

Fortune's Child - drjohnson
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/fortunes-child.php?page=all

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erikpukinskis
I loved this. The refusal of people in the tech world to engage the world
politically (beyond ill conceived political fantasies described to friends in
restaurants or strangers in internet forums) really bothers me. I had never
thought about it as a prolonged adolescence, but that's pretty apt.

~~~
wtbob
And indeed, what political engagement we _do_ see is of the adolescent
variety: 'you can't tell me what to do!' rather 'what _ought_ I do?'; 'you
should give me X, Y and Z' rather than 'I should give A, B ad C.'

For a generation so deeply self-interested, we don't do a lot of self-
examination.

Growing up has always been difficult; our culture, our politics, our
technology and our way of life make it avoidable. The result is unsurprising.

Says a grown man sitting alone in his boxers on a computer from a hotel room
on a Sunday morning rather than surrounded by the family he never fathered, in
the suit he doesn't own, at the church he doesn't attend.

~~~
idexicon
Things can change fast. My husband was alone until he met me at 35. 11 years
later he had found the family of four small children, the suit, and the church
(at least on Christmas and Easter).

If you want a different life you can find it change pretty quickly.

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camikazeg
As an expectant father of my firstborn, I still feel like I have a connection
to what it was like to be a boy and I wonder how true this quote is: “Boyhood
is a most complex and incomprehensible thing…A man can never understand a boy,
even when he has been the boy.”

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tomjen3
A bunch of assertions without the slights proof, dressed up in excessive
verbiage and florally sourced platitudes with the occasional quote by person
or person long departed from this world and therefore permanently unavailable
for consultation.

Can't we do better? I mean I liked being called an elf wizard but this is
exactly the kind of writing that we don't need on Hacker News - pretentious
but with very little substance.

~~~
dang
Essays don't have to prove things. If they did, they wouldn't be called
essays.

There is more than one kind of intellectual substance. Lapham and Lapham's are
easily good enough to be here.

