Disinformation. More and more difficult to have conversations rooted in truth and objectiveness.
Identity politics that infiltrates into how we view events without nuance, sophistication and offer blind support/hatred. It's a daily struggle to fight the mainstream media narratives and frankly, quite exhausting.
The people on my personal circle I like the most don't know basic math and are not interested in learning anything about it.
I can't talk with relatives about optimizing anything, because mostly they don't allow me to talk. When I do talk, they don't listen anything. For them, the game is just about status. Or politics. Trash talk all the time. Nothing objective. As time goes on, I talk less and less with them. I don't see any solution for this, and I feel guilty for thinking on giving up on trying to express my thoughts for them.
I feel bad about realizing I killed animals and ate their corpses my whole life. And this is considered the norm, and my family can make me feel bad for even considering not murdering more non-human animals. I feel bad the most of the world don't care about non-human animals.
I feel bad for not being able to buy for my mom a house that does not flood every rain that has been happening daily.
None. I think this is partly a function of age. I have as many complaints about the world as I did 10 or 20 years ago, but the extent to which I take these things personally or feel personally threatened by them, and the intensity of my emotions about them, have gone way down.
I’m somewhat scared to check my email inbox in the morning because every week or two there’s something in there that existentially threatens my company, like our app not getting approved in the app store or most recently Facebook inexplicably blocking our ads.
The huge amount of unnecessary pesticides around me and the paucity of insect life compared to my childhood. This is a disaster and won't end well.
Patterns desperate to reproduce themselves will ally themselves with cancer because they don't have better options.
to see younger people disregard the elderly. I witnessed once a 20-something year old and an (older than) 80- year old in a situation. The elder was pulling out of a garage on a hill and his car rolled back and tapped the younger persons car. She was so irate without giving regard to the fact that she could have given him him a fateful fright.
Ever since then, it's stood out to me whenever it happens.
War... used to, but now that we have less of it in the news, it's not on daily basis anymore. They just batch the statistics for larger chunks of time.
These months it's rather the expected shifts in our education system which is planned to move online to some extent. Nobody knows what exactly it means, everybody expects everybody "to defect". E. g., low quality textbooks and especially the online framework (including lack of Internet connection in some places); overall lack of motivation; even lower standards of (self) grading... it gets to me because my kid will be in his third year, I will have to somehow teach him despite everything and work, too. The problem is not that this is a temporary solution to the corona-crisis, the problem is that it's going to stay afterwards.
I now think about it all like a Gift from the Gods. A charmed chalice, a ring of Power, you name it: something not "fatal" itself, but inexorably and ungovernably causing ripples in the world. Something everybody wants to use himself, and knows everybody does. Something that cannot be mislaid, in our legendary times.
Lately it's a reddit argument I had recently.
Not just the argument itself. One asshole I could deal with. The fact that people upvoted them...
Like, there's nothing that particularly stands out to me about /r/programming readers. As far as I know they're generally fairly normal humans. And a bunch of generally fairly normal humans apparently thought that those comments were good?
:(
That was instructive.
I think the direct reason for your disappointment is simply that the people that would have upvoted you just didn't find the conversation interesting enough to follow. Or to put it differently, they're mistake theorists and didn't see anything there to learn or fix. The other guys don't have to be worse people or less intelligent - just more conflict theorists, which I think they probably are. Ergo more upvotes, even deeper in conversation.
As an example: I realized I didn't even upvote you. I agreed with you...
They're not good comments. But maybe they express an opinion held by r/programming.*
*The members that read that post. (It's a shame that the number of people who voted isn't available there, just the sum.)