He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.
I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.
Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?
I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.
Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.
Also any hint of empathy I might have had for you evaporated when you decided to make an infantile joke about my username. You're nothing but a troll, and not even a smart one.