> 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.
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".
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.
Just moving your head around in a forest also gives an amazing amount of input. And if you're being chased by a tiger through a jungle, you cross about 1,000 different species of plants and small animals.