Yes, I do.

The goal is roughly the same: financial security, a good home, as much of a family as one cares to raise.

But for basically my entire life as a middle-aged American, there was a well-lit path to that goal:

1. Do good in high school.

2. Go to a university and get some four year degree. Obviously some degrees are duds, but basically any of them was considered a worthwhile investment.

3. Get a white collar job doing something intellectual. Make a decent salary at a stable company. Change jobs periodically as needed.

Now:

1. Doing well in high school is still important, but it is very easy for kids to get good grades using AI while not actually learning anything and not realizing they are setting themselves up for hardship.

2. College is so expensive now that determining which college and which degree is actually a sound financial investment is very hard. An 18 year-old-kid is being asked to make a financial choice with life-long consequences at a point when they have none of the expertise about their long-term goals to know what to do.

3. AI will very likely eliminate many of these jobs. People will be competing for fewer and fewer jobs and who knows what on your resume will actually help you stand out? Also, most of the blue collar jobs are already gone, either automated away (ag) or moved overseas (manufacturing).

There was also a sense in the US that even if the government wasn't great, it was at least functional and a source of relative stability run by somewhat mature adults. That is clearly no longer the case at the federal level.

People don't all commit suicide for the same reasons. Durkheim's book Suicide which in some ways created the idea of sociology itself categorizes four types of suicide.

I think a big part of the problem is that middle-aged men are at the apex of their expectations to be successful in the eyes of society, and we are living through a period of time where success is very hard to define, much less attain.

There is a name for this in sociology: anomie [1]. Émile Durkheim coined it in his book Suicide, written not too long after the Industrial Revolution.

In times of great change, the set of norms and rules that we take for granted as an organizing principle of our lives get uprooted. It's as if all of the pieces and tokens and rules of the board game we played our whole lives are swept off the table to make room for a new game, but the new game has not been set up yet. In that interim, we all feel a sense of unease. It is our turn to move, but we don't know the rules of the game or what moves to make. We feel intense pressure to play the game well, but don't know how.

In the past, these transitions have ended and society has generally returned to some sense of stability. A new board game gets set up, new pieces doled out, we learn to play the new game. I hope we get to that point with AI soon, but the revolutions seem to keep coming faster and faster.

I think for a lot of men, it feels like just at the time when we should be able to rest on our laurels a bit after having worked so hard to play the game society told us to, the rules have been ripped out from under us and any sense of security going forward is lost. We feel too old to learn the new rules of the game in time to play well, but not old enough to be able to abstain from playing.

It's a psychologically very difficult time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

* Video files are absolutely huge compared to basically every other domain. Just dealing with media is not trivial in the way that we take for granted in software. It's easy to fill terabytes for a production. Just copying stuff around can be a noticeable logistics problem. People still mail hard drives.

* A lot of people working in video production are there to be artistic creators and are not very technical. They are often extremely skilled at producing beautiful work using specific tools, but they often don't have the computer fundamentals we presume.

* Unlike the software world which increasingly a small number of very large companies who can invest heavily in centralized processes and tools, the video world still has a lot of small companies.

* Margins are very narrow and many of these small businesses are barely scraping. Production gigs can be very feast-or-famine.

Put all that together, and it's not at all surprising that a lot of productions don't have the backup discipline you would expect.

If all you wanted was a reasonable facsimile of a family member, then photography made attaining that object dramatically cheaper. Prior to photography, almost all of images of people are of fabulously wealthy and powerful people because they were the only ones who could afford a skilled painter making their portrait. After photography, most people could afford a daguerreotype.

The impact on fine art is much more complex. I think probably all you can say definitively is that the timeline where photography exists produces very different fine art paintings because the incentive structure and the implications are different in a world with photos. But better or worse? Impossible to say.

This may be true. But people should also be allowed to grieve the loss of important pillars of meaning in their life.

But they are in fact full-fledged human beings living physically in the United States. They are buying groceries, paying rent, getting their haircut.

Once you realize they are fully participating economic actors, it is much less clear whether they are a net positive or negative.

Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.

Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.

I've never watched a YouTube short.

My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

For this incentive to work, you have to only send your partner songs that you have earned through accountability. Otherwise, you can not do the thing, but still send your partner a song.

For the carrot to work, you have not also give yourself unlimited access to carrots. Which means for the most part, it still functions sort of like a stick.

You have to deprive yourself of the privilege of sending your partner a song in order to motivate yourself to earn it back.

This is the general problem with these kinds of gamification schemes. They can work, but they do require the self-discipline to not let yourself acquire the goal without doing the thing.

I think it's a lot less exhausting when it's a skill you use often. The problem is that modern society and technology allow us to solve 99% of our problems alone so those social muscles are deeply atrophied for many people.

It certainly wouldn't hurt! I think a lot about how many people in the US would be willing to be artists barely making ends meet if doing so didn't also mean losing access to healthcare.

> But, maybe those are the only two things you see because you're putting the end goal way too high... as in being a renowned novelist to take one example, instead of someone with some following.

Yeah, I agree that it's important to set your sights lower. You can be a successful novelist without being the next J.K. Rowling.

But power laws and the way word of mouth works iteratively within social media is a merciless popularity engine. The best way to get popular is to be popular. There is a positive feedback loop that consolidates most attention on a small number of winners.

You can still find your niche (my two books did!), but it's hard. And finding a niche small enough to not get dwarfed by the superstars but large enough to be a sustainable source of income is nearly impossible. Almost every creative has a day job these days.

Emile Durkeim's "Suicide" is famous in sociology because it helped kick off the entire field of study. It was, I think, one of the first works to consider how a profound individual action (suicide in this case) might be largely determined by the surrounding social structures.

I don't know what a good introductory book would be.