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People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives.

It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

An archduke shot in Bosnia, or an incident near a bridge in northern China?

This is a good point, but the average person is unlikely to hear about a skirmish on a different continent, and then know they should start stocking up on tinned food and bottled water. The problem is with the volume of information. It's impossible to take all of it in, so you need to pick and choose, and stay within your own limits. Some people might have the capacity read a whole newspaper's worth a day, others can only manage the local headlines.

There is a great netflix documentary made in 2018 called "the long road to war". By the time the shooting happened a lot of other pieces had fallen into place. Basically, there were people in military circles and in the government that dictated the geoplitics game based on which country has leverage, who has the train tracks or a port to handle the logistics of war, and there was a certain zeitgeist, an egregore if you will, and things were ripe for conflict.

I think the problem is signal-to-noise. For every thing that actually turns out to matter, there are hundreds of thousands of things that you're told are Important but turn out not to be. It's basically impossible to filter "Which remote events are actually important vs just ragebait?" until after the fact.

Both things I can do nothing about.

You can try to move out of harm's way, though.

Yeah, it's not that we don't care, or that it doesn't affect us directly, it's the complete lack of agency that makes us disinterested. Why focus our attention on the million things that we can do nothing about, when we could focus instead on the very few things where we can make a difference?

There are plenty of people out there who live their lives rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it is really hard to make an argument that their lives are any worse.

The argument is rarely that their lives are worse, it's that they're somehow making other people's lives worse by not paying attention to X, Y, or Z injustice. But even that argument doesn't really hold water.

I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.

Since you touched the topic. The protests in the US did have an impact, which now triggered a second impact on Harvard international students.

I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong way and there will be more awareness.

Additionally, there should be more awareness that protests are less tolerated by the government, which seems a bad thing.

How does "awareness" of any problem help anything? As people have been saying in this thread, we lack agency to do anything about the million problems that we are already "aware" of. That awareness is neither helping us nor the million causes we are bombarded with.

On top of the things that we have zero control over, that do have an impact on our lives. DEI outrage killed a Girls in Tech summer program at our local children's museum. Similar cuts killed a lot of kids summer programs at our local library. Fewer summer programs at the public library and other institutions means thousands of extra dollars in extra camps we have to find and pay for over the summer so that we can sort of work during the day, between drop-offs and pick-ups.

But you can. Out of the (limited) choices, vote for whoever you think is most in tune with how you'd like the world to be.

If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change anything, the few people who do care enough to vote get to say who's elected.

Sure, I vote. I do the things I can do, but I mostly focus on hyperlocal things (Little Free Pantries/Libraries) and my friends/family. Impacting their lives and the lives of the people in my community are my top priorities.

I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

>> they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

A previous generations old guy told me about this. He worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of things for the engineers. Then the government changed the way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the project) had to start handling all those other things themselves and most of the support staff went away.

It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.

You’re describing the change from personnel to human resources. Its this little linguistic trick the C-suite foisted on the rest of us. You dehumanize then exploit. Resources, after all, are meant to be exploited.

Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions and implications of “resources” and “exploit”.

I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers.

In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.

The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.

I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.

> Those are unnecessarily emotionally charged definitions and implications of “resources” and “exploit”.

One, don’t attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely necessary. Necessary because our parents and grandparents lived better lives because they weren’t as dehumanized. Necessary because so few people in this community specifically see it that way and it *needs to be pointed out repeatedly*.

Perhaps it would resonate more if you, too, had heard a couple of C-suites & their chosen MBAs joking about this exact topic. Perhaps dehumanizing people would make your blood boil if you experienced it as casually and often as I have.

But perhaps not. One of the great things about the WTFC-era is that I can disregard your opinion utterly.

If your parents and grandparents were able to live better lives as labor sellers, it was because the ratio of supply of labor and demand for labor was more favorable for them. Not because HR used to be known as Personnel or people were inherently “better”.

There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.

"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.

Zero sum claims do not a positive sum reduce

> People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met

Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.

I similarly don't have those specific expectations, but plenty of others. I'm expected to understand the most recent updates in Gaza, and the latest DOGE cuts. People act smug when I don't have a good understanding of current medical theory on cholesterol. I'm expected to have a nuanced opinion on trans kids in sports despite having no kids, and knowing exactly zero trans people. I mean I generally believe in letting people be who they are, but beyond that I really have no business talking about it.

> 500 years ago, what were people worried about?

It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed.

Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

I think there is a difference in the shear density and speed of information. With modern news and social media apps, information can be pushed into someone in a way that just wasn't possible that long ago.

I agree, I think it relates to the number of channels we're exposed to at any one time. Think about the rate at which that has changed over the past 20, 200 and 20,000 years. Now think how our biology has changed to handle that. And then think how our social structures and work time expectations have changed over the same time periods.

That may be true, but I'm not entirely convinced about the difference.

Just moving your head around in a forest also gives an amazing amount of input. And if you're being chased by a tiger through a jungle, you cross about 1,000 different species of plants and small animals.

Another way to look at this is, "millenials have kids/lives now and don't have the bandwidth to be rage-baited near-constantly" and also "Gen Z grew up in the rage baiting era, they're immune by default". There's no policy outcome for this particular piece of rage bait so very few people are going to suit up and white knight about supplemental ai slop. If it were a fake front page news article people might care more. Getting mad about people not getting mad is also very low tier rage-bait.