The Who Cares Era

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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!"

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?

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).

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."

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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).

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)

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

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...

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

* 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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 :-)

"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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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).

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

> 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.

It's exhausting.

As an example of out-of-fucks, a regular engineer literally couldn't be convinced to care about customers when a corporatized management creates 10,000 hoops for them to jump over - such as scrum.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.