Fortune's Child | Hacker News Reader

Fortune's Child

laphamsquarterly.org

32 pointsdrjohnson6 comments

I loved this. The refusal of people in the tech world to engage the world politically (beyond ill conceived political fantasies described to friends in restaurants or strangers in internet forums) really bothers me. I had never thought about it as a prolonged adolescence, but that's pretty apt.

And indeed, what political engagement we do see is of the adolescent variety: 'you can't tell me what to do!' rather 'what ought I do?'; 'you should give me X, Y and Z' rather than 'I should give A, B ad C.'

For a generation so deeply self-interested, we don't do a lot of self-examination.

Growing up has always been difficult; our culture, our politics, our technology and our way of life make it avoidable. The result is unsurprising.

Says a grown man sitting alone in his boxers on a computer from a hotel room on a Sunday morning rather than surrounded by the family he never fathered, in the suit he doesn't own, at the church he doesn't attend.

Things can change fast. My husband was alone until he met me at 35. 11 years later he had found the family of four small children, the suit, and the church (at least on Christmas and Easter).

If you want a different life you can find it change pretty quickly.

As an expectant father of my firstborn, I still feel like I have a connection to what it was like to be a boy and I wonder how true this quote is: “Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing…A man can never understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.”

A bunch of assertions without the slights proof, dressed up in excessive verbiage and florally sourced platitudes with the occasional quote by person or person long departed from this world and therefore permanently unavailable for consultation.

Can't we do better? I mean I liked being called an elf wizard but this is exactly the kind of writing that we don't need on Hacker News - pretentious but with very little substance.

Essays don't have to prove things. If they did, they wouldn't be called essays.

There is more than one kind of intellectual substance. Lapham and Lapham's are easily good enough to be here.

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