I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's world; the risk of believing that we never had a better one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people actually believing it was important and acting as such. Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this way. Collectively, we have access to more wealth and power now than we ever did previously. By all accounts, things ought to be great. It seems we just need the current generation of leaders to re-learn a few lessons from history.

You and I are on the same path, just at different points in the journey. Your response is very similar to my own tone and position a decade ago, trying to celebrate what we had before in an attempt to shepherd others towards a better future together. Time wore down that naivety into the cynicism of today, because I’ve come to realize that those celebrations simply coddle those who do not wish to put in the effort for change and yearn for a return to past glories.

We should acknowledge the past flatly and objectively for what it was and spend more time building that future, than listening to the victors of the past brag and boast, content to wallow in their accomplishments instead of rejoining contributors to tomorrow. The good leaders of yesteryear have stepped aside in lieu of championing newer, younger visionaries; those still demanding respect for what they did fifty years ago in circumstances we can only dream about, are part of the problem.

Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences.

We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.

> For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates)

Nobody said there were no bastards. Just that they didn’t have dominion. We let this happen, in part by being lazy and cynical.

I would argue that cynicism is born of attempting to assert accountability and finding repeated harm from said attempts, rather than some intrinsic pre-existing apathy or laziness.

I think most people will snitch on bad behavior as children. However, our systems often allow other children to discipline the snitch, rather than correct the negative behavior the snitch raised. We see it in adult systems as well: whistleblowers often end up with substantially shorter and poorer lives for attempting to assert accountability or consequences on those who committed them, while the perpetrators often enjoy lives of immense wealth and reward regardless of the whistleblower's actions.

If you want people to stop being "lazy" and "cynical", then you have to support them when systems turn against them. In my experience, none of ya'll actually want to also walk out of work when layoffs happen following a profitable quarter for no other reason than to juice the share price, none of ya'll also want to walk off the job because your employer is taking contracts from authoritarian regimes, none of ya'll also want to put yourselves in the line of fire and risk harm over your purported values.

Don't blame us cynics when we have the battle scars showing our commitment to a better tomorrow. What have you done to prevent cynicism?