Yes, this post and his brand is full of “humble” values and what not. He may be genuine, but I don’t think it’s praiseworthy. It feels like a tool for virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling is when a person trumpets their moral stance without a willingness to make any significant investment in it. This guy investing 10,000 hours into the project disqualifies it from that moniker.
Perhaps the appellation is an empty way to dismiss someone without engaging them?
Of course not.
I was simply responding to the idea that a significant investment is all it takes to counter the claim that some activity is virtue signaling.
Buying a Prius vs. buying a non-Prius is hardly a significant investment for people who make that choice.
I guess the more proper word here would be sacrifice, something you never get back.
Your phrasing implies that dismissing someone without engaging someone is a bad thing. On the contrary it’s recognizing that most people’s opinions are based on nothing but their sense of community identity and aren’t worth engaging at all.
For the great majority of people $30,000 is a non-trivial investment, one they must live with for years. Other than buying a house or having children, it is the most expensive thing most people will buy.
(ignore the exact dollar figures below .. I'm not car literate, but hopefully you'll get the idea).
Say someone bought a Mazda Miata, did the paperwork, and the dealer then sent them home in a Prius. What are the odds they would shrug and say, "Oh, ok, one $30K car is the same as any other $30K car." Zero. If the had wanted a Prius he would have bought the Prius, but he valued the Miata higher. In your scenario, the Prius buyer really wanted a different car, but was willing to buy the Prius because they wanted the world to think they were green. Fine ... but then they gave up something of value to make the statement: they will not to get to drive the car they really desired.
Is it really so impossible to imagine that someone would truly prefer to buy a Prius on its merits and not because it is making a statement?
It's this sort of broad usage that makes me feel "virtue signaling" doesn't have any descriptive value any more.
There is nothing wrong with giving $100 to a person in need, while looking all smug and dressed up, and then... the world congratulates you by giving you a lot more than you gave. Rather than... I don't know, donate the $10k to several people in need to begin with? There is a disgusting fakeness associated with all of these things. A pretense of "Look at me! We are the good guys", while we are filthy narcissistic greedy people under the skin instead. Using somebody else's misery to feed our messiah complex.
Or like those shitty "SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS", will people enjoy being around a hot mom breastfeed in public, but look down on a non-attractive mom breastfeeding in public? Facebook is littered with crap, staged, cheap money-grab, "experiments" like this.
It's like, an action that is acted on seemingly selflessly but contains hidden catches and motives.
It's not bad... just.. icky. I call this the Valentines-day-complex. It pretends to be a celebration of love, but under the hood it's all about chocolates and flowers and spending. It doesn't have to be about spending... but about spending it will be!
Pass.
In the end a person in need ended up with a hundred extra bucks, I’m hard pressed to think of negatively really.
Ideally we’d root out the societal issues which leave so many people outside in our nation’s big cities.
I don't understand your problem with people doing something tedious, somewhat interesting, that they might actually enjoy, that others might actually enjoy, and attempting to monetize it. Maybe the sponsorship works to make it worthwhile, maybe it doesn't, who cares?
But I don’t care what he does. It was just a comment. You’ve made several that imply I care a lot, which makes me seem unreasonable. If that was unintentional, please don’t do that. If that was intentional then go suck a different lemon, because I’m really not that bitter about this.
I think its completely benign.
I would be a little annoyed if the stranger’s life was a fake feel good story like the ones seen on Linkedin these days, but even then I would just accept the entertainment for what it is: entertainment. Ad supported entertainment.