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Comment by marcyb5st | Hacker News Reader

From my personal experience (I also went through a very dark period in my life and just recently climbed out of the hole I dug myself) I guess people are realizing that working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had. Once that settles in it's hard to push yourself to do basically anything.

Additionally, I also believe that feeling is compounded by social media where selection bias only shows you cherry picked moments where it seems other people are living the life you won't get.

Finally, among the younger generations there is a lot of climate change dread going around.

For me it was a combination of all these factors and to this day I can't pinpoint exactly what was the trigger, but after COVID lockdowns I simply kept social distancing.

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My pet theory is that social media isn't the problem, the always-on surveillance created by smartphones is.

When I was in university, we had nude parties. I'm pretty sure nobody would risk that nowadays. That cherry-picking you mentioned goes both for highs and lows. In this day and age, you always need to plan for your worst moment to end up in someone's picture. The ubiquity of cameras has made everyday living more risky in the sense that you're constantly at risk of losing social standing over insignificant mistakes.

My grandfather said there were such parties when he was young. That would have been 1930s-1940s. And what's even more crazy is that this was in the countryside in Portugal.

It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was known at all. Instead, we were able to see with our own eyes what actually happened.

There is certainly a hammer/nail aspect to the issue (which is itself one of degrees), but I do think that part of the blame that gets put on the technology and its use lies more correctly with the society that makes judgments off of that use's outputs. Ideally, in a functional society, no one would bat an eyelash at coeds sharing platonic nakey time.

> It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was known at all. Instead, we were able to see with our own eyes what actually happened.

An important consideration there is that the areas immediately adjacent to police should be far more tracked than general spaces or around average people.

platonic

Yeah, I find that hard to believe.

People just have no historical reference.

Think times are tough now? Try the great depression.

Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.

People living paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by? Media glorifying the rich and famous? Nothing new.

Yet the new struggles are real too? explaining them away as more of the same does nothing. There are old problems and there are new problems and they're both problems.

Yes there are struggles today. But there always have been. This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.

> This imaginary past where most people didn't live in fear of unexpected expenses, debt, struggling to pay all their bills, and not earning enough money didn't exist.

I call bullshit... Debt. Bills. And for that matter, money. These are things that our species lived for hundreds of thousands of years without. Furthermore, there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.

> there are tribes that even to this day live without these struggles.

Instead of debt and bills, that moves the problem up to struggling to defend against tribes with better weapons who want your land/labor. Or natural disasters and no resilience due to trade network. Or dying from bacterial infections and childbirth complications.

It's hard to assess, especially from our position, which set of challenges the human soul prefers. But there's an interesting point to be made, touched in both "Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress"[0] as well as "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[1] that no 'savage' has been interested in non-coercively joining an 'advanced' society, whereas there are plenty of examples of 'civilized' people choosing the 'savage' life. I don't think the choice is as clear cut as it would superficially seem.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/d... [1] https://www.amazon.com/-/en/David-Graeber/dp/0374157359

As is plainly evident, the vast majority of savages have chosen to incrementally create and join civilized societies. It’s a much larger challenge for an illiterate hunter gatherer to make a multi millennia jump into modern society than it is for someone to do the reverse.

This says nothing about their level of wellbeing.

> As is plainly evident, the vast majority of savages have chosen to incrementally create and join civilized societies.

Have they chosen? Or were they civilized?

I think at the very least there was a sense that the struggles were leading to a better future. In America, it certainly feels like we’ve regressed from the optimistic “End of History” vision of the future of the ‘90s.

Absolutely - the thing I miss most about the 80s and 90s was the feeling that we could solve our problems (e.g. ozone layer, whaling)

The world was going to unite and we would set our sights on conquering space- even the disaster movies of the time were about humanity collectively dealing with a planetary threat (asteroid collisions).

Yes, that's true. For most of human history we feared starvation, not bankruptcy.

For a bit of context: people who were hit by the New Year's earthquake in Japan were living on small rice ball rations until aid could get to them. This is partly because Japan's 2.5 decades of economic consternation has forced the country to make hard choices about where investment goes - mostly to the dense major metropolitan areas, with their higher ROI, and not to the more rural ones that were affected by the natural disaster (hence, also, the long remediation process in Fukushima).

By way of comparison, much-less-dense America will find itself in trouble if it turns out that we're facing anything remotely similar in our weird will-it-won't-it stagflation.

The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities, and how infrastructure and aid - as in, water pipes and food access - are in the crosshairs just so that the whole shebang doesn't blow. Ironically, starvation may be back on the menu.

This is a weird take. Historically Japan has overinvested in rural infrastructure, because the ruling LDP's support base is rural, rural votes carry disproportionate weight, and when there's nothing going on economically construction is the best way to funnel money in.

In addition, Japan is exceptionally well prepared for disasters, probably better than any other country in the world. Those plans are regularly battle tested because it also has a lot of disasters. Yes, it took a while to get aid out, but that's because the tsunami wiped all coastal roads, railroads, airports etc, and AFAIK hunger was not an actual problem for survivors.

I'm not an expert, so I defer anyone who can present information contrary to my statements. That said, it would seem that "well-prepared" and "the tsunami wiped out all links" are contradictory. IIRC, many buildings and pieces of infrastructure were not up to anti-earthquake/fire/tsunami regulations due in part to their age. A quick check turns up an NHK article claiming that Ishikawa Prefecture's disaster preparedness plans were deemed insufficient by experts. https://web.archive.org/web/20240201140804/https://www3.nhk....

Additionally, I recall several documentaries and news reports that referenced the difficulty of delivering aid, including food, and the lack of preparedness for the extended period of dislocation.

In any case, I think it would actually be scarier to find that the conditions present after the recent earthquake were to be found in a country considered well-prepared for such disasters. Combined with the collective experience following Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, we as Americans might be, for lack of a better term, f*cked.

Japan is incredibly mountainous, of course the transport links are near the coasts because that's the flat part where people actually live. There are sea walls etc built to guard coastal towns, but the size of the tsunami overwhelmed them and at that point you're screwed.

And yes, many buildings are out of code, because Japanese earthquake standards are continually strengthened and virtually anything built more than 20 years ago will not meet the newest set. This is also a big reason why the Japanese prefer to buy new houses.

Of course the disaster could have been handled better, and eg the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors was particularly bad, but (IMHO) they still did a better job this time than with the Kobe earthquake, where the Yakuza had to step in to help because the government was caught flat-footed by a disaster happening in the "wrong" place.

>The Strong Towns project has a ton of information about the looming insolvency of many American municipalities,

I'd be interested in reading this information. Is there a link on their site I can go to?

https://www.strongtowns.org/

https://www.youtube.com/@strongtowns/videos

The Strong Towns project cherry picks data to push a biased narrative. If looming insolvency of many American municipalities was a serious problem, then we would see that reflected in their bond yields and bond insurance rates. That isn't happening. Some cities in economically depressed areas will go bankrupt but nationwide the vast majority will muddle through and patch their infrastructure well enough to keep it working.

Some people just love catastrophizing.

yes but why do you keep saying it? It sounds like you are trying to invalidate people's modern problems or something?

Perhaps, but back in the days you weren't exposed 24/7 to all of that (IMHO).

user name does not check out

Then perhaps there is no issue to worry about here.

> Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.

During the Cold War, they were at least telling kids (at least in the USA) that the nuclear holocaust might be avoidable "if clear heads prevail," or "if we beat the Russians," or "if they back down." There was at least hope. With Climate Change, we've told two entire generations of kids that there is no hope, it's inevitable and irreversible, and that there is no way to avoid catastrophe. So is it any surprise they're all doomers when it comes to Climate? If you tell everyone that everything is hopeless, then don't be surprised when a few conclude that it really is hopeless.

I was told as a kid that there was hope for climate change as long as we could scale back our carbon emissions. Watching the opposite of that happen over a lifetime is what made me into a doomer.

That's true, it's a big difference. With nuclear war, every day that the sirens don't ring is the status quo protected, doom delayed by another day. With climate change, every day that the status quo is protected is another day of accelerating doom and increasing inevitability. They are different in that way.

The deniers simply morphed from "it's fake" to "it's unavoidable."

As we all predicted. Because they don't argue in good faith, they're just opposed to ... whatever (science, research, media, school, etc.)

The doomerism rhetoric is coming more from one side of the political isle, the one that was in denial about climate change, generally votes against legislation that helps deal with the consequences because they’d rather their perceived enemies suffer, and them along with than do good.

>With Climate Change, we've told two entire generations of kids that there is no hope, it's inevitable and irreversible, and that there is no way to avoid catastrophe.

If that isn't bad enough, the final nail in the emotional coffin is telling them there is a way out: the lifestyle of a Dravidian. Eat the carbon neutral bugs in BlackRock's leased pod. Some of us would rather die.

> In the 1980s it was nuclear war

As opposed to now when it is nuclear war and climate change? :)

It is hard to explain to people today how scary nuclear war was during the Cold War. It wasn’t so much just that we were in real jeopardy of starting a deliberate nuclear war: it was the fact that we were heartbeats away from doing one by accident, and nearly did a couple of times [1]. It was standard for kids in elementary school to discuss the implications (at least we didn’t bother with duck and cover when I grew up, since politicians realized that was pointless.) Maybe we’re still in the same place (or will be again soon) but today’s atmosphere is nowhere near as scary.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Sure, but after like only one decade of halcyon optimism 9/11 happened and thousands were killed on American soil, leading to over a decade of paranoia and political-infighting which then petered out to become… more paranoia and infighting, except even more self-directed. It seems like in America the fear is more personal than ever.

And disinformation, and greater wealth inequality, and “AI taking our jobs” and all other forms of doomerism.

Hey, on the bright side the nuclear winter will cancel out global warming.

There's not been many studies, but no, it probably won't. A nuclear winter would involve heavy dust and soot, that won't stay up in the air for very long. After that settles down, the net effect is just more CO2 from all the burning, and CO2 is an oxide, it is very very stable...

Plus, we get power armor and catchy tunes on the radio.

well after the Ukraine stroke radar target inside the Russia. Risk of nuclear war might have gone higher,, at least temporarily. And nuclear war Means turning earth into Venus or Mars twin. USA can decide how much support is too much support and how small support is too small support, because too little support might lead Russia attacking NATO countries event without needing to occupate but the much support can just lead to termination of All life on earth.

well thats unhelpful, diminishing the concerns of people by implying: "back in my day we all had it tougher", just doesnt help and its just not true, back in the day it was a "different" tough but no less or more real than what people are experiencing now.

> Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.

Nuclear war didn't happen. Climate change is happening. Pretty key difference!

If nuclear war happened, and there was no way for us to know whether it would happen, there was nothing we could do to survive the event.

While climate change is happening, there is still a lot we can do to slow it down and mitigate its effects, both individually and collectively.

Yes, at the time it seemed like something that might happen tomorrow. You had TV movies like "The Day After" and constant discussion of it in school and in the media. It was a real fear.

Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963) has somebody in Sweden becoming depressed and withdrawn due to anxiety over China developing an atomic bomb. Then in 1982 Prince sang "everybody's got the bomb, we could all die any day". That's two decades of continual anxiety about sudden obliteration (or worse, near obliteration).

When did Reagan take Carter's solar panels off the White House roof, again?

I don't get it. The answer seems to be 1986. What do you mean?

That climate anxiety has existed at least as long.

The solar panels (and the famous sweater Carter wore when turning down the White House thermostat in winter) wasn't done out of climate anxiety though. This was done because of the oil crisis (at the time the US was more dependent than now on Mideast oil and their organization OPEC raised the price dramatically leading to shortages in the US).

Again, that doesn't tell the whole story. As we've discussed, solar research predates the episode by quite a long time, and Carter's efforts were not just about the energy crisis, but also about setting the foundation for future pro-environmental efforts (which were not necessarily about climate change at the time, but that certainly bled into those concerns later on). Your characterization seems to try to make Reagan's later actions seem more rational, when they very well may not have been based on anything but his disdain for his predecessor and his policies. We don't really know.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2008/11/jimmy-carters-sol...

The solar panels that Carter installed were nearly useless, given poor 1970s technology. It was performative, showing that he was interested in doing something to handle the oil crisis, even if it was futile. And Regan's removal of them was likewise performative, signaling that there no longer was an oil crisis.

Carter's installation was actually then the latest in a long line of interested advocates who pushed for American adoption of not a particular device or system, but solar technology as a whole; his panels were better than what came before and worse than what came after, and might have prompted enhanced development, if not for the course history took.

Reagan, on the other hand, was one in a long line of what I like to call "Powerful White Men Whose Irrational Beliefs and/or Reckless Actions Ruined Millions of Lives", alongside the likes of Hoyt Hottel, an MIT chemical engineering professor who co-founded the Combustion Institute and who was somehow allowed to head (and thwart) MIT's solar engineering research efforts. (CEO Jack Welch, welfare reformer Larry Townsend, chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr, and urban planner Robert Moses are also on that list.)

I just think your scope is unnecessarily limited, I suppose.

Not a fan of Reaganomics, and people like Midgley are hard to defend, but I think you have the wrong idea of Hottel. Hottel basically invented solar energy as we know it in the 1930s -- he wasn't some guy trying to subvert it. There's a reason that the highest honor the American Solar Energy Society gives out is called the Hoyt Clarke Hottel Award.

And The Combustion Institute (which was founded in 1954, well after Hottel's solar breakthroughs) isn't the sinister thing you think it is. It's not about cars and their internal combustion, but about combustion science -- the science of fire.

Hottel expressed both explicit bias against solar research and implicit bias against one of his charges, who was actually a much more natural advocate for the technology ( https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/journeys-innova...). He headed MIT's solar research efforts, for sure, but again, I find this strange, since so many of his decisions reflected an undue skepticism for someone in that position. What a coup for his apparent ambitions that his name is on so many of the institutions whose purposes he stunted from the most advantageous perch imaginable: "leading" them.

Ultimately, he was a true advocate for combustion-based heating (solar also being focused on that rather than electricity generation through mid-century), which lead to the national status quo of high levels of airborne pollutants both indoors and in the environment, as well as the ever-present threat of one's domicile or business detonating with little notice. But, you know, worth it since hydrocarbons are cheaper. /s I apologize for the snark, but the way people like this get the benefit of the doubt in retrospect is quite frustrating. They made the world we were born into worse, and they did it on purpose (or negligently), for specious reasons. Fixing their mistakes means acknowledging that they sucked.

> While climate change is happening, there is still a lot we can do to slow it down and mitigate its effects

Not to disagree with your general point but one of the most frustrating things about climate change is knowing how much we could do, while seeing how little hope we actually have of making those changes.

Rich Americans can buy a Tesla, solar panels, heat pump and give up meat, and feel like they’re making a difference.

But there’s several billion people without those options. Who’d all love to consume like rich Americans if they had the chance.

That nuclear war deal sounds way too good. Can't do anything about it? Well you don't have to worry then, since the inverse is also true. I.e. you don't have to do anything.

The thing is, it is not about what you can do, it is about what you must do. Emphasis on must. You must, but you don't, hence the guilt.

Your observation is neither novel nor helpful. People suffering are often not suffering due to a lack of information, or because they’ve never taken middle school history.

The article reports this happening in countries that are quite comfortable at the moment and have strong safety nets. This isn't being reported from Venezuela or Ukraine or even Poland or the UK.

China has something else - the "lying flat" movement.[1][2] This is just "dropping out", something China is now rich enough to allow. It's not about isolation, just not working much.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti...

I wouldn't call what the young people lying flat in china "rich enough". There are stories of people in their 20s and 30s, after college or after layoffs, that they've either got a few thousand dollars saved up or from family. They couldn't find any jobs due to ~70% youth unemployment rate. Or they don't want to work in factories that pays out $2/hour and waste their degree. So they are moving to very remote countryside and renting a room for $50/month, and spending only $.50 a day. Or live off of parents, what's also known as 啃老族 or eat the old.

Remember the previous Chinese premier confirmed there are 700 million people living off less than $100/month a few years ago. so this living of standard is possible for young people. Especially now that there's widespread 50% reduction in wages/cost of living in China.

>Worried about climate change? In the 1980s it was nuclear war.

Yet they could afford _homes_. One of the most important things any human can have. A place to feel safe, call home, not be afraid month after month that your landlord will raise rent by 50% or 100% leaving you on the streets with all the stress that comes afterwards, etc.

Also we have that now as well. We are at the risk of a total war between China, Russia, USA, EU, India, etc. all with nuclear weapons. We have the worst of both worlds.

Looks like someone hasn’t heard of stagflation and Paul Volcker. Way before that there were housing crises during other decades too.

Homes are overrated. Rented almost all my life out of desire for flexibility. Owned two houses for 5 years each, and regretted it both times. People divorce, move for better job, retirement and other reasons - all that is easier while renting.

I thinking renting works perfectly when you don't have kids. With kids, it's better to give them a place they don't just grow up but can come back to as well.

I grew up in my family house. Had all my childhood and school time there. All my nostalgia basically revolves around the house I grew up and played in. I see that in my dreams still.

I have been living in rented houses since my school finished with my parents and then now with my own kid on my own. Seeing how I don't have any attachment or those kind of memories from other rented places I have been through, my plan is for my kids to grow up in a place they can call their own.

> Yet they could afford _homes_

I’m not from USA, (so only educated guess whether statistics lie), but I wager that millions could not afford homes then and millions can afford a home today.

My most minimal effort attempt at stats follows.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat....

> …in 2023 the proportion of households occupied by owners declined to 65.7 percent…

Also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_...

(Shows that it was bellow 70% in 1989)

first graph has very sharp peaks and dips, but please note that the y axis has values from 62 till 70.

Based on this I would say that it would be misleading to state “in 1980 people could afford homes and today we can’t afford”

But I can see a lot of “outrage” in US media. My unrequested speculation: more people got college and university degrees, but that did not change their ability to own a home. (But it did change their expectation, especially how pricey degrees seem to be in USA)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_th... (percentage of educated population had has risen steadily since 1950)

You're conflating 'having a home' with home ownership, even though the GP talks about the hassles of dealing with landlords and therefore clearly includes renting.

Rent used to be a lot cheaper in the US. I'm not sure about the 1980s, but in the 1980s I had a spacious room in a nice San Francisco neighborhood for $300/month.

Median family income in 1980 was $21k. Also San Francisco back then may not have been the San Francisco of today. So if you factor in inflation and increase in desirability and local wages, this would make for a more meaningful comparison.

> Yet they could afford _homes_

Peak homeownership rate [1] in the 80's was 65.8%. Today, it is at 65.6%. And it has fluctuated in a narrow band since 1960's.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

I would say nuclear war is unfortunately back on the table again considering the current conflicts going on.

It always has been, regardless of the current world conflicts. There are nukes ready to be launched at moments notice all the time.

It's unfortunately the kind of thing where perception matters just as much as reality. People worried about the world ending tomorrow make different decisions than people who put nuclear annihilation out of their minds; this adds up and shapes the economy, and even feeds back into international policy.

Well, I think whether or not people objectively had it worse or better is sort of beside the point. How well did people deal with adversity before? Are people lacking something now which is making them less resilient, and less capable of connecting? I'm not sure what the precise answers to those questions are, but it feels like folks are generally doing worse from a mental health perspective. That's a problem to solve just like the "real" problems of the world.

The on-ramps for fulfilling activity (not even necessarily jobs) are disappearing. If you want to learn something new, you're not looking at a nominal fee at a local community college; maybe the suggestion is to watch (flawed, unfinished) tutorials on YouTube, or to buy a creative influencer's course pack. Maybe that gets you basic skills, maybe you waste your time. But let's assume you picked up [skill]. Someone's probably not going to hire you for it. Do you try to make something by yourself? Here's the list of other skills you should probably pick up in order to compete (yes, you're competing) with the wunderkids who can produce [project], and also the associated devlog and Patreon and streaming schedule. Or, maybe you try to join an existing project that needs your [skill]. That's going to be a decent amount of time lurking the Discord, trying to keep up with a group of people who might not even like you because you're the weird new guy. If the goal is prosocial socialization outside of the house, this might be counterproductive.

Did I mention that the increasing focus on "problem-solving," driven by the tech Cult of Productivity, seems to have predisposed people to the kind of skepticism and pessimism that makes finding problems to solve easier?

Or, you could just... not.

>Have problem

>Don't care.

>Don't have problem anymore.

I don't understand at all. Because you (in my opinion, erroneously) believe that you need to work some X% harder than the last generation to accomplish the same thing you're just not going to try?

What about pretty much every generation prior to the last, who had to toil in hard labor most days, who often didn't have indoor plumbing, who often didn't even have electricity, who went off to war, did they have any easier time being "successful" than you? Did they just give up and not try? Do you honestly believe you're worse off in 2024 than they were? That you're working harder than they were?

I'm not even going to touch the climate dread stuff as climate change is a topic that can not be impartially discussed anymore.

So what’s the difference between the past and now? Maybe having corporations profiting off of people’s attention and fear is not a good thing.

Social media. That’s the difference.

I don’t think you are saying the same thing.

You are saying this;

> you need to work some X% harder than the last generation to accomplish the same thing

And this is the contrasting bit from the comment you are responding:

> working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had

The difference is that your sentence says they have to work harder to achieve the same, while their comment says that even if they work hard they can’t achieve the same. That is two very different things.

The reason that ppl give up now is not that it is worse now than before, but rather the opposite. Now you can do almost nothing productive and still survive. Before, you would simply starve to death.

> I guess people are realizing that working hard won't get you anything close to what previous generations had.

I hear this a lot. It’s also untrue. If you are open to anecdata, it’s trivial to prove this is untrue.

What people constantly miss and fail to consider is what they are working hard at. Hard work is a requirement for success and class mobility, but it is not sufficient. You must also work hard at the right things.

The truest thing I have learned about life is that you need to do three things to be successful:

1. Identify places where you can add value /for people who can compensate you/.

2. Learn how to articulate the value you add.

3. Ensure you get compensation for that value added.

If you do these three things, your hard work will pay off, maybe in a big way.

#2-3 is where I would say the majority of people get stuck. I sure have, I volunteer to help people whenever I can but that doesn't mean I'll get paid or compensated for it. Not that I mind but I can get burnt out.

#1 can really be hard when #2-3 never seems to come into the picture for long. It can make anything you do seem like a waste of time. Can you add value, sure, is it worth it? That's where it can be tough.

I think a problem with a lot of this too is lack of real long term community too. But I think some people are just better at managing that naturally.

I think also in men there's the expectation of being a provider as your only role in life, and the fork in the road is either this (reclusion) or unfortunately suicide (apparently work and financial pressures are 2/3rds of reasons for men's suicides).

I've had friends go like that, it's not nice. But the saddest thing is that it happens and the n we all just kind of...move on somehow?

Pumping M1 and M2 at a continuously compounding 7% CAGR is making Thomas Jefferson's prediction come true.

Can relate.

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