Comment by mpalmer
7 hours ago
Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?
7 hours ago
Our vocabulary is so stunted. Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?
It's not a vocab problem. It's inherent to the human brain, which appears to be fundamentally designed to prefer to view the world in terms of stories, with heroes, villains, and a narrative arc.
You don't have to tell me - even Bill S: "and what's he then that says I play the villain?"
Unfortunately, the collective quality of our storytelling is waning. Most people watch the least common denominator.
So now the greater human truth you allude to is being filtered through the streaming age mode of storytelling, and people have arcs, and bingo cards, and everything is reduced to water-cooler levels of urgency and relevance.
Is it though? Or are we simply in an environment that is heavily skewed toward "Great Person" theory narratives?
This isn't a new thing. Ancient stories like the Iliad or the Odyssey are discreetly historical records of a particular region mixed in with mythological foundations of a particular culture, but framed as the stories of Achilles ("Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.") and Odysseus ("Speak, memory, of the cunning hero, the wanderer, blown off course time and again after he plundered Troy's sacred heights."). Likewise, ancient fables and parables are moral lessons couched in terms of stories with protagonists whose actions demonstrate the intended lesson, and this sort of thing is universal across every ancient culture for which we have records. Stories stick in the human mind, and they're what humans most prioritize transmitting forward through time.
Nobody can gauge the world for what it really is. It has always been like that. Proper empiricism is expensive and often enough impossible.
There's inability, and there's not trying.
When Microslop bans "Microslop" I don't need to try. I use their software daily, I know how their technical support is utterly fucked now and how rare the heroic power user actually solving the case for every co-sufferer has become. And I know I'm not alone.
Just recently they fixed the Win 11 start menu bug where they forgot to expose any functionality behind the "hide mobile pane" button. At least the forced recents are gone now, Jesus Christ! This is toddler level software engineering.
It's a corporation suffering from corporate things and the ridiculously out of control financialization of everything, feeding on its insane first mover advantage and network effects. This attempt to hide it is simply embarrassing.
There's only gonna be so much thinking or research involved and forget contacting primary sources or anything like that.
1 reply →
Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
Your complaint is that young people use English in a way you dislike.
Or devolve. Perhaps it reflects an increasing detachment from reality in younger generations.
The complaint isn't actually about they way they're speaking. The way they're speaking is a symptom of the way they're thinking.
In an age of the dumbest, most propagandistic narratives since the 50s, pumped out by the largest multinational corporations in history. Young people are looking at the world through shitty Marvel movie-colored glasses.
It's also not their fault, and the fictions they think they're living through are written by gen Xers being paid by boomers. It is not a youthful point of view, it is the sabotage of any emergence of a youth point of view, substituted with Disney product.
> Language shifts and evolves over time as the lives and viewpoints of speakers evolve.
This is a "things just happen" argument. Things happen for reasons.
"Has no one else noticed that we increasingly talk about the world like it's fiction playing out in front of us?"
Most of our world is a fiction or at least a highly distorted version of reality.
My advice to people is: Get out into nature, stop believing everything on the news and meet people in person.
Most of the news is ragebait designed to get you angry at specific targets rather than the systems themselves.