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Comment by amundskm | Hacker News Reader

Answering questions fully and honestly means being vulnerable, and depending on a lot of societal norms, being vulnerable is frowned upon. Most people don't let themselves be vulnerable with anyone, or if they do, its only a few very close people that trust absolutely.

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>and depending on a lot of societal norms,

I'm not sure I can accept that it's just social norms. It feels like a human universal. I really like honestly, and I often bend to social norms and avoid these kinds of topics. But for years, I falsely assumed that other people were like me: if we could just be past the initial fear everyone would be so happy to be able to speak so openly and honestly.

And unfortunately, this just is not the case. From what I can tell, for many, many people they just don't want to go there; they don't want to offer real answers to questions; they want the questions un-asked, or they want to answer with a socially-please lie, or a joke, or anything that changes the topic. I don't think we've been taught to be this way. I think we are this way.

I said societal norms because I do think it depends culture to culture. Danes are famous for being incredible forthright and blunt while the Japanese are often seen as being circumspect.

In the US there is an incredible difference in what is allowed to be talked about in the midwest vs the west coast. I don't know about other regions as I have only lived in the two, but I would assume they differ as well.

Like many things different societies can be graded on a gradient.

East Coast and Midwest also differ. As someone from a WASPy east coast family with a partner from a working class Midwest family, a literal union steel mill family, I can attest to the challenges of navigating situations like this. I had a realization like this article through spending time with my partner and now I basically cannot interact with my family without changing modes of interaction.

The opening chapters of A Passage to India include an Indian man thinking about how irritating it is that these uncultured Brits don’t understand a polite lie as a refusal, and always want to try to solve the “problem” to get around the refusal. How unrefined!

A share a similar frustration as you, that it seems “people” don’t care about / never question things, but for me it’s really about one big question:

Why the f*ck are we here? Why does ANYTHING exist? What IS this reality?

How “nobody” (very very few) people are trying to figure this out or are bothered by the question and open to talking about it blows my mind mind.

Your questions have been the focus of religion since the dawn of humanity. I don't see how you can think nobody tries to figure this out or considers the question.

Go ahead, begin. What do you say about it? I could find the Wikipedia page, and put a name on the question I guess, some philosopher must have written some discussion of the matter. I kind of doubt it went anywhere.

Oh, the article is just called "Why is there anything at all?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...

You are commiting category error. "Why are we here/why does anything exist" implicitly assumes an impetus, a do-er with motivations. And "what IS this reality" contains it's own answer(and the refusal to accept it): It is 'this reality'. It is IS-ness itself. It's like saying "Perfectly describe the entirety of Moby Dick, leaving out not a single word or punctuation", and refusing when someone hands you the book.

Buddhism, Yoga, the more esoteric parts of the Abrahamic religions and many more all have you covered with an extensive corpus if you want people who are asking the same questions you are.

Well, yeah. We don't have to field criticism all the time. It wouldn't do any good. That's why there's a concept of privacy.

You're not alone in your preference

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