> 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".
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.
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.
It's exhausting.
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.
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.
A previous generations old guy told me about this. He worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of things for the engineers. Then the government changed the way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the project) had to start handling all those other things themselves and most of the support staff went away.
It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.
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.
There are plenty of people out there who live their lives rarely watching the news, or browsing social media, and it is really hard to make an argument that their lives are any worse.
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.
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.
I know people who are so incapacitated by their anger, frustration, and sadness about the Gaza war that they spiral into depression and are incapable of making any impact on the world directly around them. In their own words, they say that they have a hard time seeing how anything they do locally really matters when such terrible things are happening elsewhere. Their excessive amount of care about things outside of their control has actively hampered their ability to care about things that they actually can influence.
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.
"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.
> 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.
If almost no-one votes because they think it won't change anything, the few people who do care enough to vote get to say who's elected.
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.
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.
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.
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
I think the concern in Gaza tickled some group the wrong way and there will be more awareness.
Additionally, there should be more awareness that protests are less tolerated by the government, which seems a bad thing.
Turn off all notifications. Don’t listen to radio, don’t have a TV, don’t buy newspapers or magazines. Talk to your neighbours, friends and family. Join the community garden, go on toddler led walks, go hiking/fishing/swimming/camping.
Live in the real world and fill your life with things from the real world. The rest is pure noise designed for the specific purpose of grabbing and holding your attention and keeping you in a state of panic or concern.
You wouldn’t put toxic items in your pantry to eat, don’t put this toxic crap into your awareness.
I am a resource for my kids, my spouse, and the rest of my friends and family. I am also a resource to my employer and other customers.
In any organization, a resource can vary from things such as land, chemicals, machines, humans, books, etc.
The term Human Resources seems accurate to a refer to a group of people that deal with the humans in the organization.
I do not see why “resources” is seen as having a negative connotation in this context. Of course, just like a family can mistreat a resourceful family member, so can any organization mistreat a human resource.
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.
One, don’t attempt to invalidate my emotions. They are both entirely valid, given the concerted push from the C-suite to dehumanize their workforce, and entirely necessary. Necessary because our parents and grandparents lived better lives because they weren’t as dehumanized. Necessary because so few people in this community specifically see it that way and it *needs to be pointed out repeatedly*.
Perhaps it would resonate more if you, too, had heard a couple of C-suites & their chosen MBAs joking about this exact topic. Perhaps dehumanizing people would make your blood boil if you experienced it as casually and often as I have.
But perhaps not. One of the great things about the WTFC-era is that I can disregard your opinion utterly.
There were more slaves before MBAs, and before MBAs joked about mistreating employees, factory/plantation owners/kings did.
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.