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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

> We really need a change in mindset around what success means.

How?

Wealth and power is all that society obsesses about and there's an endless list of suckers for people that appear to be wealthy or powerful. Hell, even this board is filled with rat races spamming how to climb the pyramid in companies I vomit just thinking about "oh, this is how I got promoted to L17 from L16" or bs like that.

Nobody's getting interviewed and hailed for saving the most lives in an Indian hospital or risking its life reporting in Gaza under constant Israeli bombs and shooting.

But sure there's endless content of how this or that startupper created yet another unicorn with some pointless B2B saas.

People want to hear and reflect and empathize with winners who have all, not with the "real" heroes impacting the world positively through sacrifice and pain.

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This is only true in America. American culture has become one where your worth as a person is based on money. If someone has alot of money, they must be better, smarter, etc, than everyone else who has less.

I dont think this holds as strongly in other countries. Other countries do not have the religious like worship of money that is the usa. Having a Phd is seen as higher status than making millions on legal scamming.

My Indian coworkers talk more about people in their country helping other than who is richest in India where the us folks talk about nothing but stonks and what car they will buy next.

I'm European, I see no difference here.

Maybe asian cultures are different.

You really think China and India are full of people who want to do good for society instead of wishing to get rich at any cost? I think their human rights record and treatment of the less privileged point at a very different direction.

I have no idea, I'm not from there.

Religion

It doesn't need need to be tied to some mystical god, "music is my religion" is a phrase that has been used and is understood easily, and you can replace music with many other nouns, games, science, family, dog grooming, whatever.

You can kind of see this in the rise of weird internet cults around celebrities and obviously many IRL cults over the years, and I don't know if the frequency of weird cults has increased in the last 3 decades but I would take wild guess and say it has.

"Make religions cool again" is a bit of a hard sell considering worldwide events but unless we can come up with a better word for a shared value system where people sacrifice things they can gain, for the good of the group, I don't think there is a stronger word.

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