agent008t

I would love to see that stats on that, but it somehow seems like it is more common in the US than in, say, Denmark or the UK even. But then, my perception is primarily from:

1. US TV shows, where it seems like all kinds of drug use is more normalized

2. US 'high-status' culture seeming very odd - this whole thing about people having to always appear positive, high-energy, always busy (partly what I see from US TV shows, partly what my own experience) just doesn't seem sustainable without some sort of drug support.

Is substance abuse not more common in the more rural communities though? Is it not just a 'grass is greener' effect?

Anybody interested in this should play Policenauts. It is an amazing game by Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear fame. It features lots of details like that about life in space, very fleshed out, and is just altogether one of the best games ever made.

There is also an amazing English translation, and a blog on how it was done: https://lparchive.org/Policenauts/Update%2042/

Event better - instead of a conference call, why not just have the discussion in HN format? Is it not far more efficient?

You can have multiple threads of conversation at the same time; it relies on arguments, not charisma; it easier to search, index and reference; it is faster to read than to listen; it is 'greener' in every way.

So what would your advice be? Delay having children? Not have children? Only have children if the mother is prepared to do most of the work raising them? Something else?

It seems like having children is something you may enjoy in 30-40 years - or rather will potentially prevent feeling miserable and alone in 30-40 years. But in the short term - at least 2-3 years, but likely much longer - it can be quite miserable.

Now, given that we don't know how long we get to live and what sort of health we will be in, time when you are younger seems more valuable than time when you are older. That would suggest that having children is often a bad idea, unless you strongly believe that you will enjoy the whole experience. But then, imagining what my own parents' and grandparents' life would be like today had they not had children, it seems like it would be far worse. But their circumstances were very different, too.

Just go for a hike together?

I thought the pandemic showed us all that we don't need to pay anyone money to connect. We could just go for a walk together and talk. If that unnecessary massive part of the economy was to disappear, we would have more free time to connect, too.

Phone cameras were popular before iPhones.

The kind that has to keep working 5 days a week while you don't certainly could. Not saying they would, but it is a real possibility.

Except family and friends could become resentful of you, the 6 billion people may have no time for you, and you could end up alone and irrelevant.

Enter association with other people and assume obligations and responsibilities? That's not too different from having a job or a career.

Just what I see in London - business areas now look as full of people as they ever were.

There does not seem to be much appetite for freeing up hours lost commuting. We just had a massive experiment in WFH which appeared to be a massive success, yet there seems little appetite to build on it.

Do you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has gone way down, but the number of users as well.

I guess the fact that every generation seems to have moral panics about new technology (radio, tv, video games, internet), and every generation seems to complain about the decline of pop culture, led many reasonable people to adopt the heuristic that this is all just the talk of old curmudgeons, and new fads are no worse than old fads.

But what if facebook, instagram, youtube etc. are actually harmful? What if modern pop culture is toxic trash compared to that of the previous decades? What if popular music has, in fact, been getting worse?

There was also a government during the collapse of the Roman Empire, which surely must qualify for any reasonable definition of a 'collapse of global civilization'.

The US going through something akin to what happened to the USSR would be a similar event for today's world, given the massive role that the US plays in the current world order.

Depends on what is meant by 'global civilisation', but it has happened several times in many countries during the 20th century. The US has been immune to events like that throughout its short history, so there seems to be a very strong sense of "can't happen here", but it can. These things happen and people live through them. It's not a collapse you'd see in a Hollywood movie, in real life it is more mundane.

Just look at what happened with the collapse of the USSR, for example - that was just 30 years ago and affected a massive part of the world. Hyperinflation, many people had to resort to small-scale farming to feed themselves, specialists and academics with advanced degrees had to become taxi drivers and many older people had to resort to dumpster diving to survive. Crime of all sorts went way up. All sorts of factories/organisations/societies/buildings were near abandoned/were sold off for scrap and became derelict.

How did you manage to get two girlfriends? Do they get along? Have you written about your experience anywhere? I'd love to read it.

There are a lot of reasons to get the newest phone with the best features, and many of those reasons are not wholesome ones.

For example, my iPhone 6 is getting obsolete just because it would not get latest iOS updates. Many apps are no longer supporting the old OS version. Yet these apps are not video games requiring the latest hardware - they are simply glorified web pages. There is no objective reason for why the phone could not run them.

It is worse than useless. You do not need social media to call someone - on phone or on video, to send an email, organize an online game, chat on whatever messenger (Why do we need a new one every few months?) or even send a snail mail letter. Even an old-style message board is better for social interactions than social media.

Some (a lot?) of economic activity seems to be self-serving, not making our lives better (and sometimes making them worse). The lockdowns demonstrated that very well. For example: social media (doesn't add anything beneficial, makes us less social); 'influencers'; a good chunk of the hospitality industry; anything to do with crypto.

Very often, free alternatives / those not involving 3rd parties, simpler living, are better for us overall. But if more expensive options are available, we are pressured to take them so that we are not left behind / feel like we fit in / have a social life.

Also, at some point certain things are just 'good enough', and marginal improvements require a ton of effort but don't make life better. For example, mobile phones - an 8 year old phone would work just fine, if not for forced obsoletion. Yet tons of effort go into very marginal improvements, because if you don't do it, your competitors will.

The public can be informed of 'what is out there' without ads. Word of mouth, trusted review/digest media that would attempt to do an honest comparison of offerings while avoiding conflicts of interest.

The only things ads may be good for are for funding things that might otherwise have required explicit payments.

A 999 year term sounds like a long time, but time flies; before you know it, 980 years would have passed, and you would be wondering why you didn't buy a freehold instead...

I agree with you, particularly when it comes to information consumption. On-demand services are bad enough; cleverly optimized services that push content are even worse.

But in some ways, if you hang out in the right circles, being healthy is a lot easier today. Alcohol consumption seems to be down, people exercise a lot more, being out of shape in your 30s is not seen as 'the norm'. So it is probably easier psychologically to go for a jog now when parks are full of joggers than to do it in 1950s when people would think a 30-something person out for a jog is a bit strange.

In this way, healthy fads can actually be very positive. I find it very likely that in the near future a culture will emerge that tries to minimize the use of technology and information hygiene becomes a part of 'normal' life.

You have probably watched them but '5cm per second', 'Garden of words' and others from Makoto Shinkai are very good.

Kaiji and Akagi were both amazing!

Also plusses of cities:

- possibly shorter commute (walk/cycle to work)

- anonymity - you probably won't even know who your neighbours are

Minuses:

- you won't have a house, decent living space or any land. So a lot of hobbies and recreational activities won't be available to you (gardening, barbecue, woodwork, proper cooking, home gym in the garage - even having a cat could be problematic)

- anonymity - you probably won't even know who your neighbours are

Another thing to note is that the income distribution in London seems bimodal. And so if you are earning a good amount, you may still find it a bad idea to assume similar good income in the future and therefore not want to get into a huge mortgage.

So yes, you may technically be able to afford a decent house, but in practice find it a very bad idea to do so. E.g. imagine if the OP got herself into a massive mortgage - she would feel even more trapped than she is now.

This is also where philosophy can help. I would recommend reading Seneca's 'Letters from a Stoic'.

I wouldn't say that growth through eating is unnatural though.

I was just pointing out that a baby does not gain weight faster than it ever will again in its life, in absolute terms. That's all. Not sure why I got the downvotes and no-true-scotsman arguments in return.

You talked about weight gain, in absolute terms. A novice powerlifter can easily put on both more absolute weight and absolute strength in a year than a newborn.