> The days of having time to make something great are mostly over.
Such times never existed, you just failed to notice. Flat design took over not because it was pretty, but because it was cheap and versatile. That's why I love the furry community - you can see those people value art as a goal itself, rather than a mean to achieve other (often monetary) goals.
> Because you feel as if they lack nothing, yet they seem like empty shells: their lives are filled with commodities, and all their actions seem stripped of a spiritual dimension.
This is exactly the situation I am in. I really really don't know what to do.
I am always a strong advocate of doing volunteer/nonprofit work.
Folks on HN have some truly valuable skills that could make a huge difference. NPO work also brings together passionate, like-minded people. It’s an automatic community.
For me, I often have similar feelings. However, I have enjoyed reading since I was a child, so I usually know how to pass the time. There are countless excellent works, both novels and nonfiction, that one could never finish reading.
Figure out what is important to you. Just listen and don't force it. Don't feel guilty or shameful of where you are; it's ok. Be present in your feelings including the difficult ones.
Because fuck community. It's extremely rare to meet people who don't suck. My parents were never interested in me as a person, they were interested in me fulfilling their fantasy of a picture-perfect family. My aunt completely exploited her husband and then he happened to drink himself to death which was completely and unavoidably his own fault. Now she's ruining her daughter's teenage years just so that she can score popularity points among other religious nuts. When I was a kid I was the least popular in my class and I know that when you reach the bottom, literally nobody cares about you, unless they can extract something from you. It's dog eat dog. Now I'm an adult and the more I interact with general population the more it feeds my narcissism. I genuinely tried becoming a better person so that I'd have more friends but at some point I understood "it's not me, it's them". There's only so much I can do before I realize, most people aren't worth being friends with. The few people that are worth it are ridiculously difficult to find and usually have their own busy lives and chances are, the ones you happen to meet live on the other side of the city which is one hour one way.
This way of seeing the world is foreign to me. My family, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and even the guy who works at my local bakery are all good people.
I agree that most of the people I meet aren't going to be my friends, but disagree that they aren't worth being friends with for someone else. Most of them have got other friends. They're still worth something even when I don't have enough in common with them to want to hang out. I'm better than them at the things I'm good at, but they've all got their own strengths where they must surely outdo me.
I can't tell if you're from a different culture, carry some trauma, expect an unrealistic level of commitment, or something else that would cause us to have such a different outlook on life. I'm sorry that you've been let down by other people and I hope things get better for you.
1. If the community has "healing power", it can accept new broken members as long as they don't overwhelm the support system. Many hippie and religious movements work with some version of this idea.
2. A struggling loner might be so because of traits unattractive to general society, but attractive to the community. Pretty much all subcultures fit here.
I remember people welcoming Uber not because of the app, but because the idea "you'll know exactly how much the ride will cost you before you take it" was revolutionary at the time. Over here, what used to happen was that you order the taxi, the guy says "yeah I'll take you there it'll cost you $10" and then the bill was $20 and there was nothing you could do about it except pay. It was completely normal for taxis to scam people. So when Uber came and started scamming drivers, everyone cheered.
The point is, you're essentially right. It's just that before Uber customers were most likely victims of scams, while with Uber it's the drivers. As in, in a capitalistic market the scamming is always present, the question is who scams who.
Scam is too generic of a word... its information asymmetry. Also for the most part everyone is trying to get some service/product for the lowest price while at the same time trying to earn as much as possible for some labor.
> But deciding to go along and play the same awful game and drag everybody else down with it is a personal choice.
True but misleading. If the system promotes being an asshole, then you'll have assholes at the top, no matter how much effort you put into moralizing everyone.
If the system promotes being an asshole, and you decide to play along, you’ll have to accept the fact that you are, in fact, an asshole. It’s not a matter of moralizing anyone. It’s just a matter of accepting consequences.
A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.
Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?
You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
> do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune
No I fully admit some minors will still get access to FaceTok. We accept this failure for alcohol and tobacco. We don't have internet connected beer cans phoning home when you open them, asking to scan your face.
But at least where I live, most kids aren't falling over drunk or puffing away at school bus stops. So if the system is good enough for selling actual poisons, it's good enough to limit most minors' access to online vices.
Moreover social media has network effects. If most kids aren't on it, the rest will likely not bother either.
So basically you've designed an expensive solution that is very complicated to roll out and has obvious cases where it doesn't work, but you still think it's a good idea, rather than explore alternatives.
I also have no issue with viable alternatives (read: have a chance of being passed as law) that preserve privacy. This is just my idea, take it or leave it. I couldn't care less.
Yes but the thing about power is the more you use it the more the other party learns to live without it. US has such a giant leverage over Europe because Europe believed US would never actually use its power against it. Imagine US sanctioning Chinese officials - they would shrug at best because China has its own everything because they always knew US would bully them.
The consequence is that Europe will slowly move its financial and IT systems away from US solutions. It's a very, very slow process because it was believed for almost a century that US wouldn't actually bully Europe. But for example, there will be more pressure to roll out Wero and have the systems completely European. Before Trump, there was decent chance the whole thing would be just Visa/MasterCard with extra steps. Now it's clear that EU needs its own independent payment system.
Such times never existed, you just failed to notice. Flat design took over not because it was pretty, but because it was cheap and versatile. That's why I love the furry community - you can see those people value art as a goal itself, rather than a mean to achieve other (often monetary) goals.
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