[nitrogen]

Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad.

The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they have robbed us of any sense of common identity.

It's no longer acceptable to be thought of as part of broad category A where everyone has different interests and affinities. Instead now, we have to be exclusively XYZ and W, and nobody else could possibly understand the XYZW perspective.

[camgunz]

I agree retrenching pluralism is necessary, but it's a long road to hoe. I've been reflecting lately on my day to day, how even before the pandemic I never knew my neighbors or anyone in my neighborhood, had a low-key resentment towards any forced or incidental social interaction where I'm not 100% in control of my experience, sometimes I load up HN and high-road people for an hour or two or some online dating app, blah.

It's like, no wonder things are depressing, and I'm super privileged. Mostly what I'm running up against is existential and abstract. It's hard for me to even imagine working gig jobs or being back in tech support.

Maybe this is just rehashing what you're saying, but I find modern life intensely dehumanizing. There's so much space between us--on purpose--that we're just adrift.

My brother and I were talking with an older guy a couple years ago, and he pinned the blame for this on garages. Time was you parked in your driveway and had a neighbor interaction, but with the garage, you just slipped in and no interaction. Was it always an awesome neighbor interaction? Definitely not, but it had a cohering effect. I think he's wrong in the micro, but it does to me ring true in the macro, where we have so much more control over our interactions that we just don't get the incidental mixing. Then again lots of people in our society have tons of unwanted interactions (e.g. women) so dunno if this is at all right.

IDK this was weirdly personal and whiny, but I don't know how else to really get at what I've been thinking for a while.