I don’t think it’s this. I’ve lived in NYC recently and people there don’t have tolerance for shit behaviors either and you’re surrounded by people all the time.
It’s due to people having higher standards than before and being bifurcated on every issue. There is deep polarization and tribalism within American culture.
Everyone consumes different content and there’s very little homogeneity within our culture. Like… Americans are more diverse than ever in terms of their thoughts and behaviors. They genuinely have little in common compared to many other cultures.
I'll buy that, especially in NYC-like urban environments where frequency of exposure is definitely not the issue. Suburbs and rural may be different.
Part of the increased diversity is unavoidable due to technological changes eroding previous touchpoints. E.g. limited broadcast TV becoming cable becoming streaming.
But there does seem to be an increasing dearth of the logical tonic: discussion-facilitating diverse spaces. Places where people of different opinions can mingle, there are strong social norms around mutually productive conversation (and enforcement to discourage / weed out poison apples?), and that are open to new people.
This comment will get buried in the sea of individual responses here since I am too late. But for the dumpster divers, here is my contribution!
1. People have obscenely high standards for social interaction. If this person is not an outlier (in a good way) with their behaviors, it's just not going to happen. Most people have a very low tolerance for new people in their life. This has always existed to some degree but people today much prefer to listen to endless content from their favorite streamers, comedians, etc. and form parasocial relationships.
2. The environment for interacting with people has much higher stakes. Think about all the people who get recorded and posted on TikTok every single day. These are people doing it where you can see it - not just the Meta glasses people who remove the recording light. You can act like being a weirdo has no consequences but everyone has this extremely powerful device that can broadcast whatever you do to billions of people immediately - and you can suffer real consequences from this. Every crashout you have in any kind of crowd will be posted for eternity so that the world can see.
3. There is less and less benefit to having social networks/friends. Your friends aren't going to help you get a job, buy you a house, or meet your spouse. Meeting a spouse through friends is increasingly rare as online dating is dominating. As much as everyone complains, it is the major way people meet their spouse in major cities. People assume this is because friend networks are getting smaller but it's not due to that. It's because standards for interaction within friend groups has changed and standards for partners has changed. Unless you are prolific top 1% social maximizer, you are not going to run into anywhere near enough eligible people in your social network to meet your maximized match. We expect to completely maximize and find the best possible fit for our spouse now. Compromise of any kind is considered worse than dying alone. Cost of housing has exploded, jobs have become very hard to keep/find, and this turns everything into a transaction. Living with friends and kicking them out when they can't make rent is a tough but very real situation. People are more transactional because the economy dictates its necessities. Your family is the only thing that will bail you out - your friends can't overlook you skipping $2000/month in rent for 6 months.
There is more but anyway - loneliness epidemic is not going to get solved. It will continue to get worse until some kind of revolution which would require a complete reworking of our entire economy. I would accept this as the new normal and try to figure out how you can optimize your own individual experience in spite of all these things that are working against you. It is not worth trying to fight it on a systemic scale because there are simply too many components and the core cause is one our entire economy is based around. (A good investment is inherently counter to affordability)
It’s weird how people don’t recognize that most of these companies started with American founders who then decided to use exploitative labor policies including collusion then slowly became more and more detached - and hired other people to do the exploitation for them. Who better to do the exploitation than those who know the ins and outs of what makes the exploitees tick?
Do people really have no clue that the rise of Leetcode has come from exam culture in eastern countries? Are they that clueless?
I am one of the only Americans in my department at faang. The people I work with aren’t some special level of intelligence. It’s just not cool to work in tech and Americans know that. That’s why you see 2nd gen Asian Americans joining finance and going to nyc. They know it’s fucking lame.
Yep. It also depends on types of goals you have and stage of life.
I can safely say as someone who FIRE’d in his early 30’s that it doesn’t matter how much money you have because women are very adverse to a man who isn’t working. Mind you, I am quite physically ugly and so my experience is not that of everyone’s. It might be that for men who are of average and above looks that it doesn’t matter as much but for the women I encountered it mattered a lot that I wasn’t working. It didn’t matter how much money I had made. I was spending on a lavish lifestyle in manhattan as well. I gave up on pursuing a family life due to poor genetic basis, chose to be single back in the Bay Area, and go back to work since there’s nothing else to do. All my goals were revolved around family and building a life for a family. No point in those goals if you’re alone.
This isn't true. Republicans love illegal immigration because you can underpay people and avoid a lot of regulation.
It is trivial to implement e-verify for employment for everyone. It would nearly eliminate illegal workers. If Republicans (or anyone) cared about stopping the hiring of illegal workers, it is a trivial process to implement. No one wants to do it because then Americans would unionize.
I exercised for years. I’m talking multiple hours a day. It was a part time job. It never improved my mood.
Some people don’t suffer from chemical imbalances, unhealthy habits ruining their mood, or whatever your snake oil will magically cure. There’s a term called Shit Life Syndrome and some people just have that as their long term situation.
Nah, it’s actually a studied thing. Exposure therapy can work for some subjects but it’s quite controversial due to it quickly becoming “trauma therapy”. It can easily reinforce someone’s existing beliefs and make someone actually weaker and traumatized. Happens a lot. Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance. He won’t be resilient from this - it will haunt him for the rest of his life. Plus, there can be social consequences (and consequences with other exposure therapies) that will be lasting from making such a brute force strategy.
Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue - bad things do happen. And sometimes bad things happen more often to those who are “needing” exposure therapy.
> Imagine an ugly kid asking every girl out at school, you think maybe he just needs to get a single success but it’s possible he gets completely rejected and/or the rejections are so immense that it overpowers any single acceptance.
Just randomly doing shit that causes you stress isn't exposure therapy. It's just hazing yourself and rolling the dice as to the outcome.
> Exposure therapy can make sense if it always resorts in good outcomes but that’s the issue
I think you have an over-simplified notion of "good outcome" here.
It's not necessarily about achieving the goal of the action, it's about seeing that the catastrophizing scenarios in your head aren't based in reality. In the example with the ugly kid, if he's afraid that asking a girl out will lead to her laughing in his face and publicly humiliating him, then even simply being rejected with compassion is enough to thwart that catastrophizing.
But, of course, having him ask out every girl at the school is a terrible example of "exposure therapy". Strangers should not be used as unconsenting test subjects in one's personal therapy.
I'm sorry, but what's wrong with asking my partner to choose something for me?
Am I supposed to get upset with what they choose? I'm not saying I would leave. I'm saying I would stay and let someone else pick something for me to eat.
People talk about this with exercise and I’ve never understood it. As someone who has exercised continuously for years - it has never gotten better.
Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.
The only thing I ever “feel” good about is purely a mental thing. Eg I hit a new PR (progress), didn’t skip a lift (perseverance), or whatever. The act of exercising itself is always painful and it’s why I always dread it.
Wanting to "make optimal development" is just one of possible motivations for exercising and not everyone who does it is interested in that. Maintaining good health and generally wanting to feel better across the day are also perfectly valid reasons to exercise.
You gotta give yourself a bit more slack. We all deserve to rest and go slow now and then. What's the point of living if you can't take a break?
We are chaotic and beautiful bundles of dozens of trillions of cells that evolved over 4 billion years. We breath. We feel. We are alive. We aren't math problems that need to be "solved" or "optimized".
> Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.
You are way too demanding of yourself my friend :(
> if it doesn't hurt then you're not making optimal development
this is almost certainly wrong - 100% balls to wall training will surely be suboptimal (on avg) to achieving most fitness goals - eg within a running training block there will generally be recovery and "general aerobic" runs which are easy in effort relative to the harder work in the block. These easy efforts are necessary to optimally achieve the desired physiological adaptations acquired through increased volume and "nailing" the hard workouts. The easier runs enable this by getting volume at lower risk of injury + conserving energy/will for the key workouts.
This also doesn't consider how important recovery is to optimal results (as in sleep, rest, self-care etc).
Exercising is doing some activity that is good for your health. You’ve reduced this to some narrow set of activities that presumably make you stronger, faster, or better at some other easy to measure metric. I assure you it’s easy to enjoy exercising if your incentive is longevity and simply healthy living by a more subjective metric
I finally started getting stronger in the gym when I stopped going to failure on everything. I got in the best endurance shape by going on a steady comfortable pace for progressively longer periods of time.
One of my favorite styles of weight training is volume based. The premise starts with something like I need 10 reps of a certain weight, but it doesn't matter how many sets it takes to get there. Each set ends if I cannot do another perfect rep. If I can't do a single perfect rep, then the exercise ends and I move on to the next thing. By requiring the rep to be perfect, it naturally keeps you from going to failure and lowers chance of injury.
There's more to it like how to pick the weight, etc... but the perfect rep piece I really enjoyed.
I'd point out that at least in aerobic exercies (ie running and biking) its generally recommended that you shouldn't be pushing too hard for most of your workouts. If you're going out four days a week it's only on one or two of them that you're generally supposed to push yourself. The others should be at an easier pace. Which I tend to find more enjoyable.
There's also something to be said for seasons of maintaining a level of fitness rather than pushing for the next level!
It seems very likely to me that the sensations experienced during exercise are highly variable among individuals.
I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.
This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.
Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.
A friend told me he was addicted to running because he literally got high from it. I said, running hurt for me. He said it used to for him too. I asked how long until it stopped hurting. He said 2 YEARS!!!!
There's no way I'm going to run for 2 years on the hope that one day it will stop hurting and get enjoyable.
I love working out and have for over 25 years. You should never be in real pain or feel 'shitty'. It should be challenging of course and part of that challenge is being uncomfortable. Learning to embrace being uncomfortable, IMO, is one of the super powers of being a person that translate to all other areas of life. Once a person learns to embrace uncomfortable moments, everything else just becomes...easier.
It’s due to people having higher standards than before and being bifurcated on every issue. There is deep polarization and tribalism within American culture.
Everyone consumes different content and there’s very little homogeneity within our culture. Like… Americans are more diverse than ever in terms of their thoughts and behaviors. They genuinely have little in common compared to many other cultures.
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