Comment by Fiveplus
2 days ago
I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy.
In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction was something like = I provide logistics and you provide content; like the story of your cross-country bike trip.
Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed. We have largely replaced the P2P protocol of kindness with a sort of centralized platform of service. We stripped out the human latency and the requirement for social reciprocity and replaced it with currency and star ratings. It makes me surreal to think about this.
It's a choice. I go to the supermarket twice a week, not shopping for much. I switched the store I use three, four months ago, but I can already talk about some of the employees at the store I visit. Louis is back where he grew up right now because his 97-year-old grandfather died. Among other things, he feels lucky grandpa's passing came after the new year because of his time-off allotment. Nikki had great holidays, mostly because her adult daughter was here for a week. Nadine ("Shh.") has decided she's going to retire at the end of the month but hasn't yet told anyone at the store.
Raffy, the UPS delivery guy I see maybe five times a year? He's doing well, finally feeling things slowing down some after the holidays. His fiancé will finish her graduate degree this spring, then they're going to decide if they want to stay here or move back to the state where they were born. They like it here, but think job opportunities will be better back home.
I'm sure many here are familiar with "This is Water," the commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace. Many often cite his line, "Everybody worships," his observation that we all hold aspects of life in reverence, whether religious things or otherwise. It's a valid, pithy point, but I always thought the key part to his speech comes later and has been widely overlooked:
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
He delivered that speech in 2005. Before the modern smartphone. All those people I mentioned earlier were strangers. That's no longer the case because all of us chose to interrupt what we were doing and open up a little to someone unfamiliar. It's a choice. Or, as Bob Dylan once sang,
Freedom, just around the corner from you
But with truth so far off, what good will it do
My aunt lived to 94 and was in a retiremement community outside Boston. She never married (had some long term relationships) but was always interested in people. I used to visit regularly from the UK, and she was always introducing me to people around the community, nurses, helpers, gardeners, whatever. She would invariably give me a potted life history of these people, who she might only have known a few months.
No need for crosswords or other activities to keep her brain active - talking to people and remembering their stories is what kept her going!
Before moving to the community, she had a house in Cambridge (Boston) and let out the upper floor to students, post grads etc - and kept up with many of them long after they had left. Connection was definitly a skill of hers.
this comment was beautiful. In my younger years, I used to be so embarrassed when I'd go grocery shopping or elsewhere with my mother and she would ask about service people's lives and stories. I used to hate it and feel uncomfortable and wonder what the point even was.
Thank you for completely changing my perspective, on something I haven't thought about in a long time
This was a deeply moving comment, and has changed my perspective in a way that I will never forget. Thank you.
Ahhhhhh I love this and love that you referenced This Is Water something I've held dear to me as my default perception of life. There's so much to the world which we can access on our very doorstep, we just need to open up to it.
It's an easy thing to forget if you don't do it consistently enough to be 2nd nature.
Thank you
> Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed.
Not just strangers. The content tentacle reaches even deeper. You can go to a restaurant and see two people (presumably partners, who know and love one another, or friends who at least like to hang out together) sitting together separately scrolling their phones, lost down their own personal content-holes. When Joe Rogan is more interesting than talking about your day with your spouse or friend, I think it's pretty sad, and indicates a even bigger problem.
One question could be: which set of people know more about each other at the end of dinner.
Dinner time used to be a time of the day where couples and families would have the first chance since breakfast to discuss their day. With all of different available forms of communication today, my partner and I already know what happened during the other’s day and we are doing something like planning the next adventure.
I work from home and “retired my wife” six years ago. She’s home most of the time unless she’s out either teaching fitness classes or taking fitness classes. We talk all of the time off and on during the day.
We also travel a lot (nothing glorious or expensive and I know all of the credit card hacks), if you see us on our phones when we are out, we are usually looking at our shared calendar/Google sheet plotting and planning what we are going to do next.
We are 51/50 and have a window where our kids are grown and our parents see mostly healthy and independent and we are both in good shape and gym rats
To be fair, you don't know if that couple is just out for dinner because they didn't make anything at home that day. You don't know if they've been around eachother and off their phones for the past 24 hours. I have the opposite anecdotal experience to yours. Lots of people at restaurants are not on their phones but I've also stopped caring to look honestly.
Or maybe one of them is responding to another human being in their life over their phone, and as that results in a break in conversation, the other person starts using theirs.
People were doing this with the TV, the radio, the newspaper. To an extent at least. The phone is so easy to use it can come out in pretty much any situation. Even at the urinal.
> When Joe Rogan is more interesting than talking about your day with your spouse or friend ...
... you may (just may!) have been married for a rather long time. I still think that is sad, but in a different sort of way than it would be for younger couples/pairs.
I think maybe this happens in waves? I’ve been with my SO a while, over a decade at least, so we’ve run through the backlog of stories. But there’s usually at least one or two new things to talk about from our independent lives. I guess if we were both retired, we would probably spend less time apart, and have less time to accumulate stories the other didn’t know about.
Although sometimes we just play the crossword, taking turns on one of our phones, when waiting for the waiter.
Rogan pushes fairly regressive and misogynistic narratives, so I would expect a "Rogan guy" to not have a great relationship with his wife and would not at all be surprised they stopped getting along or just lacked a lot in common anymore, unless she's also a Rogan type.
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Put another way, we are all competing with professional entertainers now. Sink or swim...
>> In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value.
Haha! In the 90's I picked up a hitchhiker on the Pensylvania turnpike. I thought 'oh, someone to talk to". After a brief conversation he said where to wake him up and slept until we were there...
You should try again sometime. I try to pick up hitchhikers when I get the chance (I rarely drive) and always get to hear some truly interesting stories - I have yet to regret picking someone up.
I haven't seen someone hitchhiking in probably 20 years.
I would encourage people to test this out for themselves, I think you will find a different result. People today are starved for in-person connection, but are afraid to initiate the conversation.
This doesn't come naturally to me, but after working on it over a few years, 95% of the time strangers are excited to chat and say hi and make a friend.
You mentioned working on it — do you have a particular strategy, venue, or opening line/guiding ethos that you find works well?
I love making friends with strangers, but usually rely on the "handshake protocol" of a casual observation or small talk that is then accepted (with a similar slight-deepening or extension of the thought) or rejected (casual assent or no response at all), until the bandwidth opens and I can foster a more meaningful moment of connection with a pivot like "Oh awesome that you do $THING for work. Do you enjoy what you do?" or "Oh I don't know much about $LOCATION_YOURE_FROM. Good spot for a vacation, or good spot to drive straight through?"
As somewhere between "thinks like an engineer" and "on the spectrum," I really enjoy hearing others' strategies or optimizations (optimizing for quality, connection, warmth) for social situations.
I found out that everybody has at least one subject that they are super passionate and knowledgeable about, and that I can learn at least this one thing from any human being. So instead of pushing the conversation into my areas of expertise, I find it more fun for everybody to let people steer it to what they really care about. This way we both get a sense of connection, it takes the weight of my shoulder to have to perform or amuse people, I get to learn random interesting things, and on top of that people think I am an amazing conversational partner, even though its them who do most of the talking (lol). Sometime people go full autistic on you and give you a massive ear beating but then you always have the option of saying "hey, it's been great talking to you, but I gotta run for a $thing. see you around!"
FWIW I think you're already doing the thing. That's it. But I'd suggest trying not to care too much about optimisation. It's unnecessary in my view because it implicit puts goals & outcomes as the end, when it's, ore about meandering and seeing where things go, endless possibilities.
> "Oh I don't know much about $LOCATION_YOURE_FROM."
I always love the most to chat with strangers in line or wherever when I'm in a foreign country, as there's so much good dirt for digging with someone from a far away place. It's funny, though, the number of times I strike up a conversation with someone halfway around the world only to find out they live within a few miles of me. Last time I was in London, for example, the lady in line in front of me had an Australian accent, and I always enjoy talking to Aussies. Yep, she was an Aussie... Who lives a few towns over from me in the US, in the same apartment complex my wife lived in when I met her.
I'd echo this.
There does feel like some wide resignation (more so with younger people <35 if I can generalise a bit) that we're too far gone everyone being closed off. But I've generally found that there is no real resolve to that resignation. Many just do not want to, or feel comfortable, making the start. Once the start is done though, the pleasantness of the experience is generally visible.
Exactly this. I don't do it much in the USA to be honest, but when traveling.
Well, you're not wrong about novelty being a much rarer thing in the past but people rarely drove alone in total silence. 8-tracks and cassettes came along eventually but even before then, people listened to the radio which had a wide variety of music, news, sports, and call-in shows. Truckers had CB radios and would talk to other truckers and drivers to pass the time.
Those who didn't see much of the world before the last two decades have this impression that everyone was far less connected to the world and each other before the Internet. That's not strictly true... the Internet made long-distance connections and access to content easier, but the ease of access to entertainment (namely, social media) has greatly weakened local connections.
I saw somewhere here saying they want some kind of AI appliance that learns their regular commute and warns them about traffic and construction and I was like, dude, every radio station had regular traffic reports from helicopter pilots through the whole morning and evening drive times.
An individualized report tailored to your route at your time is much higher utility than periodic reports of a few popular routes provided at random intervals.
Also, all the big map apps already provide real time traffic so not sure what LLMs (“AI”) bring to the table.
I've seen it work the other way: some evangelical Christians picked me and friend up in Alaska and spent the whole ride proselytizing, ha ha.
I got picked up by a born again christian women hitch-hiking in the interior of British Columbia. She was telling us about smoking pot with her friends at a retirement home. Good times
Human contact is more scarce than ever, it's not fungible with podcasts or audiobooks, and most people are starving.
I've backpacked/hitchiked through Ireland few years back. It was easy to catch a ride, even easier to find somebody to let me pitch a tent on their land. People were open and kind and wanted to hear and share stories.
Yes but the large language STEM salad of "marginal utility of a stranger's story" and the "P2P protocol of kindness" is surely more authoritative than your real world experience.
When I look at stunning works of art (especially architecture - how did they build such tall structures when they didn't have cranes) from hundreds of years ago, first thought is - that should have taken a long time and tremendous effort.
But they didn't have Netflix, video games, YouTube... That could be at least a tiny contributor? Maybe
I'm fortunate, in that I participate in an "extracurricular" organization, in which we constantly tell each other our stories.
Most are damn interesting. People pay money, for fiction, that isn't as interesting as the stories I hear, almost daily, from the folks that lived them.
It's interesting, when someone talks about how he was shot, then pulls up his shirt, to show you the scar.
> "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull."
- Mark Twain
Now interruption is the default state, and attention is already fully saturated before another human even enters the picture
I dunno, I've picked up my share of hitchhikers and to me it wasn't about being a trade, it's about sharing presence and our stories. Not a transaction, but just sharing.
One time I was stopped on a single lane highway in the mountains, in driving rain, as a power pole was blocking the road. A fellow commuter was in the same boat, but he was on a motorcycle. I invited him in my car and we just chilled and shared some light conversation. No trade, nothing gained besides someone offering a little shelter to another.
People had CDs, tapes, radio for their long trips before spotify and podcasts. It was actually easier in the old day because all this stuff was more or less curated for you; record store stocking the popular music that would actually sell, radio dj playing the popular songs, various genres represented, even "underground" radio, same with tv and video stores, just turn it on and it plays no friction, vs the modern streaming era where "what will I watch?" or "I binged that already, now what?" is such a dilemma and source of friction since the algorithmic recommendations are usually trash, or pushing the first party slop content of the day the service doesn't have to pay a license for.
I dont think this is it as we've had radio and music since the 50s and mp3 audiobooks since the early 2000's.
I think this is just the communal values of that society. Its not entirely some weird transaction about being entertained, and that's just a really mercenary way to see human life.
A lot of cultures, especially in more rural areas, pity or feel responsibility for people walking far and will just offer them rides. Especially if there's risk in that area from storms or criminals or wild animals. Its something we've been doing since forever. I don't think its based on entertainment. I think talking and sharing is just a normal part of being human.
don't have time for any of that, must worry all the time how to survive in this super inflated economy.. 20 years ago one still made a wage and living..
I firmly believe that AI will disrupt this trend, because content will be overrun with predictable AI generated slop and we will appreciate genuine 100% human IRL stuff more.
I’ve long felt the same way. I think this will eventually happen but there’s going to be a lot more starving artists and other producers of emotionally meaningful works before we get there. The interesting problem down the line will be how to verify someone is human or something is human made.
I have nothing to base this on except anecdotal experience, but I really think this current generation (Gen Alpha?) is going to hate AI and anything related to it. One recent example: a friend’s kid’s third-grade class recently visited our local city hall and had a mock city council meeting with the mayor. One of the kids asked if we could “ban ChatGPT from the city.”
That's true, but hitchhiking declined in the late 70's, well before podcasts, Spotify, satellite radio, or even books on tape, so the availability of alternate content can't have been a factor.
Instead, I've heard a variety of alternative reasons for the decline in hitchhiking:
- govt and media fearmongering about dangerous hitchhikers - increased police enforcement - higher rates of car ownership - the Interstate Highway System made pulling over safely more difficult
> A stranger with a story was high value.
What? Really? I though the rule was cash, grass, or ass.
> replaced it with currency and star ratings
In addition, the socioeconomic gaps are wider. So much so that the software engineer rushing to their 10am meeting doesn't want your $50. The Uber driver does, though.
There is no such thing as a "software engineer ".