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Comment by virtuous_signal | Hacker News Reader

This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on <chosen social issue>.

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I have spoke to many people who have said that they feel that work has replaced their social life, myself included to a degree. It also means that people don't want to move on in their careers as they get too comfortable with their work family and pass on better opportunities. I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone. A close friend had to be prodded by his wife to apply for better positions in other areas to advance his salary. Another friend's wife refuses to get a better job because she likes her coworkers so much.

> I have a coworker who passed on a great opportunity just because he really likes working with everyone.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your tone makes me believe you think your coworker made the wrong decision.

I'm actually jealous of your coworker. Currently, if someone offered me a better career opportunity, I'd likely take it without hesitation; but I wish that weren't the case. I don't hate my current position, but I wish I loved it more to the point where leveling up, learning the newest framework, and making more money wasn't the priority.

On top of that, everyone around me seems to be more focused on the trajectory of their life rather than their current situation, so I feel like its hard for me to get out of this rat race mindset.

He did tell me directly that he regretted it later on. Though it didn't keep him up at night.

I think the current tech industry rat race and churn is socially stifling in the sense that you must become nomadic and chase opportunity. By the time you settle in its time to move again. I see people working the same job at the same company with families and homes who although make less than the average tech worker, appear to me much more happy and fulfilled in life.

Alternative proposition.

'Moving on in your career' may be horribly overrated, or at the very least not something everyone prioritises the same way.

Enjoying the work you do, and the people you do it with, and being satisfied by same, may be a sufficiently compelling reason to not engage in high-risk behaviour for the sake of 'advancing your salary'.

I strongly suspect that the cause of isolation is that we don't treat our workplaces as our community anymore.

My parents' community all met their spouses and friends at work, whereas people of my age seem to find something unprofessional about this. And I believe that old-fashioned civic organizations like the Elks were built from a tangle of professional relationships.

And realistically, where are you going to find a stronger community than among the people with whom you spend 40 hours a week?

People replace God with something else I have noticed. Many of the Atheists in the Atheists community in the United States started a new organisation called Atheism+, which alienated a lot of group and those in Atheism+ started added a lot of dogma, which I find as someone who observed the split from the outside in the UK to be somewhat ironic.

I am not religious myself (but I am slowly having a greater appreciation of religion as I get older).

Indeed, as an atheist I long ago recognized the value of religion even if I could not believe in myself.

The problem is that a lot of writing from ancient sources e.g. Bible, Confucius etc. get discounted because of the language used. If you actually think about what they actually meant at the time a lot of the time there is a lot of wisdom in it but because of the language used it is too dense for most modern readers.

Unfortunately a lot of atheists just decided they knew everything once they realised that the Bible wasn't the literal truth. Many Christians wouldn't claim that and Atheists tend to point at the likes of Ken Ham to strawman the rest of the Christianity.

However I do appreciate Christianity in Europe is very different than it is in the USA.

Sadly I think a number of atheists decided that an absence of religion meant that there was also an absence of morality, at least in any universal sense. Oddly that put them in agreement with the theists, even if neither realized it.

One of the benefits of religion as I see it is an establishment of a morality that rises above "that which is popular in the moment." Most people are too busy dealing with the minutiae of day-to-day living to sit back and ponder the philosophy of morality, and while some religions may hold unpalatable beliefs they at least have the virtue of being predictable as opposed to the temporary vagaries of the mob.

It's almost like our social bonds are being broken in the same way chemical bonds get broken when we digest food. Like our capitalist society is a higher-order organism that is extracting energy from our societal bonds.

I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted.

Sun Tzu wrote about humans acting as a bigger organism when an army work together as one.

And with that in mind, and with your comment on top of that, I wonder:

We generally agree that self-awareness is a sign of general intelligence, right? So if a group of people see them selves as one, in some sense, and act as one in some sense, then could we say that we are witnessing an organism that is built from people and that is elevated over the mind of just each of the individual people?

In the same way that we people are made of what I will very scientifically refer to as “a bunch of smaller stuff” but yet we are more than just the individual bits of stuff we are made of because as a whole each of us have our self-awareness and all that.

That is, something of higher general intelligence than its parts.

> I think this way of looking at it is interesting and I don’t see why your comment is currently being downvoted.

Many HN users seem to have a strong knee-jerk reaction against criticism of capitalism, however gentle or thoughtful.

Well perhaps the issue is that the comment had no justification to attach it to capitalism? Capitalism has been around much longer than the decline of these social bonds.

Has it though? The roman empire was a command economy, but there are obvious vestiges of the empire in our society still

I think that’s spot on and relates with what I understood after reading Pirsig’s “Lila: An inquiry into morals”, where he talks about inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual patterns, when introducing his Metaphysics of Quality[1]. Capitalism would be a social pattern that is made of us, as we’re made of our cells. And just the same, what’s best for the organism as a whole does not have to be the best for a specific individual cell.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qu...

Not saying capitalism is devoid of fault but it seems like consumerism is more directly to blame

Isn't consumerism caused by capitalism?

No?

Consumerism, at the least, is dependent on capitalism's core feature, generalized commodity production. So far, that seems true - was there any consumerism in pre-capitalist societies? I'd hazard a guess and say no. If consumerism is further driven by advertising, it depends on capitalism even more. This paper[0] persausively argues that consumerism is a consequence of specifically capitalist society, considered in its historical development.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/978047067059...

Perhaps, but does it have to be?

What force will stop it? Things are how they are because of the systems that exist. Changing how things are requires changing one or more things about those systems.

Sure but that doesn't mean entire existing systems need to be thrown out and replaced wholesale by completely different ideology-based systems

While I disagree, I never suggested that with my comment.

But a central tenet of Communism was dismantling all other social structures like religion. Modern technology under capitalism may be destroying these social structures over time, but communism did actively.

This whole comment just reeks of fanciful anti-capitalism with little real substance.

Pretending that the only alternative to modern capitalism is full-on Soviet-style communism does no one any good.

What a fascinating analogy. There's certainly a well-explored conception of Capitalism's benefiting from particularly "alienating social relations," but as I conceive if it, that benefit's not so much about deriving "energy" from breaking social bonds, as it is about lowering the cost of coercion. After all, social bonds can give us the self-confidence to stand up to our bosses orders, and to re-organize our work along lines less profitable to them and more profitable to, e.g. our church, community, family, selves, etc.

Is the Firm energized by alienating one worker from another? Is there, from that event, free energy? I don't think so. In fact, it's energetically costly to dis-organize social bonds, but for the Firm it's an investment in a more alienated--and therefore more vulnerable--future workforce.

If the firm extracted energy from social bonds, it would collect well-bonded groups, and "spend" them. Oh, wait. That's what acquisitions do, isn't it?

It's a commonplace today that people are defined by what they choose to consume; that one asserts their personal identity by what brands they buy and what media they watch. The ones who are selling membership in these "sub-cultures" therefore stand to gain from the destruction of any form of belongingness that they cannot sell as a commodity.

> people are defined by what they choose to consume

And are they not, also, affected by what they do not choose but nonetheless consume?

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