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Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if some of it is a sort of parallel to the self-image issues called out for young women on social media. In the same way that it used to be easier to be happy about your appearance when you didn't see the genetically gifted on your feed every day, it was easier to feel proud about being good at $job/$hobby/etc when you only had to be better than anyone within 100 miles rather than competing with that one guy who lives 3,713 miles away who hasn't done anything but eat, sleep and blacksmith (or whatever) since he was 3.

Even as an adult, I feel it a bit. You see somebody on YouTube and think the hobby looks intriguing, but feel discouraged because you'll never be as good as someone who made a "make it or break it" bet on the hobby at 12 years old with a parent who was famous in the field.

It seems hard to feel proud of yourself these days in a world where everything you do is judged on a national or global scale instead of your city or county.

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Shouldn't you have some ability to be internally/intrinsically motivated or proud of a hobby without comparing on a national/global scale?

Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists. You can blacksmith, poorly, even though someone's making some stunning damascus on YouTube - in fact, it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.

A common struggle seems to be that for whatever reason, people have tunnel vision on achieving the end result instead of enjoying the path to it.

From a random HN comment not so long ago, I highly recommend this gentle intro to applied Adlerian psychology:

The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi

Not challenging as far as reading goes, but it might hit some people deep enough to only chew on a few pages at a time.

> Plenty of people played guitar, poorly, even though they could hear CDs of good guitarists.

I think it is different because that guitarist on the band that released a CD is a famous musician, at least famous enough to get a contract and release a CD. So I, as a hobbyist, don't expect to be as good.

But now there are thousands of regular people non-professional musicians on youtube (or wherever) who are a hundred times better than me, so it can become discouraging.

Ok, so shouldn't those same feelings mean that nobody would go bowling, ice skating, or participate in a team sport? Statistically there'll be someone better than you at the venue.

Better, always, but not usually pro-level better.

When younger I liked to play amateur (very, very amateur) basketball, but Michael Jordan never showed up at our court.

OTOH I did have that experience once, in kart racing, where a top-level professional, a then-current Indy car driver showed up at our local track! It was a humbling experience, but very educational. I'm a good car (and kart) racer at an amateur level, but this pro guy was so many orders of magnitude better than any of us at the club. It was also eye-opening to consider that this pro was only a mid-pack racer in Indycars, the top guys were much faster than him.

My Dad and I built a kart to spec but didn't race it, only drove for fun and skill. Luckily I had no idea there were so many levels of expertise as you speak of. Helluva way to learn to drive though! By the time I got full control of an automobile all my wild urges had been satisfied.

If I'd met someone like you describe I'd have challenged him to a race: what else is there but to learn!

And so much of life is necessarily chance - so go for it!

Oh we did have a race. He lapped all of us.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we purchaed music on physical media. I had a Tower Records near me, took up an entire side of the shopping center - its since been cut up into five stores. Anyhows, it was filled with CDs, every genre. Somehow, when faced with all of that music, it didn't stop people form creating more music.

Guitar and art in general is weird because technical skill and commercial success are orthogonal. I grew up on pop punk; anyone with a desire and like 4 hours of free time can basically play Blink-182’s entire discography of power chords.

I wouldn’t even say I can play guitar and I can do an okay rendition of Stairway to Heaven.

It’s easier to get into hobbies, but you’ll also be far more keenly aware of just how shit you are at it. I do hydroponics and YouTube won’t even really show that; apparently if you haven’t upgraded to aquaponics (hydro with fish to poop out nutrients) it’s not even worth having a channel. The algo hasn’t even suggested someone with a normal sized setup. The smallest I ever see verges on a commercial setup. Genuinely I think the smallest setup I’ve seen had a 500 gallon tilapia tank for a reservoir. The larger ones were installing hydroponic power on rivers to run all their pumps and fans for a detached hydroponic grow system.

Guitar's an easy example because you had a benchmark for "success" before and after social media. But the logic extends to any hobby or skill: before social media, surely people still recognized they weren't in the top 1% of hydroponics, or painting, or bowling. Did that stop them then? Why were they motivated to keep doing it without 50,000 subscribers?

It's possibly a good outlook to strive for but I'm inclined to think that most people fundamentally and inherently need to feel like respected members of society or else their mental health suffers.

I feel like this is a better phrasing of what I’m trying to get at. Feeling like you aren’t good at anything feels like you’re bound to be “undifferentiated worker #7354 at Amazon warehouse 13.12b”, and the abundance of talent on social media can make it hard to feel like something other than a corporate cog that has hobby #142

That's a very modern idea: that everyone is special and valuable and the main character of the story.

The reality is that for most people (and all of human history, excluding a handful of kings, popes, and explorers) you are just undifferentiated worker #7354, undifferentiated office employee #436, or undifferentiated serf #324.

Should we give up all hope and ambition? Or perhaps there is a middle ground to strike?

As I said in my original comment, you've got to have some internal motivation. It's unhealthy to derive all your motivation from likes or views, and people need to recognize that, as Schopenhauer says, "the safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy".

The problem is that this is antithetical to western (particularly) American cultural propaganda.

Now a lot of people are angry that you've been lying to them for years and the best you have to say now is "sucks to suck". I predict increasing political instability and violence and the social and economic classes get reshuffled.

> it should now be easier to get into the hobby, learn, and connect with others than it ever was.

Nope. I'm doing less hobby stuff that I was 5 years ago even. Anything that's not free software has gotten much more expensive or the opportunity cost has been raised too high and my wages are down.

   174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft- hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

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