Under that light my job (marketing analytics sw) seems pointless if not detrimental. But any direction I looked to kind of help out with the things that matter seemed a dead end. There are just no jobs about climate change or school violence. No startups addressing these issues. It seems to me that it is almost impossible to put any effort in what matter which increases the sense of me living in a bubble about to burst at first contact with reality.
Dunno. How do feel about all these and bow do you deal with it?
As many have already advised you in this thread, quit (or ration) the news and social media. At least be selective of what you choose to read/hear. You'll feel better.
To be clear, things are NOT devolving; we hear about injustice that wouldn’t used to make it to the news and we humans have new information processing challenges to handle.
In the radio / TV age, there were only a few channels and sources of information. What you heard was curated for attention, and the only choice was to hear or not hear. And everyone heard from the same, shared sources. It was relatively expensive to spin up your own radio/tv broadcast. It was a few-to-many relationship.
In the internet + personal devices age, there’s a flood of new information sources (some automated even) AND information consumers can now be segmented down to each individual. AND the barrier to creating these many-to-many information pipes is way lower than before. So now, the onus to sorting all this information out is up to individuals: on/off, which channels, and who else “heard” what you “heard”.
More information and disinformation available requires humans to figure out and process information better - def. a challenge, but it can help _accelerate_ improvements to society as well.
As for violence, it's worth noting that "The USA has lower violent crime rates than the average of industrialized countries."[0] That's not to say it doesn't have severe problems that absolutely should be fixed with better policies, and it doesn't disprove your belief that things are devolving, but it maybe shows that things can be a lot worse and still be okay.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying complex civilization has a good chance of getting through this century, but I think the problems are more subtle than current news stories suggest, so we need to think carefully about what actions we can take as individuals that will have the best chance of improving things.
...
18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which **destroy the earth.**It's an interesting point, though, that only in the last 100 years have humans really been able to conceive of "destroying the earth" as something that we are directly capable of.
Just take the whole arc of the Industrial Revolution for an example: more goods start flowing and more resources start being available, but simultaneously, people are pushed to work harder for lower wages; sunrise to sunset at the factory, tenement housing, etc. It takes generations before most really start seeing the visible benefit to their lifestyle. And the benefit is achieved through a series of fights - violent ones - to secure a new social contract.
So where does it end? Where do we get the source of optimism for this transition? Well, look at the people analyzing the stats. Hans Rosling has long been popular for his positive framing of demographic changes. More recently Tony Seba has taken on a similar role in framing technology changes. They point to the graphs and say: "our trends are going here, not there." And "here" looks pretty good, but also surprising, because it doesn't behave linearly.
The thing is, we don't address most societal challenges in a "Fix-it Felix" heroic fashion: either we find a technology that changes the game (which is produced mostly from people given the necessary access to resources to commit to lengthy trial and error - hence a lot of advancements are perceived as elite phenomena), or we let it fall into the political sphere, where a fight takes place and someone is declared a winner and their opinions become the law, for a while.
Given the option to do so, don't be too concerned about picking a "right" job. Jobs emerge from what the market can support, and when some jobs are called more right than others, that's a factor of politics. The only way to truly remove the politics is to create more spheres of autonomy, which could happen not just "within" jobs but "without", by e.g. trying to redefine your household lifestyle.
Yes, news programming sells itself with hysteria. But some things have unquestionably regressed, notably U.S. politics and the dignity and respectability of those who hold office in the USA. And, for that matter, the Supreme Court.
But all of that goes back to the deliberate, belligerent ignorance championed by millions of people in this country. The tragedy is that the Internet, once a conduit for scientific knowledge and research, has been turned into a clearinghouse for retrograde "thought," allowing stupidity to reach the critical mass required to bring down entire societies.
The world is ('Future Shock') changing. Including some very positive trends. The reaction to Ukraine for one. Covid was addressed in a year, not four. But enough is enough, and in most cases our best chances for positive actions are local.
- https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
- https://mashable.com/article/best-time-in-history
I think it's a matter of perspective. If you just focus on the negatives, things will appear to be getting worse. Unfortunately, bad news sells better than good news. I think this is an evolutionary artifact: the world was much more dangerous, and it was important to avoid things that could get you killed.
Since historians are the first people to say the past was not better, maybe a deep dive into history and truly understanding the past (vs. just vicarious nostalgia[1]) would help balance your perspective.
[1] Interestingly, even gamers recall old versions of games as being better, when they were objectively worse. They just remember the good experience without remembering the bad details: https://youtu.be/1pXJqs2bgi4
- - -
There are opportunities to use your skills for positive impact. I know because I found one, and I’m working on tools which people use to improve and save lives.
Well, I should clarify: I had the luck of having the opportunity brought to my attention by a friend who knows my values and wondered if I’d be interested. I may have found it on my own, but I don’t know!
Assuming I wouldn’t have (which is a pretty safe assumption, I wasn’t aware of any of the projects or relevant technologies which would’ve put it on my radar), what brought this opportunity to my attention was having long term connections outside of tech with people who share my values, and enough familiarity that there was a tech overlap that my friend recognized I might be interested. I met the friend through protest circles, the intro for the opportunity came almost 20 years later.
That’s not to say that kind of timeline is inevitable. It’s to say I’m overwhelmingly happy to be doing meaningful work today, and I think it’s unlikely I’d be able to say so if I’d been focused on the career path to this.
My sincere advice is to build relationships with people who are working on issues you care about outside of tech or at least make those connections outside of a tech context. If you want to make the world a better place, people already working on that are much much better people to know than people discussing the topic on a forum (regardless of all of the good things about HN) bourn of startup VC funding.
If you’re socially inclined, go to a neighborhood or a community group meeting organizing around something you care about, instead of a tech-centered meetup. If you’re looking for inspiration or news about how tech is having a positive impact, take some time off HN and start finding sites where those are the focus.
Edit: deleted the thing which might be construed as promoting my team’s projects. If you want to know, I’m easy to contact. I’d hate for this to be misinterpreted as some kind of shill.
The solution is you must find ways not to look at news.
For me:
1. Blocking via my hosts file
2. Telling myself that HN is enough- if it doesn’t make HN then it wasn’t bad enough.
Listen to optimists.
https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_is_the_world_getting...
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a26487546/steven-pinker-wo...
- it's a text post, so not a link to anything.
- the title ends in a question mark.
Stop for 1 week. Come back and report how you feel.
There are lots of green energy startups. And startups around ways to consume atmospheric co2. What are you looking for?
To a certain extent, I agree that there are today floods of news and information that have never existed in preceding decades. But overall, over the centuries, trends have been tracing increasingly worse trajectories, contemporary news and information overload notwithstanding.
Coincidentally, I was re-reading the Powell memorandum today[1], and trying to unpack the layers upon layers of deception and evil and all the other failings of humanity in its every line. It is a reminder of the propensity of the human psyche to prey upon itself and other life, just because. (Also, this pre-dates the internet as we know it today, and was (and still is) being "implemented" by the powers that were and are.)
My unshakeable (though highly personal and highly subjective) worldview is that the systems that humans have been collectively building (or are being forced to build against their will) across many generations are force-multipliers to the detriment of this planet and all its lifeforms.
This leads to shrapnel like:
* System efficiencies are designed for, and forced towards accelerating exploitation at all costs rather than optimizing for general well-being.
* Human effort has largely been, and is still being massively misdirected for generations into building things that shouldn't have even been ideas to begin with. All modern "innovations" (ads? zero-privacy faang walled-gardens?) operate under the implicit assumptions that your consciousness is game; that your consciousness exists as the ultimate cannon-fodder to satisfy these "innovations", and then some? F*ck that noise.)
* We have more hydrocarbons and their residues inside and around living things today, than in earlier decades.
* There is more water draining away from the poles and into the oceans than ever before.
* There is more orchestrated exploitation of the planet and its organisms than before.
As for me, I address it by a bit of selflessness and selfishness combined, being both single and childfree by choice. I've seriously considered offing myself. I refuse to bring a child into a world accelerating downhill, and forced human reproduction (just like your tasty chicken came to be) is actually beginning to take root in some places around this world (see what's up with Roe v Wade these days, as an example.) That sentiment will probably keep spreading rapidly across the world in the years to come.
I know I am to blame to some extent for the world I end up creating through my actions and my profession (as maybe you do as well.) But I have really, sincerely and honestly tried to do my bit as well: never owned or cared for a car, barely ride a motorbike a couple score kilometers a month, veggie, adore my cats. I know it doesn't amount to anything in the grand scheme of things, but hey, my cats purr at me, my poops are just better with all that fiber and I like learning to cook new things that aren't heart-attack food if I'd have to buy them instead.
It is sad that the only way to "win" (atleast in my mind?) is not to play the game: every day I have lived is the most powerful reinforcement of having made the choices I made. I have some regrets, but those pale in comparison to knowing that my children and descendants will never have to suffer through the minefields and exclusion-zones that many generations before me have laid out for them in full coherence and with full force of will. That pain and regret is a small price to pay for such an assurance.
[1] https://law2.wlu.edu/deptimages/Powell%20Archives/PowellMemo...
/soapbox
edit: formatting
It can be argued that news can still be obtained elsewhere and I'd agree, but that isn't the advice I've been seeing here. It's pretty much just "walk away from news and social media" without any mention to where to go instead or some sort of platitude about how "things aren't really that bad".
Ignorance isn't going to fix anything, or help people prepare for what's coming or come to terms with what's happening now.
Things right now are not great. It's not just because of doom and gloom media (plenty of things are objectively messed up, no yellow journalism necessary), it's not just because of the internet allowing us to be more aware of the issues (the internet isn't exactly new at this point, and a lack of awareness about genuine problems should concern us far more).
Your stress is not abnormal or unreasonable. We should all be feeling more stressed out right now, either because of threats to our freedoms or our democracies, or because the effects of climate change are becoming harder to ignore, or because our children are being killed in their classrooms, or because disease is spreading, or because prices have skyrocketed, or because of acts of cruelty going on around us, or any of the other problems which are developing and/or worsening.
I'll propose an alternative: Keep paying attention. In fact, if there's something in particular that really worries you then really pay attention. Learn all you can about that issue. Consider what kinds of things might improve the situation, evaluate the extent to which there are things you personally can do help improve them and to better prepare yourself if they don't improve. If you find them, take those steps. Be proactive.
If there's really nothing you can do, or you've already done all you can then keep an eye on the situation for changes and opportunities, but try to come to terms with things outside of your control because either way we're stuck with them. Instead focus your efforts on the next thing that troubles you.
Climate change isn't something you can solve on your own, but you can stay informed and prepare. School shootings aren't something you can solve, but you can vote and campaign for gun control legislation and if you have children you can take steps to help them prepare. You'll likely have to expand your search for ways to help beyond start ups. Startups are about making money, any "making the world a better place" is incidental.
I would recommend getting out of marketing. You seem to recognize that you're in a toxic industry that's hurting people. Let it go. You've got skills that transfer. Maybe you can't find work saving the world, but there are plenty of jobs that don't involve rubbing salt in our collective wounds.
Also, consider talking to a therapist because while it won't help the underlying stressors it can help you find ways to productively deal with living under the stressful times we're experiencing, and if nothing else it's one more proactive thing you can do. All that stress and anxiety is your body telling you that there is a problem and that you should act. It's telling you to make a move and to pay attention. Doing those things is far better than trying to ignore the problem and failing (because you aren't blind) and ending up stuck feeling helplessness and despair.
Finally, take care of yourself. You'll be in a better position to handle whatever the future brings the healthier you are. Stress and depression are terrible for your physical health as well as your mental state. Treat your body better if you can.
My advice is that in the places where you can't fix the problem and help others, prepare and take care of yourself. Either way, keep moving and working toward something.
I've been around for a handful of decades and things at present really are exceptionally bad, but nothing stays the same forever and no matter how different our future ends up looking, there'll be some good times there too. The trick is in getting through to those good days to come.
There are two primary schools of thought in play here, one is a devolutionary ideology focused on a return to god, traditional values, homeschooling, and a massive rollback of mankind's progress landing us back in the 50's at best, and somewhere in the middle of the Victorian era at worst. On the other hand there is the progressive movement toward a more enlightened future, a gradual dismantling of localized nationalism, religious dogma as law, and our greed based economy in favor of a more balanced and rational approach to wealth, production, and equality. And IMO if humanity is ever going to project ourselves out into the universe successfully, or even perhaps simply to survive for more than 50 more years, we absolutely must work together as a species. Cooperation and unity is the only way, but with roughly 40% believing that would land them in the fiery pits of hell... well we seem to have reached an evolutionary impasse where progressive minds that desire a road forward need to either convince and convert the others, or find some way to nullify their objections, the trump years taught us that reasoning with them is nearly impossible. fanatical religious conviction anchored in delusion is difficult to reverse. So then it is on to plan B I suppose... hope fully whatever form that takes is over quickly. Then we can start to worry about the north pole, I hear its relocating to somewhere in the Indian Ocean...
My point in all this is simple, Things are NOT good, and in fact are going to get worse before they get better, a LOT worse. But this is not hopeless, nor is it devolutionary. This is in fact the dawning of the next age of mankind, and as with any major change or growth spurt, it is not going to be easy… growing pains are unavoidable and this one is gonna be a doozy. But the reality is that in spite of the difficulty, we are going to be much better off once it is said and done, and the world that our children will inherit will be a much better one than the one we grew up in. I can look back to my high school years in the early 90s and recall how hard it was for me as I was struggling to accept my homosexuality and how much harder it was because everyone around me had been mocking and bullying me for it for many years prior to my own realization. Yet now I see kids coming out in middle school to love and acceptance and support… churches fly rainbow flags for pride month, it’s a very different world, and while homophobia is still alive and well, its not universally accepted as the norm and is condemned more often than not. We continue to grow as a species and we do I one person at a time, by choice, every day… we write the narrative that defines out universe, we look at the world with hope rather than fear, love instead of hate and we manifest those qualities on the world around us. By keeping your mind open to beauty and hope, challenging your fear and doubt and hate, and speaking positively to the people you come in contact with you create hope and positive energy that absolutely has an effect on everything and person you come in contact with.
If we stare fear and hopelessness in the face and deny it, it looses its power over us and it cannot also then spread its negative influence THRU us… you don’t have to be a carrier of this insipid poison, you can choose to seek out the good and positive things in the world and seek to enhance them and bring them to the attention of others… if we all make the conscious choice to be better… then the whole world will change and mankind will be able to come together in unity and evolve instead of destroy ourselves and each other with fear, violence and hate. This is our choice and we must make it anew every single day.
In the words of my favorite student of catastrophism…
Eyes open, No fear, Be safe everyone