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The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nob

The only part I disagree with is the historical perspective. When was this time that people believed in personal growth? For most of history the nobels were nobels, peasants were peasants and that was that. If anything, the sense of having dynamic control of one's destiny throughout one's lifespan is a recent invention. (Well at least in the west)

zemvpferreira 3y ago
Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.
- User23 3y ago
  > Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding. Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
  - abracadaniel 3y ago
    Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.
    - kelipso 3y ago
      If you think you're happy, you are happy. Filtering your sense of happiness through some quality of life lens is absurd if you think about it.
      - abracadaniel 3y ago
        It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.
        User23 3y ago
        What do you mean by “objectively good?”
        abracadaniel 3y ago
        I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.
        User23 3y ago
        Both (emotional) trauma and suffering sound pretty subjective to me, as does psychology in general. How are we getting to "objectively good?"
        abracadaniel 3y ago
        The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
  - anthomtb 3y ago
    > they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted In a good year they might eat well. In a drought year, maybe not at all.
  - zemvpferreira 3y ago
    I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled. Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
    - User23 3y ago
      > I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled. Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1]. > But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment. Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-people-in-the-us-starved-to-death-during-the-great-depression https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    My personal impression, from what I've seen of the "third world", has been that people there are at least as happy as those in the rich world.
  - astrange 3y ago
    They were not well fed a century ago. The US had to start putting iron and iodine in all the food because all the young men were too weak and sick with pellagra to be able to fight in wars.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    Umm have you seen pictures of what a share cropper looked like during the depression? Not much dissimilar to a concentration camp survivor
    - User23 3y ago
      Yes. It’s easily googled. And they look like a normal healthy weight for the early 20th century[1]. Mama there has a healthy belly. Where are you seeing concentration camp victims? [1] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family-6977/ https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family...
      - habinero 3y ago
        That woman is thin and six months pregnant.
        User23 3y ago
        The obesity epidemic has evidently warped your perception of what a normal healthy weight looks like.
  - jamilton 3y ago
    I would be surprised if that was the case, especially in the hypothetical where she knows what she's missing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tomhoward 3y ago
Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)
- pas 3y ago
  Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?
  - tomhoward 3y ago
    I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify. We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Are you actually aware of the evidence on these matters? There have been studies on adopted children and identical twins. What are the results? Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf
fullshark 3y ago
Agreed, I think this is all downstream from recent macroeconomic forces in the west/America. Namely the "land of opportunity" in the post WW2 era has disappeared and the class structure has largely calcified and will carry over multiple generations. The anxiety people feel about not being one of the "top tier and chosen" is because that's the only avenue for social mobility left. Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.
yakubin 3y ago
Belief in personal growth was one of the pillars of Victorianism. Then there was the American Dream.

zemvpferreira 3y ago

Absolutely with you. The great dissonance is between people's expectations and their reality, not the past and the present. Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding.

User23 3y ago
> Life for someone born poor even a century ago was brutal and oppressive in a way most of us have difficulty understanding. Not really. A century ago people in many parts of the USA were dirt poor. I mean no savings, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. But they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted themselves. They had deep communal bonds, spiritual fulfillment, and a sense of meaning in their lives that is increasingly absent. I wouldn’t be surprised if your average sharecropper’s wife would blow away your average urban girl boss in self reported happiness.
- abracadaniel 3y ago
  Reported happiness seems like a poor metric for comparison when the concept itself may be rather foreign to someone in the past. If your life is mostly hardship, you may not spend much time being introspective about how you feel about your plight. In a life of luxury, you have nothing but time to think about it and find things to critique. So, you may have an objectively better life, and overall more happiness, but report it as unhappy because there is more that you want to do that you feel should be achievable. Compared to someone who couldn’t comprehend their situation ever improving, so they. There is no basis for comparison of what it means to be happy between different life experiences.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    If you think you're happy, you are happy. Filtering your sense of happiness through some quality of life lens is absurd if you think about it.
    - abracadaniel 3y ago
      It’s not about quality of life. Abuse victims will say they are happy, and stay with their abusers. War veterans can think fondly on their time at war, but neither are objectively good situations. Reporting that you are happy is not the same as being happy.
      - User23 3y ago
        What do you mean by “objectively good?”
        abracadaniel 3y ago
        I guess what I’m describing is the difference of trauma/suffering (both physical and mental) vs not. There’s too much psychology in play when dealing with how we handle trauma to trust a self reported metric.
        User23 3y ago
        Both (emotional) trauma and suffering sound pretty subjective to me, as does psychology in general. How are we getting to "objectively good?"
        abracadaniel 3y ago
        The psychology being subjective is my point. The physiological condition is not subjective. My statement wasn’t that something was “objectively good” but that experiencing pain and suffering was “not objectively good” or rather (objectively) not a good thing. Pain is real, and the absence of pain is objectively better.
- anthomtb 3y ago
  > they ate well—real food they grew, raised, and hunted In a good year they might eat well. In a drought year, maybe not at all.
- zemvpferreira 3y ago
  I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled. Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment.
  - User23 3y ago
    > I'm sorry but that's just pining for a past that never happened. In the 20th century some 100 million people died from famine. Starved to death. We're down to 200,000 deaths from hunger per year, compared to an average of maybe 2M/year up to the 1960s, while the global population tripled. Did some people eat well, some of the time in the 1900s? Absolutely. I'm sorry, but perhaps it wasn't clear from context that I'm talking about the USA. There has never been a wide scale famine in the United States even in its poorest communities. Even during the Great Depression there were virtually no deaths due to starvation[1]. > But ending hunger is maybe the greatest conquest of our time and it's barely recognised. That's exactly the sort of expectation gap I was referring to in my original comment. Your goalpost-moving notwithstanding, I'm reminded of that famous Sufi tale with the refrain "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?" After all the environmental impacts of the population explosion that it kicked off are still just barely beginning to be felt. But for what it's worth the Green Revolution was part of the standard curriculum when I was in middle and secondary school, so I wouldn't say it's unrecognized. [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-people-in-the-us-starved-to-death-during-the-great-depression https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/12297/how-many-p...
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  My personal impression, from what I've seen of the "third world", has been that people there are at least as happy as those in the rich world.
- astrange 3y ago
  They were not well fed a century ago. The US had to start putting iron and iodine in all the food because all the young men were too weak and sick with pellagra to be able to fight in wars.
- userinanother 3y ago
  Umm have you seen pictures of what a share cropper looked like during the depression? Not much dissimilar to a concentration camp survivor
  - User23 3y ago
    Yes. It’s easily googled. And they look like a normal healthy weight for the early 20th century[1]. Mama there has a healthy belly. Where are you seeing concentration camp victims? [1] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family-6977/ https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/sharecropper-family...
    - habinero 3y ago
      That woman is thin and six months pregnant.
      - User23 3y ago
        The obesity epidemic has evidently warped your perception of what a normal healthy weight looks like.
- jamilton 3y ago
  I would be surprised if that was the case, especially in the hypothetical where she knows what she's missing.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

tomhoward 3y ago

Yeah this is a good point. I guess genetic determinism is just the contemporary scientific justification for a mentality that’s existed in some for a long time or indeed forever. (I’d be interested to know if other human cultures were more and accepting and supportive of personal growth.)

pas 3y ago
Explanation or justification? Does current scientific consensus (let's say there's one) say that this mentality is okay or that it's a bias that we should be aware (and try to correct against)?
- tomhoward 3y ago
  I see genetics being used as a “just so” explanation for all kinds of things that the science doesn’t really support, by people with different ideologies depending on the thing they’re trying to justify. We take obviously mostly-genetically-determined traits like height, eye/hair/skin colour, facial features etc, then extrapolate to argue/assume that all kinds of other things must also be genetically determined, like cognition, behavioral patterns, emotional patterns, for which there is far less evidence of them being hard-coded in DNA. This will be confounded by the fact that we can often see commonalities in these factors from parents to children and between siblings, and assume these commonalities exist due to genetic coding, not recognizing that there are other forms of inheritance/conditioning that can explain these commonalities, but that even if these inherited patterns are deeply ingrained, they can be altered via the right practices (emotional “letting go” being the most important in my experience).
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Are you actually aware of the evidence on these matters? There have been studies on adopted children and identical twins. What are the results? Here's a random study on criminality I was looking at a bit ago: https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf https://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/frisell2010.pdf

fullshark 3y ago

Agreed, I think this is all downstream from recent macroeconomic forces in the west/America. Namely the "land of opportunity" in the post WW2 era has disappeared and the class structure has largely calcified and will carry over multiple generations. The anxiety people feel about not being one of the "top tier and chosen" is because that's the only avenue for social mobility left. Or maybe it was always mostly BS and the information age where the message is less controlled/manipulated by a few elite owned sources is making that obvious.

yakubin 3y ago

Belief in personal growth was one of the pillars of Victorianism. Then there was the American Dream.