from Hacker News

The West is bored to death

by popol12 on 4/8/25, 2:30 PM with 2 comments

• by incomingpain on 4/8/25, 2:44 PM

  This has been undeniably intentional. I think most agree but the reason isn't clear.

  Is this a 'bread and circuses' type thing where they intend to distract us? Revolt against government being prevented?

  Is this an 'attention economy' thing? Meta and friends have designed the perfect human trap and nobody like reality anymore?

  My personal guess, this is about the next golden age. Automation is going to eliminate factory work. Optimus or boston dynamics will produce the goods. You need an army of bored people to produce the next economy.

• by jfengel on 4/9/25, 4:32 PM

  It's an interesting hypothesis, but it requires us to look more deeply into American antipathy for each other. We've been fighting these culture wars for as long as we've been a country. They led to a shooting war less than a century later, and after that we kept taking it out on each other in the form of Jim Crow, anti-communism, Vietnam war protests, and red-states-vs-blue-states.

  The boredom may have given these things free time to sit and stew, but it has also been a deliberate political strategy. We've always exploited our ideological differences for political gain. We just finally perfected the formula, first via 24-hour TV news, then via social media.

  Neither the boredom nor the antipathy seem especially tractable. The antipathy has existed forever. The boredom may be new, but it was so easy for the antipathy to rush in to fill the void. It tells people that they are fighting for virtue against the forces of evil. It pushes emotional buttons in a way that no hobby (not even sex) will ever match.

  Other countries are managing it, or were. Europe has more leisure than Americans do. And while they, too, are nodding in the direction of culture wars, they're not as far along the curve as we are. I don't know if we can apply any of their lessons, but it seems like a place to start.