I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
>> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.”
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
Personally, I find it harder and harder to take pride in the work that I do, and in the effort I put in, when others who have no understanding of the quality of my work or amount of effort I put in are empowered to handwave it away with bullshit excuses and are applauded for doing so.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
The solution to this is worker's self-management, an economic model that was pioneered by Yugoslavia, but has mostly disappeared with its dismantlement.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
Agree that part of it is the increasingly toxic work circumstances. Many people get no health care, poor wages, and zero job security, so... they are pretty demoralized much of the time. And many work multiple gigs, so they are also tired all the time.
Blaming employers seems incomplete at best, since many of the worst abuses are employees practically bilking the very cosy employee-employer relationship, eg the MTA in NYC. Huge budgets, lots of dysfunction, very little done. Even the grandparent mentions a city worker.
I'm not trying to absolve employers here, since they are almost certainly the ones who initiated this trend, but there are very few incentives to care about employees when employees take advantage of it. The end result is they make life more difficult not just for the employer, but for their fellow employees.
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
I think you're right, but it's not just work. It's all organizations and social institutions.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes
As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.
In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.
Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.
That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.
“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.
So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:
"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."
Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.
Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.
I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.
Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
I think it's inflation. And I don't just mean Covid era inflation. Inflation has been an on-again, off-again problem since the collapse of Bretton Woods.
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
The problem isn't just laziness or corporate greed, though those play a role. It's the result of a financial system that has spent years prioritizing short-term profits over lasting value. When success is measured by clicks, quarterly earnings, and engagement metrics rather than quality or truth, the natural outcome is a flood of cheap, disposable content. The AI-generated newspaper supplement isn't an exception, it's exactly what the system was designed to produce. Think about the ripple effects: as money flows toward fast, scalable content instead of deep, meaningful work, the people who actually care, journalists, editors, even readers, are left with fewer resources and less reason to invest effort. Local news shrivels, media gets bought up by profit-driven investors, and algorithms push whatever keeps people scrolling. When the financial incentives don't support real journalism, why would anyone bother?
The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.
Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.
I’m doubtful because things always got a little worse all the time even before money existed. It’s the natural state of nature; erosion. Cleaning up after yourself and maintaining your space is a virtue for that very reason. Seems like that virtue is, itself, is in a state of disrepair (which implies an obvious course of action).
Inflation is mostly a symptom though. Of natural resources getting scarcer (harder to extract). As you can imagine the price of gasoline is quite tied with the worldwide market price of oil.
And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.
> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
Similarly, I like it when I occasionally see little bits of on the job training when I'm a customer -- the barista this morning teaching another about pouring latte art, the senior dentist nudging the trainee into what the right diagnosis was based on the symptoms I was reporting, that kind of thing. It's encouraging to see people caring about what they do and passing their skills on to other people who care about getting better.
I was in New Zealand a couple of months ago and today something crystallized about my experience there - I consistently encountered people who were good at their jobs there.
They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
Home inspection is basically the tradesman version of how real-estate developers and GCs pretty much all try getting their realtor's license and dabbling in that at some point in their career and then rage quit because smiling and pushing papers is below them.
Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
> There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
For many, it's a morality, not just an expectation. You're a bad person if you're not mediocre. See this from a recently posted article 6 hours ago:
> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.
But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
It’s different when in general the experience interacting with a government bureaucracy is poor, and government produces expensive and inefficient outcomes these days. As opposed to big tech which is creating huge profits and new technology.
to be fair we now have the knowledge and ability to begin to see the scale of the universe but are still burdened with the expectation of continuing the industrial age factory worker schedule of 40 hours a week coupled a constant barrage of information that it's actually doing more harm than good. How can you really blame anyone when the society is just working for the sake of it.
This parallels an article that someone I follow wrote a couple of weeks ago. His way of describing this is the "second world effect". The article is better than I could write (link below). But basically, the "third world" is a low-trust society and everyone understands that and behaves in a defensive way. The "first world" is a high-trust society where things work. There is a discontinuous jump from third to first world once the culture has enough high-trust built in. But if the first world devolves back to low-trust, it doesn't go back to third world, it transitions to "second world" where things look like the first world, but nothing works any more because it's low-trust, but the society hasn't really recognized that.
Thanks for the link, I thought it was a good read. I assumed it would dance around the causes but he was pretty direct with it. Getting society to recognize what's happening and then take meaningful action seems intractable. Suppose that's why the path looks like 3rd -> 1st -> 2nd -X. I'm not aware of any society or even a single city that really breaks out of it once they land in "second world".
The original second world was a bit like that in that it used to refer to the soviet and socialist countries. Looked like the west but not quite right.
This is largely a consequence of the economic opportunities presented to people at work. There is basically no organization that will pay you more as a direct consequence of being better at your job. Compensation is almost never tied to performance, and is in practice most closely tied to age. Compensation isn't adjusted quickly enough for people to associate it with the quality of their work. A yearly meeting where your wage is adjusted to keep up with inflation or reflect your time in the workforce isn't something you can control.
This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.
The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.
The goal is the same as it's always been: get the most resources for the least amount of effort. This is true whether you're a squirrel, a person, a company, or a government.
> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.
(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
>Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
I've shared this before. In a lot of modern jobs, how hard you turn the crank of effort is almost completely disconnected from the outcomes that you see.
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?
I don't know if this helps, and I am pretty out of touch with the work culture because I run my own business (boy am I glad I stuck with this in the 2000's because now its so crazy in the job market) but you know where working hard really matters? its with the people you come into contact with that value your hard work that counts. I don't necessarily work hard expecting a return (but I understand fiances are soo tight for people right now that it maters a lot), I work hard because I enjoy what do and I want people to have a good experience. I'm not sure if that is available for everyone in this day and age, but I would strongly encourage everyone that is finding this situation untenable to find something you love a start doing it. The people that values this work will come, it takes awhile to build it, but it does happen eventually.
Take a look at the poor construction quality of new build homes too--there's an entire subgenre of social media where home inspectors find all sorts of horrifying and "hilarious" issues with newly assembled McMansions. This runs the gamut from beer bottles overturned in insulation to doors that don't fit in frames, fire hazards, etc.
I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though.
In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
Society standards have been dropping since 2010, COVID accelerated it. Most of it is people mad that they are barely making it, and often they are in service of people that don't even realize prices have risen.
I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.
> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.
I did some business with the a city department at one time. I discovered that from Thanksgiving to New Years, no work was done at that department. Everyone was "out of the office" or will "be back later".
My partner and I ended up sleeping on an air mattress while we waited for the one person at the building department who could sign off on our project to come back from vacation. They were in fact completely unresponsive between thanksgiving and two weeks after new years.
This is only an example of people being bad at their jobs or not caring if you are referring to the management/administration responsible for staffing and scheduling over that time period. The people who are actually out of the office are presumably using approved PTO.
This is happening all over and I think a lot of it has to do with society moving from communities to larger societies where they increasingly feel less significant. They work for a large bureaucratic systems that don't give two shits about them. The small mom and pop businesses are all consolidated into cold soulless corporations who's only goal is numbers go up. So you do just enough to fulfill that goal and use the rest of your mental and physical energy on things that make you feel better about being a insignificant cog.
My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
It's also way more in your face that you are a sucker now that you can see the rich, carefree lives of people online. While it might not be your boss, it's people in the same circle living the same lifestyle.
Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.
Yes, precisely this. I understand that if I died tomorrow, some services would clean up the body and that's it. Nobody cares about me, I don't care about anyone. My goal is to maximize the amount of resources I own while minimizing the amount of time and energy I spend. Being shit at my job is an essential part of it. That's just how modern society works.
To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.
Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
Yeah I think this is spot on. It's just a side effect of widespread, pervasive alienation, in the Marxist sense. With LLMs we're at the point where the last enclave of relatively alienation free work is disappearing.
I just travelled to a province to pay for some private healthcare i cant get at home. Its a simple procedure, but a specific one. I sent the treatment plan to the customer service liason I was dealing with and triple checked that the doctor i was seeing was familiar with it.
Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it.
The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"
This quote from The Expanse summarizes our society right now:
> Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.
> Amos: That sounds bad.
> Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.
Cultural failure - I thought Alex Karp's recent book was pretty good and worth reading. It makes the case that our culture has failed to articulate the things that make the west great (and worth defending) and as a result it's creating a lot of political and cultural problems. https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-F...
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.
The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.
People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
>Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.
I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.
This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?
>There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.
Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".
I think it's the lack a of deeper meaning in the things we do have to do in this system. We're just cogs in a large machine that creates more and more wealth, but after you have enough to live a comfortable life that is no longer enough to make you care. There's no more purpose to it. Yet the pursuit of wealth is the only goal our economic system, and increasingly our culture as well, provides. Any other goal gets trampled under the herd of organizations seeking wealth for the purpose of making more wealth.
Part of it is COVID and also the destruction of pension and job security. Companies want to pay employees as little as possible and employees want to do as little work as possible.
Hahaha! I spent the morning explaining to a network installer who bought the wrong jacks and tools for the project that I wasn't going to keep the incorrect jacks and pay for the correct ones just so he wouldn't have to accept the return of "products that no one wants." Correct, no one wants them, me especially.
Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
> Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and priceless an even lower energy route
I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.
AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...
You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
> I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.
One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.
Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
>she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism.
It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.
If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's an instance of selection bias - the instances of things not working draw our attention more than the instances of things working. "This thing is working just fine" doesn't draw eyeballs.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.
We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.
(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
If you don't build motivation for competence by navigating difficulties in everyday life (fetching water, building a fire), where do you find that motivation? Putting humans in boxes with a screen in front of them and everything they need to survive around them without requiring much effort produces a different human.
For the past five decade, we have lived in a society where the dominant ideology was about how “egoism lead to the greater good thanks to the magical forces of the free market”.
It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.
Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.
Maybe people are bad at their jobs. Maybe they have poor management who is always increasing the scope of their job, in an attempt to maximize their profits at a cost to customer satisfaction.
In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.
It’s a result of people disliking the system. Personally thriving by gaming the system is seen as the enlightened thing to do, because people don’t respect or appreciate the system, often viewing it as actually harmful and malicious.
Nothing that all of these examples are public sector monopolies or related (e.g. permitting). Being bad at your job definitely exists in the private sector, but there are competitive forces that work against it.
My experience is that people want to do their jobs well, but SYSTEMIC reasons tend to prevent this.
Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here.
How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors?
Where I live, it seems like half the streets
don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater
where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided.
So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter.
In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)
Because you have to deal with them anytime you want to get anything done - planning and approval offices, tax departments, construction crews, contractors and on and on.
Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.
I'll add one: New house construction. There are now multiple building inspectors who are making ad revenue on youtube by showing how bad the standard of construction is.
Honestly, I hate to say it because it’s become an annoying topic—but the problem is social media. Full stop.
People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”
I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.
People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.
Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.
> that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.
Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.
I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
> but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
> To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.
I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.
It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. Not a new principle. Turns out that extreme capitalism results in extreme inequality results in similar outcomes as socialism.
The person in question was literally paid by the government, which is notoriously and world wide chronically inept, "despite" being complete isolated from any capitalist motive.
> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.
I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.
Or the local powers that be sink their teeth in and the project isn't lucrative enough for its backers to let them just leave with a pound of flesh so progress stalls.
That's not a satisfactory explanation, because you're saying that the owner of the land can't make use of it and should have given it to someone else, but they don't actually care what the best use of the land is, so they take the slow way.
The reason simply is late stage capitalism, there's not enough upside anymore, so why bother do a good job? That's how I explain it. I noticed that as well with almost all employees, there was a shift. And it feels like it's got to do with misaligned incentives. Why bother working yourself stupid if you'll never own a house if you don't become a slave to the loan? There's no upwards movement/middle class anymore.
I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he worked.
My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.
And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.
So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
I agree with this. It's a slight shift in perspective from the article: it's not just "Who cares" but "Nothing matters". It's not so much about people not caring as about people feeling that caring is pointless because everything that happens is outside their control. Even quite local dimensions of life that used to be more controllable are becoming corrupted by giant corporations, rampaging politicians, etc.
In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.
I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.
> a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs
A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.
I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way.
You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.
In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.
If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death. I'm about half way through it myself and it has already changed how I look at some things.
He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.
> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash
In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.
If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.
Most people would probably like to contribute something good to the world, and make it a better place in some way or another. A lot of folks are forced to produce things they hate because otherwise they have no health care and may not eat. All so somebody else can take most of the profit and leave them with a pittance.
>We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
Eh, I disagree with elitist...
We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
Labor rates where I am are among the highest in the nation. People in the trades largely live in the outlying suburbs and pick up the lucrative work in the urban core.
A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here.
A bit much to say society did that, they have forced this due to their very well organized and connected unions and the power they have to cause the population to fear for their safety if the "cops are on strike".
The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.
Oh man, I gotta write a comment here. I'm gonna leave out a few details in case this guy or my tech lead/manager read HN.
So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer.
Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did not have background in this field. This guy just roped into this project and stayed.
I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.
I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a decision.
Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly what were the problems)
To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.
So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.
I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should be my default attitude when working.
> I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation
> a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man
> So, that was my wake up call
Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?
If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.
Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.
But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave".
The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.
i think most people are gonna follow advice that they tend to agree with - if the reddit advice was "drive off a bridge" i'm sure he wouldn't. he probably read the opinions, realized he had the same opinion, and adopted it
The problem is that if you start caring too much when other people don't you become a target. People blend in because it works. You can't fix a fucked culture, you just can't. So either leave or become one of the pact.
Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.
* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded
* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks
* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time
* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job
So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.
It sounds like you should be able to run the table with so little competition. Why not engage, take on more responsibility, and obviously stand out to get more money and influence?
Allow me to give you a different viewpoint. And this is coming from someone that has an _amazing instinct_ to be in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club. I use that instinct to protect my mental health but nothing more than that.
What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.
So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."
I give a fuck.
I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.
I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:
1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).
2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.
I think this is reasonable. Came to the same conclusion. I need to at least pretend to myself that I care, but I will not allow it to bleed into my PL. If it does I check out and chill for a bit.
I think this is a good attitude, but it does point up that doing this requires a conscious choice and involves a certain amount of sacrifice in that you have to sort of accept that you're "wasting" effort. In other words, this is the healthiest response to an unhealthy situation in our society.
I think the 3rd or so time that all the work I'd been doing for months or years just got thrown in the garbage, having never provided more benefit than it cost, or even without ever providing any benefit whatsoever due to never having been released, through no fault of my own, was when I decided giving a shit was for suckers.
We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.
I find there is middle ground between "who the fuck cares" and "I got to fight for what is righteous". Do the job best you can. Accept resources, including skilled human beings, are what they are and unless you own the place there is very little you can do about it. Try to do the best work you can with the resources you are given is all I can say. It does give pleasure to at least try to do a good job.
Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.
It's possible to do both: you can collect your paycheck WHILE looking for a better job (because this one is toxic). And now you know to interview more seriously the people at that potential new employer.
An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before having found the better job because sanity matters.
But you never know what is the new team untill you started your work.
No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.
The only way I worry about a coworker is if it directly impacts me. I'm not a tattle tale, it's up to the company to have in place a system of determining the quality of someone's work. I will not take blame for a person and I'll call it out as a member of the team if I get blamed for something the less skilled person did. That should be enough to limit bad people, the onus is on the company and management.
There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-oriented enough to manage relationships.
I recently switched jobs, and this time I decided that during the first phase of any interview cycle I would ask if there were going to be leetcode-style questions at any point in the cycle. If yes, I ended the interviews there. If no, continue on. I was of course happy to explain my logic and that I was happy to demonstrate technical prowess in a way more useful to the proposed role.
One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).
So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).
To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.
I would describe it differently - "another day, another dollar" - where work is done as required - no more no less. Corps know this, and try to incentivize employees to bring some passion to work - via equity ownership - so, incentives are aligned. Another way is to pretend to have a mission statement like "organize world's info" which can fool employees to align without any monetary reward.
> Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation.
They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.
But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.
It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter.
I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger.
As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength. Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as you can?"
I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."
His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds exhausting."
We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if their differences were amusing to him.
His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.
Not caring can be a powerful tool. Anxiety and fear are the manifestation of too much care. Life is chaotic, and at times we must learn to swim with the tide.
There's big things we should care about, and then there's little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground, a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that occupy our minds.
It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks. Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.
And yet, if you go further by taking great care and effort into the mundane, it can become meditative.
There is a sense of honour and zen in doing the mundane as perfectly as possible. Not to achieve perfection but strive towards the ideal within reason.
This is something I recently spoke with my father about. He was annoyed with trying to keep toxic mushrooms out of his yard. It was tedious and complicated.
Then he embraced the struggle, and looked at it the same way he used to train in martial arts. As a chosen striving towards an ideal.
He “monk-moded” his gardening and found joy in a mundane, repetitive task.
Through caring, he turned anxiety and annoyance into peace and acceptance.
He also won the battle against the mushrooms after 2 years of diligent effort.
Thucydides of Athens quotes Pericles as having used a specific term for citizens who were not interested in public affairs, the community, or issues beyond their own private lives: idiotes (ἰδιώτης).
Did the Ancients ever figure out what to do when it's near-impossible to be interested enough in public affairs to gain an accurate understanding of things, and even if one manages that, it's pretty much impossible to meaningfully act on that understanding?
It's one thing when "public affairs" and affairs of your local community are one and the same. But modern democracies seem to be actively preventing citizens from being actually informed about anything, and the granularity of elections ensures people's opinions (ill-informed or otherwise) are uncorrelated with end results.
By experiencing the sheer existential horror that Nietzsche and others spoke of and coming out of it knowing the only way out is through. There is nothing to lean on. You decide you start caring and it will happen.
For me, the metric is one of empathy: would I want someone else to suffer through what I just suffered through? No? Do I have any influence over that outcome?
The Serenity Prayer is very real to me. So is "be the change you want to see in the world"
The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd century". People are focused on what's in front of them in the present. Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).
Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.
One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.
We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.
I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now, it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the pandemic broke things!
Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.
> One way to break this illusion is to remember how new things are introduced. Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced. Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students. HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit. An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop. Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
> The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
If you think that bitcoin and facebook are examples of "real newness" that we only perceive in retrospect, I think we're not seeing eye to eye. Those to me are exactly the kinds of things that represent a colossal waste of human time, effort, and money.
Your list of examples is telling; all those things do indeed make life easy. But is easy equivalent to good? I don’t think so. People have more capabilities to connect, and have more “friends” than ever before, and people are more disconnected and lonely than ever before. Life is not good for a lot of people, despite being easier than ever for a lot of people.
> Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.
>Bitcoin didn’t seem more than an intellectual exercise when it was introduced.
I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.
>Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.
>HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.
It's not?
>An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.
An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.
>Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.
I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.
I'm nearing forty and I have a sneaky suspicion it's a weird cultural thing. A bit like the Romans lamenting the fall of their culture right at the start of their golden age and they never stopped doing that. Always looking back saying shit sucks now and how in the old days everything centered on competence and morality. Men were actual men back then. That sort of thing. Some parts of it might have made a tad kind of sense, but a lot of it was baloney.
I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.
> Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable.
Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.
It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.
Thanks so much for this comment. It's something I've generally felt, but it really didn't crystallize in my head until I read your comment.
As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optimism. Now, though, I think there is a widespread feeling that tech, as a whole, is no longer in service to the improvement of human society. It just feels like it went off the rails in the past 15-20 years or so, where for a lot of us tech feels like it's made our lives worse.
I no longer look forward to the newest tech or gadget. If anything, I look forward to going for a walk in the woods and leaving my phone at home.
When we imagined phones, we imagined global communication and building friendship. Instead, we got skinner boxes designed to addict us to a constant stream of algorithm-served content.
When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.
When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.
When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.
When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.
When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.
I'm in my 60s and think the future is here. I remember writing for my college admissions essay about at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much. I guess weird and terrifying but also with possibilities for abundance and immortality. Should be interesting at any rate.
YES! I am in my mid twenties and I have only seen unimaginable technological progress from the early 2000’s to now. From the small white Panasonic television in my childhood kitchen and having to reboot my family desktop computer when zoo tycoon froze it, to playing massive multiplayer games like runescape and Roblox with real people, that was incredible!, to seeing an iPhone for the first time, the higs boson being confirmed, gravitational waves, electric cars becoming a real thing, how you can go nearly anywhere in the world and touch your phone to pay without cash, or use google maps to figure out when and where to go anywhere no matter where you are, to ChatGPT and LLM’s, which can alchemize all of our human knowledge to approximately/exact answers to questions that have never been asked before.
The future has been a lot more interesting than people are giving it credit for, atleast my brief slice of it so far.
> at some point computer intelligence would overtake biological and here we are, pretty much.
I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.
That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.
Among average people, it seems there's widespread understanding that things are collectively getting worse. The next 50 years are more likely to bring turmoil than prosperity, with climate change, AI, and political instability all getting worse every year.
Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.
Day to day life improved massively. AC units, international travel, home appliances, tools, TV, computers, cars - everything is much more affordable(and/or better).
Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.
You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.
I'm in my 30s but feel pretty much the same way. It's an odd sort standstill where we're spinning our wheels real fast, yet we don't seem to move anywhere. Everything is constantly "changing" yet the few things i actually care about see no meaningful change. It's impossible to argue that we haven't seen big technological breakthroughs in the past decade, but what _real_ and _tangible_ difference have they made.
My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.
This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.
No one on this site or on earth has any idea what the next 5, 10, or 30 years will bring. They will likely bring a world which is so radically different from today it's incomprehensible. But that doesn't mean strictly worse.
Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?
Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.
Nobody talks about "life in the 22nd century" in the way they talked about "life in the 21st century" in recent decades, because for the past 24 years we've been at the _beginning_ of a century. Once we get halfway through the 21st century, the talk about "life in the 22nd century" will really ramp up.
You apparently never learned about the 1939 New York World's Fair's "The World of Tomorrow" expo. That didn't wait for the century half way point. How about the 1900 Paris Expo and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which both also featured predictions and prototypes of future technologies that got everyone from workers to sci-fi writers focused on flying cars and moving sidewalks.
Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
> Even companies don't really talk about the future anymore, just vague AI thoughts (and often crazy negative ones, witness the CEOs talking about the white collar bloodbath coming).
The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.
Agreed. There is plenty of technological progress, but so little of it is really in service to humanity or making our lives better.
Sure, AI can make us more productive (those of us it doesn't replace), but so what? That just means that my company can either a) produce more and generate more revenue, or b) produce the same with fewer employees, reducing costs. Either way, it doesn't make my life better.
The problem is that technology is for the most part, not about making our lives better. It's about finding new markets and convincing consumers to buy/use these products.
They say productivity has doubled in the past 40 years. Are we either 1) working half as many hours as we did then; or 2) earning twice as much (inflation-adjusted) as we did then? If not, then what has the increased productivity earned us?
I'm just trying to catch up with you after the "I get so confused on this"-screenshot that's evidently going viral wrt. LLMs. I just turned 50, and that resonated so hard.
Wrt. this feeling you're describing here: You might mostly be feeling the Enshittification. At least that's a big thing for me. Companies are not making things better, they are making everything worse. Instead of actually making new stuff, they're wringing the existing lemon five extra times to squeeze that last drop of juice out of it, adding one extra ad in the youtube viewing, making it harder to integrate. APIs being deprecated, walled gardens. Things have been going downhill for at least a decade. This makes me sad.
Oh there is very much a future being planned. Project 2025 is an example. When the future was flying cars and a robot maid for every household, then of course it was broadcast in every possible medium. The planned future now is replacing the poor with robots and slavery for anyone still alive. Funnily enough they don’t talk about it, and pretend it’s not real if you hear about it.
I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is necessary to inform the present. It gives us a measure for peoples and corporations behavior. Don’t be fooled that this is an accident. “Who cares” is propaganda for a very different future.
People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.
In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.
In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.
There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
It's the dumbing down of society, but the worst of it is concerning the average "Joe and Jane" in America. Why is it the worst, because they are a huge voting block.
I'm a high school grad who had no desire to go to college, but I've always had a love of reading and usually questioned everything. I made a living in the trades and have very little complaints. I worked with hundreds of people, both young and old, and noticed something most had in common. Most cared very little for learning anything outside of just getting by. I saw very few with a book in their hands and was questioned many times as to why I was reading! I was even told I would never need to know that, when reading about technology.
I'm trying not to be overly critical, but I still don't understand why knowledge to them wasn't valued. I'm also afraid it's being reflected in society today based on the blatant refusal to read today's happenings and the lack of wisdom to interpret the possible outcomes, or to even care.
I suspect that people are reading more than you think, but instead of long form content like books, it's now short form content like tweets and Facebook posts. And of course video content from YouTube and tiktok instead of the television we had back in the day.
Sometimes I feel like the word "reading" should be reserved for reading longer-form content like articles, blog posts, books, etc.
Your mind goes into a completely different state when you are immersed in a single topic vs when you are consuming textual content that causes context switches every 10 seconds.
My mother is 70 years old and has never bothered to learn how to change the volume of the tv using a controller. My father was recently in the hospital and she had to learn how to put gas in her car.
I love her, but it's truly mind boggling how little she cares about learning stuff.
Where I think that pieces like this fall short at are identifying what they think people should "care" about and why these things matter.
For example,
* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?
(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)
* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?
* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?
I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.
We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.
I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.
I think that's only part of the story. Another part is what are you caring about or doing instead. People don't have to care about those things, but what are they doing with their time instead? "Funny fails" videos and getting french fries delivered? Part of the point is that you have to do something with your time, it's just that now people spend their time doing stuff they don't care about, which is sad. You don't have to care about those particular things, but if you're not caring about anything I think it indicates something is out joint.
That's a very good point. I know quite some people that have absolutely no interests. All they do is play games all day. No a specific game that they really like, but any game that offers enough busy work to distract for a month or two. Aside from that maybe they watch some short form videos like you mentioned, when they eat their microwaved or ordered meal.
For some people now, i would be hard to summarise them. To describe them, other than 'plays games' or 'watches videos'. And you can tell something is missing, they're not happy, but distracted enough to not care.
That's not a direct response to your concern, but I think this quote applies in a parallel manner -- I've seen this quote applied as a statement about what it means to be "punk", and how simply being content with yourself (meaning you don't fall victim to all the ways society attacks/preys on insecurities or tries to sell you drugs or makeup or clothes or surgery or whatever to change yourself), is actually incredibly "punk". You don't have to dress up weird, or go out and do graffiti, or get into fights... just being content with yourself is "punk", within a capitalist/post-capitalist world.
So, in a similar vein, I think this author is saying that, "caring" is also a form of being "punk", in a world where seemingly not-caring is mainstream now. The thing is, being "punk" doesn't need an external "why" reason to justify it... the whole point of "punk" culture is about authenticity, that just being yourself is what's important, that you don't need a special reason to reject capitalist consumerism or mainstream opiate-of-the-masses media or to dress how you feel instead of how society thinks you should look. In that way, being "punk" is quite Buddhism-aligned actually, to center on existence and enlightenment through self-realization, instead of pursuit of external "why" reasons for doing X or Y.
Caring is the punk thing to do, because it is who you actually are. You don't need a special reason to care, if you subscribe to any kind of "punk" mindset/philosophy about life. Don't care because it will yield better material rewards, get you laid, or whatever. Care, just because.
At least, that's the argument... up to you if you buy it or not.
People do care, about their own self interest and making money. Homo economicus, here we are! A critique of this attitude must look at its origins, and I think the reason we see this so much, is because the narrative of the last 40 years or so has been that: If we all look out for our own self interest, the market will balance everything out, and things will be great! Turns out, doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way doesn't yield great results, who could've seen it coming?
> doing the bare minimum in an almost maliciously compliant way doesn't yield great results
this happens when the person paying the money and the person judging the work quality, and the person "punishing" are different entities.
Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say. Politicians spend, department beaurocracy spends, and hires, etc. The workers get hired, get paid, but their performance is not judged. The final recipient of the work - specific citizens - get poor service for the taxes paid.
> Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say.
I would claim this is not a good example at all.
A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.
If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.
All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.
Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.
Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.
I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.
We got into this situation because everything is so consolidated and filled with bureaucracy and metrics and statistical analysis that whether any individual does or doesn't try won't actually come back to benefit them, or at least not enough to be worth the squeeze in the end.
But if you understand the problem, you'll also understand why the bureaucracy exist...
The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.
I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.
The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.
And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.
Readit News
The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
No wonder people become cynical.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.
Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?
1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes
As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.
In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.
Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.
That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.
“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.
So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
You don’t.
I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:
"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."
https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m
Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.
Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.
I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.
Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.
It's because of inflation that slowly and subtly, everything gets shittier all the time. It encourages businesses to cut corners, shave costs, and find cheap labor overseas. It encourages you to not give a fuck about your job because you haven't had a raise in 5 years and the price of gas just keeps on climbing.
Inflation destroys everyone's belief in the future. Why work hard when everything is always getting a little bit worse anyway?
We've staved off a lot of the worst material effects with tech and productivity increases, but half the time the benefits from those just go to shareholders (indeed, even if all you did was hold the S&P 500 in recent decades, your portfolio is one of the bright spots in all this).
But I think the spiritual effects can't be staved off once you internalize the idea that it'll continually cost you more to keep on getting the same results. The bar of soap you buy will be a little thinner, there'll be a little less meat in your burger. You're always fighting the current. There's never a rest. If you feel this way then why would you care about what you're doing?
Historically I don't think there are a lot of societies that find an easy solution to this, the solutions usually involve defaults and wars.
Maybe this is part of why the crypto cult is so rabid, Bitcoin has deflationary properties, it's the opposite of the inflation trend.
The deeper damage is harder to see. A society fed on algorithmically generated mediocrity starts to lose its ability to recognize, or even expect, better. It's not that people suddenly stopped caring; it's that the system has made caring unrewarding. Underpaid workers cut corners, audiences grow numb to low standards, and the cycle keeps spinning. The "Who Cares Era" isn't about moral failure, it's what happens when the economy no longer values quality. The irony is this same system depends on trust to function. But when readers doubt what they read, workers take no pride in their jobs, and institutions lose credibility, the foundation starts to crack.
And all the reasons why economists say inflation is necessary and a good thing seem to make assumptions that aren’t true if taken to their logical conclusion (e.g. infinite growth) and hand wave away negative consequences in order to maintain what amounts to psychologically manipulating people into not saving their money.
Index all wages to inflation and we’ll see how much those holding all the assets feel about it.
And overall we have in the West (and in the US in particular) been living way "above our means" for more than half a century. And this 'debt' is starting to come due. It will get a lot worse too, for longer, before it starts getting better again.
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Is this similar to the Peter principle, though? And not that it is exactly that concept, but that book is from 1969. People have been making this observation for a while.
In this context, it's more comforting to really pay attention to very competent people. I had a home inspector spend ~5 hours on my house and was amazed by every little detail he discovered and documented, and how knowledgeable he was, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
They've got a shortage of people in the trades, but their tradies seemed highly professional and efficient, the folks at the bike shops were on point, the airport staff were quick to help and super informative (gate attendant explained visibility 'minimums'!)
Anyone capable of working at a higher level like that will quickly be up and out to somewhere they can get paid to work on that level. Peter principal in action.
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A lot longer than that. See C. Northcote Parkinson's books.
Even worse, it's become a sort of cultural expectation. Among my friend group here in the UK, people think you're weird for even trying and classify you as a tryhard for simply doing well. It's very different to Asia and I'm not surprised the UK is falling behind.
> It does preclude, practically from first principles, those exceptional individuals many of us have encountered in our career who seemed to be able to hold the entire code base in their brains. Arguably that’s a net positive. Those individuals were always problematic similar to those folks who are willing to work 80 hours a week and jump on every incident. At a minimum they make the rest of us look bad.
Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad, or at least suspect. No doubt it's rationalized as being against anti-teamwork traits, but the reality is much more sinister -- jealousy, and lies to package up that jealousy as something that isn't jealousy.
One or two of your friends, the influential ones, are driving that narrative. If you're lucky one of them will get an ambitious partner and the dynamic will suddenly switch.
If you're not, you can get away with it in your 20s, but they'll drag you down in your 30s.
But don't extrapolate to the whole UK from an echo chamber of a friendship group.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-second-world
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This leads to a lot of doing the bare minimum, since any effort beyond what is necessary to keep the job is wasted effort. You will get paid more just for existing longer, so just hang on. The only real way to get more money is to switch jobs, which is more about negotiation and politics than being good at the previous or next job. Most people aren't ambitious enough to repeatedly job hop, but would be ambitious enough to chase more money at their current job, were the opportunity presented.
The only way to fix this is to encourage larger variations in salary between high and low performers and get the union (I've done my time) mentality out of these organizations. It will never happen for the government.
Sure there is, that organization is called having your own business, or consulting.
I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.
(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
I've noticed that this is a New England thing. Driving up for the first time, I got lost repeatedly. Signs were placed too close to exits, hidden behind trees, etc. I came to the conclusion that there must be some local aversion to proper signage, probably based in the area's age and relative insularity. "Keep things the way they are and have been for hundreds of years," and, "If you're supposed to be here, you'll know where you are," attitudes, respectively. Boston, Providence, etc. are cosmopolitan, but I'd wager that the people who control public works iniatives are decidedly not.
Beyond a small minimum requirement, turning the crank more only leads to the expectation that you will continue to turn that crank that much. Rewards for going beyond -- money, security, autonomy -- are rarely present and almost never in proportion to how much you turn the crank. Plus, one day the company will decide it no longer needs you to turn the crank anymore, and without so much as a "thank you" you're on your own.
People only have a finite amount of 'caring' to give out. Why invest a lot into something when you feel you won't see any difference for your effort?
I've seen the same in apartments I'd rented over the last few years. The owners (management co's in many cases) will perform the most quarter-assed repairs and the poorest paint jobs imaginable before renting the place to the next schlub, while charging you for "wear" on the cheapest model dishwasher on the market.
In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely.
Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.
I've been saying this for years and people are still dumbfounded.
It's easy to pick on a public sector worker, but if they were a tech worker, we'd probably praise them to high heaven for "working smarter, not harder", but we have a different standard for public sector workers (and blue collar laborers).
My work was a kind-of dysfunctional mom and pop shop. Then the owner decided to get in bed with VC to boost his business. It became a numbers go up game headed by a CEO who lives 800 miles away. We lost benefits, worse insurance, less flexibility in work hours and loss of work from home for certain roles. That totally incentivizes people, right? Then the moron president VC installed uses AI like a crutch and talks about a future with more robots and less people. Again, totally incentivizes people to work more, right? Yet these detached morons wonder why people are apathetic. Then add on the state of the world being delivered via 24/7 fast news and meme cycles. People are literally being mentally beaten into submission. So it becomes "fuck em, I'm doing the minimum."
Before it wasn't shoved in people's faces the difference in quality of life/reward/return.
To be fair though, I don't think there's ever been an era better for people like me. I've always been an outcast, I've always been a little different, so living in times that allow me to just pretend to do bare minimum and fuck off is a huge blessing. Imagine living in middle ages when your existence depends on your village but you don't like them.
Recently a memory popped up in my mind. My uncle used to grow beans. The thing is, beans grow in peels, but they can only be sold without the peel, so you need people to peel the beans. So we'd sit in the barn and peel the beans while talking and listening to music and whatnot. This is what industrialization took from us.
Then I get there and the doctor's never looked at the document I sent. No one even told him about it.
The customer service liason is "very sorry for the miscommunication and will be looking internally to see how this occurred!"
> Prax: They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply instead of the proper mineral solutions needed for long-term stability.
> Amos: That sounds bad.
> Prax: They'll only be able to get away with it for another week, maybe two. After that, the air, the scrubbing plants, what's left of them, will die off. When that happens, they won't be able to stop the cascade.
Religion (particularly Judeo-Christian) has a lot of issues with empirical historical / scientific claims, but one thing it was good at is it's culturally adaptive. A lot of the cultural tooling and support it provided both with community and with some of the core cultural ideas around family and children - life purpose and direction are probably good things for most people. Secularism does this pretty poorly for the average person and what people substitute for what's missing is often much worse.
It all seems like the same Utopian thinking any way you cut it. It makes for good fiction books because we can't see the actual counterfactual.
The simpler explanation to me would be it wouldn't matter if you had a religious or secular society. Just different trade offs on the long march of progress.
People 80 years from now will live better lives than we do today. That is just the way it goes. Of course if you asked anyone during WW2 this 80 years ago about 2025 they would give a highly pessimistic answer about 2025.
I would also add other contributors: inflation along with salaries not increasing, and housing crisis in many cities around the world
I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.
This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?
>There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.
Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".
[1] https://kai.kendal.org/
Don't work with incompetent people. Even if you set a low bar for success they'll just go and find a way to trip over it.
When I drove around Boston in the 80s, I discovered that each street had 3 names:
1. the name on the map
2. the name on the street signs
3. the name given by the person giving you directions
I learned to navigate by counting intersections.
This is a phenomenon in eastern Massachusetts that I've been hearing people talk about for ~25 years. I've heard it hypothesized as an attempt to be hostile to outsiders.
I don't think AI has anything to do with cops acting as scarecrows (at best) or construction workers take 6 years to build parking.
AI wasn't even as much of a thing 6 years ago, so these things seem fundamentally unrelated. And anyway, the cops and construction workers aren't using Claude 4...
You had me up until then. It's not related to AI at all. It's more related to post-Covid than AI imo. Even before this, blame social media since 2010 people have been more and more sucked into a small screen in their hand and a virtual set of "friends" than what's actually happening in the real world right in front of them. At this level, it's just basic detachment. Their head isn't where their body is.
If she's able to do this without risk of being fired, she's absolutely succeeding according to the values of capitalism. The worker / employer dynamic under capitalism is: employers try to extract the most labor value for the least cost (maximizing profit margin) while the worker tries to retain the highest labor profit margin possible for the least labor cost (wear and tear on mind and body, time, etc). Since it's not possible to retain / change total capture of labor profit margin on the employee side, since compensation for labor isn't attached to value but rather to "market conditions" (geography, whether or not another employer in the industry recently laid people off, the phase of the moon), the employee's only option is to reduce personal labor cost: work as little as possible, as lazily as possible.
One of the genius strokes of this arrangement is that humans aren't purely economic rational actors: we generally take pride in our work, and also want to be a part of something greater, and even if we don't have either of those things, we suffer social pressure to do good at our jobs or not leave our teammates hanging. So, in reality, the employer has an advantage, because it's basically immune to these human traits. Therefore the corporation can extract even more value for less cost (people will work harder than necessary per their compensation because e.g. they take pride in their work).
As the overall system destabilizes further and normalization deepens and people feel the inherent contradictions more strongly, I believe cynicism will increase and these human traits will hold less influence over the employer / worker dynamic, and people will operate more like rational capitalist actors.
Annoyingly this will probably lead to more articles about how "people just don't want to work anymore."
It is not entirely clear why you call these the values of capitalism. These are universal human values that do not depend on the economic formation.
If anything, capitalism makes people less cynical, simply because it is designed to function independently of such qualities in people. While in many other systems, cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness and deceitfulness of people are simply ignored, giving people with such qualities huge advantages within the system and ruining the lives of everyone else.
I tend to agree with your overall point, but I’m not sure this supports it. To me, the difficulty in building things like parking structures isn’t indifference but the opposite: we care too much.
We care about the environmental impact. We care about the safety of workers. We care about the impact on local residents. We care about property values. All of those things create a layer of risk management, and the administrative overhead is what slows many of those projects down. If we were less risk adverse, we could get things done more quickly but we care about those things enough to manage them.
(To be clear, I’m not saying any of those are bad, just pointing out the natural consequence of caring about things and how it runs counter to the OPs point.)
It turns out the greater good in fact came from people caring about what they where doing.
Too bad we only realize it now, when the destructive ideology has eventually trickled down from the profiteers class to the working class.
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In my experience, there's certainly a mix of both, but the latter is much more common.
Typically (almost ubiquitously, really) this comes in the form of time constraints. I mean, come on, we're (nearly) all engineers here.
How much suboptimal code have you shipped? How much of it was due to a lack of skill or motivation vs. time constraints or other external factors?
Again, I'd bet dollars to pennies that it's a systemic issue. Voters tend to demand lower taxes as their #1 or #2 issue, especially in local elections where big-picture issues like abortion etc. are not decided.So, are Boston's missing street signs a symptom of people not caring? Or a symptom of that department probably being underfunded? I obviously don't know, but my money would be on the latter.
In my experience the only people not trying their best on an indivdual basis are people who have been completely screwed over and beaten down by their jobs. Everybody else is trying, if only out of rational self-interest (wanting promotions, or at least needing to keep their jobs)
I filter out people like that because
A. They’re not on the same level
B. I won’t hire them and I wouldn’t work with them
C. They serve no purpose to me in my life because I don’t even want to hang out with them
Life in the outside world means relying on a ton of people doing their jobs decently.
People are so distracted, scrolling ad-nauseam, that the only hope and dream they have is: to become an “influencer.”
They’ll sell a view of their children and family life to the highest bidding sponsor. Then, peddling products to a fresh batch of spectators who think, “Ah! Wouldn’t that be the life? I should do that too—then I will be famous and making a hell-of-a lot more money than I am now!”
I mean the amount of scam ads on YouTube alone selling a lifestyle of abundance and riches—living like a rockstar—only perpetuates the wrong values.
People should be PROUD of hard work. And they will be, when they become less distracted and start to see the joys of value creation again.
Note: I just want to clarify that my intent is not to say that social media is inherently evil—there’s lots of value-creation happening there—just that THIS particular issue is because social media has misdirected people’s ambitions.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...
https://www.sostandard.com/blogs/social-media-is-changing-ge...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-b...
I might be too introverted for that sort of thing in the first place, but that sounds like hell, having to pretend in front of a bunch of strangers just to get clicks, all for clout.
Then again, I did delete Facebook too because I didn’t quite get posting bunches of vacation pics either: if there’s a cool picture or a few I can share those in the likes of WhatsApp or Discord with a more narrow and closer knit group instead of the world.
I’m guessing it’s quite different for most folks and I assume that the few of those who also do successfully become influencers are swimming in money, more than I’ll ever make.
One Nation under God
has turned into
One Nation under the influence
of one drug
Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation
- TV, the drug of the nation
edit: stoopid HN parser
Our natural state tends to laziness - both mentally and physically. There are exceptions of-course. What AI now promises is that we sip cocktails on a beach in equilibrium state while social media+AI provide narratives we want to hear, sort of the dystopia portrayed in Matrix.
> To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.
I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.
It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)
This doesn't happen because nobody cares. It happens because the financing dries up, or labor is straight up not available. And that still comes back to money.
I had my renovation stall for 6 weeks because someone at Mass DEP couldn't be arsed to approve an asbestos abatement work plan. My contractor called the guy's boss and it was approved the next day.
My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.
And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.
So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
In this environment, caring becomes not just "not worth it" but can be actually detrimental, as it opens you up to a lot of pain. To pick a random banal example, if you care what you eat, you'll be disappointed when the local tasty restaurant is replace by a McDonald's, but if you don't, you won't.
I have to add that the author's exhortation at the end still strikes me as a bit tone-deaf. There are plenty of people who want to care, and even still do care, about things. We don't need to tell people to care. What we need to do is take a sledgehammer to everything and everyone that makes not-caring the easier choice.
A lot of this derives from people not respecting what they do. We're too elitist as a society to care about the quality of what most people consume and experience on a daily basis.
I've never worked at a newspaper, but I went to college with journalism majors for four years, and I know that 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash. Knowing that it's trash was a measure of everything important about them: their intelligence, their knowledge, their taste, and their moral character. Seeing the lesser parts of a newspaper as worthy of effort and attention would call every single one of those desirable personal qualities into question. Given that, they all aimed to put themselves in a position to write the 2% that isn't embarrassing to write, but most of them, perhaps all of them, ended up writing the other bits of the newspaper, most likely embarrassed about it, most likely putting as little of their life energy into it as possible, while hanging their sense of self-worth on hobbies or a novel that they'll never publish.
I can see this in the personal arc of virtually everyone I know. The happiest people I know are the ones who have escaped this and still manage to respect the importance of their work, but the vast majority have given up on their jobs as a way of expressing who they are in a positive way.
You can see some regret about this, some desire for a different approach, in the fascination with physical craftsmanship, which can be made compatible with our elitism. There's cultural cachet in being a fanatically obsessed craftsman who makes highly priced boutique goods desired by all the Ivy League grads in Brooklyn or the Stanford grads in San Francisco. From another angle, we see it in the fascination with people in other societies who dedicate their lives to a craft, like in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." But again, we can't imagine doing that and being second best, because we don't live in a society that values doing your best, only being the best. Dedicating yourself to something and being okay at it, serving not the elite but the dumb gross masses who don't know any better, is humiliating. The high school instinct to distance oneself from stigma, the primal instinct that it's best to be as far away from a social target as possible, has been elevated to a sophisticated vocabulary of complicity, where everybody is guilty of not fixing a problem, and the most guilty of all are those closest to it. If you're producing listicles for a newspaper, you are guilty of perpetuating the intellectual laziness of all of humankind, guilty of electing Donald Trump, unless you can distance yourself with disdain and cynicism, and plead economic necessity for taking a shit job.
In a society like this, how can we expect someone to care? It's shit, so it might as well be botshit.
He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.
> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash
In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.
If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.
Eh, I disagree with elitist...
We're too capitalist. Lines must go up, that is all that matters. Well, lines for the capital holders, paying the workers less to the point they don't care is fine.
Dead Comment
A lot of the companies I deal with will jerk you around, not return your calls, not show up to do the work etc. etc..they're busy and can ask a lot of money, and there's no fear of being out of work. I think that affects the work product quality more than anything else right now right here.
You are probably right somewhere else.
To be fair, the society decided to encourage such behavior.
The only way to end the power they have is to work towards a prosperous society where it doesn't make sense to be a violent criminal.
So, I am senior software engineer, got hired into this company. I was tasked by my manager/tech lead to work with another senior software engineer.
Overtime I realized that this engineer did not have the proper background in this field. I asked him and I asked my tech lead, and confirmed he did not have background in this field. This guy just roped into this project and stayed.
I sent him articles, tutorials, and even documentations that say so and so is so and so, but he refused to believe it and said it was just my opinion. I even offered to work on these problems instead of him. But we ended up getting into heated arguments. I talked to my tech lead and my VP and they just brushed me off. It got so bad that I asked to be transferred to a different team.
I also realized later that my tech lead was not as technically competent as I hoped to be, so that's why he couldn't make a decision.
Anyway, I asked Reddit and TeamBlind how to best deal with this kind of situation. (In those forums I actually described exactly what were the problems)
To my surprise, a lot of them, 99% of the answers go along these lines "Who the fuck cares man, just get your paycheck and go home, what an idiot". These are highly paid FAANG engineers.
So, that was my wake up call. They were right. Who the fuck cares. Just get my paycheck and go home, and work on other stuffs, work on side projects, side hustle, and go Leetcode.
I was 8 years too late into the industry to know that this should be my default attitude when working.
Now I am in "Who The Fuck Cares" club.
Let me get this right, you discovered your team was mediocre, you then asked the clinically cynical folks at Reddit for advice, people you don't even know and people who certainly don't know you, and the conclusion you walked away with was that it wasn't worth caring because there's cynics on the internet?
If you're adopting a "Who the Fuck Cares" attitude, the highest form of it you can reach is not giving a flying fuck about what anons on the internet say.
Now, as an anon, I won't bother to give you advice, but I'll tell you what works for me. I found a team that is intelligent and passionate and enjoys their work, and a startup with talented founders that I respect, and I am far happier than I would ever be working at a mediocre company or team. I feel better as a person, I learn better, challenge myself more, and feel more accomplished by surrounding myself with other highly competent people.
The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.
Companies, for the past 50 years at least, have greatly incentivized little worker bees over revolutionaries. They don't want someone to fix things or tell them they're wrong. They don't want superstars, they want drones, they want yes men, they want useful idiots. And, well, they got it.
* programmer that worked maybe 2h/day, but was otherwise very important to one of the oursourced projects, so he got away with it and was publicly laughing about it without ever getting reprimanded
* devops guy that insisted on using his magic copy-pasted shitty shell scripts instead of any popular config management tool at the time, simply to make it harder for anyone else to take his duties, also no monitoring, just call him when something breaks
* junior dev, that routinely spent 2-3 days on a simple bugfix, that later had to be reassigned to a senior that fixed it in 15 minutes without any context from the junior dev, that situation was apparently okay for the company, because a clueless client paid by hour and had no idea it keeps happening all the time
* tester, who after half a year figured out that his manual testing isn't quantifiable at all, as long as he claims that everything is working to make management happy, so he found a second job
So, I'm in the WTFC camp since, I guess, a month of working in IT.
What I noticed when I checked out at work is that it also makes me check out in my personal life (PL). It bleeds in. Generally, in my personal life I'm not checked out. That bleeds into work.
So work bleeds into PL and PL into work. I found that it was painful for work to bleed into my PL like that since I'm switched on and I just had this hint of "ah... whatever who gives a fuck."
I give a fuck.
I give a fuck because it's my life. I do it for myself. I don't do it for my boss or my colleagues. I do it for me.
I've found that this attitude is way more helpful to me as two things happen:
1. I'm more productive at work so I don't have to cover my ass at all. When I was in the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, I needed to cover my ass once per month (read: I didn't do anything for like 3 days and people were expecting results on day 4).
2. Since it's in service for my personal life, I don't go too far. The moment I notice that work encroaches too much upon personal life, my instinct comes back immediately and I pay my visit to the "Who The Fuck Cares" club, and party as long as I want to.
That's the balance I'm currently taking.
We're just human parts of some weird business-metaphysical Plinko board—and we ain't the ones dropping the chip or winning the prizes. Truly, who could possibly maintain any amount of giving-a-shit after years and years of that? All that's left is pretending, which is, transparently, the same thing "leadership" does.
Yes, I am saying you should be cleaning the decks of the Titanic with all the care you can muster but without being obsessive or neurotic about it. Don't do it for the Titanic, don't do it for all the people who are about to die. Just do it for you.
An essential part of "the job" is to get done what the company wants you to do. Even when that's stupid. Fair. But toxic jobs are still toxic to us, and staying is still our decision. Pending finding another better job - but sometimes even before having found the better job because sanity matters.
No one will tell you during recruitment process about shit show they have or crazy manager. Or even if there was a nice team you've been interviewed to, after onboarding you could be reassigned to the toxic team to fix legacy code.
I wonder whether, by refusing to Leetcode as an IC, if you weed-out proportionally more companies of careerist people just going through the motions.
(Compared to companies of people who care about what they're doing, not just about jumping through hoops and receiving money.)
One company lied, I completed the leetcode-style portion of the technical interview, and politely declined their offer (with an explanation that I don’t like being lied to, and beyond that, I don’t want to work for a company that believes leetcode is a useful skill indicator for regular development work).
So far every company that I’ve worked for doesn’t do leetcode bs, and end up being great companies to work for (genuinely caring about employees, good salary/benefits, actual CoL adjustments in addition to merit-based raises, equity, etc). Small sample size, I know. I also know that every one of my tech friends who has worked at a leetcode-interview company has had some kind of issue with colleagues, management, company structure, or something along those lines (not necessarily at every company, but each person has encountered those sorts of things at at least one company).
To me, avoiding leetcode is a very good way to select for “actual good” companies to work for.
They gave you terrible advice. Vote with your feet. Don't enable posers. Find a better team or a better company. It takes time but it's possible. And when the new place drifts, vote with your feet again.
But remember to keep quiet about it. If all the competent people did this, natural selection would do its magic.
It's easy to not care, anything bad can happen and you can blissfully wash your hands of it. You don't care, so it doesn't matter.
I remember being a teenager, my defense against anything bad that happened to me was, "I don't care" with a snide attitude. I was lying, I did care, but I built up a mindset that not caring about anything made me stronger.
As an adult, I know this is wrong. Caring requires strength. Caring is hard. That's why we need to do it.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who is now no longer my friend. He said, "so, what you're saying is, you go out of your way to try and deeply understand as much of everything as you can?"
I answered, "Yes. Being curious about others, issues outside of myself, and the world around me, is in my opinion, a moral good."
His only response was, "that's not for me, that sounds exhausting."
We started the conversation because he was openly making fun of other people who were not like him. He thought it was okay to laugh at other people for being different. To mock others if their differences were amusing to him.
His lack of curiosity, his lack of caring for others made him a repulsive person. Be careful what you choose to "not care" about.
There's big things we should care about, and then there's little things we shouldn't. How the towels are folded, or the ring of water on the coffee table. When we give those things too much care, we transform the mundane into a battle. And then, every second of our everyday life becomes a battleground, a game of tug of war. We turn little issues into big ones that occupy our minds.
It's a line we have to toe. Not enough care and we are husks. Too much care and we are an anxious, brittle mess. We have to pick our battles, and we have to acknowledge that not all battles have a winner. Sometimes, there are only losers.
There is a sense of honour and zen in doing the mundane as perfectly as possible. Not to achieve perfection but strive towards the ideal within reason.
This is something I recently spoke with my father about. He was annoyed with trying to keep toxic mushrooms out of his yard. It was tedious and complicated.
Then he embraced the struggle, and looked at it the same way he used to train in martial arts. As a chosen striving towards an ideal.
He “monk-moded” his gardening and found joy in a mundane, repetitive task.
Through caring, he turned anxiety and annoyance into peace and acceptance.
He also won the battle against the mushrooms after 2 years of diligent effort.
It's one thing when "public affairs" and affairs of your local community are one and the same. But modern democracies seem to be actively preventing citizens from being actually informed about anything, and the granularity of elections ensures people's opinions (ill-informed or otherwise) are uncorrelated with end results.
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The Serenity Prayer is very real to me. So is "be the change you want to see in the world"
Things aren't really changing in many ways, but changing crazy fast in other ways, but not toward anything in particular. Maybe it is some sort of singularity-type thing approaching that I'm feeling. All I know is that my life hasn't changed much in the past decade. Smartphones, awesome computers, instead streams of videos, a sea of video games and books and music, but nothing new and remarkable. AI is here, probably, but that is just weird and terrifying, and this coming from someone that has watched and participated in it's development the entirety of my adult life.
Instead of new categories being created, we're just optimizing the hell out of everything.
The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
Be optimistic. Life is good. I’m 37 and keenly aware that as I age, I’m likely to fall into bitterness and disillusionment. But It’s natural for everyone to go through periods like that. It’s not your age, it’s your outlook.
We live in an era of almost literal magic. Being able to cure plagues that would have dealt so much misery that it’s hard to imagine; having fruit at grocery stores in winter; being able to get from point A to point B almost effortlessly as long as you have the money for it; that half our children no longer die during child birth, along with our wives. It’s easy to get caught up in tech-focused miracles, but the physical ones are often way more impactful. And we’re at the beginning of tech miracles anyway. It’s only been less than a century since computers became available, let alone practical. Charles Babbage would think he’d died and was in heaven.
Be optimistic. Life is good.
Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.
> The point is, once you wait a decade or so and look back, you find that we did in fact get a lot of newness. It just takes awhile to see what makes them distinct from mere optimizations of previous work. AI is no different, and we’re certainly not approaching some singularity moment. Not anytime soon anyway.
If you think that bitcoin and facebook are examples of "real newness" that we only perceive in retrospect, I think we're not seeing eye to eye. Those to me are exactly the kinds of things that represent a colossal waste of human time, effort, and money.
I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.
I don't know sure it's a little more than that but barely, it does solve a problem (the banks being centralized and censorship prone etc.) but another way ti solve that problem would've been to change the financial system.
>Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.
It's not even that, people are more lonely than ever despite Facebook.
>HN seemed like an alternative to Reddit.
It's not?
>An iPad seemed like a dumbed-down laptop.
An iPad is literally a dumbed down laptop, has the same chip as a macbook, but a totally different dumbed down OS to not affect macbook sales.
>Smartphones seemed like a desktop computer in your pocket.
They're less than that in most ways except for select use cases.
I mean sure be optimistic but those examples aren't the best.
I suspect we're becoming more realistic now about the nature of our civilization. There won't be any riding of laser-shooting cybernetic unicorns and we have to come to terms with that. There's adulting to do now. We have some climate issues and we have to deal with wealth inequality and finding and maintaining proper forms of government (worldwide). The laser-shooting unicorns have become the "maybe we can sort of survive as a species" and we need that. We always needed that, but we were too busy watching Terminator and playing GTA.
I'm not convinced it's all bad. Maybe some societal existential depression is called for and perhaps we'll awaken from our funk with some fresh ideas.
Late 30's here, and I feel/noticed the same thing.
It feels like a state of purgatory. Things are changing, I suppose stuff is coming out, but nothing is really new. Remakes, rehashes, the same trends over and over, the same tropes in media. The world feels "stuck" in a way that's hard to describe.
As a kid I just remember being enthralled by what the future would bring, and you'd see tons of writing prognosticating about things like "cities of the future" and "houses of the future". I think the fundamental change is that all of those were filled with a sort of techno-optimism. Now, though, I think there is a widespread feeling that tech, as a whole, is no longer in service to the improvement of human society. It just feels like it went off the rails in the past 15-20 years or so, where for a lot of us tech feels like it's made our lives worse.
I no longer look forward to the newest tech or gadget. If anything, I look forward to going for a walk in the woods and leaving my phone at home.
When we imagined computers, we imagined unbounded access to knowledge. Instead, we got an internet drowned in corporate slop, constant surveillance and unrelenting attempts to destroy privacy.
When we imagined cars of the future, we imagined beautiful, affordable, eco-friendly vehicles. Instead, we got products centered around inserting new subscription fees into the model of car ownership.
When we imagined housing of the future, we imagined gorgeous futuristic architecture for the family. Instead we got an unaffordable investment market designed to siphon money out of the common person.
When we imagined AI, we imagined being freed from menial work, free to pursue art. Instead we got corporate push to replace artists and writers with dysfunctional content generators built on stolen data to save a few cents on the dollar.
When we imagined technology as a whole, we imagined something that would empower and better humanity. Instead all we got was a tool the rich use to exploit the rest of the world even harder with no limit.
The future has been a lot more interesting than people are giving it credit for, atleast my brief slice of it so far.
I really hope "pretty much" is doing a lot of work there, because we are still far from the point of computer intelligence overtaking biological. After all, the whole point of TFA is that the AI generated article was full of outright bullshit - it kinda sorta looked plausible, but it wasn't real.
That's the problem with AI - while it definitely is really amazing at some things, in many areas it just seems to have the "mirage" of intelligence.
Meanwhile, day-to-day improvements don't seem that beneficial. Sure the Internet is all around us and it is a powerful tool, but it's also led to a lot of social unhappiness. Even the tools that have been part of society for a long time feel cheaper and more fragile than ever.
Iphone costs same $1000 but provides you massive improvements compare to iphone 10y ago.
You can argue cars are more expensive but you got more power, more features, safer vehicle. And in poor countries you can still buy cheap cars with modern technology.
My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.
This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.
Consider that with such extreme randomness the future has an unknown probability of introducing enormous improvement in daily life, for you specifically and for society in general. Are you pricing in the odds that within your lifetime, humanity could find a cure for aging? What are the odds that democracy makes a huge comeback, driving authoritarianism down across the world, even in China and North Korea? Nonzero, to be sure. Have you priced that in as well?
Don't over-focus on the things that you'll miss about the past, or the negatives aspects of the future which you expect will come. They may, but if they do, they'll likely be bundled with incomprehensibly good things, and the net effect may be quite, or even extraordinarily, positive.
Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
https://www.upworthy.com/11-ridiculous-future-predictions-fr...
The currently-ascendant business and political leaders pushing some mix of millenarian wankery and a conspiratorial mindset with all the finesse of 3rd-rate carnival barkers while stealing everything in sight definitely has me pretty down on, like, anything mattering.
Sure, AI can make us more productive (those of us it doesn't replace), but so what? That just means that my company can either a) produce more and generate more revenue, or b) produce the same with fewer employees, reducing costs. Either way, it doesn't make my life better.
The problem is that technology is for the most part, not about making our lives better. It's about finding new markets and convincing consumers to buy/use these products.
They say productivity has doubled in the past 40 years. Are we either 1) working half as many hours as we did then; or 2) earning twice as much (inflation-adjusted) as we did then? If not, then what has the increased productivity earned us?
Wrt. this feeling you're describing here: You might mostly be feeling the Enshittification. At least that's a big thing for me. Companies are not making things better, they are making everything worse. Instead of actually making new stuff, they're wringing the existing lemon five extra times to squeeze that last drop of juice out of it, adding one extra ad in the youtube viewing, making it harder to integrate. APIs being deprecated, walled gardens. Things have been going downhill for at least a decade. This makes me sad.
I think your point is that a vibrant future vision is necessary to inform the present. It gives us a measure for peoples and corporations behavior. Don’t be fooled that this is an accident. “Who cares” is propaganda for a very different future.
In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.
In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
You
hit the nail
on the head.
Such a simple thought. How did I miss it? Haha. Thanks for mentioning. A bad deal is my siren seducing me to check out at work.
I'm a high school grad who had no desire to go to college, but I've always had a love of reading and usually questioned everything. I made a living in the trades and have very little complaints. I worked with hundreds of people, both young and old, and noticed something most had in common. Most cared very little for learning anything outside of just getting by. I saw very few with a book in their hands and was questioned many times as to why I was reading! I was even told I would never need to know that, when reading about technology.
I'm trying not to be overly critical, but I still don't understand why knowledge to them wasn't valued. I'm also afraid it's being reflected in society today based on the blatant refusal to read today's happenings and the lack of wisdom to interpret the possible outcomes, or to even care.
Your mind goes into a completely different state when you are immersed in a single topic vs when you are consuming textual content that causes context switches every 10 seconds.
I love her, but it's truly mind boggling how little she cares about learning stuff.
For example,
* Who cares that those newspapers ran AI-generated reading lists when the actual people who represent the newspapers wouldn't actually be the ones recommending the books anyway?
(People who make things that you read aren't reading themselves.)
* Why should people care to fund or listen to audio deep-dives into the Multiverse or a middle-aged man's memoir about when he was 12 and he heard songs?
* Why shouldn't people submit boilerplate responses to boilerplate questions that are an artificial barrier between them and what is contemporarily accepted as a socioeconomic exchange?
I wonder if there's anything that the author can draw from their experiences in punk culture to round out the answers the questions like this.
We are flailing in the middle of a long-running vacuum of meaning and purpose.
I worry about the sort of people who are set at ease by the vague quasi-institutional appeals that conclude this post.
For some people now, i would be hard to summarise them. To describe them, other than 'plays games' or 'watches videos'. And you can tell something is missing, they're not happy, but distracted enough to not care.
And the worst-kept secret is that people have to be told what to care about.
That's not a direct response to your concern, but I think this quote applies in a parallel manner -- I've seen this quote applied as a statement about what it means to be "punk", and how simply being content with yourself (meaning you don't fall victim to all the ways society attacks/preys on insecurities or tries to sell you drugs or makeup or clothes or surgery or whatever to change yourself), is actually incredibly "punk". You don't have to dress up weird, or go out and do graffiti, or get into fights... just being content with yourself is "punk", within a capitalist/post-capitalist world.
So, in a similar vein, I think this author is saying that, "caring" is also a form of being "punk", in a world where seemingly not-caring is mainstream now. The thing is, being "punk" doesn't need an external "why" reason to justify it... the whole point of "punk" culture is about authenticity, that just being yourself is what's important, that you don't need a special reason to reject capitalist consumerism or mainstream opiate-of-the-masses media or to dress how you feel instead of how society thinks you should look. In that way, being "punk" is quite Buddhism-aligned actually, to center on existence and enlightenment through self-realization, instead of pursuit of external "why" reasons for doing X or Y.
Caring is the punk thing to do, because it is who you actually are. You don't need a special reason to care, if you subscribe to any kind of "punk" mindset/philosophy about life. Don't care because it will yield better material rewards, get you laid, or whatever. Care, just because.
At least, that's the argument... up to you if you buy it or not.
this happens when the person paying the money and the person judging the work quality, and the person "punishing" are different entities.
Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say. Politicians spend, department beaurocracy spends, and hires, etc. The workers get hired, get paid, but their performance is not judged. The final recipient of the work - specific citizens - get poor service for the taxes paid.
I would claim this is not a good example at all.
A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.
If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.
All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.
Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.
Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.
I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.
The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.
I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.
The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.
And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.