woopah

That's great to hear! It's awesome when people decide to tackle longer books. I think the matter of our (declining) attention spans and what it does to our spirit is something DFW thought a lot about, for example in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8juL7cdGj40. It seems remarkably prescient for our age, but perhaps it also suggests that being present and engaged is actually a perennial problem.

I suspect the author is reacting less to the decline of literature and cultural elitism specifically and more to the general decline of those critical thinking skills that you gain by engaging in difficult works. I actually don't think anyone needs to read all of "the classics" and there's no point gatekeeping "intelligence" behind Shakespeare. If you feel like you had your brain expanded through, I don't know, Marvel movies, then the more power to you, but the key is that you are able to actually reflect on the work instead of just saying "well that was fun."

What is happening, however, is that people are getting increasingly acclimated to consuming easily-digestible content because our lives are ruled by a couple of companies who make money off of your attention and the human brain struggles to sustain focus through friction, even though the way we actually learn and question our lives is through that difficulty. Unfortunately, social media isn't the only culprit because almost all media that gets sold suffers from forced participation in the attention economy, although social media is probably one of the worst culprits just because the form factor makes it so easy to consume brain-rotting content.

I guess all that to say, I think the problem is fundamentally structural and thus essentially bound to happen because of the way our society and economy is organized, so I'm not sure what there is to do about this. Maybe we can all collectively decide to power through the lack of dopamine and actively choose content that is more difficult but also more edifying to force the algorithms to optimize for something more substantive.

Good point, I guess another way to reduce inequality is by your ruling party having an extremely ideological stance, pragmatics be damned, although I imagine most people wouldn't prefer this method

I think people also have a natural tendency to assume that the amount you are paid is correlated to how difficult the job is, which isn't quite true. The market value of a role has a lot of additional factors besides how intrinsically difficult the actual job is such as supply and demand and the funding source. Programmers may have been able to demand high salaries partially because the explosion in demand came faster than the explosion in supply.

While it is true that a programmer's job is a lot more than writing code, I also wonder to what extent that businesses will actually be able to tell a good programmer from a bad one. For example, a lot of folks at big companies can honestly get away with being a ticket-taking code monkey because so much of the responsibility has been abstracted away so that they don't actually get punished for not caring about the customer. It's sort of similar to how many schools realistically wouldn't care to distinguish between a teacher who puts in extra effort into their classroom versus one who clocks in and clocks out as long as some bare minimums were being met.

I think strong programmers will get rewarded in the right companies that need them, but it's still an open question as to how many companies exist that have their bottom lines actually depend on a programmer doing a good job at wearing all those extra hats.

Definitely agree with this! Given the pace of technological development, we should basically expect entire groups of people to constantly drop out of the competitive labor market. Don't get me wrong, new jobs will be created as well, but it's also very possible many people will also not be able to reskill into those new roles without some sort of structural support. People have faith that technology will create new markets and roles, and while that's historically been true, I think people also tend to forget that this happens in aggregate, and that someone's personal career trajectory can be largely luck dependent. You may happen to find the role of the future or you might get stuck with depreciating skills, hard to say which unless you can predict the future!

I think we've largely been able to avoid large scale disruption in society for the past several decades because the groups losing their careers were small enough, but we can see negative effects in things like health data. I think Deaths of Despair by Deaton and Case does a pretty good job at talking about this. However, AI now threatens a much more visible work segment, the upper middle class, so I do agree that now is a very interesting time to see what happens.

While it's true that a lot of China's conveniences come from essentially labor market arbitrage and rural/urban inequality, the fact that the Netherlands can afford to attempt to reduce wealth inequality is a sign itself that it's a very wealthy country. I would also prefer the pace of life in the Netherlands, but I wonder to what extent you also have to buy more fairness and a slower pace of life?

As always, correlation is not causation, so it's very possible that the people who tend to be happier also tend to maybe fit into society better and thus get higher paying jobs, not that you necessarily need to make X/year to be happier.

It is still interesting to see how the actual numbers shake out though, especially the section on how the income quintile groups actually scale linearly instead of log linearly with reported happiness.

What about making it a daily style game where you have to guess which book the opening is from?

I also see the decline of reading, at least more "serious" long-form works, partly as an extension of the cult of productivity. Why read a 300 page book on something when you can get 75% of the main points in a 30s TikTok video? What's the point of "beautiful" language if it makes the sentence twice as long? I once had a coworker refer to Washington's farewell address as "deprecated" English, and he wasn't interested in reading it at all unless it was compressed down to an easily digestible structure.

Similar to the sentiments expressed in the article, I do think something is lost when your mind is no longer allowed to wander before getting "to the point," but it's hard to articulate this loss clearly without reaching for vague justifications like "aesthetics". However, I also don't think we should force our kids just to read for the sake of reading; I think there should be some intrinsic desire to read a well-articulated sentence, whether it be from books or articles or even Twitter, and it's the seeming lack of that desire which is sad to see.

It was a pleasant surprise to see that the article wasn't about bashing on Bourdain at all. I was a little scared when I opened it.

Like the author, I'm also a little conflicted about travel and tourism. I love seeing how other people live life differently than mine, but I wonder to what extent this becomes a weird poverty fetishization. I also haven't fully decided how to feel when a once-niche place becomes big. On the one hand, it brings life to the local economy, but on the other hand, somehow it loses "authenticity", whatever that means. I currently only travel when I have a specific reason for being there like a certain event or attraction because I find it rather hollow to just be going from tourist attraction to tourist attraction, but maybe that's just a me problem.

I think this article mostly says what we already know about the negative effects of too much screen time, but I personally always struggle to follow the basic mitigating advice like look away every 20 minutes and exercise for a little bit each day :')