It probably started when I was much younger with much worse asthma and always had a HEPA filter running in the background. Eventually this turned into basically always having some kind of fan in my primary locations. Right now I dig the Coway air filters on low or medium.
Even beyond the alleged "noise floor dopamine boost", I find some kind of background whoosh really nice for masking otherwise variable sounds, such as cars, airplanes, and the wind, which are far more distracting.
10/10 would recommend running some sort of air filter all the time. Plus, cleaner air (air pollution has all kinds of bad effects).
As someone with both (and particularly bad tinnitus) I look forward to my new air filters/fans.
It was frustrating and discouraging for a long time and then suddenly I found myself with people to call on and spend time with. Half a decade later I moved and had the opportunity to try the experiment again. This time secondary connections made finding my network almost trivial. Maybe age helped too, being further removed from the university cliques.
I was relieved to find out, albeit way after the fact, that many have this experience. One friend recently quit his job to start a company focused on this phenomenon [0]. I hope he can displace the zombie of Meetup.
Travel was difficult and dangerous. Frequently forbidden when not impractical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement).
If you think lockdowns in say, China, are harsh:
Russian Serfs were only freed 1861. Less than a century after Joseph II decided to end feudalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_Patent_(1781).
Some form of social isolation was the norm for most of human history. So I don't think you are doomed to grow crazy if you stay by yourself, we're just not used to it. No longer the norm.
Being left alone with a smartphone and "social" media apps however might cause a person to spiral.
Living alone was extremely rare until recent history [1]. Not having freedom of movement, or not living in a city does not mean social isolation. Villages back in history used to celebrate holidays together, families were much larger, everyone knew everyone since birth etc…
I just woke up but don’t feel like pulling up the sources but I believe the exact opposite of your statement. Social isolation is a modern phenomenon that was extremely rare before in history. It was incredibly difficult to survive just by yourself.
Anecdotal data for another factor: Too much effort is made! I've recently tried to make an effort to build up more of a friend network and turn some acquaintances into friends. I've noticed that we try to make everything so "nice" that it becomes inconvenient. The hosts always spend at least an hour getting their place ready and prepping food. This leads to a "barrier entry" for getting together that makes these events less. I even brought that up one time, but hosts seem unable to reduce the effort they make. Guests commonly bring gifts. Nobody needs the gifts or the super tidy home to visit. Just ring the doorbell, grab a beer and let's just hang! I say that, but I'd never do this either because it would feel like a transgression. The only exception I've noticed is that sometimes we'll end up chatting with neighbors for a prolonged time when we randomly run into each other while going for a walk or something. However, nobody would ever say "let's take this party inside". It seems to have become cultural and I am not sure how to fix this as an individual. I think part of it is that we are always busy now or feel like we should be. Gotta run those errands, work on my side project, etc.
People just feel welcome to drop by. The house is usually a total mess because « work » is not allowed, and there’s no gift bringing either because of religious reasons.
I always admired it. Just one day where no one’s working or traveling and everyone’s free to come over and hangout.
It’s an idle game at its core so it feels like Factorio whereby you try to automate as much as you can as efficiently as you can.
If it is anything like German math education back when I was in school a lot of the early things are simplified to an insane extreme and either have to be revisited later or are completely replaced with a better approach. I think we went through half a dozen ways on how to multiply and divide numbers when only one mattered in the end. If you learned the basics from your parents you could even expect to be penalized since you had to use the useless methods described in the curriculum for the first few years and could get penalized for correctly identifying an equation with a negative result.
> Basically, it seems like kid’s brains are just not able to efficiently learn math
Or it may be related to a really bad curriculum that tries to be "age appropriate" by teaching mostly useless crap.
Anything under 9 characters I can brute force in minutes. 9 character passwords would take me 9 hours.
Obviously if someone has a nest of the latest GPUs then they could go a lot faster.
But yes if your password is uwv&6qu_brusb618_$@618jg then it doesn’t really matter how you hash it.
Perhaps for the first time in history we need to rethink the whole model of production, needs, wants and consuming. A full blown Star Trek society is not “communism” as I saw it sometimes described, it’s “all-needs-are-met-ism” at zero cost.
The question is how to bridge the gap from where we are now to there.
"There is something awesome about the end of shortage."
So you understand that we, as humans, part of nature, have lived a certain way for nearly 7 million years, then lived another certain way starting 10,000 years ago with agriculture, and basically yesterday have started living in the modern world. And you expect us, as humans, to fully cope with this concept, to the point that it is awesome?
What we need to rethink is what it means to be human and our relationship with technology. We surely didn't evolve for millions of years to have all our needs met by machines and sit around without any purpose, forever being out-competed by said machines.