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Comment by mym1990 | Hacker News Reader

mym1990

I feel like it should just be "Humans are and have always been characterized by their failure to plan for the future". All of history is just a rise and fall of empires due to unforeseen or unexpected consequences, followed by an advance in technology. Who are you to say that gen X or any other generation will correctly plan for the future(as we currently navigate some of the biggest hurdles to humanity and the Earth in general)?

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My thought on this, is that a lot of humans plan like they're playing a game they expect to end tomorrow. The wealth stuff feels like people don't want to spend money, because they're afraid they'll fall off the leader board. In a Game Theory sense, that means always choose "backstab", cause "cooperate" might never pan out.

There's also a lot of selfish, and "I want to win" or "I want my sport team to win", and I don't really want to have children (except I want my sport team to win), or pay for anything, or build any infrastructure, or let the other team accomplish anything, cause that's not winning existence. I don't really want to live here, I want to win (and go to the next level). The UK is stilll talking about "leveling up" this and that. So existence has become this terrible place where a lot of people mostly fantasize about existing anywhere else. Cause you can't leave, but you can't stay here.

In a horrible Machiavellian interpretation, I want to score a lot, and keep other people from scoring (gender interactions also obviously have a "scoring" idea).

It won’t ever be so black and white. Certainly some cultures place less emphasis on the future, but western culture definitely revolves around long term goals of building a family/retiring, etc…

I think a lot of people are choosing not to have kids mainly for 2 reasons: it is getting extremely expensive to raise a child, and the uncertainty of the next 20-40 years makes people hesitant to put their kids into that environment.

Social and economic welfare is not a zero sum game, I don’t need to ruin the lives of all of my competitors in order to win, that would actually be disastrous.

Except personal preferences are mostly irrelevant from the momentum of society. Because of acting that way, an immediate disadvantage in America results. The Kardashians, Swift, Santos, Thomas (also every other Supreme Court Justice [1]), Kalanick, SBF, Trump, Bezos' yacht, Musk's Twitter strobe [2], Epstein [3], Harvard making more than the NSF while taking NSF money [4] (+corrupt professors and lawsuits for bonus points [5]), flat wages since 1980 [6], preferential exploitation of loyal workers [7], and 42 million on food stamps [8] say that machiavellian, narcissistic, psychopaths generally get rewarded in America.

[1] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/16/lets-just-say-...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0pH_XMUSA

[3] https://archive.org/details/jeffrey-epstein-39s-little-black...

[4] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/10/harvard-endowment-su...

[5] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/9/25/pierson-sulliva...

[6] https://finfacts.ie/cmsb/uploads/thumb/us_productivity_pay_g...

[7] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

[8] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/19/what-the-...

Idk what you going on about to be honest. I was talking about society in general, not the 1%. You're also just letting survivorship bias take over. Just because the cherry picked examples you picked out got to the top doesn't mean there aren't 100000 people behind them that failed extravagantly.

Thank you for adding rationality to this argument.

The whole notion that "boomers" are some unnatural microcosm of what humans have been doing for thousands of years is laughable. I always ask my fellow millennials, what are you doing to avoid having our grandchildren call us a selective cohort of do-nothings & non-tree/shade planters?

I agree. Finger pointing is easy, and for a short time, might even feel good. But it does nothing to solve the problems of today. The main questions to ask are: "how can I learn from the past?" and "what can I do to help the future?"

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