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I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't e

I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.

lgeorget 5y ago
I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?
jjoonathan 5y ago
How many times have you gotten locked out by a captcha? I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business. My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.
- dinkleberg 5y ago
  Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do with the point of the article nor OPs comment.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Sure did. Turns out my experiences inform my emotions on the matter. Who'd have thought?
crazygringo 5y ago
It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awareness of these things, multi-hour classes with other artists where all we'd do would be to analyze these types of things. And after a long period of great frustration, all of a sudden, it's like the world went from black and white into color. There was emotional resonance everywhere where I hadn't seen it before. It was like I was finally speaking a language a lot of other people seemed to just be born with. And social interactions got a lot... easier. I also realized that my emotional surroundings had always affected my mood etc., I just had never been able to pay attention to how. So while I was consciously blind to it, I was still subconsciously 100% affected. So there's absolutely nothing "wrong" with the author's psyche... but nothing's "wrong" with yours either, you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things. You're not dissociating from reality... but at the same time there absolutely is a reality that you haven't developed skills to see. And it absolutely has nothing to do with age or country. If it's a skill you want to develop, there's no single answer. The general idea of "emotional intelligence education" is one approach, fields like art history, film criticism, literature and poetry are others. Even activities like yoga and meditation can help since emotional awareness is both mental and bodily. Ultimately the more you expose yourself to things combined with seeing how other people respond to the same things and finding little pieces in common with them, it'll eventually start to "click".
- chrismcb 5y ago
  I'm trying to understand this comment. But it seems to me it boils down to "spend time to learn how to be depressed by the world around you." That doesn't seem like a skill the average person should want or need. There is something with with society if you have to spend time of hours of practice to get "emotional intelligence" from common place items that have no inherent meaning.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
C19is20 5y ago
> I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? > A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? > I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha. Double +1. And, thank you - you said it so much better than i ever could.
- WorldPeas 5y ago
  I'll second this seconding(third it?) I cannot for the life of me understand how these photos can invoke dread, perhaps something in their burgerpunk nature, but still i think the more saddening part is that people still use captchas from google!
zahrc 5y ago
They’re depressing to me because they are a chore - I don’t think much about them, just as I fail to see the beauty in washing up plates.
kbutler 5y ago
I think this is a case of hyperawareness/catastrophizing - upon realizing the mindless interruption of CAPTCHAs, the authors have focused so intensely on the minor discomforts of monotonous, poorly composed, poorly shot pictures that the discomfort has grown through hyperbolic focus into a soul-destroying burden. It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful reaction to a minor disturbance.
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  I think the minor disturbance is the article and the outsized reaction is calling it a “soul destroying burden”. I’m primarily a software dev, but clients mostly value my skills in producing visually pleasing layouts and graphics. I’ve come to realise that good aesthetics are extremely valued by most. Even during the development process, nice looking layouts/design integrated early can immensely lift the team’s spirits. I have observed though there a some people who seem to undervalue the need of aesthetics, are very quick to write it off as superficial, and may even have some very negative emotional responses to this “arty stuff”. I would chalk up much of the perceived divide between front-end and back-end developers stems from this negative emotional response.
  - kbutler 5y ago
    So Unbearably Depressing / force you / hate / deeply, overwhelmingly depressing / spirits deflate And that's just the intro. Skip to the end: "These pictures erode the soul."
    - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
      Fair enough, I didn’t really explain my point very well. I interpreted the authors choice of words more as an emotional critique of things like composition, colors, etc. If I saw some poorly written code, and I happened to say, “this code destroys my soul” as a figure of speech. Most people would understand that I just have an intense distaste for the code, not I am not having an existential crisis. From an artistic sense, if I analysed a single frame from the first scene of the Shining, I might use similar language to the author, even though objectively it is just a car on a road.
aimor 5y ago
I also don't agree with the author during the first half of the article. If anything captcha photos have an overwhelmingly suburban feel, probably because (I assume) they're taken from Google's street view. The six points listed are all the same: they're photos taken from a car. While aesthetically that's dull, monochrome, and ordinary I can't call it depressing without calling every drive to the grocery store equally depressing.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  I live in a walkable part of a city and to be quite honest every time I go out into suburbs it’s kind of depressing. Local architecture shaped by tradition and climate is replaced by giant samey boxes. Everyone is isolated in a car, streets are largely empty of anything at a human scale. Greyness and concrete.
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    This is one of the things that really surprised me when I visited North America for the first time. It's less common in the rest of the world.
hathawsh 5y ago
IMHO the author is saying that these pictures represent one way that we humans have surrendered a piece of our lives to a soulless process and machine. Any human with any photography skills would take lively pictures of interesting things, but these pictures have no life and tell no story. What's mildly depressing about this is that we're missing an opportunity to connect more and see more of life. Now, if I were to take this piece literally, I would be concerned for the author's mental well being. If I were to record everything I see all day long, nearly every picture my eyes capture would be mostly lifeless. Does that make me subconsciously depressed? Um, no. Not in the least bit. I evaluate pictures based on their purpose before I assign any aesthetic value. Still, the author has a point: the current state of CAPTCHAs is a missed opportunity for something with more life.
- desmosxxx 5y ago
  Except the entire point of at least this brand of captcha is to help solve classification problems (or so I thought) and to me doing otherwise seems like a missed opportunity
SiVal 5y ago
I think the difference is one of expectations. I get the strong impression that the author of the article is accustomed to images "meaning" something and being presented by photographers who are trying to "say" something. Fashionable urban types dress up to attend gallery showings at which a bored-looking hipster photographer is displaying his framed images of grainy, empty street scenes of nothing in particular taken from odd angles. Each photo of nothing is a deeply meaningful expression of nihilistic enlightenment or a tour-de-force denunciation of capitalism or materialism or whatever, and if you're sophisticated enough, you can buy one for $10,000. Hilariously, these captcha images that are just random shots in random directions look just like deliberate dreary, sophisticated, urban expressions of nihilism. But only if you are accustomed to assuming that photos "mean" something, so a photo of nothing must be expressing something: nihilism. But if you walked down the street and saw most of those scenes, you wouldn't think about it at all. Equivalent, meaningless scenes are around you most of the time, indoors and out. And if you don't unconsciously assume that an image is trying to say something, an image of nothing won't feel depressing at all.
irrational 5y ago
> How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if German has a word to describe this feeling?
OJFord 5y ago
> Is it because I live in a third world country Until I got there I was going to suggest that it was because you were too used to the scenes depicted - I'm not sure about the author (NYT contributor suggests but I think doesn't necessitate that he's American) but I think many Europeans find the scenes depicted quite unfamiliar and not in a particularly pleasant/intriguing/exciting way. The way towns & cities (to a large extent I'd even argue it seems North America doesn't have towns in any recognisable way) are organised is just different, designed around cars and big infrastructure, car parks and 'box stores' over high streets, etc. I might not independently go as far as (or at least not recognise it as) 'depressing', but they're certainly not particularly 'nice' or 'pleasing' images to me either.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  That would be my number 7 for the list. To a Dutchman it all seems so incredibly depressing that everything depicted is built for cars. Even the residential areas seem to prioritize driving over everything else. The humans aren't just gone from the pictures, they're not even welcome without a car. For someone who is used to just getting on a bicycle and go anywhere — safely and often faster than by car! — in the city I live in, this is just so depressing.
joegahona 5y ago
I think it's a humor disconnect. The author is expounding on something extremely minor and mundane with a large amount of hyperbole and detail, which his readers may not have thought of with that detail before. Some people might find it funny, others will not. I fall in the former group; I enjoyed it.
Semiapies 5y ago
The first picture is morning or evening sun catching some brilliant autumn leaves. The second picture is some stoplights in front of a building and trees. The third has boats and blue water and a palm tree. Not exactly drab stuff. At that point I just lost interest in trying to figure out what was even vaguely objectionable about the images. It was like someone was trying to imitate the humor of something like The Gallery of Regrettable Foods with perfectly reasonable restaurant dishes.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
This essay must be a personality test, because I read it as satire and laughed manically imagining someone so concerned with this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
techrat 5y ago
> Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? Nope. I know what Captcha photos are. Photos from the Google Maps car driving around. It explains the weird... "depressing" angles and largely brutalist/barren perspectives. They're the view of a camera on top of the car going through urban centers. Of course streets are going to look like streets and a camera above a car is going to give you weird angles as it drives around town taking pictures of the middle of the road. Much ado about nothing if you ask me.
thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
Some of us have very strict security settings that cause captchas to be very frequent and I believe more challenging. I whitelist domains for cookies and I am not signed in to a Google account. These two things really can make the web a frustrating experience. I’ve lost out on campsites from US national parks because a captcha popped up when I tried to add the reservation. By the time I passed the multiple tests, all the campsites were taken.

lgeorget 5y ago

I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?

jjoonathan 5y ago

How many times have you gotten locked out by a captcha? I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business. My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.

dinkleberg 5y ago
Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do with the point of the article nor OPs comment.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Sure did. Turns out my experiences inform my emotions on the matter. Who'd have thought?

crazygringo 5y ago

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too. I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped. Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awareness of these things, multi-hour classes with other artists where all we'd do would be to analyze these types of things. And after a long period of great frustration, all of a sudden, it's like the world went from black and white into color. There was emotional resonance everywhere where I hadn't seen it before. It was like I was finally speaking a language a lot of other people seemed to just be born with. And social interactions got a lot... easier. I also realized that my emotional surroundings had always affected my mood etc., I just had never been able to pay attention to how. So while I was consciously blind to it, I was still subconsciously 100% affected. So there's absolutely nothing "wrong" with the author's psyche... but nothing's "wrong" with yours either, you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things. You're not dissociating from reality... but at the same time there absolutely is a reality that you haven't developed skills to see. And it absolutely has nothing to do with age or country. If it's a skill you want to develop, there's no single answer. The general idea of "emotional intelligence education" is one approach, fields like art history, film criticism, literature and poetry are others. Even activities like yoga and meditation can help since emotional awareness is both mental and bodily. Ultimately the more you expose yourself to things combined with seeing how other people respond to the same things and finding little pieces in common with them, it'll eventually start to "click".

chrismcb 5y ago
I'm trying to understand this comment. But it seems to me it boils down to "spend time to learn how to be depressed by the world around you." That doesn't seem like a skill the average person should want or need. There is something with with society if you have to spend time of hours of practice to get "emotional intelligence" from common place items that have no inherent meaning.
- iratewizard 5y ago

C19is20 5y ago

> I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? > A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? > I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha. Double +1. And, thank you - you said it so much better than i ever could.

WorldPeas 5y ago
I'll second this seconding(third it?) I cannot for the life of me understand how these photos can invoke dread, perhaps something in their burgerpunk nature, but still i think the more saddening part is that people still use captchas from google!

zahrc 5y ago

They’re depressing to me because they are a chore - I don’t think much about them, just as I fail to see the beauty in washing up plates.

kbutler 5y ago

I think this is a case of hyperawareness/catastrophizing - upon realizing the mindless interruption of CAPTCHAs, the authors have focused so intensely on the minor discomforts of monotonous, poorly composed, poorly shot pictures that the discomfort has grown through hyperbolic focus into a soul-destroying burden. It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful reaction to a minor disturbance.

JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
I think the minor disturbance is the article and the outsized reaction is calling it a “soul destroying burden”. I’m primarily a software dev, but clients mostly value my skills in producing visually pleasing layouts and graphics. I’ve come to realise that good aesthetics are extremely valued by most. Even during the development process, nice looking layouts/design integrated early can immensely lift the team’s spirits. I have observed though there a some people who seem to undervalue the need of aesthetics, are very quick to write it off as superficial, and may even have some very negative emotional responses to this “arty stuff”. I would chalk up much of the perceived divide between front-end and back-end developers stems from this negative emotional response.
- kbutler 5y ago
  So Unbearably Depressing / force you / hate / deeply, overwhelmingly depressing / spirits deflate And that's just the intro. Skip to the end: "These pictures erode the soul."
  - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
    Fair enough, I didn’t really explain my point very well. I interpreted the authors choice of words more as an emotional critique of things like composition, colors, etc. If I saw some poorly written code, and I happened to say, “this code destroys my soul” as a figure of speech. Most people would understand that I just have an intense distaste for the code, not I am not having an existential crisis. From an artistic sense, if I analysed a single frame from the first scene of the Shining, I might use similar language to the author, even though objectively it is just a car on a road.

aimor 5y ago

I also don't agree with the author during the first half of the article. If anything captcha photos have an overwhelmingly suburban feel, probably because (I assume) they're taken from Google's street view. The six points listed are all the same: they're photos taken from a car. While aesthetically that's dull, monochrome, and ordinary I can't call it depressing without calling every drive to the grocery store equally depressing.

egypturnash 5y ago
I live in a walkable part of a city and to be quite honest every time I go out into suburbs it’s kind of depressing. Local architecture shaped by tradition and climate is replaced by giant samey boxes. Everyone is isolated in a car, streets are largely empty of anything at a human scale. Greyness and concrete.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  This is one of the things that really surprised me when I visited North America for the first time. It's less common in the rest of the world.

hathawsh 5y ago

IMHO the author is saying that these pictures represent one way that we humans have surrendered a piece of our lives to a soulless process and machine. Any human with any photography skills would take lively pictures of interesting things, but these pictures have no life and tell no story. What's mildly depressing about this is that we're missing an opportunity to connect more and see more of life. Now, if I were to take this piece literally, I would be concerned for the author's mental well being. If I were to record everything I see all day long, nearly every picture my eyes capture would be mostly lifeless. Does that make me subconsciously depressed? Um, no. Not in the least bit. I evaluate pictures based on their purpose before I assign any aesthetic value. Still, the author has a point: the current state of CAPTCHAs is a missed opportunity for something with more life.

desmosxxx 5y ago
Except the entire point of at least this brand of captcha is to help solve classification problems (or so I thought) and to me doing otherwise seems like a missed opportunity

SiVal 5y ago

I think the difference is one of expectations. I get the strong impression that the author of the article is accustomed to images "meaning" something and being presented by photographers who are trying to "say" something. Fashionable urban types dress up to attend gallery showings at which a bored-looking hipster photographer is displaying his framed images of grainy, empty street scenes of nothing in particular taken from odd angles. Each photo of nothing is a deeply meaningful expression of nihilistic enlightenment or a tour-de-force denunciation of capitalism or materialism or whatever, and if you're sophisticated enough, you can buy one for $10,000. Hilariously, these captcha images that are just random shots in random directions look just like deliberate dreary, sophisticated, urban expressions of nihilism. But only if you are accustomed to assuming that photos "mean" something, so a photo of nothing must be expressing something: nihilism. But if you walked down the street and saw most of those scenes, you wouldn't think about it at all. Equivalent, meaningless scenes are around you most of the time, indoors and out. And if you don't unconsciously assume that an image is trying to say something, an image of nothing won't feel depressing at all.

irrational 5y ago

> How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this? I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if German has a word to describe this feeling?

OJFord 5y ago

> Is it because I live in a third world country Until I got there I was going to suggest that it was because you were too used to the scenes depicted - I'm not sure about the author (NYT contributor suggests but I think doesn't necessitate that he's American) but I think many Europeans find the scenes depicted quite unfamiliar and not in a particularly pleasant/intriguing/exciting way. The way towns & cities (to a large extent I'd even argue it seems North America doesn't have towns in any recognisable way) are organised is just different, designed around cars and big infrastructure, car parks and 'box stores' over high streets, etc. I might not independently go as far as (or at least not recognise it as) 'depressing', but they're certainly not particularly 'nice' or 'pleasing' images to me either.

Freak_NL 5y ago
That would be my number 7 for the list. To a Dutchman it all seems so incredibly depressing that everything depicted is built for cars. Even the residential areas seem to prioritize driving over everything else. The humans aren't just gone from the pictures, they're not even welcome without a car. For someone who is used to just getting on a bicycle and go anywhere — safely and often faster than by car! — in the city I live in, this is just so depressing.

joegahona 5y ago

I think it's a humor disconnect. The author is expounding on something extremely minor and mundane with a large amount of hyperbole and detail, which his readers may not have thought of with that detail before. Some people might find it funny, others will not. I fall in the former group; I enjoyed it.

Semiapies 5y ago

The first picture is morning or evening sun catching some brilliant autumn leaves. The second picture is some stoplights in front of a building and trees. The third has boats and blue water and a palm tree. Not exactly drab stuff. At that point I just lost interest in trying to figure out what was even vaguely objectionable about the images. It was like someone was trying to imitate the humor of something like The Gallery of Regrettable Foods with perfectly reasonable restaurant dishes.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

This essay must be a personality test, because I read it as satire and laughed manically imagining someone so concerned with this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

techrat 5y ago

> Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? Nope. I know what Captcha photos are. Photos from the Google Maps car driving around. It explains the weird... "depressing" angles and largely brutalist/barren perspectives. They're the view of a camera on top of the car going through urban centers. Of course streets are going to look like streets and a camera above a car is going to give you weird angles as it drives around town taking pictures of the middle of the road. Much ado about nothing if you ask me.

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago

Some of us have very strict security settings that cause captchas to be very frequent and I believe more challenging. I whitelist domains for cookies and I am not signed in to a Google account. These two things really can make the web a frustrating experience. I’ve lost out on campsites from US national parks because a captcha popped up when I tried to add the reservation. By the time I passed the multiple tests, all the campsites were taken.