The internet is making me sick | Hacker News Reader

The internet is making me sick

theoutline.com

22 pointscremno4 comments

I truly wonder when we, as a society, started to grow so fragile. So brittle that the slightest exposure to disagreeable ideas would make us shatter and lose ground. Education is supposed to give us tools to make us intellectually stronger. To give us enough critical sense to understand and confront. But all we can do is ignore and retreat. The fact that most triggered people are highly educated (cf. the safe spaces in colleges) looks like an indictment of our modern education system. Is it because we are bred by so much tittytainment that we cannot face displeasing thoughts or situations? Or because we are so strongly formatted to see the world in one shade that we feel threatened when we are confronted to other shades. Or are we simply so bored of being content and fed that as a result we are becoming intellectual hypochondriacs? Regardless of the cause, I am not hopeful for the future of our intellectual elite.

I believe it's a combination of things.

- everyone gets a trophy/self esteem movement. We've been taught that no matter what happens we will be told it's good. We never learned to challenge ourselves.

- the move to socialising primarily online. It's very easy to find people who have the same opinions as you. People avoid useful discourse that allows both people to grow and become more aware. It promotes extremism on every side.

- a quickly changing world. The path our parents and grandparents followed to live a good life isn't guaranteed to work today. Blindly going to college and getting a degree is one of the biggest mistakes young adults can make today.

Humans are emotional creatures that don't have a modern guide to living their life.

There's two ways this can change: on the level of the individual or at a societal level.

The individual changes by realising their own needs aren't being met and taking responsibility for it.

Socially I believe things can only change by having something quite dramatic happen. Though the recession was something dramatic yet everyone complained about "the economy" rather than doing something for themselves.

Nonsense, Internet is run by Google and Facebook. Thats clusterfuck!

Google and Facebook playing moral police and disabling peoples accounts if they opimions are not aligned with they sick and twisted ones.

Avoid these: google and facebook. They spy, steal your data, read your emails, track you and sell your private information to highest bidder.

Well that is the price you pay for their services. People just don't understand or don't care that they pay with their data. In my opinion this is a totally valid business model nothing to avoid. I think the autor is complaining about his personal filter bubble not committing to his standard. If you don't like the garbage on Twitter don't use it who cares about that crap anyways.

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