Comment by AlotOfReading
10 hours ago
The parent comments are talking about how the game is negatively impacting society. Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them. One of the many problems with that suggestion is that it's hard for your best self/life to emerge in a bleak future.
I think it's possible to "pick and choose" to some extent. I've found most of the bleak future stuff goes away if I turn off my phone, but since I need it to contact people in 2026, I try and give things their due, and, to the best of my ability, ignore the more unpleasant aspects of modern life. I think the landline telephone is a good example. It was fun to chit-chat with friends on the phone, but when a telemarketer called, I either hung up immediately, or said "stop calling," then hung up. It can be the same way in modern society. Weight the conversations with warm-bodied people higher, and stop scrolling as much (to put it overly-simplistically).
It’s done wonders for my free time and mood by deleting my Reddit account and restricting HN to toilet time. Instead of reading rage bait American news I do a daily scan of BBC. All those are sources of negativity and stress that bring nothing of value to your life. I invest my newfound time and energy into my family, hobbies, and health.
Nice. That feels like the correct way to me
You can’t ignore climate change
Ignoring it is a tradition at this point in the US...
fair
That's not what I said. I didn't say anything about leaving society, I alluded to leaving their society. That's the thing: people keep giving these guys money and attention. If you take that away, they become more than irrelevant. Simplified: if they're going West, you go East.
The more "small time" people reject this narrative that we need a bunch of elitist white guys shoving their mediocrity down our throats, the faster we rebuild a society they're barred from accessing.
Can you explain how to do that without either drawing attention to them via discussions like this or leaving society altogether? I don't personally fund a16z, but my taxes do. Calls to coordinated action to stop giving them money also count as attention.
Leave Babylon behind and go build local businesses and communities in what they refer to as "flyover country." That's what I'm doing. Easy? Fuck no. But does it take their relevancy away from them? At the scale of everyone who isn't a coastal barnacle: big time.
They view the rest of this country with disdain and indifference. I'm suggesting that others quit looking at these people as lords and sages to be placed up on a pedestal. Most of them are quite incompetent, skill-less, and frankly, not cool enough to want to hang out with (why they're making "jokes" about there only being two jobs left in the world in the future: Anthropic employees and hookers for Anthropic employees [1]). I'm sorry but I'm not taking direction from a bunch of dorks who can't get laid without paying for it. And I'd take a wild guess that given the climate, the lion's share of America is with me.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tjrCFuEA1ds
2 replies →
> Your suggestion is to check out and leave society to them
Absolutely not. Their suggestion is to play a different game. You don't even have to play a game with win conditions. You can just play to play.