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Comment by johnnyanmac | Hacker News Reader

>One thing I've noticed with young and ambitious employees, is that many need constant feedback. If they don't get any direct feedback immediately, they feel left out in the cold, and don't know how to react.

It's an increasingly cold world and some young people may legit get zero feedback outside of work. Ghosted on dating scene, ghosted by the remaining friends post graduation, and now feeling ignored at work.

Add on no third place to go to and how work is increasingly ceasing to be a second place with wfh and you just have a loneliness sandwich. They spend 18-20 years having people their age all around them and then it poofs up in smoke. I'm sure they want some kind of feedback in the one remaining place that is now taking up more and more of their time.

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Excellent insight. Let me add:

> Ghosted on dating scene, ghosted by the remaining friends post graduation, and now feeling ignored at work.

> Add on no third place to go to and how work is increasingly ceasing to be a second place with wfh and you just have a loneliness sandwich.

And all around them, a social media full of hucksters and fake personas that should how successful they are. Build something, and get inundated by infinite liars that have shipped your idea in 30 days and earned a billion dollar MMR, blessed with capacity to work 80 hours a week and come back for more.

Meanwhile these new people just want to feel they have a mark, any mark at all, in the world. Ever self doubting. Before the next layoff.

The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. I am a Millennial, but a digital native no more.

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. I am a Millennial, but a digital native no more.

Similar to the conclusion I got to in the past 5 years, I'm in my mid-30s by now and been steadily removing myself from being a "digital native" back into the real world.

It was immensely enlightening to grow up on the internet, see it appear and flourish, being taught by so many anonymous people on IRC chats, forums, blogs, etc. but now I can also see it's been transformed into something that's not helping me, it's not making me more fulfilled or happier. The information available online is still my bread and butter for learning hobbies, new skills, etc., but the "internet scene" as a whole is definitely something I've been slowly waning myself away from.

Being part of the real world, part of the life of locals around me, helping others to set up events and gatherings for real people (even when they're small for about 10-20 others) is much, much more fulfilling than being yet another voice shouting into the void of the internet.

The internet was always a bit of a cold place but there was some character, the communities' interactions were between some hundreds to thousands of people gathering at a place, nowadays most of it is an incessant feed of bullshit pushed to millions at a time, no sense of community, just bland posts and snippets that you don't care about. Curating that has become such a massive job that I stopped caring, I found the places I like and stuck to them.

Maybe I'm just getting old...

> Maybe I'm just getting old...

Don't worry, plenty of us "zoomers" are getting sick of it too.

Prior to 2010, I met A LOT of people IRL that I had previously only interacted with on forums, IRC channels, and what not. I guess that was the exciting part, to see what kind of people they were IRL, as you only had their internet persona and nickname to go after.

We'd meet up at a bar, pizza place, etc. in groups and just shoot the shit. Hell, my roommate at the time got a visitor from the other side of the world, and they'd only been discussing stuff on some (niche) hobby chatroom.

I haven't really met too many like that in the past 10-12 years though. Many forums moved over to become Facebook groups/pages, and the excitement is kind of gone.

> Maybe I'm just getting old

You know, I don't think we are. We are in our 30s, and the only generation that has grown right in the middle of the pre- and post-internet world.

We have seen how life was before, how socialising functioned, and we still adopted this world-changing invention with the fresh excitement and energy of a teenager.

I feel we might be the only ones to truly understand what we have gained. And what we have lost.

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills.

I watched a lot of star trek when I was young. At some point it became hard to go back and re-watch because of the advent of social media and the 'modern' web. Social media was so obviously going to be a massive part in everyone's lives that it felt weird that it wasn't present in our star trek future.

Sure, star trek had a world war 3 that would have knocked out current existing social media platforms, but it seems like the natural progression of technology. At some point you get networks, then you hook computers up to them, then you get muggle friendly UX, then social media. Because star trek was a product of its time, they didn't consider the inevitable social media future, and now the suspension of disbelief is too great.

However, then social media continued to exist. Now I feel the obvious natural technological progression is something like: networks, computers, easy UX, social media, large scale societal disruption due to social media, continued technological progression without social media because everyone agrees 'never again'.

A perspective that might help: social media failed catastrophically at some point in the distant past. Society shunned it to ensure it would never be repeated, to the point where it was baked into future technological development and not even a point of discussion.

Yeah, still a stretch. But it could work...

It would fit right in with how TNG portrayed entertainment: passive enjoyment was generally frowned upon, creating something new and being in-person social was what everyone wanted in that era.

> continued technological progression without social media because everyone agrees 'never again'

We didn't say "never again" when we first threw rocks at a rival tribe and saw the aftermath. We didn't say "never again" after millions of people died in world wars. It is beyond optimistic that one day we'll look at Twitter and say "no more of that."

What if the Great Filter is light-speed communication and dissemination of ideas? The odds of a physical lifeform able to deal with the implications of that discovery from day 1 are infinitesimal.

> We didn't say "never again" after millions of people died in world wars.

We did, that's why the League of Nations, the UN and the EU were created.

I'm not saying we're doing an incredibly good job, but at least some people are trying.

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills.

Really though, a lot of it can be blamed on the advent of the internet. Which sucks, because the internet is an awesome tool.

> Add on no third place to go to and how work is increasingly ceasing to be a second place with wfh and you just have a loneliness sandwich

The office never was my "second place" as a junior; to me this concept is very much a myth. I spent most of my time in my cubicle or in a meeting room and very little time with people my age. Most of my work got done when I was home and undistracted. I stayed up late coding and was perpetually trying to catch up on sleep. When my dog was in the process of slowly dying I worried every day that I'd come home to her corpse and that she'd die alone. I got lucky she died on a Saturday. Now that I work from home I spend a lot more time with people my age and those problems I faced that seemed to be part of every day life that I just needed to "deal with" as consequences to corporate life have evaporated out of thin air.

Is it true that their friends ghost after graduation? I thought they would have more contact through Snapchat etc. Do you have personal acquaintances who had that happen.

Im older, 30s but I felt that friend contact really fell off after moving away from SF former room mates and startup friends.

Everyone I knew at uni stopped talking after a while.

Probably because they didn’t make any friendships or they were too shallow and time/distance killed them.

I went to university and I'm not mute yet… should I be worried? :D

Someone, I don't remember who, said that friendships are fleeing products of time and place. Meaning that many friendships are mainly the result of where you are (e.g. university) at a certain time (e.g. youth) in your life.

When those things change, friendships may cease to exist. People move away, and grow away from each others - it is a sad fact of life, but it is what it is.

I had friendships in college which I felt were going to last my entire life - you really felt close to those people. Struggling together in the reading halls and labs, going out to pubs in the evening, and just chilling with movies on the weekends.

But then life happened, people move away, and you lose contact. Maybe one part tries to keep in touch, but you with work, family, and what not - it is not always a two-way street.

Then you bump into each others, 5-10-15-20 years later, and the magic is gone. Or maybe not, I've bumped into people I haven't seen in ages and we picked up were we left things.

Same goes for work - or dare I say - especially for work.

I am 20. All my high school friends have just stopped replying after leaving school. (even the ones promising to keep contact)

In university, social life is non-existent. Dating? It's in the category of "don't even think about that".

So yup, there's a reason why most of us are utterly lonely.

Why wouldn't you even think about dating?

I lost most of my high school friends pretty quickly once gone to college but have managed to keep 2 good ones into my 30s, messaging or having a phone catch up with each anywhere from 1 to 5 times a year. In college the social life was pretty accessible through clubs, fraternities, study groups or dorm common rooms. My most steadfast friends have been from high school and from startups after college. They say "shared struggle breeds friendships" or something like that.

Though in my generation ghosting was considered much more rude (or at least seemed less common), you at least had to try to politely deflect a message or phone call.

I'm 47, I met my current three best friends the first day of college. Two of us have families and we have all moved about. We have an active group chat on imessage and still get together a couple times a year.

There's no relationship-as-a-service app despite the hype, relationships take work and you only get what you give.

edit: when we do get together we just sit, watch youtube or play video games and drink beer just like in college heh. Our meatspace relationships are like a time capsule more or less, in that respect it's sort of depressing haha.

I guess society has decided better to ghost than be cancelled. Are you surprised?

I'm confused as to why you're bringing up "being cancelled" - it's not relevant to the conversation in the slightest.

because the alternative to ghosting is to say something. and saying something may result in being cancelled.

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