The Who Cares Era

https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-05-23-who-cares/

by NotInOurNames • 1 year ago

739 711 1 year ago

dansinker.com

Raed667• 1 year ago

the reader didn't care

I would argue -in cases like this- the reader doesn't exist, closer to a dead internet society

Hacktrick• 1 year ago

Very few read the inquirer anyways, which reflects the author's idea of a trend away from sitting down and just consuming normal media.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Sadly, this seems to be the case, but I'm not so sure that it's new.

I think "If it's worth doing; it's worth doing half-assed." is a personal working philosophy that is probably thousands of years old.

It's just that now, we have better tools for half-assing it.

mclau157• 1 year ago

We have better tools but are usually forced to stay for the same 8 hours it used to take

amanaplanacanal8• 1 year ago

Yeah. Despite gains in productivity, we've had the same 40 hour work week for what seems like forever, and all the monetary gains have gone to capital instead of labor.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

I think there’s something historically unusual going on in the US currently. We got an incredible lead when the rest of the world blew it self up right in the middle of industrialization. Things worked out by default, allowing other parts of the system to half-ass it. Now we have a tradition of half-assing it which seems likely to come back and bite us in the ass as the feedback loop slows down.

Our whole corporate culture is based on the idea that business doesn’t have to plan more than a quarter ahead, because engineering will pull a magic trick instead.

0_____09• 1 year ago

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.

The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)

Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.

Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).

I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.

There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

maxehmookau• 1 year ago

An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though.

In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.

Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.

jaccola• 1 year ago

Maybe (and I mean this genuinely, I don't know for certain) "Who cares?" is a cause of wage stagnation.

Permik• 1 year ago

From these kinds of observations in my own life I've just concluded that unfortunately some neurotypical got hired to do an autistic people's job.

XorNot4• 1 year ago

The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)

This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.

HideousKojima• 1 year ago

And zoning, permitting, environmental impact reviews, etc. add significant extra drags onto many such projects.

0_____09• 1 year ago

Yes, and...

I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.

imtringued• 1 year ago

That's not a satisfactory explanation, because you're saying that the owner of the land can't make use of it and should have given it to someone else, but they don't actually care what the best use of the land is, so they take the slow way.

potato37328424• 1 year ago

Or the local powers that be sink their teeth in and the project isn't lucrative enough for its backers to let them just leave with a pound of flesh so progress stalls.

sndean• 1 year ago

a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.

In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

0_____09• 1 year ago

I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there.

They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)

pm215• 1 year ago

Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing. It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and passing their skills on to other people who care about getting better.

potato37328424• 1 year ago

Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing papers is below them.

Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.

WalterBright27• 1 year ago

People have been making this observation for a while.

A lot longer than that. See C. Northcote Parkinson's books.

whobre• 1 year ago

Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.

To be fair, the society decided to encourage such behavior.

mlinhares• 1 year ago

A bit much to say society did that, they have forced this due to their very well organized and connected unions and the power they have to cause the population to fear for their safety if the "cops are on strike".

The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.

bandoti• 1 year ago

Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop.

People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”

They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”

I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.

People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.

Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...

https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...

disgruntledphd2• 1 year ago

Honestly, maybe social media has accelerated the trend, but this has been happening for all of my life now (almost 44 years).

One Nation under God

has turned into

One Nation under the influence

of one drug

Television, the drug of the Nation

Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

- TV, the drug of the nation

edit: stoopid HN parser

KronisLV• 1 year ago

that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”

I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.

Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.

I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.

_lvbh• 1 year ago

There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.

Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.

AnimalMuppet3• 1 year ago

Asia has the whole "lying flat" thing. It may be less widespread, but it's there too.

mattmanser• 1 year ago

Friendship groups are like mini echo chambers.

One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.

If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.

But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.

energy123• 1 year ago

For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago:

It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.

Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.

superdude12• 1 year ago

It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.

this15testingg• 1 year ago

to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How can you really blame anyone when the society is just working for the sake of it.

MisterTea• 1 year ago

This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog.

My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."

voidhorse• 1 year ago

Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively alienation free work is disappearing.

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.

To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.

Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.

_DeadFred_6• 1 year ago

It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online. While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same circle living the same lifestyle.

Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.

safety1st• 1 year ago

I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods.

It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.

Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?

We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).

But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?

Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.

Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.

ambicapter3• 1 year ago

I’m doubtful because things always got a little worse all the time even before money existed. It’s the natural state of nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies an obvious course of action).

transcriptase• 1 year ago

Exactly.

And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.

Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.

greenavocado6• 1 year ago

The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?

The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

And one of the cut corners is not letting bad employees go, because hiring costs money and they might be struggling just to stay in business.

BlueTemplar• 1 year ago

Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.

And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.

RamblingCTO2• 1 year ago

The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.

RankingMember• 1 year ago

I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he worked.

doctor_lollipop• 1 year ago

This, very much.

My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.

And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.

So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.

weweersdfsd2• 1 year ago

This is it. It's rational not to give a damn in this environment, at least for anyone who isn't an entrepreneur or very well paid.

BrenBarn6• 1 year ago

I agree with this. It's a slight shift in perspective from the article: it's not just "Who cares" but "Nothing matters". It's not so much about people not caring as about people feeling that caring is pointless because everything that happens is outside their control. Even quite local dimensions of life that used to be more controllable are becoming corrupted by giant corporations, rampaging politicians, etc.

In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.

I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.

sp0rk• 1 year ago

There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

adamc• 1 year ago

Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.

palmotea7• 1 year ago

> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.

If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.

toomuchtodo8• 1 year ago

Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.

If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.

WalterBright27• 1 year ago

because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees

There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.

saubeidl17• 1 year ago

The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.

Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.

This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.

II2II• 1 year ago

I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.

thewebguyd5• 1 year ago

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.

A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.

vjvjvjvjghv4• 1 year ago

“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.”

Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.

No wonder people become cynical.

munificent• 1 year ago

I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.

We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.

If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.

So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?

0cf8612b2e1e2• 1 year ago

On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.

simonsarris• 1 year ago

Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.

try_the_bass6• 1 year ago

Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.

I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.

Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.

I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".

paulddraper3• 1 year ago

When do you think large employers were pretending to care? And when did people stop caring?

Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?

navane• 1 year ago

"It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike."

I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.

reaperducer• 1 year ago

I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.

A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.

Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.

nancyminusone• 1 year ago

The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the dominant ideology was about how “egoism lead to the greater good thanks to the magical forces of the free market”.

It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.

Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.

Gravityloss• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is how it felt in Rome or Byzantium or various other places in the years leading up to collapse.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

IIRC the Romans had a cultural meme of mythologizing their past. So they probably did feel like this on the way down. But also on the way up.

zwnow• 1 year ago

Pay shit get shit work simple as that

0_____09• 1 year ago

Labor rates where I am are among the highest in the nation. People in the trades largely live in the outlying suburbs and pick up the lucrative work in the urban core.

A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here.

You are probably right somewhere else.

bwfan1232• 1 year ago

but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?

Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.

danans2• 1 year ago

I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.

It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).

0_____09• 1 year ago

In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.

dkarl2• 1 year ago

a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs

A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.

I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.

I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way.

You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.

In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.

amanaplanacanal8• 1 year ago

Most people would probably like to contribute something good to the world, and make it a better place in some way or another. A lot of folks are forced to produce things they hate because otherwise they have no health care and may not eat. All so somebody else can take most of the profit and leave them with a pittance.

pixl976• 1 year ago

We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.

Eh, I disagree with elitist...

We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.

criddell• 1 year ago

If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death. I'm about half way through it myself and it has already changed how I look at some things.

He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.

98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash

In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.

If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.

gardenhedge• 1 year ago

I think it is a lasting effect of the pandemic. It'd the same outside the US.

I would also add other contributors: inflation along with salaries not increasing, and housing crisis in many cities around the world

dayvid• 1 year ago

Part of it is COVID and also the destruction of pension and job security. Companies want to pay employees as little as possible and employees want to do as little work as possible.

justin66• 1 year ago

The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)

I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.

(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)

bigtex882• 1 year ago

I'm fairly certain this is how things have always been.

0x000xca0xfe2• 1 year ago

I'm fairly certain we had multiple big cultural shifts over the past decade and things are completely different now.

PaulHoule3• 1 year ago

In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.

Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".

[1] https://kai.kendal.org/

bombcar• 1 year ago

Once you realize the builders build for the lenders and for nobody else, everything becomes crystal clear.

0x000xca0xfe2• 1 year ago

They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.

constantcrying2• 1 year ago

The person in question was literally paid by the government, which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept, "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.

WalterBright27• 1 year ago

it's Boston

When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each street had 3 names:

1. the name on the map

2. the name on the street signs

3. the name given by the person giving you directions

I learned to navigate by counting intersections.

WalterBright27• 1 year ago

I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".

ewhanley4• 1 year ago

This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

Google works this way too. We don’t include Q4 in our plans.

0_____09• 1 year ago

My partner and I ended up sleeping on an air mattress while we waited for the one person at the building department who could sign off on our project to come back from vacation. They were in fact completely unresponsive between thanksgiving and two weeks after new years.

michaelrpeskin• 1 year ago

This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world

qwerpy• 1 year ago

Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware of any society or even a single city that really breaks out of it once they land in "second world".

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

I think that’s a good way to describe the 15,000 years of stagnation we see in the Star Wars universe.

tim3334• 1 year ago

The original second world was a bit like that in that it used to refer to the soviet and socialist countries. Looked like the west but not quite right.

dfxm12• 1 year ago

Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer satisfaction.

In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.

almosthere• 1 year ago

Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely making it, and often they are in service of people that don't even realize prices have risen.

I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.

AndrewKemendo• 1 year ago

There’s two things going on:

1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes

As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.

In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.

Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.

That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.

“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.

So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?

You don’t.

Balgair2• 1 year ago

1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:

"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."

https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m

Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.

Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.

I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.

Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.

babyent2• 1 year ago

Why not just filter out those kinds of people?

I filter out people like that because

A. They’re not on the same level

B. I won’t hire them and I wouldn’t work with them

C. They serve no purpose to me in my life because I don’t even want to hang out with them

testing223212• 1 year ago

Because you have to deal with them anytime you want to get anything done - planning and approval offices, tax departments, construction crews, contractors and on and on.

Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.

nyarlathotep_4• 1 year ago

Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc.

I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.

0_____09• 1 year ago

Hah! When we renovated we found century old liquor bottles in the walls. Some things don't change.

bumby10• 1 year ago

really? A parking garage takes six years?

I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.

We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.

(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)

constantcrying2• 1 year ago

Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.

This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?

There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.

Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.

komali25• 1 year ago

I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.

If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.

One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).

As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.

Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."

Ray206• 1 year ago

she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism.

It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.

If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.

h2zizzle• 1 year ago

Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).

I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

Can you explain the meaning of kvetching and where it comes from?

deathanatos• 1 year ago

Just Google it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch

To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.

I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.

It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)

mieubrisse3• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's an instance of selection bias - the instances of things not working draw our attention more than the instances of things working. "This thing is working just fine" doesn't draw eyeballs.

miiiiiike• 1 year ago

Hahaha! I spent the morning explaining to a network installer who bought the wrong jacks and tools for the project that I wasn't going to keep the incorrect jacks and pay for the correct ones just so he wouldn't have to accept the return of "products that no one wants." Correct, no one wants them, me especially.

Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.

homefree2• 1 year ago

Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...

Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.

int_19h7• 1 year ago

The founder of Palantir is certainly not the person I'd seek to articulate what things "made the West great".

rxtexit• 1 year ago

I just doubt all this is true though.

It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.

The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.

People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.

dividefuel2• 1 year ago

I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.

Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.

People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?

trinsic2• 1 year ago

I don't know if this helps, and I am pretty out of touch with the work culture because I run my own business (boy am I glad I stuck with this in the 2000's because now its so crazy in the job market) but you know where working hard really matters? its with the people you come into contact with that value your hard work that counts. I don't necessarily work hard expecting a return (but I understand fiances are soo tight for people right now that it maters a lot), I work hard because I enjoy what do and I want people to have a good experience. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone in this day and age, but I would strongly encourage everyone that is finding this situation untenable to find something you love a start doing it. The people that values this work will come, it takes awhile to build it, but it does happen eventually.

alphazard2• 1 year ago

This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the workforce isn't something you can control.

This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.

The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job.

Sure there is, that organization is called having your own business, or consulting.

immibis6• 1 year ago

This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now:

Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.
Amos: That sounds bad.
Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.

TFYS• 1 year ago

I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.

h2782• 1 year ago

but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an even lower energy route

I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.

AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...

You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.

THroaway2254• 1 year ago

I just travelled to a province to pay for some private healthcare i cant get at home. Its a simple procedure, but a specific one. I sent the treatment plan to the customer service liason I was dealing with and triple checked that the doctor i was seeing was familiar with it.

Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it.

The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"

JohnBooty• 1 year ago

My experience is that people want to do their jobs well, but SYSTEMIC reasons tend to prevent this.

Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here.

How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors?

    Where I live, it seems like half the streets 
    don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater 
    where you'd expect this, it's Boston).

Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided.

So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter.

In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)

Vegenoid• 1 year ago

It’s a result of people disliking the system. Personally thriving by gaming the system is seen as the enlightened thing to do, because people don’t respect or appreciate the system, often viewing it as actually harmful and malicious.

phendrenad22• 1 year ago

I'll add one: New house construction. There are now multiple building inspectors who are making ad revenue on youtube by showing how bad the standard of construction is.

xnx2• 1 year ago

Nothing that all of these examples are public sector monopolies or related (e.g. permitting). Being bad at your job definitely exists in the private sector, but there are competitive forces that work against it.

LoudFrog• 1 year ago

We could make the same argument about this lazy post.

QuantumGood• 1 year ago

If you don't build motivation for competence by navigating difficulties in everyday life (fetching water, building a fire), where do you find that motivation? Putting humans in boxes with a screen in front of them and everything they need to survive around them without requiring much effort produces a different human.

richardfontana• 1 year ago

Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).

This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.

sznio• 1 year ago

Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.

These are the people who had their applications rejected elsewhere since the AI didn't like them. I use ChatGPT to create my resume since it gives me at least a chance I'll get a response. Manually written resumes get ignored.

MikeTheGreat• 1 year ago

genuine question: can anyone expand on this?

This is the first I've heard of this and I'd love to know more. What is it about AI generated resumes that get paste AI resume filters that manually-written resumes don't have?

tines2• 1 year ago

Sounds like people coping about their lack of responses. “It’s not me, it must be AI’s fault!”

SirFatty2• 1 year ago

For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle and current president. The zone has been flooded, I quit reading the news and cannot be bothered to care about any of it.

Additionally, AI generated content, AI pictures and deepfakes have a numbing effect. I guess I can say "who cares?"

account42• 1 year ago

This obsession is not healthy.

cladopa• 1 year ago

For me, the who cares part started with the latest election cycle and current president.

I would say it started before, when the supposedly most powerful country of the world was ruled by a senile person and it was not replaced immediately. Instead half the country negated the evidence that we now know was true.

I am not American so I observe those things with curiosity from outside and from inside only as a visitor.

But I don't know: the weapons of mass destruction, the too big to fail. Most people didn't care them unless it affected them personally, like savings.

My theory is the opposite, that people care too much. Company owners wanted free money so if the country gets destroyed in the process, they will "not care" as much for the people that printing money throws under the bus as the "care" about them and their personal proffit.

In a two-party system the same thing happens. They do "not care" about having a senile president as much as they "care" about not losing the power for "their" party. Now the same thing happens with Ukraine and Trump.

The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power.

SirFatty2• 1 year ago

"The culprit here is the two party system that lacks healthy competition for getting into power."

Actually, no, the issue is corruption. The two party system is fine. Both parties are corrupt. Have 4 parties... still are going to be corrupt. Citizens United, meme coins, insider trading and no term limits equals a bad time for John and Jane Doe.

AnimalMuppet3• 1 year ago

When there was little to read, people read what was there, sometimes several times. When there is too much to read, people skim at most. You simply can't engage with it all; you can't even try to engage with it all. There's too much.

When someone lies to you enough times (or, if you prefer, speaks with total disregard of the truth enough times), you stop listening. It's not worth your time to sort out the truth from the not-truth. Worse, it's unhealthy to listen to lies in volume. (Think in bayesian terms: If you update your priors at all, then if the lies come in great enough volume, they will eventually become accepted as truth.)

I care some. I care about where the country is going. I'm concerned. But I can't care about every post and every back-and-forth and every he-said-she-said. There's too much.

AI... I can't be bothered to care about anything written by an AI, for the exact same reasons.

zingababba• 1 year ago

Thankfully I'm a contrarian so for the first time in my life I'm actually caring.

dmje• 1 year ago

On the one hand I’m nodding along and have a bunch of links bookmarked about the - for want of a better phrase - “trend to mediocrity”. It’s true that the median is where everything goes if you feed the beast the most average stuff you can find, there’s no doubt about it.

On the other, there are many, many examples of artists and musicians and museums and galleries and others who are - still, always have been, always will be - making extraordinary, brilliant, unique, beautiful things. There’s not a day goes by on HN that I don’t see stuff that fits this mold.

I think there’s actually extraordinary opportunity here, to continue making things that are great and unique and rough around the edges and cared for. The author sums it up well: but I’m not sure the scene is quite as dire as he’s making out at the beginning of the article.

Barbing• 1 year ago

There’s not a day goes by on HN that I don’t see stuff that fits this mold.

Surprised this didn’t smack me in the face when I first read the post. This very site does indeed serve as a bit of a counterpoint.

How could we compare and contrast effort and apathy across time, apples to apples? Maybe comparing farmhands or authors… e.g. the average reception of authors’ works vs. length of writing time

(bad example, maybe someone has a better one)

joshstrange• 1 year ago

I've got bad news, people didn't care far before AI, this is not new at all.

Even when work is 100% done by people I regularly see output that shows no one cared.

ncr1005• 1 year ago

Well it's just news news. More like, survival. I think that's kind of what it boils down to.

Humans can only mentally handle so much. In this era of humanity, we are overloaded on many dimensions. Therefore we should expect the byproduct and blow back from being overloaded.

It's like trying to teach a toddler how to manage a non-profit organization of 100 people. Is not going to go well.

jaoane• 1 year ago

Yes, nobody cares about what a special supplement says. No one reads those and if they do it’s just to pass time. What happened here is that having used AI to write the supplement made the obvious more evident. The rest of the article is just crying about AI and Trump and yawn wow this is even less interesting than a Chicago Sun Times special supplement!

bytepoet• 1 year ago

Such a well-written and thoughtful blog post. Loved it!

naming_the_user• 1 year ago

People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.

In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.

In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.

short_sells_poo4• 1 year ago

There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?

The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.

curiousgal• 1 year ago

Yeah even if you had one of those fancy job and make over 150k, owning a decent flat in London is still out of reach nowadays.

mettamage3• 1 year ago

People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.

You

hit the nail

on the head.

Such a simple thought. How did I miss it? Haha. Thanks for mentioning. A bad deal is my siren seducing me to check out at work.

surgical_fire• 1 year ago

"In the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate."

bananapub• 1 year ago

this is the thing that bothers me most about it all (well, second most after the entire ruling class deciding to replace humans with the Mostly OK Machine without caring about the harm it does to employee and customers and society in the long term) - that people just don't want to take responsibility.

if you want to use an LLM to produce code, OK! have it produce a PR, then review it carefully yourself with your human brain, then send it along. if it fucking sucks, that's on you, and you should feel bad and bear the social consequences of it. if you're not skilled enough to review the PR, then why are you sending it? ditto bug reports. ditto emails.

you, the human, are the one sending it. you, the human, need to take responsibility, instead of pretending it it is someone else's fault, or no one's fault. you, the human, need to use your judgment to decide if sending an LLM-edited or LLM-generated PR or email is a waste of time or not.

ramesh31• 1 year ago

I've always thought that caring is the most precious resource in software development. You can pay people to show up to an office, you can pay people to write code, but you simply cannot pay people to care. It takes some special confluence of factors that money can't buy. And great software is only made by people that care. This is the real "10x" factor that most people and organizations don't have.

weweersdfsd2• 1 year ago

Perhaps you can't pay people enough to make them care, but you sure can make them not care by paying too little.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

necessary but insufficient, I think. if your salary doubled tomorrow but without a change in responsibilities or agency at work, would that move the needle? I think you need other things in addition to the pay, like recognition for efforts and outcomes

GenZ_RiseUp• 1 year ago

I think this is what is meant by 'slop', especially Dan's mention of Hanif Abdurraqib's subject matter on content meant to be consumed while doing something else. Its purpose is consumption for consumption's sake.

That's not necessarily a negative, a lot of entertainment has been predicated on non-thought (Seinfeld was great in part because of no hugs, no learning) consumption. However, when it leaks into how we access and shape the world, there is an increase in 'slop'pily made, low quality structures and products. I feel like its ushering in an era of 'Chabuduo' [1] across the globe that's going to be very difficult to come out of.

[1] https://www.chinaexpatsociety.com/culture/the-chabuduo-minds...

biophysboy3• 1 year ago

I think people right now are way too willing to surrender their own judgment. AI is an example of this, but there are many others: restaurant ratings, movie metascores, political polls, college rankings, engagement metrics, etc. These kinds of data should be a part of decision making, but not all of it. Otherwise, you get this passive, "who cares" mentality that the author describes.

potato37328424• 1 year ago

With that judgment they are surrendering responsibility.

"don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization in the western world.

biophysboy3• 1 year ago

Yes, absolutely - Dan Davies' "The Unaccountability Machine" is a good overview of this problem

thewebguyd5• 1 year ago

"don't blame me I'm just following what the professionals said" is an attitude that has pervaded damn near every organization in the western world.

Same thing as "Nobody got fired for buying IBM." They aren't just surrendering responsibility, but accountability as well.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

What do you base your decision on if not data?

biophysboy3• 1 year ago

I have no problem with people using data per se; I dislike people using data blindly, without thinking about the collection/analysis methods, personal preferences, etc.

Too2• 1 year ago

The only thing worse than data is fake data.

Finding the reliable sources of data or enough metadata and experience to make your own judgement is the key skill today.

elric• 1 year ago

When I do things for myself, I cut every corner until everything is spherical. But when I do things for others, I get joy from doing good work. Half-arsing something makes me feel ashamed. Not everything I do is done well, motivation waxes and wanes, sometimes I'm ill or tired or stressed. But then I try to do things as well as possible given the circumstances. I would hope that most people try to do the same.

fhennig• 1 year ago

People do care, about their own self interest and making money. Homo economicus, here we are! A critique of this attitude must look at its origins, and I think the reason we see this so much, is because the narrative of the last 40 years or so has been that: If we all look out for our own self interest, the market will balance everything out, and things will be great! Turns out, doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way doesn't yield great results, who could've seen it coming?

chii2• 1 year ago

doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way doesn't yield great results

this happens when the person paying the money and the person judging the work quality, and the person "punishing" are different entities.

Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say. Politicians spend, department beaurocracy spends, and hires, etc. The workers get hired, get paid, but their performance is not judged. The final recipient of the work - specific citizens - get poor service for the taxes paid.

nosianu• 1 year ago

Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say.

I would claim this is not a good example at all.

A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.

If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.

All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.

Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.

Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.

I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.

potato37328424• 1 year ago

We got into this situation because everything is so consolidated and filled with bureaucracy and metrics and statistical analysis that whether any individual does or doesn't try won't actually come back to benefit them, or at least not enough to be worth the squeeze in the end.

pixl976• 1 year ago

But if you understand the problem, you'll also understand why the bureaucracy exist...

The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.

I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.

The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.

And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.

jplusequalt3• 1 year ago

This is late stage capitalism at work. Our economy and political systems incentivized the behavior that lead us here, and the current apathy we see is the working class realizing the rot in the bottom of society.

chrisco2554• 1 year ago

There's no such thing as late stage capitalism. There's ebbs and flows, businesses that were formerly great (like newspapers), fade out and go out of business. New forms of media take their place, the cream rises to the top, the train keeps going.

amanaplanacanal8• 1 year ago

In our case I think late stage capitalism is what we are calling the combination of extremely low interest rates, low tax rates on the super-rich, and a lack of antitrust enforcement. The rich get richer, the middle class gets gutted, and nobody is incentivized to care any more.

saubeidl17• 1 year ago

There definitely is. The contradictions inherent to capitalism are becoming harder and harder to ignore, to the point where we're all in a state of hypernormalisation. Everyone knows the system is broken, yet we pretend it isn't, because to think of an alternative is too scary.

jplusequalt3• 1 year ago

There's no such thing late stage capitalism

I'd wager you'd argue there was such a thing as late stage socialism, no? You're inability to imagine anything else than capitalism is a fallacy. Google Capitalist Realism.

the cream rises to the top

No it doesn't. Success is largely determined by who had access to the most capital, or who was able to build a moat around themselves fast enough. The meritocracy people love to imagine they live in, is nothing more than a myth for a majority of people.

photochemsyn• 1 year ago

The people who control institutions seem to care more about fiscal solvenceny of their institutions above all else. Thus, if AI chatbot generated content in media results in more visits to the site and more ad revenue, that's 'good' - the content doesn't need to be accurate or truthful, it just needs to bring in more eyeballs which translates to more ad views which translates to more revenue, which is the metric that the leaders of the institution care most about.

In a more authoritarian state bent on information control, the leaders of the institution might have a different metric, especially if they were a state-funded institution - namely, ensuring that their content didn't offend the heads of the authoritarian state, resulting in either a removal of state funding or a visit from the thought police.

Of course there is some intersectionality here - if the ad revenue is controlled by a few monopolistic corporations, then they might respond to critical investigative reporting on their industry with the removal of their advertising revenue from the media institution. In a monopolistic situation, this might not hurt their own revenue that much as consumers have nowhere else to buy products, but in a competitive market situation, refusing to advertise is likely to result in lower revenue.

For the media institution, generating fluff from a chatbot instructed not to offend either the state or the corporate conglomerate is the safe route when it comes to fiscal solvency (and staying out of prison).

Fundamentally, if the economic system is so corrupt and soul-crushing that the vast majority of people dream of acquiring enough capital to escape the system ('f-u money'), then something is very wrong with that system.

sharadov• 1 year ago

I think 90% of people did not ever care, this is not new.

They pretended to care because it looked bad if they did not.

But when you started talking seriously about effecting change ( in context to workplace situations), they would diplomatically excuse themselves.

That's why I avoid big corporations where this behavior is endemic.

I mostly worked at smaller companies and left when they got too big.

agentultra• 1 year ago

It's the bullshit era.

The truth doesn't even matter. It's not factored in. Even liars care about the truth enough to deceive you. Bullshit is worse than lying.

We disagree? Ok. You believe your facts, I'll believe mine. We can scream into the void with our respective audiences.

It's hard to maintain the energy to seek the truth because there is so much bullshit. The peddlers of it are filling every single form of media with it. Every text box on every webpage and in every app is an invitation to add more of it to the world.

I think people get overwhelmed by it. And you have to have the bullshit cop on your shoulder exhorting you to care. It takes time and energy to care. Most people are too tired. So we let things slide. We stop listening to the bullshit cop. We become more selective. We care about the truth in some contexts but not others. It's survival.

hypeatei• 1 year ago

Bullshit asymmetry principle: it takes less energy to produce bullshit than it does to refute it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

I think about that a lot while trying to read PRs that Copilot Agent has created

ferguess_k• 1 year ago

It is just the same mindset dripping down from the top.

For decades after the Cold War, politicians and financiers are gradually moving to the "apres moi le deluge" mindset. Now it drips down to ordinary people because the Cold War generation is dying.

That's it.

buangakun• 1 year ago

Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN.

So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer.

Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did not have background in this field. This guy just roped into this project and stayed.

I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.

I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a decision.

Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly what were the problems)

To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.

So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.

I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should be my default attitude when working.

Now I am in "Who The Fuck Cares" club.

bwfan1232• 1 year ago

I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar" - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned. Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align without any monetary reward.

mystifyingpoi• 1 year ago

In my first job after graduating I've found:

* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded

* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks

* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time

* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job

So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.

ewhanley4• 1 year ago

It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?

mettamage3• 1 year ago

Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that.

What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.

So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."

I give a fuck.

I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.

I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:

1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).

2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.

That's the balance I'm currently taking.

whyowhy34849394• 1 year ago

I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.

BrenBarn6• 1 year ago

I think this is a good attitude, but it does point up that doing this requires a conscious choice and involves a certain amount of sacrifice in that you have to sort of accept that you're "wasting" effort. In other words, this is the healthiest response to an unhealthy situation in our society.

chrisco2554• 1 year ago

I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man So, that was my wake up call

Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?

If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.

Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.

j2kun• 1 year ago

+100 get advice from people in your life who care about you and can contextualize your situation.

XorNot4• 1 year ago

But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave".

The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.

93po• 1 year ago

i think most people are gonna follow advice that they tend to agree with - if the reddit advice was "drive off a bridge" i'm sure he wouldn't. he probably read the opinions, realized he had the same opinion, and adopted it

const_cast4• 1 year ago

The problem is that if you start caring too much when other people don't you become a target. People blend in because it works. You can't fix a fucked culture, you just can't. So either leave or become one of the pact.

Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.

rkozik1989• 1 year ago

There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-oriented enough to manage relationships.

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving a shit was for suckers.

We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.

neilv3• 1 year ago

and go Leetcode.

I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just going through the motions.

(Compared to companies of people who care about what they're doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving money.)

jmb99• 1 year ago

I recently switched jobs, and this time I decided that during the first phase of any interview cycle I would ask if there were going to be leetcode-style questions at any point in the cycle. If yes, I ended the interviews there. If no, continue on. I was of course happy to explain my logic and that I was happy to demonstrate technical prowess in a way more useful to the proposed role.

One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).

So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).

To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.

creer2• 1 year ago

It's possible to do both: you can collect your paycheck WHILE looking for a better job (because this one is toxic). And now you know to interview more seriously the people at that potential new employer.

An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before having found the better job because sanity matters.

ponector3• 1 year ago

But you never know what is the new team untill you started your work.

No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.

whyowhy34849394• 1 year ago

I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what they are and unless you own the place there is very little you can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure to at least try to do a good job.

Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.

EasyMark• 1 year ago

The only way I worry about a coworker is if it directly impacts me. I'm not a tattle tale, it's up to the company to have in place a system of determining the quality of someone's work. I will not take blame for a person and I'll call it out as a member of the team if I get blamed for something the less skilled person did. That should be enough to limit bad people, the onus is on the company and management.

alecco• 1 year ago

Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation.

They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.

But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.

ironman1478• 1 year ago

I think it's less that nobody cares, it's that more people who don't care think they can get into these jobs and they slip through due to sheer volume. There have always been this many people that don't care, but never had opportunities to enter certain jobs or those fields weren't as appealing at the time. Many in software engineering don't care about the actual field, but because it's become such a high paying job, we see many people who enter purely for the money.

lapcat4• 1 year ago

The author talks about the phenomenon like it's just an individual failing and exhorts people to "be human". But I think that "who cares?" is in fact a natural human reaction to the incentives. We need to look at how our society is structured and how the incentives are set up. I would highlight two factors that I think are consequential in the current economy: corporate consolidation and job insecurity.

Increasingly, we have larger corporations eating everything, including other companies, leaving consumers with fewer choices. In recent years there has finally been some pushback from the government—antitrust was more or less nonexistent ever since Microsoft got a slap on the wrist in 2001—but it remains to be seen whether this will end with more than just another wrist slap, and whether the new administration will roll back even the small progress made. When we have more competition, more economic choices, more companies, indeed more smaller companies owned by individuals rather than by collectives of fund managers (effectively a tragedy of the commons), we're more likely to have people in power who do care, and the people who don't care have to compete against the people who do, which incentivizes caring. On the other hand, corporate consolidation leads to a small number of people controlling everything, who care about nothing but profit.

At the lower levels, below the C-suite (with their golden parachutes rewarded regardless of success or failure), job insecurity has become a fact of life for everyone. The epitome of this situation is the so-called "gig economy", in which millions of people don't even have permanent employment or hours (or health insurance, for that matter) but are forced to live day-to-day with tenuous connections to giant corporations and the odd jobs those corporations may throw their way. Even people who do have full-time jobs can be tossed away unceremoniously like so much trash at any time in mass layoffs, for any reason or no reason. The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them. There was a time, many decades ago, when companies were more like families, felt some community responsibility, and an individual could work for the same company their entire career and retire there. The incentives were more aligned to caring about your job; it was similar to caring about your own family.

The way that humans behave depends crucially on the environment: place them in a healthy, supportive situation, and they'll tend to behave well; place them in a hostile situation, a war of all against all, and they'll tend to behave badly. We need to arrange our society intentionally so that the incentives are aligned for mutual benefit and caring. We primates are inherently imitative.

Loughla• 1 year ago

You're not supposed to take work personally. That is a lesson that I've been taught many, many, many times over the years. I've been told that within the last 24 hours.

So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?

I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?

This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting" (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and no more).

lapcat4• 1 year ago

So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?

I'm a bit puzzled about how this reply is supposed to relate to or add to my comment. For example, I already said, "The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them."

What I don't see in the reply is any kind of contextual or critical analysis. You speak as if this is simply an immutable law of nature rather than a product of our contemporary economy. "You're not supposed to take work personally." Where do you think this "principle" comes from? I agree that a lot of people say it, and indeed that it's a rational reaction to the economic circumstances. But must it be this way, and why? And if so, what do you expect to be the outcome, aside from animus and anomie? Is it a good way for us to live together, forever?

alexjplant• 1 year ago

Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?

You should care about the people whose lives are affected by the result of your work at the very least.

If you work in property management, for instance, you shouldn't repeatedly bill your tenants after charges are due then accuse them of late payment. Ditto for double-billing them for a month and doing the same anyway... if these bogus "late payments" end up on one's rental history then it's a lot of work to fix even for a completely honest person that's never paid a bill late in their life.

Or, if you're a doctor, you should probably read a patient's blood test results correctly so that you don't prescribe them the wrong medicine or tell them to take an incorrect supplement. If you have somebody take the wrong chemicals because you can't read a piece of paper then bad things could happen to them.

I could go on and on and on but the bottom line is that you need to give at least an iota of a shit when your fellow people are at the mercy of the quality of your work. Missing a topping on a sandwich is whatever but messing with somebody's finances, shelter, or health out of lazy defiance is outright sociopathy. The fact that you don't like your boss is your problem; stick it to your employer on your own time.

ludicrousdispla• 1 year ago

If people were paid to not show up to 'work' then they wouldn't be in a position to over-produce garbage. We wouldn't be generating as much waste and we would have more higher quality 'things'.

bloomingeek• 1 year ago

It's the dumbing down of society, but the worst of it is concerning the average "Joe and Jane" in America. Why is it the worst, because they are a huge voting block.

I'm a high school grad who had no desire to go to college, but I've always had a love of reading and usually questioned everything. I made a living in the trades and have very little complaints. I worked with hundreds of people, both young and old, and noticed something most had in common. Most cared very little for learning anything outside of just getting by. I saw very few with a book in their hands and was questioned many times as to why I was reading! I was even told I would never need to know that, when reading about technology.

I'm trying not to be overly critical, but I still don't understand why knowledge to them wasn't valued. I'm also afraid it's being reflected in society today based on the blatant refusal to read today's happenings and the lack of wisdom to interpret the possible outcomes, or to even care.

amanaplanacanal8• 1 year ago

I suspect that people are reading more than you think, but instead of long form content like books, it's now short form content like tweets and Facebook posts. And of course video content from YouTube and tiktok instead of the television we had back in the day.

rpozarickij• 1 year ago

Sometimes I feel like the word "reading" should be reserved for reading longer-form content like articles, blog posts, books, etc.

Your mind goes into a completely different state when you are immersed in a single topic vs when you are consuming textual content that causes context switches every 10 seconds.

maximus-decimus• 1 year ago

My mother is 70 years old and has never bothered to learn how to change the volume of the tv using a controller. My father was recently in the hospital and she had to learn how to put gas in her car.

I love her, but it's truly mind boggling how little she cares about learning stuff.

827a2• 1 year ago

This is the entirely predictable and avoidable impact of hyperscale bureaucracy. Its not because people aren't paid enough (though, most aren't). Its because people in these systems aren't given enough agency. Humans crave authority, agency, and creativity.

Here's something I implore tech business leaders to think about: If you believe AI to be the world-changing technology you say it will be: It follows that you must believe that intelligence will become commoditized. What is going to differentiate your business from every other business as thought workflows become a commodity? I'm not sure I know the answer, but while most business leaders seem to believe the answer to live in "how much AI can we shove down our employees and customers throats", I suspect the real answer is the opposite. If AI is an omnipresent, powerful substrate of business delivery, like computers are today, available in-kind to every business, what will differentiate your business is how you handle the gaps between what AI is capable of. What is your human element? Are the humans just glue between AI agents or are they actually a differentiating factor?

All this is why I tend to believe AI is going to mean slow but complete death for hyperscale companies, and there's nothing they can do about it. The only survivors will be the ones providing AI services, and they'll be the next generation's IBM. The winners are going to be small companies, teams of ten that can now operate like a team of a hundred. These small teams will have access to the exact same thought workflow automations that the hyperscalers have access to, but they also have something that the hyperscalers don't: human agency and agility.

pixl976• 1 year ago

You say bureaucracy, but what I think you mean is complexity.

Bureaucracy is a type of complexity that occurs once systems become to big for a small well trained group of people to manage.

AI/humans managing the system will work for a while, we'll be able to manage the current complexity better, but it won't last. We'll make even more complex systems that become unmanageable.

827a2• 1 year ago

No. I said bureaucracy and I meant bureaucracy. Complexity is not what causes the problem of low agency in organizations. Bureaucracy is. There are many ways you can choose to build organizations to respond to complexity; Bureaucracy is one of them, and Bureaucracy is the one that takes agency away from your people and drives apathy.

czhu12• 1 year ago

“ Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.”

In the Dark was a podcast I came across recently that struck me as being in the former camp. The reporters cared, the organization supported them, and they created content that was gripping and demanded the listener to pay attention.

I’m sure this is the wrong place for a podcast recommendation but I wanted to play my small part in surfacing the work of people who do care

sam-cop-vimes5• 1 year ago

It comes down to what is "popular" culture.

When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community.

Now we have reality TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies and the hype generated by social media as major influences for children growing up today.

Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.

I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. We in the tech community are partly responsible for this.

I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author suggests is a good start. Start caring.

squigz2• 1 year ago

Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation.

Sure, and then, after we started getting more "external influences", we all realized that "hard work" isn't going to get us anywhere.

It's really easy to blame this on some kind of change in individual values - kids these days don't respect hard work, etc. It's harder to come to terms with the idea that maybe those values were a lie - or, perhaps a better way of putting it, a coping mechanism - in order to keep us placated with the status quo. Now we're really starting to wake up to the fact that employers do not reward things like hard work or loyalty. So why keep up the pretense?

Unfortunately this does indeed result in this issue - a lack of caring. But I don't think we're going to get people to care again by appealing to those older values.

sam-cop-vimes5• 1 year ago

Not sure how you got the impression that I'm blaming the kids - that wasn't what I was trying to say at all. I'm blaming the society we have created for kids who are growing up today.

e-topy• 1 year ago

I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population.

Just thought about something:

There are a few sides to this. There is innovation that just makes things easier but doesn't amputate, like typing machines vs word (took me a while to come up with an example, essentially just evolution). Then there are things that are so old it's useless to know them. Like making butter, sure you can do it if you want to, might be fun, but in the grand scheme of things irrelevant. Then there's stuff that is in decline but needed anyway. Like being able to read a book.

Maybe you could express this as a 2D graph, where X is how much people know it and Y is how much people need to know it.

sam-cop-vimes5• 1 year ago

Interesting point, I'll try and plot such a graph!

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

typing machines vs word

That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do. This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds.

In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd otherwise delegate to others. You could write memos and reports yourself, instead of asking your secretary. You could manage your calendar and tasks yourself, instead of having someone else do it for you. You could design your own presentations quickly, instead of asking graphics department for help. And so on, and so on.

What happened then, all those specialized departments got downsized; you now have to write your own memos and manage your own calendar, because there are no secretaries around to do it for you. Same for graphics, same for communication, same for expense reporting, etc. Specialized roles disappeared, and along with them the salaries they commanded - but the work they did did not go away. Instead, it got spread out and distributed among everyone else, in tiny pieces - tiny enough, to not be visible in the books; also tiny enough to not benefit from specialization of labor.

Now apply this pattern to all other categories of software, especially anything that lets you do yourself the things you'd pay others to do before.

And then people are surprised why actual productivity gains didn't follow expectations at scale, despite all the computerization. That's because a chunk of expectations are just an accounting trick. Money saved on salaries gets counted; costs of the same work being less efficient and added to everyone else's workload (including non-linear effect of reducing focus) are not counted.

THroaway2254• 1 year ago

Yes, and in my generation, Jackass and skater culture gave us all the dream of escaping the horrors of adult life

mierz002• 1 year ago

I don’t buy into this narrative.

Every generation has some form of “kids were better when I grew up” and there has been a very long history of kids not respecting others, your generation included.

Things are changing as they always do, but when it comes down to it humans have not changed that much.

sam-cop-vimes5• 1 year ago

I must have worded this wrong because you are the second person to interpret it this way. I am not criticising the kids of today. On the contrary I'm saying that the society we've built for them is actively harming them.

tolerance2• 1 year ago

Where I think that pieces like this fall short at are identifying what they think people should "care" about and why these things matter.

For example,

* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?

(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)

* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?

* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?

I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.

We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.

I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.

strgcmc2• 1 year ago

Your comment somehow reminded me of this quote: "In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act." (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9371890-in-a-society-that-p...)

That's not a direct response to your concern, but I think this quote applies in a parallel manner -- I've seen this quote applied as a statement about what it means to be "punk", and how simply being content with yourself (meaning you don't fall victim to all the ways society attacks/preys on insecurities or tries to sell you drugs or makeup or clothes or surgery or whatever to change yourself), is actually incredibly "punk". You don't have to dress up weird, or go out and do graffiti, or get into fights... just being content with yourself is "punk", within a capitalist/post-capitalist world.

So, in a similar vein, I think this author is saying that, "caring" is also a form of being "punk", in a world where seemingly not-caring is mainstream now. The thing is, being "punk" doesn't need an external "why" reason to justify it... the whole point of "punk" culture is about authenticity, that just being yourself is what's important, that you don't need a special reason to reject capitalist consumerism or mainstream opiate-of-the-masses media or to dress how you feel instead of how society thinks you should look. In that way, being "punk" is quite Buddhism-aligned actually, to center on existence and enlightenment through self-realization, instead of pursuit of external "why" reasons for doing X or Y.

Caring is the punk thing to do, because it is who you actually are. You don't need a special reason to care, if you subscribe to any kind of "punk" mindset/philosophy about life. Don't care because it will yield better material rewards, get you laid, or whatever. Care, just because.

At least, that's the argument... up to you if you buy it or not.

BrenBarn6• 1 year ago

I think that's only part of the story. Another part is what are you caring about or doing instead. People don't have to care about those things, but what are they doing with their time instead? "Funny fails" videos and getting french fries delivered? Part of the point is that you have to do something with your time, it's just that now people spend their time doing stuff they don't care about, which is sad. You don't have to care about those particular things, but if you're not caring about anything I think it indicates something is out joint.

drw852• 1 year ago

That's a very good point. I know quite some people that have absolutely no interests. All they do is play games all day. No a specific game that they really like, but any game that offers enough busy work to distract for a month or two. Aside from that maybe they watch some short form videos like you mentioned, when they eat their microwaved or ordered meal.

For some people now, i would be hard to summarise them. To describe them, other than 'plays games' or 'watches videos'. And you can tell something is missing, they're not happy, but distracted enough to not care.

tolerance2• 1 year ago

We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.

And the worst-kept secret is that people have to be told what to care about.

joshcsimmons• 1 year ago

Dan - the article strikes right at the core of the problem. I enjoyed your writing style so I decided to have a look around your site and found myself saving a bunch of other articles to read later.

I see that you're an artist. The concept your writing about here is obvious to most artists but not so to technologists (generally speaking). What do you make of that?

zzzeek• 1 year ago

doesnt mention anything political until the 11th paragraph, where he digs in.

HN "flagged for politics!" enforcer mob caught unawares. good

PaulHoule3• 1 year ago

I think of the crypto scammers who prove they don't care when they flack stupendously ugly NFTs -- and it seems to be the point that they don't care.

bmartin13• 1 year ago

It's emblematic of the post-modern mindset. When feelings are the diver for truth then there is no moral compass. This kind of mindset redefines "excellence" as anything that helps you feel "good". Is it any wonder that character traits like diligence and sacrifice are diminishing?

Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses because it doesn't "feel" good!

lapcat4• 1 year ago

Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses because it doesn't "feel" good!

This is a self-fulfilling prophesy that violates the HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

nthingtohide8• 1 year ago

The Who Cares Inception.

As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light.

He wouldn't have used this wording if he had actually spent sometime on understanding how wasteful the previous governments have been. So in a sense, Elon was correcting the previous Who Cares mistakes and not actually committing new Who Cares mistakes. This shows that even Dan doesn't care enough to ground his opinions in facts.

strawhatguy2• 1 year ago

yeah, cutting waste is caring. And totally right, turns out Dan himself does not care.

amanaplanacanal8• 1 year ago

Elon was doing no such thing. They didn't even take time to try to determine whether there was any waste in the things they cut. They just cut wholesale and claimed victory.

This is, of course, on top of the administration claiming that Elon was in no way in charge of DOGE. He was evidently just one of the president's personal advisors.

1dom3• 1 year ago

I read the title and it triggered something I've been thinking a lot lately: there's too much for everyone to care about right now. Article didn't really touch on it directly, but:

something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.

15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o

I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.

Night_Thastus2• 1 year ago

It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit

I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of people in other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Things changed more slowly and the only time you heard about about a tragedy was if it was truly enormous - or very local.

Now, there is this constant vying for attention/support/outrage/etc. It's exhausting. People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met, or some event halfway across the world, or some new thing that released now like literally now.

I think that a lot of people have subconsciously hit their limit. They can't muster the energy needed to genuinely think about or care about a lot of this stuff because they're bombarded with so much of it. And over time, I think that shifts thinking. "Why did I not care when X happened?" leads to "Those people don't matter/are less than human" instead of the real "Because I'm completely exhausted from so much happening".

fragmede2• 1 year ago

People genuinely expect you to care about the back-and-forth between two celebrities you've never met

Maybe this is some unknown privilege of mine or some bubble I live in, but I only know about celebrity gossip when people ask me if I've heard about it and I say no, or not really. You get to choose what to give your attention to, and you don't have to just because other people expect you to. I still have friends and acquaintances, we just talk about other stuff.

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

I think a lot of harm has been caused by "automation" actually meaning "distributing parts of the same tasks among a bunch of people". As far as I can tell that's one of the main outcomes of "efficiencies" from computerization of offices, among other places: they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

icelancer3• 1 year ago

People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives.

It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

smokel2• 1 year ago

500 years ago, what were people worried about?

It wasn't so much different from our time. Read "Don Quixote" [1] and be amazed.

Whether the updates you read are actually playing out live, or happening in a book doesn't make much of a difference, unless you are actually influencing events.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

hadlock• 1 year ago

Another way to look at this is, "millenials have kids/lives now and don't have the bandwidth to be rage-baited near-constantly" and also "Gen Z grew up in the rage baiting era, they're immune by default". There's no policy outcome for this particular piece of rage bait so very few people are going to suit up and white knight about supplemental ai slop. If it were a fake front page news article people might care more. Getting mad about people not getting mad is also very low tier rage-bait.

jasminebelmont• 1 year ago

This hits harder than I expected. There’s a bleak kind of irony in how tech gave us infinite visibility but shredded our ability to process any of it. Stuxnet was a wake-up call. Now it’s just another push alert we swipe past while ordering oat milk.

The caring bandwidth’s not just saturated—it’s been monetized, splintered, and stuffed with things designed to trigger micro-concern at scale. You’re not a cynical old man. You’re just sober in a system that treats numbness like adaptation.

The worst part? I’m not even surprised the BBC article didn’t trend.

Nifty3929• 1 year ago

Yes, and also there's no sense of proportion as we are being asked to care about every single possible thing. There's only one volume setting for everything: 11.

It's exhausting.

jmye• 1 year ago

So… turn it off. Social media is 99% of the firehose, and people adamantly refuse to do anything about it.

There’s no reason anyone needs the minute-by-minute Twitter-esque “information” feed, just like 24-hour news stations are a laughably idiotic waste of time and attention. There’s no reason “you” need to spend hours refreshing and obsessing about where your 6th-degree ‘friend’ is on vacation, or their promotion, or their new car or whatever.

Turn shit off.

Or drown, I guess.

nthingtohide8• 1 year ago

This is why Institutions are important. They should be truthful and unbiased and undogmatic. But given intentional pollution of information environment. The same lessons being learnt again and again. New generations growing up and trying to navigate this new polluted environment, all of this is taking a toll. Hence delulu is the solulu.

zdragnar• 1 year ago

You're asking for more from the institution than we can ever expect from the individuals within the institution. Humans are fallible.

Rather, we should expect that institutions are never so powerful that we have no recourse when we have been wronged by one, and that we have options when one lets us down.

nyarlathotep_4• 1 year ago

the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create

The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time.

I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways.

Seemed like it went downhill so fast.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

It's not that the dudes don't care

Nope, I don't care.

Everything is garbage filler vying to buy my attention for some purpose or another and I expect bullshit from everyone. I am generally outraged, but for specific instances of bullshit? Not at all, those are expected. It's not desensitization, you just can't have less than 0 trust in an entity and once you get there specific instances of outrage no longer happen.

The major reason I think tiktok is so successful is it is the platform for punishing BS. You've got 3 seconds to get to the point and if you don't, you don't have attention. People complain about modern tech ruining attention span but I think it's the opposite, traditional content sold out to become ever less worthy of people's attention so people used tech to circumvent it.

mieubrisse3• 1 year ago

I'm not sure if I'm convinced, but I find this perspective very interesting to think about - that Tiktok might actually be about finding signal in the noise. My objection is around whether "getting the point" really means "getting to the most dopamine-producing thing" (which can still be bullshit).

bakuninsbart• 1 year ago

My initial reaction was to be rather dismissive as to AI being the thing to care about, but rather the rise of fascism and authoritarianism across the West - rather clearly proving your point. I do truly believe that AI will be bad for some people (myself included to a degree), but it is far less dangerous than the political shift we are feeling.

But it is true that we are supposed to feel strongly about a myriad things. And possibly more damaging, we are supposed to be a dozen things as well - rich, career-minded, pretty, athletic, spiritually centered, vegan, environmentally-conscious, politically educated, a model partner, there-for-our-children, well-travelled, financially responsible, and so much more... Each of these points is individually good, but social pressure mainly enforced through social media is turning the good life into a sort of whack-a-mole challenge people get burnt out on.

chasd00• 1 year ago

A clever trick by BigOutrage was labeling people choosing not to engage as part of the enemy de jour. now, not having enough information and choosing to not participate in the debate puts you firmly in their bad guy territory.

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create

"No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.

oooyay• 1 year ago

I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of the article I read this:

Be yourself.
Be imperfect.
Be human.
Care.

It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.

What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.

1dom3• 1 year ago

I guess it comes down to world view, since we can never know the answer: when a human has everything they need, including enough bandwidth, how many will care by default vs being apathetic by default.

If they care by default, all we need to do is give them everything they need and they'll do what is wanted. If not, then giving them everything they need will result in them doing nothing more.

leptons• 1 year ago

15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.

Stuxnet did not impact any "normal people" at all. It was very explicitly targeted at the Iran nuclear program. I'd bet that most "normal people" have never even heard of "stuxnet" or know if it had any impact at all in their lives. I know plenty of "normal" people and I'd be hard pressed to find a single one of them that even know what stuxnet was. Outside of people very interested in computers and cyber attacks, very few people could tell you what stuxnet was.

Maybe if Iran had been able to create a nuclear bomb, and maybe if they had actually tried to use it (which would be extremely foolish and would destroy Iran) then maybe the hypothetical non-existence of stuxnet would have impacted some lives, but that's a big IF. Most people have no clue at all.

groby_b• 1 year ago

Let's be clear, it's not just the age of tech.

It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something.

We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times.

Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure.

This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves.

I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.

bowsamic• 1 year ago

caring capacity feels like a biological limit

I agree with that. At some point you just give up because there's literally nothing left for you to give. I've learnt to be very selective with what I choose to care about

xnx2• 1 year ago

Concern for things beyond our immediate survival is a cursed luxury.

NooneAtAll3• 1 year ago

In my opinion, "who cares" era is the consequence of "care about this!" era that preceded it

if all loudspeakers scream "care about this", but don't give a thing (or worse) about something /you/ care - you stop caring in response

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

I would argue that "who cares" era is the consequence of post-"care about this" era (90s-2000s). It was going downhill after dotcom boom and took nearly vertical nosedive around 2012-2015 when mass of content generation happened.

theptip• 1 year ago

“Who cares” is one way to frame it, perhaps a bit blame-y.

I view this as more epistemically significant, it’s the Post-Truth era. Politics and national discourse has been heading this way for some time, but now AI may mean that nobody can distinguish truth from falsehood, at least for online content.

We need new methods for attesting and chaining trust.

recursivedoubts• 1 year ago

that means that caring is a competitive advantage.

(always has been)

clolege2• 1 year ago

I agree with many of the comments here, but also feel part of this is caused by the declination of our collective physical and spiritual health.

It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or perform consistently.

And then social media gives us post after post about how your coworkers are not your family and how dumb you have to be to give 100% to your work. A lot of people seem to mindlessly prescribe to this train of thought that would otherwise have questioned it if they went to a church or had some belief system that emphasized the inherent importance of doing good work.

ncr1005• 1 year ago

Yes. And in my view the concept of expectation plays I think a vital role in how an individual relates to society.

If the individual expects that society doesn't care about the individual than the individual has no / less reason to take care of oneself for the benefit of society.

A solution to this is to be more conscious of one's own values. What do you value for how strangers who are nearby you should be treated? Kindly? Aggressively? If those values are being met and are shared by your immediate society, then it's a chance that you might also feel like you are being taken care of. Which then might meet your sense of stress and satisfaction which might then allow you to feel comfortable interacting with society in a playful manner more comfortably bringing up your own needs in the group, and having a shoulder to cry on when when you need to, and having a group just help step in and take care of some of your needs because they have the bandwidth to do so. And they also care because they share your values.

Values are, I think, an underappreciated concept, these days, partly because of all sides shaming, but also because the algorithm as they call it is what is supplanting our values. The algorithm is pushing views on us. And you know the old saying, you are what you eat, that also applies to you are what you read.. we're undergoing conditioning by reading all this stuff about all these different ideas about all these different things which we were supposed to care about. So our values are becoming a little soft and squishy, about what it is that we want or need. We are trying to get what we need from a environment which is being driven by the algorithm and its values.

So anyhow, pay attention to your values... And shape your interactions with the world including social media based on those values. And you'll be happier.

LastTrain• 1 year ago

Our leaders have forced a third our population to accept, defend and repeat bald face lies and deception on a daily basis, how can things like this compete? It is the point of all that deception to make us apathetic.

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

People don't have any goal. It's not surprising at all.

110 years ago it was WW1, then it was WW2, then postwar euphoria. Then it was Democracy vs Commies, golden age, space race, rise of Hollywood, disco, fast cars, cheap housing, economy booming.

What is there now? Everybody is scared shitless of war (and for a good reason), economy is not doing good a small guy (only for trillion dollar behemoths), space race is dead. Mindless scrolling, degradation and grinding are the only things left.

dangus• 1 year ago

What this article gets wrong about this situation is that it's not really about caring versus not caring, it's about desperation moves from struggling, declining businesses versus thriving, growing ones ones.

You won't find AI writing at The New York Times because their leadership has a sustainable business model. They have adapted well to the digital media upheaval, using their gaming, cooking, and product review businesses to drive up subscriptions to a point where subscriptions are contributing a larger share of revenue than they did in the print era.

The Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Enquirer are papers that have struggled financially in ways that better-managed media companies have not.

hn_throwaway_993• 1 year ago

What the author is describing is an inevitable consequence that happens when the cost of producing something falls dramatically.

It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.

With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.

The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.

sandspar• 1 year ago

This makes sense. Recently I learned that there's a collectors market for marbles. Like, people will pay thousands of dollars for a glass marble. Who knew? An article talked at length about the difficulties involved in making a really good marble. There's all sorts of tricky things to manage and a million ways to mess up. But that's part of the fun, right? A collector wouldn't spend thousands of dollars on a glass marble that's easy to make. And if marbles were easy to make, surely a talented craftsman wouldn't devote their life to making them.

strawhatguy2• 1 year ago

Ugh, he had a point until he brought in cutting the government as a bad thing.

Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't care. There's a lot of care there. As an analogy, when I program, I'm always on the lookout for performance improvements, and that involves cutting non-performant code and doing less. It's the bro-coders that slap together dependencies to cobble together a monstrosity that don't care. Not the cutters. Cutting waste is caring.

The more accurate "Who Cares?" moment is the fact Congress refuses to codify any cuts and in fact spends more. Just paying off friends, the impeding doom of our debt, when seriously deep cuts of everything will be forced, is just shrug.

dragonwriter• 1 year ago

Seriously, DOGE is sweating the small stuff, trying to get cuts where they can, and that does NOT happen from people who don't care.

DOGE is a propaganda exercise (in part to provide false justification for policies undertaken with other motives, and in part as a distraction), and the appearance of energy is important for that.

They care, but not about the thing that it is the public rationale.

asdf6969• 1 year ago

It’s the “Why should I care?” era

chrisco2554• 1 year ago

The decline of newspaper journalism has long been observed. Readership has declined and along with it, salaries and talent. AI looks to be the final nail in the coffin. Nobody cares about fake articles in Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer because nobody reads them at all. You've got a skeleton crew managing the decline of a barely profitable institution with shrinking staff and declining YOY revenues for going on two decades.

It used to be a staple of society to read the paper. Everyone read the paper. We read the feed now, and it's been that way for some time.

Lichtso• 1 year ago

I think caring and competence do correlate.

If you do not care about something you are not going to become competent. And once you are competent you are also more likely to care:

E.g. once you learn a music instrument, or a craft, or the arts, you suddenly see all the flaws in other peoples work as well, not just your own. Sometimes it can even be hard to enjoy these things like you did back when you were ignorant.

Unfortunately, if you have neither you are stuck.

softfalcon2• 1 year ago

The hardest thing to do in life is to care.

It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter.

I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger.

As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength. Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.

I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as you can?"

I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."

His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds exhausting."

We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if their differences were amusing to him.

His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.

rexpop• 1 year ago

Thucydides of Athens quotes Pericles as having used a specific term for citizens who were not interested in public affairs, the community, or issues beyond their own private lives: idiotes (ἰδιώτης).

TeMPOraL4• 1 year ago

Did the Ancients ever figure out what to do when it's near-impossible to be interested enough in public affairs to gain an accurate understanding of things, and even if one manages that, it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully act on that understanding?

It's one thing when "public affairs" and affairs of your local community are one and the same. But modern democracies seem to be actively preventing citizens from being actually informed about anything, and the granularity of elections ensures people's opinions (ill-informed or otherwise) are uncorrelated with end results.

Jorchime• 1 year ago

I wonder, how do you decide to care about something?

whyowhy34849394• 1 year ago

By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you start caring and it will happen.

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

For me, the metric is one of empathy: would I want someone else to suffer through what I just suffered through? No? Do I have any influence over that outcome?

The Serenity Prayer is very real to me. So is "be the change you want to see in the world"

const_cast4• 1 year ago

Not caring can be a powerful tool. Anxiety and fear are the manifestation of too much care. Life is chaotic, and at times we must learn to swim with the tide.

There's big things we should care about, and then there's little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground, a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that occupy our minds.

It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks. Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.

softfalcon2• 1 year ago

And yet, if you go further by taking great care and effort into the mundane, it can become meditative.

There is a sense of honour and zen in doing the mundane as perfectly as possible. Not to achieve perfection but strive towards the ideal within reason.

This is something I recently spoke with my father about. He was annoyed with trying to keep toxic mushrooms out of his yard. It was tedious and complicated.

Then he embraced the struggle, and looked at it the same way he used to train in martial arts. As a chosen striving towards an ideal.

He “monk-moded” his gardening and found joy in a mundane, repetitive task.

Through caring, he turned anxiety and annoyance into peace and acceptance.

He also won the battle against the mushrooms after 2 years of diligent effort.

chipsrafferty3• 1 year ago

This seems unrelated. I care very deeply about many things. I do not care about work.

sceptic123• 1 year ago

Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened

Meanwhile, from Pineapple Street Studios in 2024: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wonder-of-stevie/i...

lesuorac2• 1 year ago

This is seems largely expected from Dunning and Kruger's paper.

The true Dunning-Kruger effect is not that low-skill individuals believe they're better than high-skill individuals but that low-skill individuals do not know what skill looks like. (Hence the title "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments").

When you cannot evaluate the output of something then _any_ output looks good.

AnimalMuppet3• 1 year ago

I think that the problem may be that people no longer believe in a future worth having.

If society is going to fall apart anyway, because of nuclear war/climate change/Trump/demographic collapse/soil depletion/microplastics/forever chemicals/peak oil/whatever, why should I care about trying to build a future? It won't come anyway. Why should I care about the quality of my work? Why should I care about having kids? Marriage, even? Why should I care about anything? "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (bad advice in any era, but seductive to those fighting against apathy).

bad_username• 1 year ago

I like to remind my colleagues at work that our most important commercial offering must be "Giving a Shit as a Service".

try_the_bass6• 1 year ago

I don't think I agree with this.

As someone who has cared deeply about sometimes esoteric things, I've found that caring is actually the shortest path to being _hated_, mostly by other people who care about the same things but for different reasons.

The best thing I did for my own sanity was to stop caring so much.

But this is still the case. One of the things I care the most about is having a consistent moral framework. I care less about the specifics of that framework; everyone's is slightly different, and I think that's a good thing overall. However, I do care that people apply their own frameworks consistently, and when they don't, I call them out on it.

Still mostly just ends up with me on the receiving end of a lot of hate.

Which is ironic, given that in my experience, the worst of it had come from people whose moral framework is presumably incompatible with hate!

I care deeply about that, too, and it's really not healthy for me.

ncr1005• 1 year ago

As a person who has dabbled in that that perspective olive, saying the sky is falling, and who has other people who actively engage in that, in his life, I think it's important to be aware of your own motivations. Deeply.

Because, relationships are a two-way thing. If you notice people are being mad at you .. then know that's one of the "two-ways". You are doing something which triggers them. Now I need to be careful of course about victim blaming here, but assume I'm you know a fair and kind person just giving some orthogonal advice :-). I am.

And it's not The World is just against change. It's More often the message, and how it is delivered.

Specifically, it's the emotional weight behind the message. This is where it gets difficult because we're not like trained emotionally, by many of the western cultures.

Briefly, analyze Like, why do you care? Why do you care about the subject that you are saying needs to be changed. And then you can start to think well maybe the way that I care comes out in terms of intonation. Or brevity. Or the way that I cut people off. Or the way that I force the conversation to be focused on my concern. Note here I am transposing me and you.

And of course all of this is just my two cents based upon speculation, so feel free to ignore it :-)

try_the_bass6• 1 year ago

This isn't the first time I've received this advice, and it certainly won't be the last.

The trouble I have with this advice is that every specific example or suggestion on how to change my message has ultimately boiled down to "soften the message enough that the recipient can feel okay with ignoring it."

But that defeats the whole purpose! If someone is actively entertaining a cognitive dissonance of some kind, "softening" the message merely gives them the "out" they need to continue to hold the dissonance!

Unfortunately, because I've been given this advice so frequently, and because it always ends up being "just don't challenge people", it comes across as rather condescending. I'm sure that's not your intent, but next time, please consider that maybe I've already done that analysis a hundred times over, and still reach the same conclusion.

Perhaps I'm just stubbornly wrong! But I really don't think the issue is that; I think the issue is that we've made it socially unacceptable to call people out for being inconsistent. Just look at what the typical responses to such a thing are: whataboutism, radical generalization, ad hominems, retreat to an echo chamber, the classic gish gallop of tangentially-related things, etc.

Perhaps what we've really made socially unacceptable is the admission of fault?

acureau• 1 year ago

I am the kind of person who is very inconsistent. My opinions and identity are fluid, often I learn something new or see something from a different perspective and my framework gets adjusted. So I've come to understand that I don't have a framework. I have a constantly changing state.

There are people such as yourself who live by rigid guidelines, there are people such as myself who live by morphing guidelines, and there must be people who live by nothing at all. I don't think one approach to life is strictly better than the others.

That's where I imagine the negativity you experience stems from. I don't know anyone who appreciates the imposition of rules on their lifestyle, regardless of how well you think you've profiled their framework. Especially in a casual setting, most people just want to get along.

try_the_bass6• 1 year ago

But I don't live by rigid rules, as a general rule. I have a rigid moral framework, perhaps, but that doesn't mean my opinions and identity aren't fluid, as well.

My first rule for myself is that I must always acknowledge that I could be wrong. This demands that my opinions remain fluid, because it's not possible for me to be right about everything I think I think I'm right about.

So I think you're wrong, and I think you're making a huge number of assumptions based off of very little concrete evidence.

The negativity stems from seeing the current world of social media, in which people constantly put forth strong moral statements, full of black-and-white thinking and absolute statements--and summarily contradicting the very moral frameworks they purport to uphold in the process of doing so.

And then seeing the hundreds (or thousands, or even millions!) of people agreeing with them, all not sparing a single thought for whether or not they're being internally consistent.

The social world is frothing with righteous hypocrites, and the most frustrating are those who claim to stand for inclusion, positivity, and the denouncement of hatred, while simultaneously being quickest to hate when faced with disagreement.

So, no, I'm not convinced that people "just want to get along". More and more, I think people just want to be "right", without any regard for the truth of the matter.

int_19h7• 1 year ago

Being principled isn't imposing your rules on someone else, though, merely acting consistently with them at all times.

And it can earn one a surprising amount of hate because you aren't willing to make exceptions.

THroaway2254• 1 year ago

"As someone who has cared deeply about sometimes esoteric things, I've found that caring is actually the shortest path to being _hated_, mostly by other people who care about the same things but for different reasons."

This is too true, and ive been guilty of being the hater more times than id liek to admit.

0xCMP• 1 year ago

A lot of the comments complaining about working at companies with coworkers or leadership that don't care about hard work never seem to take the time to think about why that may be.

In short: the problem is the customer/consumer. All of us.

Who really doesn't care? The person paying. Or at least the median person paying. For most industries the customer does not care about hard work or whatever. It's always something else. Ongoing operations cost money. Growing costs money. In the end you need revenue to pay for on going work and justify investment or loans to help make more money. But the customer who will provide that needed revenue DOES NOT CARE about all these things we want.

This happens with citizens and infrastructure. This happens with businesses and their internal dev teams. It happens inside FAANNG all the time.

I don't know how to fix it, but certainly demanding change against an uncontrollable reality is not a sustainable solution. In the face of such a reality you can certainly understand how and why "not caring" is the only rational response.

Probably the only way to escape it is to work at companies that are pre-revenue and have enough external investment to fund their operations. Oh hey...

rglover• 1 year ago

I'd argue this is a byproduct of what's shown in the chart where productivity has continued to increase since the 1970s, but wages have remained flat [1]. And that is a side-effect of the money itself being screwed up (e.g., the U.S. is nearly $37T in debt and though they'll wax poetic about it...nobody really cares—the number just keeps goin' up).

Why care when—if you're the average bear—you can work incessantly and never really get anywhere close to what past generations enjoyed? I'd prefer to live in a world where people cared more, but if the incentives aren't there, we can expect to see the amount of "care" continue to decline.

This is why the "fix the money, fix the world" ethos of Bitcoin should be given more attention by detractors.

[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap

gilbetron6• 1 year ago

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd century". People are focused on what's in front of them in the present. Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).

Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.

Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).

The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.

thewebguyd5• 1 year ago

Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable.

Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.

It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.

sillysaurusx• 1 year ago

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.

The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.

Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.

We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.

Be optimistic. Life is good.

gilbetron6• 1 year ago

I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now, it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the pandemic broke things!

Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.

chaosbolt• 1 year ago

Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced.

I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.

Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.

It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.

HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.

It's not?

An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.

An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.

Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.

They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.

I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.

tines2• 1 year ago

Your list of examples is telling; all those things do indeed make life easy. But is easy equivalent to good? I don’t think so. People have more capabilities to connect, and have more “friends” than ever before, and people are more disconnected and lonely than ever before. Life is not good for a lot of people, despite being easier than ever for a lot of people.

BrenBarn6• 1 year ago

One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.

If you think that bitcoin and facebook are examples of "real newness" that we only perceive in retrospect, I think we're not seeing eye to eye. Those to me are exactly the kinds of things that represent a colossal waste of human time, effort, and money.

gilbetron6• 1 year ago

Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.

I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.

lowbloodsugar• 1 year ago

Oh there is very much a future being planned. Project 2025 is an example. When the future was flying cars and a robot maid for every household, then of course it was broadcast in every possible medium. The planned future now is replacing the poor with robots and slavery for anyone still alive. Funnily enough they don’t talk about it, and pretend it’s not real if you hear about it.

I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is necessary to inform the present. It gives us a measure for peoples and corporations behavior. Don’t be fooled that this is an accident. “Who cares” is propaganda for a very different future.

delusional• 1 year ago

I'm in my 30s but feel pretty much the same way. It's an odd sort standstill where we're spinning our wheels real fast, yet we don't seem to move anywhere. Everything is constantly "changing" yet the few things i actually care about see no meaningful change. It's impossible to argue that we haven't seen big technological breakthroughs in the past decade, but what _real_ and _tangible_ difference have they made.

My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.

This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.

Vrondi• 1 year ago

Nobody talks about "life in the 22nd century" in the way they talked about "life in the 21st century" in recent decades, because for the past 24 years we've been at the _beginning_ of a century. Once we get halfway through the 21st century, the talk about "life in the 22nd century" will really ramp up.

gilbetron6• 1 year ago

Except people in the first quarter of the 20th century did talk about the 21st century.

https://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-fr...

asadotzler• 1 year ago

You apparently never learned about the 1939 New York World's Fair's "The World of Tomorrow" expo. That didn't wait for the century half way point. How about the 1900 Paris Expo and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which both also featured predictions and prototypes of future technologies that got everyone from workers to sci-fi writers focused on flying cars and moving sidewalks.

Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.

tim3334• 1 year ago

I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.

jmogly• 1 year ago

YES! I am in my mid twenties and I have only seen unimaginable technological progress from the early 2000’s to now. From the small white Panasonic television in my childhood kitchen and having to reboot my family desktop computer when zoo tycoon froze it, to playing massive multiplayer games like runescape and Roblox with real people, that was incredible!, to seeing an iPhone for the first time, the higs boson being confirmed, gravitational waves, electric cars becoming a real thing, how you can go nearly anywhere in the world and touch your phone to pay without cash, or use google maps to figure out when and where to go anywhere no matter where you are, to ChatGPT and LLM’s, which can alchemize all of our human knowledge to approximately/exact answers to questions that have never been asked before.

The future has been a lot more interesting than people are giving it credit for, atleast my brief slice of it so far.

hn_throwaway_993• 1 year ago

at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much.

I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.

That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.

dividefuel2• 1 year ago

Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year.

Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.

ponector3• 1 year ago

Day to day life improved massively. AC units, international travel, home appliances, tools, TV, computers, cars - everything is much more affordable(and/or better).

Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.

You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.

whyowhy34849394• 1 year ago

I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.

I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.

I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.

gilbetron6• 1 year ago

I appreciate this nuanced take, thanks for writing it.

holtkam2• 1 year ago

No one on this site or on earth has any idea what the next 5, 10, or 30 years will bring. They will likely bring a world which is so radically different from today it's incomprehensible. But that doesn't mean strictly worse.

Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?

Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.

hn_throwaway_993• 1 year ago

Thanks so much for this comment. It's something I've generally felt, but it really didn't crystallize in my head until I read your comment.

As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optimism. Now, though, I think there is a widespread feeling that tech, as a whole, is no longer in service to the improvement of human society. It just feels like it went off the rails in the past 15-20 years or so, where for a lot of us tech feels like it's made our lives worse.

I no longer look forward to the newest tech or gadget. If anything, I look forward to going for a walk in the woods and leaving my phone at home.

Llamamoe• 1 year ago

When we imagined phones, we imagined global communication and building friendship. Instead, we got skinner boxes designed to addict us to a constant stream of algorithm-served content.

When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.

When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.

When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.

When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.

When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

Agreed. There is plenty of technological progress, but so little of it is really in service to humanity or making our lives better.

Sure, AI can make us more productive (those of us it doesn't replace), but so what? That just means that my company can either a) produce more and generate more revenue, or b) produce the same with fewer employees, reducing costs. Either way, it doesn't make my life better.

The problem is that technology is for the most part, not about making our lives better. It's about finding new markets and convincing consumers to buy/use these products.

They say productivity has doubled in the past 40 years. Are we either 1) working half as many hours as we did then; or 2) earning twice as much (inflation-adjusted) as we did then? If not, then what has the increased productivity earned us?

stolsvik• 1 year ago

I'm just trying to catch up with you after the "I get so confused on this"-screenshot that's evidently going viral wrt. LLMs. I just turned 50, and that resonated so hard.

Wrt. this feeling you're describing here: You might mostly be feeling the Enshittification. At least that's a big thing for me. Companies are not making things better, they are making everything worse. Instead of actually making new stuff, they're wringing the existing lemon five extra times to squeeze that last drop of juice out of it, adding one extra ad in the youtube viewing, making it harder to integrate. APIs being deprecated, walled gardens. Things have been going downhill for at least a decade. This makes me sad.

mdavid6263• 1 year ago

Brace yourself — it’ll get only worse. The geene is out of the bottle and not possible to put it back. Software engineering will become everything, but engineering.

I consider myself as someone who cares and takes pride in creating software. I barely can take working in the industry anymore… It’s time to become a goose farmer.

ncr1005• 1 year ago

In my opinion:

It comes down to values, of the people that you are working with, and of the market in which your groups people is operating.

If you can dial those things in to match your own proclivities about how you like to be treated, then you're golden.

mdavid6263• 1 year ago

The problem is, most of the people, including me, can’t.

cloudpushers• 1 year ago

Totally. This isn’t just an AI issue, it’s a reflection of a larger shift where speed and cost-efficiency matter more than accuracy or intent. AI just amplifies the effects. When every step of the process is driven by “good enough,” you end up with work that no one really stands behind beyond a seed round.

ncr1005• 1 year ago

This is also called the Accountability Gap.

MinimalAction• 1 year ago

I entirely resonate with this article. It is true that most people don't care these days; empathy is a resource that is hardly spent/utilized on others. It is also true that there is just way too much to care. There are two different kinds of being overwhelmed going on here.

quantadev• 1 year ago

I think the "Who Cares Era" (great name btw) is able to continue down this path because really the entire business purpose nowadays for any online content is simply AD Delivery.

If the website can successfully prove to the advertisers that some human likely did indeed view the ADs then it's "mission accomplished". It matters very little what the content contains, as long as the AD revenue stream (the only revenue stream for most online sites) keeps rolling in. So really the only text to get right is the "Clickbait Titles" and "Clickbait Imagery".

So the longer canonical form of our Era is "Who Cares, We Made Some Money...Era"

Animats• 1 year ago

Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened.

Expecting people to pay full-time attention to 90 minutes of talking about some hip-hop group from the 1990s is a big ask.

pchristensen• 1 year ago

On the flip side, most people shouldn't pay attention to it, but for those that care, it's an incredible gift of creation.

flkiwi2• 1 year ago

I keep experiencing absolutely mediocre middle manager types challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..." The outsourcing of the most basic thinking by people who would rather do anything other than think is, paradoxically, creating a bonanza for people like me who end up having to do the thinking for them (and clean up their messes). And yet they continue to fail upward.

I'm not even anti-AI. I use these tools all the time to make "zeroth draft" documents that I can build on. It actually saves me a lot of time! But everything is in service of me delivering products I care very, very much about getting right, and I don't assume their output is anything other than very sophisticated text autocompletion.

neilv3• 1 year ago

challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..."

This might be a variation on one I've seen a few times: I'm an expert on something, and advising someone who wants to instead go with advice from their friend who isn't even involved.

(And who usually has little-to-no experience in the thing. But it's like calling up your nephew at Google to ask why your computer is slow. After the knowledgeable neighbor who looked at it already told them it's because they have very little RAM, and they're pushed into swap by this one program they installed. But the Google nephew hears "home PC slow", says they probably picked up a bunch of malware, and to reinstall Windows, and please stop calling during work hours.)

I think this can be a psychological quirk, or social dynamics pressure, or an inability to assess competence due to a lack of understanding of the field/subfield.

If I had to guess, I'd say the last one is probably the factor in being overruled by ChatGPT.

One end-run around that is to have some validation of your expertise in the decision-maker's mind, and it might be stupid. For example, in the minds of some decision-makers, if the person has some credential they value ("They went to MIT!", "They worked at Google!", "I'm paying out the nose for their consulting fee!") the decision-maker will put a lot more weight on that person. Maybe even more weight than they give the ChatGPT superintelligence they imagine. It's nice to be listened to, even if it's for the wrong reasons.

flkiwi2• 1 year ago

That’s the funny part: decision-makers never cause this issue for me. They, generally speaking, are deeply aware of what they don’t know and welcome my input.

It’s always the climbers, the middling intellect crowd that play the petty dominance and status games in a large organization, believe that their advancement is enabled by unwavering confidence. I say they keep rising but there’s a limit—they generally end up at the top of the peon pyramid but never ascend to the very highest leadership roles. But, unfortunately, I still have to deal with them.

Ancalagon• 1 year ago

Dude it is exhausting. Just existing - working, exercising, maintaining the house - is enough to make me tired at the end of the day (and I don’t even have kids). It’s frankly just overload. The capitalist machine is in its end game.

gecko6• 1 year ago

CS Lewis on the dangers of caring too much:

"It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help, and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do for those we know.) A great many people now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don't think it is. We must, if it so happens, give our lives for others; but even while we're doing it, I think we're meant to enjoy our Lord and, in Him, our friends, our food, our sleep, your jokes, and the birdsong and the frosty sunrise."

drw852• 1 year ago

I think there are different types of 'caring'. Of course you can't care about everything and everyone. but you should have some things in life that you care about.

Many people nowadays don't. Their job sucks and they don't care about it, they have no relationships, no real interests. They just distract themselves with meaningless things they don't actually care about. They watch videos/shows/streams they don't really care about. They play games they don't really care about. They eat food, but don't care about it. And they don't feel any motivation for anything anymore.

didgetmaster• 1 year ago

Devious people used to try and hide unpleasant or harmful information. Now they obfuscate it by surrounding it with a boatload of irrelevant information.

Important contract terms are buried in a 100 page mortgage contract. Wasteful government spending on someone's pork project is on page 980 of a 2000 page spending bill that no one reads before voting on it.

Evenjos• 1 year ago

The who cares era is just a symptom of the unaccountability machinery of our era.

It's hard to care or be passionate when you are certain that anything you produce which is worthwhile or original will be crushed, lost in the ocean of slop.

broabprobe• 1 year ago

there’s a lot to unpack here. Makes me think of the This Is Fine meme. People know the room is burning around them but they just don’t have enough bandwidth to address it.

mobileturdfctry3• 1 year ago

I'm simply pulling from my personal experience / interactions I've had with AI chatbots when I say this, but from my perspective anyone who considers AI a "mediocrity machine" is doing it wrong.

camillomiller• 1 year ago

Mussolini’s motto was “me ne frego”, literally “I don’t care”. Seems fitting.

superultra• 1 year ago

I think a better term for it is the “we’re cooked era.” I see this phrase everywhere, in relation to AI, in relation to national politics, in relation to big problems like climate change. It’s really demoralizing because it’s a passive acquiescence to systemic change as if we have no control over anything. Which will inevitably lead to entropy.

If there’s one book I could “force” everyone to read, it’d be the Dawn of Everything. The David’s (Graeber and Wingrow) describe how the fundamentally most interesting attribute of humans is how much we tinker.

I love this article because it shares those same values. It’s so crucial for us to reject abject passivity and even when things seem impossible, to tinker and play and never assume that everything is as it will be.

DavidPiper2• 1 year ago

Big +1 to the Dawn of Everything. Best book I read last year; probably in the last 5 years.

But my own "force" recommendation is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Also a very clarifying read on how exactly we got to this Who Cares Era through the mid-late 1900s.

footlose_3815• 1 year ago

Caring takes time, so it's a currency.

Triage your caring like you handle high or low priority requests in any other job you would. Being mindful of what is consuming your time and your brain's free cycles is so imporant.

Some people have become burned-out of caring, and it's dangerous. Burned-out by the internet pulling at their attention all the time, their phone notifications blasting to them telling them something is important but it isn't. Breaking news, but it's about a celebrity's dramatic encounter at a rewards event, and not about our politicians stealing from us.

The era of smartphones have made us emotionally stunted and and opposite of mindful.

tim3334• 1 year ago

I care about what I consider important stuff, say the war in Ukraine and will it be WW3 or not. I really see no reason why I should care whether some mediocre supplement or podcast I've not heard of was done with AI or not. Is there some reason I should care about that?

rossant• 1 year ago

Some people may also feel that nothing matters, since they're convinced we’ll all end up dead in a nuclear or climate apocalypse anyway.

tuckerpo• 1 year ago

The canonical life vectors people used to align themselves to, largely school -> university -> job -> marriage -> house in the suburbs, are long dead. They don’t work anymore. They don’t even exist for most people. And the worst part is that for a huge swath of the population, life outcomes are no longer a function of personal agency. Not entirely.

I grew up poor. Trailer park, unemployed father, chronically ill mother. I did the "right" things, got degrees, worked my ass off in tech, climbed the ladder. And now, at 30, with a high household income, I still can’t afford a single-family home near my job. The American Dream has been geographically priced out of existence. It's a tautology: you need to be near economic opportunity, but that proximity makes the spoils of that opportunity unattainable.

And let’s say I could buy a house without draining my savings and becoming house-poor, what would I be buying? New builds are laughably bad. Developers optimize for speed and cost-cutting, not longevity or quality. Even the “luxury” apartment I rent, which was built in 2018 in a fairly affluent area, is $3k/month for water leaks, a cracked foundation, bargain-bin appliances, and slanted floors. It’s a high-cost, low-trust ecosystem. Everywhere.

What’s replaced those dead pathways is a schizophrenically fragmented collective ethos. A thousand micro-cultures screaming past each other about what actually matters. For some, it’s hustle and the entrepreneurial grindset. For others, political purity. Or aesthetic curation. Or spiritual awakening. Or personal brand optimization. Some chase passive income, others clout, others raw dopamine. One group preaches family values and self-reliance; another insists that simply surviving is oppression unless all conditions are ideal.

There’s no coherent worldview to plug into anymore. Just a buffet of ideologies, all half-digested and shilled beyond recognition. Each individual has to construct their own belief system out of whatever cultural detritus they happen to trip over. And the result is a populace with no shared reference point, just competing, incompatible theories of meaning, each as brittle and anxious as the next. A non-stop race to the bottom.

And when nobody can agree on what matters, nobody bothers to care. A Boeing tech doesn’t torque the bolt on a 787 properly because, why would he? No one else seems to care. Drivers treat public roads like a demolition derby because enforcement is a joke. People skip car insurance entirely because the odds of meaningful consequences are laughably low. If you're in a fender bender, just drive away! Nothing will happen to you. Steal stuff from the supermarket, nothing will happen. Why pay taxes for your small business? You're never getting audited! See an old lady getting mugged in an alley? Meh, not my problem. Nothing compels people to act in the collective interest anymore... not law, not shame, not pride.

The U.S. increasingly feels less like a country and more like a clown-show economic zone designed not to nurture citizens, but to extract from them, manufacturing wealth from thin air for a rentier class while selling everyone else the illusion of mobility. Unless you were born into money, got absurdly lucky with crypto, or won a scam lawsuit, the system is rigged to keep you running in place, and spare me the cope about “the best time in history,” when modern medicine is a privatized racket pushing pills over care and our “peacetime” economy is bankrolled by an endless carousel of proxy wars and every tech "innovation" in the last 15 years is just a new medium to drill ads into people's lives.

As Jon Blow once said, we live in a profoundly unserious country. And the logical endpoint of that unseriousness is a culture of nihilism, malaise, and quiet surrender. How do you fix it, or is it simply too far gone?

mobileturdfctry3• 1 year ago

One thing I learned about my career in tech. Small companies tend to operate a little more so as meritocracies than large corporations.

The real incentive in large corporations / organizations seems to be about "building strong relationships / trust with people in power". Not about "becoming good at what you do".

This incentive structure was probably fine in a "post-industrial age", but is very wrong for the "information age". Eventually I think this way of thinking / organizing will go away via natural selection , but probably (sadly) not until most of us are dead. Because there are so many entrenched interests who espouse this kind of hierarchy.

mobileturdfctry3• 1 year ago

The part about "caring" that I think requires nuance to get to the heart of the issue:

I used to seek out tough challenges that had tight deadlines. Early in my career. This helped me gain a lot of knowledge about my craft. However, now that I've acquired a lot of knowledge I don't go actively seeking work I'm not being asked to do. It's not because I don't care, but it's because I value my life outside of work.

The other part of this is that there were never tangible rewards, such as a raise or promotion (besides the experience I acquired) so at this stage in my career by asking to do extra work and spend more stressful hours in a salaried job environment for nothing in return would ultimately be a bad decision on my part.

tom_m• 1 year ago

Of course no one cares. How do you think we ended up with all the things we have today?

sophyphreak• 1 year ago

So, I'm living in a Buddhist Monastery. This article basically details why.

In Buddhism, we talk sometimes talk about how apathy is the "near enemy" of equanimity. That is, equanimity is good and apathy is bad, but sometimes apathy looks like equanimity.

I was a software engineer for several years, and what was hardest for me was this exact "who cares" attitude. I wanted to do good work, but that was not the culture.

Now I seek the extinguishment of suffering. No one here says "who cares" here about this work. It's deeply refreshing. I feel very lucky to be here.

mdaniel3• 1 year ago

Honest question: why visit HN from a monastery?

sph2• 1 year ago

We’re so cooked that even Buddhist monks need their daily doomscrolling session.

presentation• 1 year ago

I agree this is a real phenomenon, but I also have been finding a lot of truly interesting and great (long-form, deep dive) stuff on the web lately, from podcasts to Youtube videos to Substack blogs and so on, by people who do care. You can scratch the intellectual itch in this age if you curate what you consume. The signal to noise ratio is terrible now, but if you know how to look, you'll find great things.

tsoukase• 1 year ago

There is a considerate difference of peoples' general stance and living in relation to pre 2010 era. I refer some non-exhaustive and not-in-order list:

Less and less people: - want kids

- want a hard work, only a few hours sitting in an office with a secure, albeit low income

- want to advance in academics

- read books

The underground reasons are debatable and I leave them for comments. Increased AI usage is both a result and a reason.

panstromek• 1 year ago

Can we finally stop this "kids these days... " "back in my day..." attitude around this? Literally non of this is anything new. Before AI slop, TV's were full of soap opera nonsense that my mom would watch while doing laundry or cooking. Stephen Leacock was making fun of throwaway detective novels hundred years ago. The lesson here is not that "nobody cares." It's that nobody cares about slop, and that's why it's slop. It's now cheaper than ever to produce, so we have more of it but I doubt it occupies more space in our life than occupied before.

dostick• 1 year ago

The article puts it way too softly by calling it “mediocrity”. I’d like to see mediocrity to return, it’s like middle class. Mediocrity means someone tried their best but they are not talented or skilled enough. People not trying and don’t care means hitting the bottom. There’s nothing below that.

duckilicious• 1 year ago

Mediocrity was here a long time before AI. In every field. And most people don't care. But yeah, it might get worse now that LLM output is also mediocre and they enable us to produce much more mediocre products.

lippihom• 1 year ago

Some hiring data points...

After I post a job to hire a developer or designer (freelance), I get one application every five minutes, until the job gets taken down. Say I leave the post up for a week, that means that I have 2,000 applications to sort through.

It is shocking to see the quality of inbound responses.

60% obviously don't read the job post, 10% read it but don't make an effort to do anything other than the bare minimum, 10% have a huge delta in skills vs expected salary, and the rest are a mixed bag but at least made an effort.

I think these numbers stack up pretty accurately across my day-to-day interactions with people in the world. 60% are totally checked out, 10% are doing the bare minimum, 10% show up but are maybe in the wrong role.

So 1 in 5 people can be expected to care and make some sort of impact.

throwaway5028• 1 year ago

Datapoint from a late-twenties Ph.D. student in AI:

During my formative years studying pure math, I learned that the hard work of _caring to understand_ is rewarded---for example, by your internal sense of beauty and by the enthusiasm of other mathematicians.

For my Ph.D. I decided to try bringing the mathematical toolbox to the field of artificial intelligence, which seemed to be facing some interesting problems. Overall, the message I've received loud and clear is that understanding is _not rewarded_ in this field, and actually discouraged.

The work of an outwardly successful machine learning scientist is to make incremental improvements to well-established methods and package the results in easily marketable papers. Learning about and using previous work is rewarded to the extent that it improves marketability (for example, by improving Greek alphabet or \displaymath density) but is discouraged if standing on the shoulders of giants in this way renders the paper incomprehensible to a goldfish with a knowledge of high school algebra.

I think it's clear that our current paradigm on deep learning is struggling to make scientific progress. The hard work of reshaping a paradigm must involve looking back and _caring_ about the perspectives that have been developed over the last 60-odd years. Learning other points of view is hard work, but it's what you're supposed to do as a scientist! Unfortunately, it's hard to overstate how little people care about anything beyond their diminutive research niche. (I had one colleague who said their work hasn't been intellectually demanding ever since LLMs got good at writing pytorch code and others who seem to feel that LLMs are "experts on math.") Every day I look at my own research group and the boatload of "top conference papers" and feel sad and angry that we call this science.

It's certainly poetic that LLMs---the emblem of people who don't care---is backed by a "research community" that, on average, doesn't know what it means to care about science.

raymondcarl1• 1 year ago

Social Media

Mikhail_Edoshin• 1 year ago

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving".

The Who Cares Era

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