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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any personal experience with this, but what's interesting to me is how similar a lot of this sounds to America. I'm not saying it IS the same as America, just that if there is a substantive difference I didn't get a sense of it

- Nationalism stemming from insecurity (I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest)

- "social death" - Is that not so different that being canceled or fear of being canceled? To me it seems very apparent that people who get ostracized on the national stage take a huge personal toll and have their personality changed for years.

- Also for the Dark World example he uses a Peter Thiel quote. I think optimism/trust/community is lower here now that a few decades ago. But I do agree that in tech jobs I've anecdotally seen more cutthroat approaches (e.g. refusing to share knowledge with a coworker) from other cultures more often.

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> I tend to notice the poorest, most desperate tend to be the proudest

I think this is where folks go astray. There are tons of well-off or even wealthy people who love America, give to their churches, cheer on their kids at sporting events, and have what appears to an outsider as an unbelievably high amount of nationalism. It's not really the poorest, most desperate slice of society by any measure. Have you lived outside of a major city in the US?

I don't live in a major city.

Looking at the research it shows that subjects who self-identify as loving America can be preducted by best by being older, and political party, though not wealth at all.

So I don't really have any hard-data to justify my impression that it's uneducated blue-collar white men without much going for them that vociferously love america, maybe it's just country music that gives that impression, or the type of uneducated poor who enter the army with blind faith in our institutions, etc.

I'd love to see the data on age. The only clear data is that having children makes you more patriotic and conservative. Basically you have a stake in the future.

Now, people who are younger and urban tend to also be childless, but if you control for child bearing, you will get some eye opening stats. There is also a correlation with depression and the number of visits to therapists, but that could also be due to the loneliness of being childless in a major urban area.

Might also be due to parents with children being in greater need of a chinwag with a therapist or three but as a group mostly veering toward lacking both free time and spare cash.

Lot of room to speculate.

No, it's childless people who see therapists more.

The axis is childlessness/more concerned with online social standing/less patriotic on one side, versus having kids/being more patriotic, fewer accounts of depression.

Much of the push for parasocial relationships is, I believe, the result of people not having kids to come home to but living life online. That also is responsible for the fear of "social death", e.g. online ostracism. People who come home to kids and grill with their friends on weekends don't particularly care about conforming to the beliefs of strangers online.

> No,

Read carefully, I didn't disagree.

> it's childless people who see therapists more.

Possibly because they have more free time and disposable income.

As I said, there's a lot of room for speculation, probably best to avoid sweeping generic explanations based on keyhole PoVs.

Maybe in the specific domain of corporate america.

In everyday life the description in the article is nothing like what I imagine America to be.

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