Hacker News Reader

Comment by noname123 | Hacker News Reader

Nah, bro. The most difficult thing about modern life are choices. In a small town or elementary school, you are friends with everybody because those are the only people you can be friends with.

Life gets more complicated as you move from elementary school to middle, high, undergrad school and the real world as you are forced to make more choices about the people that you choose to hang out with. That's why people go to grad school, participate in a hobby, or join a sub-culture to make their world smaller again and limit their choices to make themselves happier.

View on HN

> That's why people go to grad school, participate in a hobby, or join a sub-culture to make their world smaller again and limit their choices to make themselves happier.

I don't think people do those things to limit their choices to make themselves happier.

I think they do those things because the act of being at grad school, or enjoying a hobby or sub-culture makes them happy.

In other words, people don't do those things to socialize with fewer people; they do those things because they enjoy doing them. Socializing with people who enjoy the same things they do is a pleasant side-effect.

Ask how to make friends and everybody will tell you to have a hobby or join a club.

And when you do, you indeed meet people who only do these things because they enjoy them, already have enough friends and no time for new ones.

Or maybe it just looks that way to me when I'm in a bad mood like now.

That's true bro. But I don't think it's because other people aren't interested in you or don't have time for new friends. I think it's because in these situations when you are the new kid to the social clique/workplace/club, the onus is on you to take initiative to make friends. Sure there are probably ass-holes but you probably don't want to bother with them anyways. But most people are friendly if you make the move, but they'll never know that you are interested in bromance/romance if you never do.

Hell, people in the club probably think you are the one with so many friends that you don't want to talk to them because you are just there for the hobby.

I completely disagree. You give too much credit to humanity.

People go to grad school, join a hobby or sub-culture for validation and then later, they rationalize it later. "Screw those Wall St. guys, I'm making a difference with my research!/I may not be as rich as those corporate drones, but I'm an artist with an interesting life!/At least I'm rich and money can truly buy anything!"

Most people (including myself) will never make a choice based on their intrinsic values. Not even CS nerds that go to CS grad school - publishing and presenting a well-cited paper to your peers or launching your startup based on that paper is flaunting your status in academia/Silicon Valley.

Grigori Perelman/J.D Salinger is probably the closest well-known people who only do things because they enjoy doing them. But even they are big phonies by making a big ruckus about how they are not phonies.

> In a small town or elementary school, you are friends with everybody because those are the only people you can be friends with.

Basically. So if or when that goes sour, what do you do? In a small town you're up the creek.

> That's why people go to grad school, participate in a hobby, or join a sub-culture to make their world smaller again and limit their choices to make themselves happier.

And in a small town you have less choices about which schools to attend, clubs to join, sub-cultures, etc. You started out with "Nah, bro." and then supported my argument. Unless I'm missing something.

lol. What I mean bro, is that let's say you like to wear red shirts but everyone in your small town likes to wear green shirts (trying to pick the most PC example in today's PC world).

So you say, "man I hate all those green-shirts wearing bro's, I'm gonna move out to San Francisco/Portland/NYC/Seattle/Boston where red shirts are not only welcomed but celebrated!" So you move out to the big city to the soundtrack of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing..."

At first everything goes well, you see all of these symbols/paraphernalia/newspaper articles in your adopted city supporting the red shirts and you go to all of the red shirts social gathering or whatever, thinking "wow, everyone here is really into supporting the red-shirts clause." But then you slowly realize that not all red shirts are equal, there are skinny red shirts, fat red shirts, conservative and liberal redshirts, redshirts that sometimes like to mix it up and wear green-shirts and even "redshirts-wearing bros"!

It's human nature to discriminate and to stratify people into hierarchy. More people in one place leads to more structure, hierarchy and discrimination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com