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Comment by YesBox | Hacker News Reader

IMO… You need to detach yourself from the big data straw you’re gagging on.

Go outside and interact with people.

There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.

Teach yourself how to choose

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If this solution is as effective as you claim, then wherefore comes this sense of societal malaise? I'm not disagreeing you that life is worth living IRL, but still, if you just need to "touch grass", then why _aren't_ we doing precisely that?

I think our brains are wired for hyper-compacted headline news (removes all nuance), emotional bits of info (high reactionary impact), especially if it's negative (survival instinct kicks in, makes a person feels alive).

It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).

That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.

I sort of agree, but what I'm worried about is that our own desire for social connection and validation has been hijacked as a commodity. As I see it, "McDonalds" capitalized on our lizard-brain's desire for easy calories, as "Porn Hub" has done for sex, "Apple" for shiny things and "Facebook" for socialization. All these successful products take advantage of some base instinct which served us well 100,000 years ago but when given the opportunity, just run wild.

>if you just need to "touch grass", then why _aren't_ we doing precisely that?

There is no profit in it. We've let corporations have far too much influence in our lives.

I appreciate you're trying to give well meaning advice, but do you think what you wrote could be perceived as very condescending?

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