The Pace of Modern Life

Why is this a bad thing?

 

This is all very true, and this "separation" and rushed activities is pretty prevalent in society.

However, it is very irrelevant to me. Philosophy is generally not something I delve into, however, the whole issue with life needing to get off of Earth to elongate survival is more intriguing than minuscule losses of human interaction. While the issue I am more interesting in has a much longer timeline to answer, and the answer is much harder to figure out, the issue pointed out here is due to our own reliance on technology and will only get worse. Theres no answer to it, because humans can efficiently live alone better than ever before, and this ability will only get better. Altruistic people help the problem, but there is simply to many people that have a lust for success that stopping to talk to another person is a waste of their time.

example would be something like, the millions of people in modern society that live on a routine of working and sleeping, just so they can pay to work and sleep and hopefully reproduce, retire, and die. The time between working and sleeping is used to get to the reproducing, retiring, and dying time. Why should they stop for a second and interact with someone they don't need to? It's a negative mindset, but if you surveyed middle to low class unmarried working people under the age of let's say 40, the majority of people will probably dislike how their life runs, because of the issue brought up in this thread, and the work-sleep-mentality. However nothing will change, because it's the mindset of modern people. It'll worsen as society progress.

 

I read an article about a bunch of retired Yale graduates. The most common complaint they had with their life is they wish they did what they wanted to do, instead of constantly listening to others. Steve Jobs says don't listen to other people's dogma. And this stuff resonates with me.

I think you would like the book "Alone Together" (here it is on amazon). It's about how people today expect less from each other, emotionally. In a nutshell, we see what we want in people without really hearing them out. Though this seems contradictory to the first statement about the Yale graduates, I don't think it is.

I think it's a combination of people who are forced into things (careers, hobbies, who they hangout with, etc.) because of other people's dogma, and people who don't really understand one another because of said dogma. For instance, a father who forces their kid into becoming a lawyer, but the kid doesn't realize that the father only wants this because he failed his father (the kid's grandparent). So everyone is stuck doing things through dogma instead of actual reasoning.

There's a lot of psychological reasons that people seem to avoid (sometimes altogether) today. We're so stuck in taking people literally that we don't take the time or effort to really understand another human being.

Anyways, yeah, I get what you mean Jacket. Though the whole family watching tv together isn't entirely a bad thing I think, but only if it's all they do. 9 times out of 10 if my family watches tv we try to have some sort of dialogue/conversation afterward. Might seem effeminate/nerdy/other labels people force today, but those labels are dumb.

tl;dr (western) society doesn't know what it means to be human anymore. We might not be robots but we're turning into man-made apparatuses.

 

I think you are all missing the point of the xkcd strip entirely. It's saying that these exact same thoughts we are having, that things are now more hurried than they were in the past, that just a few years or decades ago people were more deliberate, these exact sentiments were being had as far back as 1871. So maybe things haven't changed much at all over long stretches of history. "Nothing is new under the sun", and all that.

 

That's precisely what I got from it. It reminded me of another attempt to convey this idea which, whilst not quite as insightful, is still funny:





I think what's particularly interesting about this idea in more general terms is how (or, indeed, whether) the phenomenon of nostalgia shifts with increases in the rate of change. For example, I notice that the practice of nostalgia with regards to gaming appears to be accelerating, to the point where you get 16 year olds engaging in quite strong nostalgia for how things were less than 5 years ago.

So, whilst I think the point that nostalgia and rose tinted glasses are a part of the human condition is true, I think there's some interesting discussion to be had about shifts in how quickly it sets in. I think many would argue a primarily chronological basis for such attitudes, the "small desk syndrome" of revisiting a school, for example. But I think there's also a strong aspect not just of the chronological distance from the point of nostalgia, but the number/frequency of intervening experiences. In contexts which change faster, such as gaming, nostalgia appears to accelerate even though the practical aspect of age does not. I'd love to know if anyone's discussed or studied this in more depth; the idea of experiential age, a dynamic form of mental ageing, and how it ties in with nostalgia

Does the rate of changing experience give a subconscious sense of increased experiential age, and thus greater cause for nostalgia? Or is it simply proportional to chronological age so far, thus younger people are more inclined to become nostalgic over shorter chronological distances because it seems more significant to them?

 

I understand the first, but not so much the second part..

As for the rest, that's interesting. But after rethinking things it seems to me that "shortened" nostalgia is a product of being part of an age of information. Things have developed faster today than they ever have, I think, so kids naturally become nostalgic when they hear of something that vanished from the radar after it was replaced with something new and more efficient.

The comic is intriguing but I see it mostly as satire.. there's truth to it, being that there will always be people who take advantage of technology in order to exploit, and people will probably nearly always learn from those mistakes. But a part of me thinks people are becoming so wrapped up in the constant stimulation of modern, 1st world life that there's danger we might become simply unable to deal with some dangers due to the complexity of technology. I've recently read, for instance, that there's a belief that the 3 mile island nuclear accident in 1979 and NASA's dealings with the Challenger incident in 1982 were simply anomalies that a modern era just has to deal with, and can't prevent. This is because there are literally thousands of very intricate parts in these technologies, and it's very possible that at least one part will malfunction. While if one part malfunctions it's generally not a problem, but if multiple parts go haywire under the radar then the combination of these can cause catastrophes as big as the ones mentioned above. The article I read references the movie Apollo 13, and how everyone on board is flabbergasted that terrible things happened around them for no apparent reason. While this is somewhat of speculation, I think there's a considerable possibility that technology could become so complex that any group of workers, or even robots, wouldn't be able to detect a freak accident. I mean it happens with people almost daily all over the world, it's astonishing how many freak accidents happen in the human body that doctors still don't know about, and often only make inferences about. Sure, this will progress, but my question is is it possible that the world could become too complicated because of such extensively complex technologies?

Personally, my thoughts are the world population is growing exponentially, the world is becoming very globalized, and stakes are becoming riskier due to the unification of entire nations, and thus entire mindsets. We could one day find ourselves with a larger problem than an atom bomb and maybe we won't know how to deal with it. I realize this sounds rather cynical, but it's just a theory (might as well take it with a grain of salt). We usually don't do anything about "unforeseen" problems until we see the effects, hopefully we learn.. I slightly believe we can harness nuclear power/something cool to visit other galaxies within the next couple thousand years... but we better know how to deal with that power when it arrives..

Edit: Just reread my other post and realized how cynical it is, sry 'bout that :s

 

Found an interesting Sci-Am article on nostalgia that I thought some of you might enjoy.

I'm not sure I agree with their overall assessement of nostalgia as a beneficial mechanism, insofar as statements like this: "The punch line of all this work is that nostalgia is good for people. Contrary to past assertions, nostalgia does not harm people; it benefits psychological health and well-being."

I feel that they fail to account for the practical ramifications of nostalgia on social well being, ie. a disconnect from what is actually going on now and what went on at the point of nostalgic recollection. As a mechanism, I don't doubt that it makes people feel better, but inherent in this is a skewing of perception, which can be detrimental in other ways. Perhaps not in such a way as to be scientifically recognised as detrimental to the person themselves, but when it comes to questions like how nostalgia impacts upon social awareness, and decisions made on that basis, surely one can argue pretty easily that it presents real barriers. It inhibits the ability to make informed, objective decisions where they may perhaps be necessary, or at least beneficial to oneself and others. On a larger scale it impacts upon political views, reactions to policy, and can be argued as a large factor in this same disconnect between perceptions of political issues and the facts of what's actually going on. The idea of rising crime rates is a key example. When people make judgements, and resulting decisions about how they act in a political sense, based on a nostalgic recollection of their past and, say, the rate of crime when they were younger, the strength and positive psychological impact of this feeling is exactly what makes it so dangerous, as it lends more internal weight to it, making it easier to ignore objective assessment and study in favour of what one "feels" to be the case.

I find the way they looked at the phenomenon very interesting, especially in light of the question of disorder/disease, but I feel they really missed a key point in not properly discussing the wider ramifications, and the role nostalgia plays in society at large. The momentum it affords certain ideas, often in the face of evidence, and the problems this causes time and again are surely key points of discussion with a subject like this.

 

I find it's hard to say nostalgia is the case when it's something like, for example, making time to sit down face to face and talk with someone, just 'cause that almost never happens. Maybe it is since we tend to only write letters, take walks, do more old fashioned things when it's most convenient. We don't know what it's like to always have to wait for a letter to arrive, what it's like to always be on foot, etc. So in a way our perspective is generally skewed since we rarely recognize the drawbacks of old technologies/ways of life.

Anyways, I think nostalgia's positives outweigh the negatives. True, the article hardly talked about the bigger picture (but that's not to say they're not thinking about the bigger picture), but I think that being mentally healthy, even if it means a skewed perspective, is better than being purely rational/objective and thinking more pessimistically (at least in comparison with nostalgia as a coping mechanism) which could result in a growth of a disorder, a shortened life span, and being mentally unhealthy in general. Lastly I'll say it's important for people to recognize the distinction between being "sulky" and being nostalgic, I think nostalgia isn't just about coping as it is about remembering... whereas being a negative nancy (a purely scientific term, of course) is more about being unreasonably resentful/pessimistic about your current state.

Kind of jumping all over the place, but still, if I had a time machine I would try it just to see what other times are like. If you've seen safety not guaranteed one of its themes is nostalgia, and the negative effects of being what we think is objective/rational when really it could just be us being negative and too critical of one another (and not seeing the larger truths in the big picture). What's interesting about nostalgia for me is it's a very wide topic and it reveals a lot about one's overall perspective in life, what people value, etc.

Anyways, a little tired atm, i'll end this here :s