Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

"Hanging out" has been the resting state of humans for 99% of humanity [1] [2].

That is to say, most of our time as humans has been spent sitting around with other people telling stories and sharing our feelings and thoughts. Full stop.

The fact that loneliness is so pervasive is a symptom of the larger social crisis that will certainly be our ruin.

Simply hanging out with strangers, being vulnerable, giving and receiving emotional and physical care in platonic ways with no social expectations, is one of the key things we need to do to get humanity onto a safe trajectory.

[1] Chan, E.K.F., et al. (2019) Human origins in a southern African Paleo-wetland and first migrations. Nature 575, 185–189

[2]Sahlins, Marshall (2009). Hunter-gatherers: insights from a golden affluent age. Pacific Ecologist. 18: 3–8

> most of our time as humans has been spent sitting around with other people telling stories and sharing our feelings and thoughts.

We replaced that with spending most of our time listening to made-up narratives by massive media companies who share portfolios with financial scammers and military contractors.

Podcasts especially scratch this itch of "hanging out" with other people in the most alienated and commerce intermediated way

Can all this pent-up trauma be undone?

I think so but it's going to take centuries of serious dedicated work by millions of patient, sophisticated and persistent non-violent pro-social volunteers.

This is the path in my view:

1. Mutual cooperatives become the dominant form of labor organization over corporations (definitely possible)

And

2. Mutual Aid Communities become the dominant form of social organization over Churches and Families (harder but I think still possible)

Great ideas!! Especially the concept of mutual aid communities, I bet they could be implemented right now. If only we could get a bunch of engineers to build a worldwide, decentralized, nonprofit platform to organize them...

As a society, we need to grieve. We need time to grieve, yes, but we also need a process. We need permission to grieve: we need to let ourselves grieve.

Not just for the dead, but for the shocking loss of this or that imagined future.

And this process is going to be weird, and we'll hardly recognize ourselves, but of course nothing fundamental will have changed.

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