Through evolution we have been programmed to associate music with security of the group being nearby. Now we can listen to music even though the group is very distant in time and space. Maybe it's not a complete reality mismatch because in a sense we are still close to the group through the Internet.
However the positive feelings are over exaggerated given the limited modern benefits.
As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.
The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.
The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.
Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.
Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.
This is the experience of outsiders. People without tribe. There choice is not between bread and cake, but between bread and an empty belly.
They were just stating the reality of some people that don't necessarily chose to feel how they feel...
To me it seemed like melodramatic self pity, like the person complain that they had no other choice but go to the party but be alone. If someone hates company, they should go be a hermit, not show up and tell everyone about it.
It's okay to be a loner or a hermit. If you're not doing it, then either you are choosing the trade offs or you don't actually want it.
People should own their choices. Self pity and denial of agency are two of the most self destructive cognitive phenomenon.
Indeed, it was your misreading.
what agency is it that i should have that would allow me to make friends with people? i can't use my agency to change the behavior of others. you are right of course that self pity and denial of agency don't help. but the comments you are responding to don't talk about that at all. they are not suggesting that people without a tribe wallow in self pity and denial of agency. you brought that up.
i am the kind of person that has difficulty finding a tribe. (my tribe is here on HN and in the FOSS community to an extent. but those people are all distant and hard to meet. btw, you are one of the few names on HN that i recognize because of interesting discussions we had already). except i don't show up at parties where i am not welcome and don't talk to people that don't want to listen to me. but that's why i used my agency to leave my home country and travel the world to find communities that accept others without judging them and without expecting them to change just for the sake of being accepted.
If this is not the case, then the rant doesn't apply.
The comment to which I responded was about how degraded that experience is relative to music in social settings.
When a person does not have access to those social settings they are not better for that person…and as your comments suggest, often worse than nothing. On the other hand headphones are better than nothing.
The bread and cake are an historical reference.
HN guidelines are to make the charitable readings of other people’s comments. They are linked at the bottom of the page.
I don't know how you can read the parent post and get that. I think it was speculation on The evolutionary basis for why music is soothing.
Agreed.
> Friends who join a Jam can listen and add songs to the queue together, whether in-person or virtually.
> Note: Premium is needed to start and host a Jam. Free users can join and add songs to a Jam hosted by a Premium user, allowing for in-person Jams. This feature works also with smart speakers and most Bluetooth speakers.
I've used this with online friends, and it's really good. If you use a voice chat app (we usually use Mumble) you can even talk while the music plays.
interestingly, as someone who plays an instrument, i don't enjoy just listening to music as much because i'd rather play with friends
Either way, this sounds like vague popsci reasoning.