I’m a little drunk and I have not even read the article but I was discussing this very thing with my friends. We have so many stories and we are each going through so much struggle individually. Why can’t we be kind and considerate of each other?
Because going through a struggle tends to turn people inward and makes them see everything, including the harm they do to others, as if they were a victim just doing what they have to do to survive. It is very hard to overcome it because you have to become a kind of martyr, who accepts the reality of their suffering but who's too holy to blame it on everyone else, or even on yourself.
Kids are often nicer than adults because their lives are so easy, but if they don't learn to bear a cross (this is the best metaphor I know) they'll become nasty as they get older, as people reject them and their health starts failing. It's one thing to be a nice young man, another one entirely to be a nice overweight balding 60 year old with joint pain and a skin disease. That's not to say it's about age. It's about how good you feel, and age is just the big conveyor belt that everyone goes down whether they're ahead or behind their demographic.
You can watch this play out in you next time someone says or does something annoying when you're still smarting from a minor injury, like a stubbed toe. You'll tend to act as if they were the ones who stubbed it because blame wants to earth itself.
I think that what you call "learning to bear a cross" is really an application of empathy, and an important one. It's the knowledge that "if I have an emotional meltdown, those close to me will be forced in to the role of caring for me, which emotionally drains them."
It's such an important skill to know when to hide or bear your hurt, to spare others the burden of care, and when to share your hurt to acquire some care. It's a difficult balance to strike because if you go neglected for too long, you will completely meltdown, but if you elicit care too often, you will also elicit compassion fatigue from your carers (especially as an adult, I mean, parents will pretty much pour all the care required in to their young children, it's not that they are limitless, but the limits are way higher).
To be less transactional about it: you don't make every negative event be all about you, because you recognise that things affect others, even things that seem to only affect you. That requires a quite refined and well-developed sense of empathy where you are balancing various overlapping and conflicting needs of, potentially, several people at once.
Generally, people who experience childhoods which are impoverished of the stimuli necessary to develop robust senses of self and the coping skills that come with it are left much less resilient to life struggles in adulthood.
If you have developed a sense of self early in childhood, then you are able to develop empathy for others, if you bring empathy in to a relationship, then you can be trusted and trust others. Think about it, you cannot rely on a relationship that does not have trust as it's basis, you cannot be trusted in a relationship if you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings, and you cannot perceive or understand the other persons needs and feelings if you cannot perceive or understand your own.
If you have a sense of self, and then you have developed empathy, and then taken that empathy in to relationships, and if you have then made the moral choice with that to be a kind person, then that enables you to form resilient relationships. And you take those relationships with you in to adulthood. These relationships, and the coping mechanisms that got you them, are highly effective cushions for the shocks of adult life. Life changing struggles can still afflict such people and bring them down, but then they are much more able to recover since they still have the scaffolding they developed in childhood and they can rebuild.
For those with a childhood impoverished of the necessary stimuli, it is much more difficult, because they are rebuilding it all from scratch.
And then there are those for whom the experiences of life have been so damaging, possibly combined with genetics, that they may never be able to develop a functioning sense of self, or empathy and go through their entire lives. And yeah, the older you get, the more difficult it gets because you may not have the attributes that would enable you to turn it around earlier in life (family or school friends with whom relationships haven't yet been completely poisoned, good looks enough to meet someone new, meeting ambitious people your age at the start of their careers who are looking to network, etc..)
Because empathy and kindness have to be instilled in children for it to develop. We all have the capacity for it, but the capacity has to be nourished.
Adult lives generally unfold in either one of two ways:
1. Wondering how so many people have made it to adulthood without having developed empathy. Even if you ignore empathy as a moral condition, it's acquisition is a practical condition which is a pre-requisite for managing many other aspects of adult life (careers, relationships, interactions with strangers, etc.). The idea that so many people are roaming the earth without having developed this capability is astonishing, slightly terrifying.
2. Wondering why, despite all my best efforts, I am unable to connect with anyone. Does everyone else experience this profound sense of hurt and isolation? Even when I am with people, I feel alone. Nothing I do alleviates this condition, except momentarily. I feel like I even lack a connection to myself, or that my self doesn't exist, except maybe in rare moments. It's like there is a void and I must fill it with something: religion, drugs, sex, spending, etc.
In a word, righteousness. The human mind grew up in a world of divided bands and fighting. Us vs Them is a very comfortable paradigm. So now we have people fighting about Woke-ism or Gamer's Gate. People get bitterly angry about this because their personal morality is challenged; shame is a knife to cut the sinner. We feel a shared sense of righteousness with our own band - how dare they oppress minorities / how dare they challenge the way I was raised / how dare they take away my rights and personal choice / how dare they behave so recklessly.
Maybe you're angry about one of those things right now. Anger is an emotion that tells you to change something. If you can't change the thing you get angry about, then you get angry at that feeling of not being able to fix things; you get angry at people that get in the way. You get angry at people on 'the other side'. Then they respond by defending themselves and saying things that make you more angry. Once the fighting starts, you have the original problem and the original feelings about the problem, and you also have anger about the fighting, which quickly becomes bitter.
I don't know how or if humanity will stop this at scale. A path forward would be choosing not to use shame and righteousness, but that is a deeply alien feeling. Of course you want racists/wokists to feel bad; they are doing harm and they want you to feel bad! It would be unrighteous to not attack them!
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I do not believe wokism is a problem in the way that racism is a problem. I believe that many people experience historic structural inequality. I believe that some people want their own race to prosper ahead of other races. I believe that people try to advance their own personal interests without regard to the power structures they participate in. I don't believe that shaming non-minorities really helps fix this.
Ironically, the author mentions what you've done here directly and calls it "Narrative Take Over":
"We try to communicate "I understand" and go on to provide a personal anecdote. Our story is usually of something that we think is in the experiential vicinity of what someone is sharing with us. This, however, is not empathy."
The easiest way to be kind and considerate is to listen and attempt to understand rather than making assumptions. Even on the Internet :)
When you live in a system that increasingly benefits the few at the expense of many, anger is a natural immune response. A healthy catalyst for change, really.
- The one you employ as a manipulation to get something you want out of an interaction. Not to make a moral judgement on this, we all do it, when you want to buy a pack of gum at the convenience store you affect kindness (we call it "being polite") in order to make the transaction go smoothly.
- The one which requires empathy. Empathy requires a sense of self, combined with the ability to recognise the same selfness in others.
And the recent heatwave? The last argument with my brother was so over the top it did permanent damage to our relationship. Upon reflection I do wonder how much heat had to do with it.
No. I would rather think its the lack of proper education on how to behave morally, how to have make valid argument, how our choices impact the life of others, and lack of self control training.
Non sequitur. Inflation and education quality are unrelated.
(Perhaps they are related when inflation gets really bad, but we aren't anywhere near that. And, education wasn't great when inflation was very near zero for a decade, and neither was social kindness.)
I wonder if this could be converted into a web application, maybe using WASM? I'm sure a lot of people here want to try it out on their own, but for me the build process is daunting as I haven't written C++ since college days. A web application would be very accessible.
As an immigrant who walked everywhere where I grew up, this is one of the things I miss the most about living in America. Walkable neighborhoods are rare in most parts of the US, let alone the cities. I wish we had more places to walk. Sigh.
In the U.S. walking has even been criminalized to some extent for those in out groups. For instance, if 4 black teenage boys walk together in an affluent, white neighborhood they can expect police to stop them. Walking is so rare that a small group of people walking together is seen as something out of the ordinary. I think it’s bad for society to be set up this way.
I walked a block with a friend yesterday next to a relatively busy feeder and someone in a passing car screamed at us. It's not a rare occurrence, I have plenty of memories of walking to the nearby gas station convenience store as a 13 year old and the same happening.
People really underestimate how antisocial people are to walkers in the US.
Well the issue can be even more profound than that: areas that actually physically cannot be walked at all (excluding technicalities like walking on busy roads). On the bright side, you can't be arrested for walking somewhere that doesn't even let you walk there.
That is something I’ve never encountered anywhere except bridges. Just because there’s no road there doesn’t mean you can’t walk (unless the space next to the road is air/water).
To be clear, the technicality I was excluding was the 'technically you can always walk on the road' part. In places without footpaths your choices often require walking on the road because of fences etc. even if momentarily that's still a horrible walking experience that will effectively cut pedestrians to zero. Also, gigantic highways across which the crossings are separated by kilometres will effectively segregate areas from anyone who has no car.
This article doesn't talk about "walking" though. It talks about two things - jaywalking, i.e. walking in places designed for motor vehicle traffic, and minor children walking on public street unaccompanied by adults. While both have arguments in favor of current regulation being excessive (the latter probably has much stronger case, my whole generation's childhood is "child endangerment" by these laws, I wonder how we survived) - you comment implies it's about generic walking and racial angle, which it is not.
A second order effect of criminalization of walking is a culture that does not value walkability. People are so accustomed to non walkability and so unaccustomed to groups of people strolling about that it does not even occur to them to think about what a loss this is.
The claim still works without the element of racism. In the extreme car-centric areas of the US you're regarded a weirdo for walking anywhere by members of your own race.
You could bet you that those four people would have the same thing happen to them in Japan's walkable cities as well. It is nothing to do with walkable cities.
at least have enough courage to admit that 4 teenagers would make you nervous. there's nothing wrong with being alert. teenagers can be dangerous and unpredictable. the dividing line IMO, would be behaving preemptively in such a scenario.
4 teenagers would not make me nervous. Happens many times per day for many of us. Parent comments are talking about something different than "common sense" or "being alert". Profiling is a real thing that many people have to deal with.
I see reference to jaywalking. The argument was "Walking is so rare that a small group of people walking together is seen as something out of the ordinary."
While I skimmed the 20+ page PDF two clicks into the "reference", I still don't see cases where walking itself has been criminalized. Of course people can walk places they shouldn't (and whether they should be allowed or not is debatable) but I really don't see anything about walking itself being criminalized as the comment argues.
So I asked a question for clarification, instead of posting about the fact the comment was conjecture.
There is no law that says walking is illegal. There are laws that prevent loitering which has a side effect of encouraging people to not hang out outside. Particularly if you don’t “belong” in the area. Knowing that you will be harassed by police even if you are doing nothing other than walking with too many friends is a form of de facto criminalization. What is being talked about is the effect of living in a culture that does not value or understand a need for walking and the attitude of police forces in this regard. Again, there is no law that says walking is illegal.
As lawyers sometimes say, you can win the case in court but will you survive the time spent in jail waiting for the trial? Effective criminalization is not limited to just what is written in the law.
I remember when I was younger, that in many suburban neighborhoods it was common (i.e. expected) that everyone would walk around the block after dinner. You'd see all these couples walking slowing, chatting with neighbors, and basically showing their face.
Around where I live, there are large residential areas with no sidewalks at all. It blew my mind when we first moved here. I still don’t understand the reasoning behind it. Some of those areas are in the hills with winding roads, it’s pretty scary walking there, having to be constantly on alert.
This is not just a US thing. I have definitely been outside of towns in the UK for example where there are no sidewalks and walking along the narrow country lanes with zero shoulder is scarier than most places I've experienced in the US.
Wow, good eye! I see you're one of the OG people who tried it out. If there's still a product area you'd like to see fleshed out more, do let me know. It's been a whirlwind of a year trying to maintain a high development velocity as a solo dev working on nights/weekends, but in the grand scheme of things it's easy to do when you love what you're building.
I was in the camp "this-is-bullshit" until recently. It felt backwards. We recently switched to Tailwind for one of our projects, and Tailwind was a delight to use, especially with its VS Code extension. Code readability is surprisingly not that big of a deal because we use components. Of course if you are looking at the raw HTML in chrome tools, it can get disorienting. For folks that are worried about having to learn yet another "language", the learn curve is pretty short.
yep. With the VSCode extension, you don't even need to read the docs. I would just type in what I thought I wanted, and most of the time it would work. It's awesome.
> Paul Graham spoke about a similar idea in an essay about keeping your identity small.
I don't know. I follow PG on Twitter, and it doesn't seem like he keeps his identity separate from his ideas. He has some really good ideas and clearly he has thought about them for some time, but you can't budge him from his worldview. And worldviews are harder to change. [1]
Never heard of Cardinal either, and I like that they don't show typing status. If I see someone is typing in a Slack channel, or typing to me privately, it takes all my focus away until it is complete. Interesting though that they don't show their pricing on the website. Why's that?
Just typing something and then not sending a message puts me out of order for about 5 minutes while I'm waiting if there is a message coming. And then another 10 minutes while I'm speculating what he could have wanted from me.
Hey! We're super early on in our journey and are figuring out pricing. If you reach out through the site we'll get you set up with an account and work with you to figure out what's reasonable for your team price-wise.
We're focused on making sure pricing isn't per-user because it's annoying to pay an additional bit of rent for each new person on the team regardless of how much they use an app.
