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Comment by nharada | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious if you think viewpoints have also gotten more extreme in this period. It feels like the gap in political ideologies has widened a lot since I was younger.

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The gaps in views are certainly widening in societies in general, but my point wasn't exactly that. It was more about differences which always existed. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable. It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting.

I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.

Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.

I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this

In my twenties my friend group had a gay jewish law student and an actual nazi, and everything in between. We all had the same sense of humour and didnt take ourselves seriously. The two guys specified would have deep and long conversations (not debates, not arguments) intonthe early hours while the rest of us fell asleep or left due to next day obligations. The only controversy I recall was when I said Conan the Barbarian is better than Lord of the Rings.

> The only controversy I recall was when I said Conan the Barbarian is better than Lord of the Rings.

facts

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