ref. "it's happening now in particular, more than at other times in history even when mass media existed.", mass media before was nothing like the individual mass media made possible with rise of the blogging, youtube, facebook and so on. Individual doomerism may be amplified by the internet which lets us absorb and reflect each others anxieties much more easily than before.
I don't think the world is any worse today (I should qualify this but it would take a while), but rather people have access to more narratives than they are equipped to handle. Community is easier when we can agree on how to act with one another and what things are important to think about/do.
I love this Apologist business. Catch and justify your initial intuition for the answer as well as come up with what /should be/ the answer.
APOLOGIST: How did I decide what to write?
APOLOGIST: I thought of a few different scenarios. one being my parent's generation which grew up in socialist India, which tell me they were happier than young people seem to be today, some of them believed it was because of cultural unity i.e. a lack of narrative contention.
> Individual doomerism may be amplified by the internet which lets us absorb and reflect each others anxieties much more easily than before
Fair point. Why anxieties, though, why not all the other emotions equally? Or maybe I'm cherry-picking, and there are several other categories of universal narrative besides apocalypse?
APOLOGIST: I kept this comment half-written in a background tab so that I would magically have a better insight about narrative coordination.
Somewhat glib: Anxieties are an emotion which make us reach out to others.
As far as universal narratives go, I think of OUR COUNTRY IS THE BEST COUNTRY. Also WE ARE OPPRESSED. But I meant narratives in a more everyday sense, in that, with the decline of mass media people have less in common, they're watching different things, and I wonder if there's more value fluctuation between groups.
Dreams are the oldest form of media. They're being replaced by social media et al. How many people are exchanging their sleeping hours for scrolling ones? Every medium has a different set of devices that leads to the message being processed differently. The visual and personal nature of social media makes it the best proxy for sharing dreams so far, but the viral factor makes it too noisy. It's fantastic for sharing the shape/vibe of a problem, the vaguest feeling that something is wrong. But to come up with an interpretation, a solution for that problem would require something more nuanced and less lossy, an indepth psychoanalysis. Cooler forms of media such as novels capture more nuance, but they don't have the virality or attention capture of social media.
See also: "Sure, I'll go ahead and incorporate that into my belief system". It seems like there is a tendency for brains to collect shiny ideas that line up with other shiny ideas, sometimes in non-obvious ways. But I wouldn't trust it to always be correct about anything except the fact that it likes the idea. It sure does like it! Nobody can tell it otherwise.
Hmm. I really like the idea of unconscious moods surfacing as doomerism and I feel that those unconscious moods are real. But I'm not convinced that those unconscious moods are specifically about today being "worse in complex but directly perceptible ways". It feels to me like saying "I have a headache, therefore I must have bruised my head": it could be related to the head, but it also could be unrelated; maybe I slept poorly or didn't drink enough water or something. Similarly, I think that unconscious moods surfacing as doomerism *could* mean that life is terrible, but I suspect it means something quite different and harder for doomers to put into words, which surfaces as doomerism.
Let's make it a little more objective. One of the common refrains of doomers is that we're stuck in "late-stage capitalism heckscape", where you work non-stop until you die. But in fact, the number of hours we work per week is at record lows. Back in the 1800s people casually worked 70-hour work weeks, or 14-hour days. That's much, much worse than today! But it's only today that we have this common refrain that life is a void where you work until you die. It's hard for me to consider that evidence and also agree that modern people have it worse.
Obviously, part of the problem here is that people who worked 14-hour days (or suffered in the past in some other way) aren't around to tell us how much worse it used to be. And don't even get me started on how people in the past had to live through world wars, the invention of the nuclear bomb, etc. Again, I do agree with the overall claim that something is wrong - I just don't think it's that the present is worse than the past.
yeah, I think that's basically true – I'm not claiming that the present is definitely *net* worse, only that it's likely worse on certain important axes. I'd also guess that dreams work more at surfacing truths we don't (yet) recognize consciously; they don't need to tell us anything we're already reading off a graph. So the contents of cultural myth might be more skewed toward pointing out the nebulous effects, versus the dominant ones.
ref. "it's happening now in particular, more than at other times in history even when mass media existed.", mass media before was nothing like the individual mass media made possible with rise of the blogging, youtube, facebook and so on. Individual doomerism may be amplified by the internet which lets us absorb and reflect each others anxieties much more easily than before.
I don't think the world is any worse today (I should qualify this but it would take a while), but rather people have access to more narratives than they are equipped to handle. Community is easier when we can agree on how to act with one another and what things are important to think about/do.
I love this Apologist business. Catch and justify your initial intuition for the answer as well as come up with what /should be/ the answer.
APOLOGIST: How did I decide what to write?
APOLOGIST: I thought of a few different scenarios. one being my parent's generation which grew up in socialist India, which tell me they were happier than young people seem to be today, some of them believed it was because of cultural unity i.e. a lack of narrative contention.
> Individual doomerism may be amplified by the internet which lets us absorb and reflect each others anxieties much more easily than before
Fair point. Why anxieties, though, why not all the other emotions equally? Or maybe I'm cherry-picking, and there are several other categories of universal narrative besides apocalypse?
APOLOGIST: I kept this comment half-written in a background tab so that I would magically have a better insight about narrative coordination.
Somewhat glib: Anxieties are an emotion which make us reach out to others.
As far as universal narratives go, I think of OUR COUNTRY IS THE BEST COUNTRY. Also WE ARE OPPRESSED. But I meant narratives in a more everyday sense, in that, with the decline of mass media people have less in common, they're watching different things, and I wonder if there's more value fluctuation between groups.
I really like the phrase "narrative coordination"
Dreams are the oldest form of media. They're being replaced by social media et al. How many people are exchanging their sleeping hours for scrolling ones? Every medium has a different set of devices that leads to the message being processed differently. The visual and personal nature of social media makes it the best proxy for sharing dreams so far, but the viral factor makes it too noisy. It's fantastic for sharing the shape/vibe of a problem, the vaguest feeling that something is wrong. But to come up with an interpretation, a solution for that problem would require something more nuanced and less lossy, an indepth psychoanalysis. Cooler forms of media such as novels capture more nuance, but they don't have the virality or attention capture of social media.
See also: "Sure, I'll go ahead and incorporate that into my belief system". It seems like there is a tendency for brains to collect shiny ideas that line up with other shiny ideas, sometimes in non-obvious ways. But I wouldn't trust it to always be correct about anything except the fact that it likes the idea. It sure does like it! Nobody can tell it otherwise.
The main thing I would trust it to be doing is indicating a non-obvious way that the shines line up.
Hmm. I really like the idea of unconscious moods surfacing as doomerism and I feel that those unconscious moods are real. But I'm not convinced that those unconscious moods are specifically about today being "worse in complex but directly perceptible ways". It feels to me like saying "I have a headache, therefore I must have bruised my head": it could be related to the head, but it also could be unrelated; maybe I slept poorly or didn't drink enough water or something. Similarly, I think that unconscious moods surfacing as doomerism *could* mean that life is terrible, but I suspect it means something quite different and harder for doomers to put into words, which surfaces as doomerism.
Let's make it a little more objective. One of the common refrains of doomers is that we're stuck in "late-stage capitalism heckscape", where you work non-stop until you die. But in fact, the number of hours we work per week is at record lows. Back in the 1800s people casually worked 70-hour work weeks, or 14-hour days. That's much, much worse than today! But it's only today that we have this common refrain that life is a void where you work until you die. It's hard for me to consider that evidence and also agree that modern people have it worse.
Obviously, part of the problem here is that people who worked 14-hour days (or suffered in the past in some other way) aren't around to tell us how much worse it used to be. And don't even get me started on how people in the past had to live through world wars, the invention of the nuclear bomb, etc. Again, I do agree with the overall claim that something is wrong - I just don't think it's that the present is worse than the past.
yeah, I think that's basically true – I'm not claiming that the present is definitely *net* worse, only that it's likely worse on certain important axes. I'd also guess that dreams work more at surfacing truths we don't (yet) recognize consciously; they don't need to tell us anything we're already reading off a graph. So the contents of cultural myth might be more skewed toward pointing out the nebulous effects, versus the dominant ones.