What an insane article. It's almost like he hasn't read Eric Hoffer.
Mass movements arise when populations, that had had large increases in living standards, find their living standards are no longer rising. Hoffer cites something like 30% of the country is now 'middle class' and then depressions etc. set in.
Take the quote, "A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives."
The reality is the opposite. When work doesn't pay (i.e. when hard work can't lead to buying a condo/house and starting a family) the original premise of "work hard to get ahead" breaks. And here we are.
Any civilization where two 30 year old elementry school teachers can't buy a 1,200 sq-ft 3bdr/2bath condo for less than 30% of their income - is morally bankrupt. Aka 99% of the bay area, or DC, NYC. So people tern to idleness without the ability for work to result in personal progress.
The solutions are simple: make it easy to build housing. If you're bored, deadlift. Spend time outside. And, most of all, change our national household economics to allow ownership and family formation.
os2warpman · 2h ago
>American greatness has produced a society whose members know not what to do with the freedom and abundance that earlier generations secured.
There have been several posts on HN about this. I have commented every time I have seen one because I think the above quote is true. I also think it is one, of several, reasons things are going the way they are.
Many of my friends, coworkers, and relatives have fallen into the trap of being bored to death. They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling. Almost all of them are unhappy. I think it is widespread to be like this.
But the problem is solvable.
There is no person, no person too busy, too tired, too poor, too disabled, too shy, too anything, who cannot find the time to do something that provides value to their life. They just have to, and this is the part that makes people mad, put down their phone and turn off the TV.
In every zip code in the entire United States of America, there is some group of people, somewhere, that is looking for someone to join them-- unless it is an isolated patch of remote wilderness where food and fuel need to be airlifted in or a remote island separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of sea there IS something.
You just have to get out, find them, and join them.
The last time something like this popped up I do what I usually do and listed non-work, non-social media things to do within an hour of my deceased grandparents' farm in central Southern Indiana. That's my benchmark-- if there are things to do here there are things to do everywhere because it is about as far from "the big city" you can get absent stretches of western desert or alaskan tundra.
Some quick searches found rod and gun clubs, knitting circles, small rural libraries with 3d printers going idle and anime clubs, three (yes, three) astronomy clubs, amateur radio clubs, gardening clubs, volunteer fire companies (who always, everywhere, need members), civic societies, book clubs, and even a small community performing arts center with a banging schedule of shows whose website was practically begging for people to come join them to be stage crew, performers, and set builders. Rural, barely-covered-by-a-cell-signal, southern Indiana, and those are just the things I found with online calendars full of events.
Being active in one's community outside of work, and deriving meaning not from work but your personal accomplishments and activities is a skill-- but it is a learnable skill.
c22 · 47m ago
How do you square your belief in the opening premise with the results of your research into clubs and "things to do" that seems to completely contradict it?
Aerbil313 · 1h ago
Congratulations on being lucky enough to not be afflicted by a bad enough mental health disorder! All you have to do is to "get out there and do stuff" to achieve fulfillment.
Maybe you'll consider not projecting your experience onto the many others who are literally unable, even though they are equipped with the same number of functioning hands and feet as you do, and don't seem disabled by mere appearance.
> They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling.
You might consider extending this empathy by also not blaming the otherwise healthy people falling into these dopamine traps that are designed by professionals to entrap, designed carefully over many thousands of man-years to maximize ad revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you for the most part. Yet I'm struck by the complete omission of the robber from the story, and the focus on the robbed houseowner's weakly built front door, when it was already made of steel. And of course, the non-negligible fraction of the population whose front doors are made of weaker material through no fault of their own.
> Almost all of them are unhappy.
Then surely they would climb out of their dopamine gravity-wells in the first chance and pursue happier, more real lives, right, if they could?
I kindly ask you to reconsider your beliefs regarding "willpower".
nradov · 1h ago
If you try hard enough you can always find reasons to justify failure and explain why no improvement is ever possible.
supportengineer · 2h ago
Trying to do almost any productive work results in the government stomping you to death. Stay in your place, citizen!
estearum · 58m ago
Genuinely curious what experience you had that led you to this belief?
bko · 2h ago
I dealt with a little bit of what the article describes, the burden of too much leisure. I ended up getting a masters part time and another certification that ate up much of my 20s. But after that I still felt anxiety growing older. It was all just so meaningless. And every year I was less likely to ever have my career really take off so what the hell was the point? I'll be working until my 60s or moving to some random cheap country I have no connection to to live out the rest of my days.
This all changed once I had children. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention children at all. But I was in a kind of prolonged adolescence. You see this among many people without children. Just obsession about "addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media", Disney World for adults, collectibles, anime, video games, all distractions.
Obviously children are not for everyone and I can only speak from personal experience. But having kids just cured that anxiety almost immediately. Not that I was not bored, but I kind of flipped things where time was on my side. Prior to kids, I felt anxiety growing older because I was just that much less likely to have some big breakthrough. And every year we get a little slower and less interested in things. Now every year my kids grow a bit and I know they got their best years ahead of them. And I get to experience all of that, win back some hard earned free time for personal interests, and overall have more interesting dinner conversations. But probably most importantly, you get to see what kind of people they're going to grow up to be.
This is just me of course. Some people might have the opposite experience, where they feel children are a prison. And plenty of people blow their lives up and abandon their families. But for me I couldn't imagine where I'd be without them.
bicx · 2h ago
My wife and I are unable to have children due to health reasons, and we decided not to adopt after years of hardship. Now, we’re in a better place, and I’m nearing my 40s. My brother has 2 young kids, and my parents help take care of the kids during the week. They are literal neighbors and walk back and forth between their houses.
Meanwhile, my wife and I have moved from our hometown, lived in SF for a while (focusing on career), sold normal possessions to live and travel in an RV for a year, and now we live on a gulf coast island. It’s been a great adventure these past years, but there is a deep feeling that there isn’t much of a purpose in what we do.
Raising kids seems to answer this for some, but other parents seem to become genuinely disgusted with it over time (unfortunately for the kids). From an evolutionary perspective, a feeling of purpose from raising children makes total sense. But, that doesn’t mean I must lean into all evolutionarily baked-in tendencies as a form of true meaning.
I think the hard truth is that if we want meaning, we have to be honest that there is no unquestionable source of meaning in life. That also goes counter to the idea that we are individually special or have a destiny, which is also a hard pill to swallow for many (particularly in the Western world). However, it does open up our lives as a canvas on which we can paint our own vision of meaning and purpose.
bko · 2h ago
> I think the hard truth is that if we want meaning, we have to be honest that there is no unquestionable source of meaning in life.
I agree, but children are one possible source of meaning in life. I haven't found a compelling one for me personally besides that. I guess for some people it could be discovery. If you're on the frontier of some field or science that could have a big impact, perhaps that can give you meaning. Perhaps Nikola Tesla never felt the urge to marry or have children. But for us mere mortals that becomes harder. And today's map doesn't have many unchartered areas. Nearly every problem accessible to us is impossible or trivial.
I hope you find meaning and purpose in your life without kids. But you're also relatively young. I feel like my passion and interests wane over time. This holds for most people I know as well. And other fun things like adventure and living out of an RV becomes harder as well.
tbd23 · 44m ago
I totally agree - having kids gave my life a meaning that I didn’t know I was missing until I experienced it. I’ve experienced higher emotional highs (and lower lows) than I think I would ever have any other way.
More broadly, I think western culture has abandoned the old trifecta of “God, family, country” (and I would add a fourth of career) that gave life meaning. All of those pillars have their problems but our culture did not replace them with anything expect a vague “do what makes you happy” sentiment that doesn’t seem to be working for a lot of people.
spamjavalin · 2h ago
This. As unfashionable as it might be the truth is that children are the reason, for everything. Ultimately you will get bored of living just for yourself.
ViktorRay · 2h ago
Boredom isn’t the worst thing.
30 years ago being a couch potato who watched tv all day was stigmatized. These people were wasting their lives. But at least they weren’t hurting others.
Nowadays these bored coach potato aren’t watching COPS and Judge Judy all day. They’re posting angry stuff online and radicalizing themselves and others. Which makes the world worse for everyone else.
(For what it’s worth I personally happen to be a big fan of COPS and Judge Judy. And I also post stuff online as evidenced by this very same Hacker News comment. But sometimes what you post matters)
teruakohatu · 2h ago
> Just a few short years ago, everyone was advised to “learn to code”, regardless of where their real interests might lie. Yet now, we are told, this is one area where large language models already excel. Will some share of the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested into Stem be reallocated toward rescuing the humanities – the one set of disciplines whose value does not depend entirely on unforeseeable macroeconomic contingencies? We shouldn’t hold our breath.
This is an odd statement, and probably reflects the authors own anxieties.
user68858788 · 4h ago
I enjoyed this article and it is giving me ideas on how to improve the quality of my own leisure time.
qwerpy · 2h ago
Same. For years now I've vaguely bucketed leisure activities into "empty" and "wholesome" in the same vein as caloric intake. Empty: mindlessly following a YouTube/Instagram/Tiktok algorithmic feed, modern games that are more slot machines than games, drinking alone. Wholesome variants: intentionally reading/watching high quality content, playing offline or 2-4 player coop games, socializing with friends in person.
Knowing is just the first part of the war though. If you don't constantly stay mindful of what kind leisure is taking up your time, the vastly more addictive nature of empty calorie leisure will win. And how many people even bother trying to resist, let alone win most of their battles?
supportengineer · 2h ago
Blame the government. They have strangled the hell out of productive Americans. Try to get a building permit to build something, anything.
Insane amounts of taxes, being wasted.
Failure to raise the minimum wage.
nradov · 1h ago
"The government" isn't a monolithic entity. Some state governments such as Texas make it fairly cheap and easy to get a building permit.
burnt-resistor · 34m ago
And build toxic, explosive factories and petrochem facilities in residential areas also in flood zones. cough Houston cough
Residentially, Texas has crap tons of HOAs that forbid even minor changes, so permits don't matter. Texas is also pretty boring, spread out, and requires a lot of driving to do anything. Business-wise, tiny industrial-centric cities would be happy to permit an asbestos factory and an oil refinery beside a nursery school and farmland, and all in a known flood zone. Ask me how I know.
nradov · 13m ago
Well there's no pleasing you is there. But if you don't like Texas, it's also easy to build in other states like North Dakota.
Mass movements arise when populations, that had had large increases in living standards, find their living standards are no longer rising. Hoffer cites something like 30% of the country is now 'middle class' and then depressions etc. set in.
Take the quote, "A society so thoroughly steeped in the work ethic and committed to the pursuit of individual achievement cannot but fail to prepare its members for any other kinds of lives."
The reality is the opposite. When work doesn't pay (i.e. when hard work can't lead to buying a condo/house and starting a family) the original premise of "work hard to get ahead" breaks. And here we are.
Any civilization where two 30 year old elementry school teachers can't buy a 1,200 sq-ft 3bdr/2bath condo for less than 30% of their income - is morally bankrupt. Aka 99% of the bay area, or DC, NYC. So people tern to idleness without the ability for work to result in personal progress.
The solutions are simple: make it easy to build housing. If you're bored, deadlift. Spend time outside. And, most of all, change our national household economics to allow ownership and family formation.
There have been several posts on HN about this. I have commented every time I have seen one because I think the above quote is true. I also think it is one, of several, reasons things are going the way they are.
Many of my friends, coworkers, and relatives have fallen into the trap of being bored to death. They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling. Almost all of them are unhappy. I think it is widespread to be like this.
But the problem is solvable.
There is no person, no person too busy, too tired, too poor, too disabled, too shy, too anything, who cannot find the time to do something that provides value to their life. They just have to, and this is the part that makes people mad, put down their phone and turn off the TV.
In every zip code in the entire United States of America, there is some group of people, somewhere, that is looking for someone to join them-- unless it is an isolated patch of remote wilderness where food and fuel need to be airlifted in or a remote island separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of sea there IS something.
You just have to get out, find them, and join them.
The last time something like this popped up I do what I usually do and listed non-work, non-social media things to do within an hour of my deceased grandparents' farm in central Southern Indiana. That's my benchmark-- if there are things to do here there are things to do everywhere because it is about as far from "the big city" you can get absent stretches of western desert or alaskan tundra.
Some quick searches found rod and gun clubs, knitting circles, small rural libraries with 3d printers going idle and anime clubs, three (yes, three) astronomy clubs, amateur radio clubs, gardening clubs, volunteer fire companies (who always, everywhere, need members), civic societies, book clubs, and even a small community performing arts center with a banging schedule of shows whose website was practically begging for people to come join them to be stage crew, performers, and set builders. Rural, barely-covered-by-a-cell-signal, southern Indiana, and those are just the things I found with online calendars full of events.
Being active in one's community outside of work, and deriving meaning not from work but your personal accomplishments and activities is a skill-- but it is a learnable skill.
Maybe you'll consider not projecting your experience onto the many others who are literally unable, even though they are equipped with the same number of functioning hands and feet as you do, and don't seem disabled by mere appearance.
> They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling.
You might consider extending this empathy by also not blaming the otherwise healthy people falling into these dopamine traps that are designed by professionals to entrap, designed carefully over many thousands of man-years to maximize ad revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you for the most part. Yet I'm struck by the complete omission of the robber from the story, and the focus on the robbed houseowner's weakly built front door, when it was already made of steel. And of course, the non-negligible fraction of the population whose front doors are made of weaker material through no fault of their own.
> Almost all of them are unhappy.
Then surely they would climb out of their dopamine gravity-wells in the first chance and pursue happier, more real lives, right, if they could?
I kindly ask you to reconsider your beliefs regarding "willpower".
This all changed once I had children. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention children at all. But I was in a kind of prolonged adolescence. You see this among many people without children. Just obsession about "addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media", Disney World for adults, collectibles, anime, video games, all distractions.
Obviously children are not for everyone and I can only speak from personal experience. But having kids just cured that anxiety almost immediately. Not that I was not bored, but I kind of flipped things where time was on my side. Prior to kids, I felt anxiety growing older because I was just that much less likely to have some big breakthrough. And every year we get a little slower and less interested in things. Now every year my kids grow a bit and I know they got their best years ahead of them. And I get to experience all of that, win back some hard earned free time for personal interests, and overall have more interesting dinner conversations. But probably most importantly, you get to see what kind of people they're going to grow up to be.
This is just me of course. Some people might have the opposite experience, where they feel children are a prison. And plenty of people blow their lives up and abandon their families. But for me I couldn't imagine where I'd be without them.
Meanwhile, my wife and I have moved from our hometown, lived in SF for a while (focusing on career), sold normal possessions to live and travel in an RV for a year, and now we live on a gulf coast island. It’s been a great adventure these past years, but there is a deep feeling that there isn’t much of a purpose in what we do.
Raising kids seems to answer this for some, but other parents seem to become genuinely disgusted with it over time (unfortunately for the kids). From an evolutionary perspective, a feeling of purpose from raising children makes total sense. But, that doesn’t mean I must lean into all evolutionarily baked-in tendencies as a form of true meaning.
I think the hard truth is that if we want meaning, we have to be honest that there is no unquestionable source of meaning in life. That also goes counter to the idea that we are individually special or have a destiny, which is also a hard pill to swallow for many (particularly in the Western world). However, it does open up our lives as a canvas on which we can paint our own vision of meaning and purpose.
I agree, but children are one possible source of meaning in life. I haven't found a compelling one for me personally besides that. I guess for some people it could be discovery. If you're on the frontier of some field or science that could have a big impact, perhaps that can give you meaning. Perhaps Nikola Tesla never felt the urge to marry or have children. But for us mere mortals that becomes harder. And today's map doesn't have many unchartered areas. Nearly every problem accessible to us is impossible or trivial.
I hope you find meaning and purpose in your life without kids. But you're also relatively young. I feel like my passion and interests wane over time. This holds for most people I know as well. And other fun things like adventure and living out of an RV becomes harder as well.
More broadly, I think western culture has abandoned the old trifecta of “God, family, country” (and I would add a fourth of career) that gave life meaning. All of those pillars have their problems but our culture did not replace them with anything expect a vague “do what makes you happy” sentiment that doesn’t seem to be working for a lot of people.
30 years ago being a couch potato who watched tv all day was stigmatized. These people were wasting their lives. But at least they weren’t hurting others.
Nowadays these bored coach potato aren’t watching COPS and Judge Judy all day. They’re posting angry stuff online and radicalizing themselves and others. Which makes the world worse for everyone else.
(For what it’s worth I personally happen to be a big fan of COPS and Judge Judy. And I also post stuff online as evidenced by this very same Hacker News comment. But sometimes what you post matters)
This is an odd statement, and probably reflects the authors own anxieties.
Knowing is just the first part of the war though. If you don't constantly stay mindful of what kind leisure is taking up your time, the vastly more addictive nature of empty calorie leisure will win. And how many people even bother trying to resist, let alone win most of their battles?
Insane amounts of taxes, being wasted.
Failure to raise the minimum wage.
Residentially, Texas has crap tons of HOAs that forbid even minor changes, so permits don't matter. Texas is also pretty boring, spread out, and requires a lot of driving to do anything. Business-wise, tiny industrial-centric cities would be happy to permit an asbestos factory and an oil refinery beside a nursery school and farmland, and all in a known flood zone. Ask me how I know.