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Comment by growingkittens | Hacker News Reader

I know that traumatized human brains tend toward negativity. I don't believe it is a natural human condition, though. With trauma, the instincts you mentioned start applying to the wrong situations - trauma rewires the brain. "Minor" trauma, sustained trauma, traumatic events, can all contribute to this.

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I don‘t think negativity necessarily has something to do with trauma. Negativity bias is very widespread, regardless of previous trauma. Basically everybody flies at negativity.

Bad and shocking headlines click way better than positive ones, negative feedback is occupying our attention more than positive feedback, we perceive losses way more important than gains, we perceive losses as way more impactful than gains of the same degree, etc.

I am 100% sure trauma can and does affect the negativity aspect of our thinking in a big way. But I do not think that negative thinking overtopping positive thinking is limited to trauma sufferers

This is likely a byproduct of us being too comfortable now. Not in the "you've got nothing real to worry about!" boomer rethoric kind of way, but in the sense that our baseline for reward has shifted a bit higher. So trauma can still present a very strong negative RL signal, while positive RL signals of similar magnitude become rarer.

This is probably also evolutionary. Most species, once safe and sated, tend to calm down and relax, or even nap. But we humans suffer from boredom, which tend to agitate us into action even when there is no hunger or threat. Probably the evolutionary adaptation that allowed our particular lineage to overtake (and parhaps wipe out) other competing lines of homonids and develop civilization.

and overtake all other civilizations, and overtake our less workaholic colleagues at work, etc.

Or a byproduct of sustained trauma being more prevalent in modern society. There was a large shift in the way children are raised in the past 100 years, from community to individuality. Entire generations of people whose childhoods prepared them for a world that did not exist by the time they were adults. There is no template for raising children in the new world, and no community to fall back on. Many react with anger and resentment, and raise their children accordingly. Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.

Technological comfort just disguises it all.

I have a personal bias but suspect this is more prevalent than it's made out to be since I've both lived through it and have not had much opportunity throughout my life to recognize how the two issues were connected until many years later.

I think always-on Internet devices both exposed latent difficulties in home/working life that already existed for many and amplified those same vulnerabilities. You can observe a single person on their phone for 8 hours a day and call it "problematic usage", but this alone does not give enough information about what underlying forces drive so much usage. If it's boredom, then why are they bored all the time? If it's stress, then where does so much stress originate from?

The introduction of smartphones has raised the stakes since a huge number of people are now confronted with the same problem in a highly talked-about way, some of which could have been activated by latent mental vulnerability that may not have been brought to light in a past age. And sometimes this does result in a discussion of sometimes completely unrelated personal issues, but by their nature I would imagine not many would be willing to open up about them in public, compared to complaints about social media. Problems related to tech get a lot of social advocacy, but I find it hard to imagine a national "organization for adults abused by <type of guardian>". What is there to advocate for when the issue at hand already opened and shut itself decades ago and the people involved are either dead or incapable of admitting fault? Not to mention that the causes for each trauma are wildly diverse, and sometimes there is not enough information to be able to find a concrete meaning in the events at all?

Sadly, even regulation of technology seems to be a workable issue compared to that of preventing future abuse. Each upbringing is distinct, and most effort seems to be put towards recovering from abuse long in the past knowing that (when dealing with certain personality types) there will never be hope for reconciliation. Knowing how intractable a problem intergenerational trauma is is enough to make me lean antinatalist at times, even though I say I am recovering.

I've talked about how intergenerational trauma has affected my family before, although I didn't mention it started in 1918 when my great great grandfather killed my great great grandmother in a murder suicide, leaving my great grandmother an orphan who would one day abuse my grandma. [1]

I think there are patterns to abuse regardless of the cause. Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger (the seven deadly sins are all forms of addiction). The patterns I can see give me hope that it is entirely possible to stop the cycle.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40485608

> Abuse is essentially addiction to control or anger

That's an interesting formulation. I have someone in my family who could be described by these words.

Is this your own description or does this come from somewhere?

It is my own description, based on patterns I've seen over my lifetime.

Additional note. Since it is my own description and it sounds familiar to you, if you want to discuss it further my email is in my profile.

Or byproduct of the fact that we live 2 to 4 times longer depending at which scale/how you want to count it. Ie not so long ago in ancient rome reaching 5yo was slightly above 50% chance gamble.

> Abuse is way more prevalent than most people realize.

Frankly, abuse and childhood trauma has always been a staple of human history. Even in the Bible, so at least a few thousand years ago, physical punishment against children is described. Sexual abuse was rampant as well, the Quran documents marriages at age 9. Wars and all the horrors that came with them were all too common - Europe only got actually peaceful after WW2.

Just ask in your own family if you still got really really old people left alive... they will all report from some uncle, aunt or godknowswhat that just went loony. Or tell horror stories about rape, beatings, bullying...

Nothing is new, the only thing that is new is that abuse gets called out and, at least in some cases, perps get punished.

Many people fall into a trap of thinking "we catch the bad guys now, not like in the old days." I'm sure people were saying it in the 90s, 80s, 70s...every era of advancement involves experiencing technology before it is widely understood, which can feel very futuristic or magical. The underlying systems we depend on, like the court system, are still stuck in "the old days".

What? We're more comfortable? What planet do you people live on? People have never been more stressed and uncomfortable. People are literally fighting psychological warfare and vanishing opportunities. Psychologically, we have never been so uncomfortable.

Just no. There is a particular problem of 'reporting' vs 'reality'.

Less fighting, more opportunity, more food, more clean water, less disease than ever.

What we do have now is 24 hour news and social media screaming how bad it is so we watch ads.

My grandmother, who lived to 90, used to tell me "The only thing which really improved in my life is medicine." She would tell me that people were so happy and society was so safe when she was a child that her family used to sleep with the windows open.

I also observed things only getting worse in my life. So I really don't buy this narrative that things keep getting better. IMO, the only people who think things got better are billionaires and multi-millionaires; of course it got better for them but it didn't get better for the average-luck person. For the average ambitious person who worked hard to improve their situation, things got MUCH worse; there are all these artificial barriers preventing them from succeeding, depriving them of opportunities and then constant gaslighting to blame them for systemic issues (including their own failure to thrive). Low birth rates, high rates of depression, high rates of homelessness, high suicide rates speak for themselves.

The fact that it all gets covered up by social media echo chambers to the extent that some people think life got better, makes it MUCH, MUCH worse, not better. People just don't seem to notice the tent cities, the increased immigration (due to worsening conditions in poor countries), the political division (again, driven by poverty).

I mean the places I've lived in my life I've left the windows open and the doors unlocked and not had issues. Maybe I'm lucky as your grandma.

Of course maybe your grandma like my grandma ignored all the cases of people that had abjectly terrible lives back then because that wouldnt fit her world view of 'make the present the past again'. Birthrates dropped in the US long before we were born. Homelessness was very high in the US before the postwar 'irregularity'.

All those poor countries are still richer than ever historically, it's just that first world nations are that much better.

Just stop the billionaires from sucking up everything and it's not really too bad at all.

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