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By contrast, membership in groups of necessity cultivate a rather different set of habits and expectations, certain virtues are inculcated because the group of necessity requires them to function.
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Thats really the problem with all these virtual activities "on the computer". They beat the real thing by a mile while not providing the psychological sustenance human beings need. Online porn is a million women at your finger tips that will never reject you so why go talk to woman in real life? Why be funny or interesting or well groomed, that's so hard.
Instagram is full of beautiful vistas you can see without breaking a sweat so why go exploring in your back yard?
Games are full of achivments, ones you are certain to get so why work hard at anything real where it might be for nothing?
The problem is that we need all of that real life friction to lead a full human life and we really need to strive to find meaning. We need to sweat, we need to fail and we need to get rejected every once in a while, too. That's the real reason why if you live a mostly virtual life it feels so empty and bad that you want to kill yourself.
Wasn’t this premise part of the story in The Matrix where they initially created a perfect work but the humans didn’t thrive in that. We needed a world with some pain so we can enjoy living.
In discussions about what you’d change in your past I’m fairly unusual in that I wouldn’t change anything, including the bad bits [0] because it’s all part of what has formed the person I am now.
In the plant world a forest fire is often good in the long term as it helps with the distribution of nutrients so allows fresh growth.
[0] I appreciate that for some people there will have been possibly devastating events or rabbit holes they’ve been down from which they haven’t been able to recover and they may well have a different view.
> Wasn’t this premise part of the story in The Matrix where they initially created a perfect work but the humans didn’t thrive in that. We needed a world with some pain so we can enjoy living.
Be wary of arguing from fictional evidence. "Suffering is needed to appreciate happiness" is a deep-sounding meme with not much of actual evidence for it. The utopias described in fiction tend to be either purposefully dystopian (because stories thrive on conflict), or mind-dumbingly boring (e.g. visions of heaven in some religions). It's hard to design an utopia.
sure, after all you have the world writing for you. The best minds out of hundreds of million put their stuff online faster than you could consume it all. However, if that wasn't the case and we were neighbors I might be one of the few people that you could even have conversations of this kind with. Instead of flaming me and then going on to the next link you might "settle" for a less then pristine conversation and there is at least a chance we become friends. Meanwhile in the real world: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern-mentality/201...
----- By contrast, membership in groups of necessity cultivate a rather different set of habits and expectations, certain virtues are inculcated because the group of necessity requires them to function. -----
Thats really the problem with all these virtual activities "on the computer". They beat the real thing by a mile while not providing the psychological sustenance human beings need. Online porn is a million women at your finger tips that will never reject you so why go talk to woman in real life? Why be funny or interesting or well groomed, that's so hard.
Instagram is full of beautiful vistas you can see without breaking a sweat so why go exploring in your back yard?
Games are full of achivments, ones you are certain to get so why work hard at anything real where it might be for nothing?
The problem is that we need all of that real life friction to lead a full human life and we really need to strive to find meaning. We need to sweat, we need to fail and we need to get rejected every once in a while, too. That's the real reason why if you live a mostly virtual life it feels so empty and bad that you want to kill yourself.