old man claims society collapsing; back in his day…
I do agree that comparing the past with the present if fraught with complicated nuances, and people do tend to see the past with rose tinted glasses. But, I read Talwar's blog post more as a personal reflection on their experiences they are facing and not some kind of scientific treatise on what went wrong.
if this were titled “Java/JavaScript peaked” or “my reflections on XYZ” and written like that, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. but claiming programming peaked 15 years ago leads me to not feel bad about my summarization
We have records from many periods in history of old men crowing about how society is collapsing because of the weak new generations. Thing is, maybe they were always right, and the new generations just had to grow up and take responsibility? And then again, maybe sometimes they were little too right and society did in fact collapse, but locally.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain
If you don't think they were at least sometimes right, to what do you instead attribute the various cases of socio-economic collapse documented throughout history?
When people say they see history repeating itself, it's worth hearing them out.
(broken clock right twice a day)
I’m all for hearing well-reasoned arguments; presenting pithy quotes as fact is absurd; claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd
But every generation doesn't have old men screaming "society is collapsing" at the same rate. There's always a baseline of people with a "get off my grass" mentality, but if you factor that out, occurrence of people actually pointing out that the world is on a dangerous path isn't uniform from one era to the next. Very few people, if any, were seriously making such an argument 30 years ago.
People who are genuinely making reasoned arguments, and not just complaining about things being outside their comfort zone, should absolutely be taken seriously.
> claiming programming peaked 15 years ago is absurd
Well, what are you measuring? It certainly peaked in some dimensions 15 years ago. Whether you personally see those dimensions as important is of course a subjective question.
To my ears this is a hilariously naive statement. It sounds to me to be roughly the equivalent or a 7-year old saying "Adults have boring jobs where they sit at a desk all day. I hate it. I promise when I'm old I'm gonna be an Astronaut or play Major League Baseball."
It's not that they don't mean it, it's that one should make promises about a situation they can't yet understand. While some of those kids probably did end up being astronauts or baseball players 99%+ who made that promise didn't. It turns out that being an adult gives them perspective that helps them realize the reasons they want a desk job even if they don't like it, or for many they actually enjoy their desk job (ex they like to program).
So the same if a million young people all thought similarly, and then magically changed their view when they got there dont promises your going to be the one who will break the streak.
You might turn out to be an astronaut, but many people listening, based on good previous evidence will rightly assume you won't.
you’re wrong right here — I understand. you’re just speaking nonsense and bullshit; you sound naive to me
Do you expect to learn? Get wiser?
If you do, you will eventually develop wisdom that younger people don’t have yet - or may never get. Younger people find new ways to do many things better, but regress in other ways. Lacking your (and your generation’s common) experiences.
Which is why the only old people who can’t see any real regression are … well I have yet to meet that kind of old person, other than those unfortunate to have dementia.
Also, every new better (or perceived better) way to do things has to reinvent many obvious things all over again. Things many won’t realize were already solved by previous practices. Which takes time.
So meanwhile, regressions.
And there is no assurance that new ways will really be better, after all regressions are addressed. Because it is impossible to see all the implications of complex changes.
Anyone who isn’t aware that the amount of today’s glue code, rewriting of common algorithms for slightly different contexts, the mush mash of different tools, platforms, and dependencies, and all their individual quirks, was a non-optimal outcome…
But the current pain points will drive a new way. And so it goes.
Progress is not smooth or monotonic.
It is a compliment to discount that you won’t also notice. Not a critique.
you’ve also just said a ton of stuff I don’t disagree with, but I’m not sure what discussion you’re trying to have here
I do regret the time spent reading this article and participating in this comment section; that was naive of me!
The word “naive” was a strong one to throw at you, but I think in the context it reflected irony and humor, not disrespect.
Anyone who learns anything looks back on a naive version of themselves. I remember thinking a lot like you, too.
(I don’t think things are collapsing, but do see significant unnecessary regressions in the state of programming: Madness, insanity, everywhere! :)
I'm so glad that for the most part in my early internet days (early 2000s), I was pseudonymous. I tended to have very strong opinions about stuff I had barely just learned and didn't have experience to get nuances. My political opinions have completely flipped and I look back on my young firebrand days and unfortunately see lots of young people repeat the same vapid shit that I believed because I was ignorant but convinced it all followed from simplistic crap ideas I was raised with.
I don’t do this; among other differences with y’all in this thread, it’s why I’m not worried about the caution presented here
"...it’s one of my least favorite types of people; and that’s precisely my point, old men have been saying society is collapsing since ancient times, yet here we are, with things better than ever"
Which is a pretty strong opinion. Also, pretty much all societies that ever existed have collapsed. When that happens, life generally sucks and lots of people die. I'm not just talking about ancient Rome or Greece, or Easter Island, or the fall of dozens of different empires, or more recently South Sudan or Haiti.
Other people in thread called you naive. I won't insult you like that but just given the statements here, there's a whole lot of familiar-sounding overconfidence that reminds of things I'd have said in my 20s.
Like, when React was new I had total Delphi deja vu. And then they went about reinventing MVC (not the Rails MVC, real MVC) and calling it "unidirectional data flow" instead of just MVC, and feeling all smart about themselves and doing proud conference talks, and I was like "this is just MVC but with worse naming".
But React also made it so that every component is designed to be reusable. Like, in Delphi you had a "Form" on which you dropped "Controls" and then you could also create your own controls if you were really advanced. But most people didn't feel like they were advanced enough, so code reuse was a mess. React made it so that every control (cough component) is reusable, because using components is the same as making components. That's a good idea! Purely functional UI, that's also a good idea! Then they threw OO out instead of fixing it, that was a terrible idea, but bottom line it's still great! Plus, Delphi didn't have to deal with the horrible mess that is HTML and CSS so it had it easy.
But yeah lots of people my age saw the same, saw how it was just Delphi all over again but with different mistakes, and focused on the mistakes. It really is purely an attitude thing.
I'm having a lot of fun with signals and SolidJS and observables now and it baffles me that something so elegant and fast took this long to be discovered (or more like, to get ergonomic and mainstream enough).
copying only the conclusion for a tl;dr: "The only way that the aphorism explains history is by reinforcing confirmation bias - by seeming to confirm what we already believe about the state of the world and the causes behind it. Only those worried about a perceived crisis in masculinity are likely to care about the notion of "weak men" and what trouble they might cause. Only those who wish to see themselves or specific others as "strong men" are likely to believe that the mere existence of such men will bring about a better world. This has nothing to do with history and everything with stereotypes, prejudice and bias. It started as a baseless morality tale, and that is what it still is."
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hd78tv/does_...
Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance.
People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without.
Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
Abundance, by contrast, allows seed saving, food storage for winter, spare resources to use on washing and hygiene and medicine and recovering from illness, rule of law and enforcement, time away from subsistence farming and scavenging for food to enable things like developing metalworking skills, inventing, practicing archery, spending time on other society-building rituals like building churches and going to church.
> "A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing"
If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"? These are supposed to be the "weak men" created by "good times", aren't they? Are they strong men created by weak times who are themselves creating weak times by rotting society? Or are they strong because they are men, independent of the times? Does this fit into the saying at all?
Famine is not isomorphic to “hard times”, and particularly not what the aphorism is referring to: self-created hard times, wherein a society’s ability to self-sustain and compete externally is needlessly curtailed.
> If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"?
I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous.
What you linked to was not a debunking. It was a political viewpoint. Reasonable arguments exist for a different one.
Nobody claimed it was
> "particularly not what the aphorism is referring to"
The aphorism does not say what it is referring to, you are making this up so it says what you want it to say (which is bias). This wouldn't be a problem if you used that to make a point and argue your point, but it is a problem when you just go "I imagine that it means something else, so you're wrong". Self-created hard times such as ... what? If laziness in farming doesn't create famine in winter... what hard times are more relevant than that for a society in 0 AD? "Needlessly curtailed" by who or what effect?
> "I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous."
Can it. Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
In which case it makes no falsifiable claims. If “hard times,” “weak men,” and “strong men” have no stable meaning, the cycle can’t explain anything and can be retrofitted to any narrative. There would be nothing to argue for or against.
That isn’t the case. “Hard times” in this context means the cumulative internal consequences of institutional decay, complacency, and short-termism. Not natural disasters. That’s why your famine example is irrelevant.
> Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
Sociological concepts are evaluated by their broad effects, not by a single scalar value. Declining institutional competence, eroded norms, reduced accountability, and loss of collective purpose are both observable and historically recurrent.
Or I can reframe it one more way: If good times create weak men, then all the rich people currently running things corruptly and soaking up whatever 90% of the wealth, are weak, and all the discipline and virtue in society are among the rest of us. Cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose and pro-social ambition in the super-rich and you might have something there.
I’m not historian but for example I could challenge the idea that a rhetoric about strength and keeping a masculine ideal for the young male population was non existent in European feodality where only nobility had the privilege of fighting, and 90% of the population were farmers. Or that 2000 years ago Jesus already challenged the idea that men needed to be strong in the traditional sense, and that real courage was loving and forgiving among others. I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
My understanding is that your rhetoric appears only recently (and is therefore not traditional) coinciding with nationalism rise and the need for bodies to throw in the total war (another modern invention) meat grinder.
You can disagree, and I’m open to hearing your counter arguments, because I’m not dismissing you as biased.
One self-described historian. On a Reddit post. Let’s not pretend this is the unified or authoritative voice of the discipline.
> I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
You’re conflating aesthetic masculinity with functional masculinity, and that’s a category error. The aphorism isn’t about how men dressed in the 17th century or how they signaled status — it’s about what kind of men can sustain a civilization.
In this context, “strong men” refers to individuals who demonstrate the discipline, competence, long-term responsibility, and willingness to bear risk that are required to build, maintain, and defend the institutions that keep a society stable — especially when conditions are difficult. It’s a sociological concept, not an aesthetic one, and it has nothing to do with your personal distaste (or favor) for particular cultural aesthetic expressions of masculinity.
It’s essentially a truism warning people that problems you ignore don’t fix themselves, and has nothing to do with gender or gender stereotypes, that’s a linguistic misunderstanding. In this context, “men” is gender neutral and means “people.” In old english, the word “men” is explicitly gender neutral and there was a different word, “wēr” for male people, which is still used in some contexts, e.g. “werewolf” means wolf man.
I bring this example up every time, but I'm a baseball fan. And seemingly every generation of fan has said there's more people striking out than there used to be. Is it because there part of getting old as a baseball fan? No! It's really happening. Strikeouts have quite literally been going up from one decade to the next for basically a century.
So sometimes it's because the thing is really happening. Environmental ecosystem collapse? Real. People having shorter attention spans every next generation? Real! Politics getting worse? Well, maybe the 1860s were worse, but the downward trajectory over the last 50 years seems pretty real. Inefficiency of increasingly automagic programming paradigms? Real!
Sometimes things are true even if old people are saying them.
Actually it's the opposite.
Strong men create hard times by trying to show to each other how strong they are. Hard times create weak men because during hard times strong men kill each other, thus mostly weak men remain. Weak men create good times because instead of trying to show their strength they just build stuff so that the world is easier for them. In good times people breed and the population returns to the mean with just enough strong men to start the cycle again.
WWII was the last time strong men created hard times. We are overdue for another round and it shows.