I am totally on the bottom right group.
A distinct lack of “drugs/degeneracy” category
I think that’s a subset of “disappeared”. If you followed up on the people who disappeared, it’s a coin flip as to whether they just hate people or have fallen on hard times.
Hey, just because I’m a degenerate doesn’t mean I don’t care about maintaining healthy relationships with my friends!
Then we’ll work with the admission board to see if we can’t get you into “obsessed with work” on a “degeneracy” path.
Uh you have friends?
What about those of us who both hate people and have fallen on hard times?
Believe or not, that’s still a “disappearing.”
Might even be a double disappearing.
yeah I feel severely underrepresented
I’m proudly in the “obsessed with work” category (organizing working class unions)
God speed. What’s the latest state of unions in the modern technological age?
I joined my work’s union.
No ones going to be working soon. Are you going to pivot?
Proud member of the bottom right. Oddly, it has made me a big topic of conversation among my friends, and I don’t get that at all.
I don’t think that’s odd. People’s lives are boring and not much happens, it’s interesting to talk about unknowns.
It’s like that scene in good will hunting. The best part of my day is when I walk up to the door and imagine you just left.
You know, for about a decade, everyone was pushed to share everything they did on social media. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on the scale of cigarettes and smoking inside and in airplanes and in hospitals and in schools. No one thought it was a stupid idea, and a lot of people pushed it as the only way to get jobs and show you’re a clever chimp that can internet so hard because interneting hard was the cool new thing.
Lower right is the hangover from that. Anyone I didn’t find or didn’t find me between 2008 and 2018 wasn’t ever worth connecting with. The people that did find me were nice to hear from once, and we haven’t talked ever again, despite being connected, for 10+ years.
My grandparents and their parents, etc. went their whole lives never seeing people again and not knowing what happened to them because they moved one time and they didn’t know their new address. Whole movies were about that. Elvis had a song about that. The last episode of the first season of The Real World ended with everyone moving out of the apartment, and once that landline and address no longer went to those people, it was 100% possible that those people would be gone from each others’ lives forever.
Y’all, we’re not supposed to collect and keep 27,000 casual contacts throughout our lives. It’s unnatural. Our brains are not built for it. We’re made to have a few dozen up to 100-ish close connections that mean something, including family you don’t pick.
Email some old friends you don’t text with daily. Send anyone you truly care about an email to say hi. If they respond, then great. If not, don’t worry about it. Enjoy high fidelity communications with those who mater to you.
We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.
The argument that something is “unnatural” has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity’s defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.
That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.
Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.
Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself “we’re humans, we change our environment to suit our needs.”
Though I think you’re excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don’t want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn’t feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It’s a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can’t participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.
Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn’t gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don’t physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren’t selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I’m so far out of it that I can’t tell.
Based perspective on this, thank you. :)
Gen Z here. Burnt out of social media. Deleted every mainstream social media app. If you want the fastest way to never ever hear from me, it would be email. That shits incredibly overwhelming. I check my physical mailbox more than I check my email. The goal is to get away from the computer.
No, I must disagree. Most of my friends are right in the centre. Many are starting families, but are also working on careers and are well intentioned gym goers who I speak to less and less because life is too busy.
How the fuck does anyone have the energy for all that?
They don’t do all equally well, and none are done above average.
Discipline. Basically.
I don’t have an answer for that. You just do what you have to do.
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Yeah I was about to say - I’m all of these things. I feel like that’s pretty common.
I know a guy who is three of these things. Goes to the gym 6 days a week, works in a hospital, starting a business, has a wife and a kid, and he still manages to have time to hang out once or twice a week. Man is as successful as I am not
As someone who is some of those things as well, I would love to know what the wife and/or child are doing during all those activities. Because something has to give when you’re doing that much.
In my experience, that balance is really hard, and even in the most hospitable, high-quality-of-life places, that balance is not exactly always something that is nurtured and valued by the systems in place.
I think he really is just built different. I’m good friends with both parents, and knew his wife long before he did. Both of them are working on higher education, kid goes to daycare most days every week. It’s not like he never sees his son either. Usually when I hang out, we’re watching his boy while we play BG3, which is nice because he can just walk away for a minute whenever a diaper needs changed
Having recieved a large sum of life insurance money after his father passed away certainly helped with the house buying and the car maintaining and the education pursuing, but his time management is pure skill
I wonder if your friend can sleep only five hours and still function to the maximum. Apparently it is genetics. Napoleon and Thatcher could sleep less than 7 hours and could still think sharp and be fresh as a daisy.
This could be funny if it wasn’t such a sad outlook on life.
I’m number four. I mean, I was. Those people have probably all forgotten about me by now.
It is a peaceful life.
The disappeared ones. I’m one of those.
I’ll tell you what we are up to. We are
40s is the same, but one of them is dead
I was going to say: There’s no space for dead, moved to Austin in the 10s, or crippling pain killer addiction.
All sub sections of category 4
Obsessed with work is the most obnoxious type of person. It’s a validation seeking behavior that I find intolerable.
In general I agree but a few people are lucky enough to have jobs that are cool enough to be obsessed with. That doesn’t excuse them from being able to talk about other stuff with other people, but I think it’s fine for them to be that way. I work in some fairly advanced science facilities and some of the people I’ve met are working on stuff that’s crazy enough and difficult enough that you almost need to be a little obsessed to succeed at it.
We do the best we can with what we know at the time. We’re products of our parents and environments. You can’t blame somebody for that.
this goes for literally everything. Someone might still experience it as obnoxious and intolerable. Me included
I am with you on generally trying to understand the reasons for a particular behavior. Does not always help with being annoyed by it though. Especially if they apply their world view to everyone else around them and start to judge you for enjoying work/life balance
I’m all for understanding, but my line is drawn when the understanding fails to lead to action. My oldest friend still chooses validation seeking over all else, despite knowing that it’s the crux of all his problems and knowing he has the support of everyone, he’s adamant that it’s not on him to change and it’s on his support network to accept this as who he is and accommodate it even at their detriment. 24 years, I can’t handle that. I’m not willing to undo changes I made for my mental health to accommodate a lifestyle he’s admitted to being toxic.
I agree wholeheartedly. I just don’t like this particular behavior. I’m a little more European in that way.
But my job is awesome and I really enjoy it and I’d do it for free if I didn’t have to worry about money. I just want to share the fun fulfilling stuff I did with my friends :(
Luckily we’re all autistic enough to tell me off if they don’t want to hear about it.
Counterpoint, the best way to organize unions is to become obsessed with everything happening within your workplace
I am not sure I’ve ever met a labor organizer but I’ve definitely met vest guy who just wants to talk about his job and if I try and change the subject a bit they ask me about my job…
Bonus points if they start telling a story with names from their work as if I know them.
Disappeared can have a lot of dif meanings behind it these days.
Yeah like, does the pub count ?
Been spending the last 20 years at the Winchester, waiting for all this to blow over.
That’s a fair effort. You’ll possibly be there for another 20 then.
The “Why is nobody joining my games on X-Box?” answer guide.
Most of this was correct
I’m happily none of the above.
I was happily in the bottom 2, now I just need to get back on the career grind…
please help, the software industry is in a rut and my child needs food.Have you tried being an AI? I hear tech is only hiring AI now.
unfortunately I am not “actually indian”
