narrative with ever larger groups the only bit i can preserve is “the status quo should be radically changed” without consensus on what it should be changed to, which simplifies to “the status quo should be toppled”, and hence the shared narrative is simply one of destruction.

the narrative of destruction isn’t universal, but the binary divide between those who share it and those who do not almost maps to progressive v conservative groupings for those who accept the labeling.

> We young people have been detaching from the old ways of living without really building a new narrative.

George Hotz, are we living in a simulation (6 minutes)

https://youtu.be/_SpptYg_0Rs

You’re in a long line of youths suspect of the old fashioned ways. It always has and always will sound patronizing and unhelpful!

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