This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)
I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)
So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))
Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.
Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.
If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.
Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
Like, sure, sometimes it is good bonding, and sometimes it's not, it's very much context dependent.
If having the emotional security of not being in the hotseat answering questions from family members is necessary for an amount of emotional security on the OP's part, then I would consider that to be a good strategy. It might not be what you would do in that scenario, which is okay, as you and OP are different and might have different methods of addressing and meeting your respective emotional needs.
I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.
Why does the techie have to go out of his way and adjust to the non techie normie?
Why don't they drink their own cool aid and adjust to the techie?
We don't like all these personal questions. Just leave us alone instead of asking the same thing over and over. If we point you to an FAQ, be like "oh yeah awesome, thank you" instead keeping on asking if we are alright. Just shut up and read the FAQ.
Who are these commenter's that demand for him not to post an FAQ? Why can't he just post an FAQ and they are like "oh yeah thank you very much!" and everyone is happy? Why does he have to feel bad for his FAQ and instead answer the same uncomfortable questions over and over even though he's fine but nobody believes him?
Why do these normies demand that the world adjusts to them?
WHAT IS A NORMIE?
Normie is a slang for a “normal person,” especially someone seen to have conventional, mainstream tastes, interests, viewpoints, etc. It is intended as an insult but often used ironically.
Normie is also sometimes used by specific in-groups to refer and distinguish themselves from specific out-groups.
Consider the idea that there is no angle here at all. What if you are simply witnessing people communicating with other people? No angles, no channels?
You read this, and your takeaway was that "SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose". That is only true under the premise that they wrote this with the intent to .. I don't know, self-market. To get reach, clicks, whatever. The usual imaginary Internet points.
What if they didn't? What if we just stumbled upon part of a genuine conversation that simply isn't directed at us?
I'm sorry if I sounded aggressive earlier - because I was.
I grew up on a different Internet, where the vast majority of stuff was in some form genuine, even if it was psychotic, moronic or simply mundane and boring.
You might disagree, but my bullshit detectors tell me that this is genuine. Which is rare these days. And because I miss that stuff, I am somewhat protective of it. Sorry for lashing out.
PS - "autistic" as code for "retarded" is, you know, like, so totally 2018.
PPS:
> Your position is ridiculous about keeping a situation private, while it's on the front page of hacker news. Give yourself a reality check about intentions.
If somebody else posts a link to something I wrote to some link aggregator, that neither says nor changes anything about my intentions when I wrote it. That much should be, in your words, "self-evident".
This is not about privacy. Just because you can access it in a browser does not make you the target, just as being able to listen to a conversation in a subway does not make you a party to it. Again, self-evident.
PPPS:
After that "moron", I'll take back my apology, thank you very much,
Unfortunately, with where my past is, a whole lot of my family too has the idea that I'm living a distorted life, and that this needs to be corrected (almost as a first priority thing). There's almost an Animal-Farm-istic "All sins are equal, but some sins are more equal than others" kind of thing going on there, if you catch what I mean.
Intellectually, I think many of them can understand how this is not really the most rational thing given the on-paper beliefs, but emotionally, it's a very different story, and the emotions seem to win out on that front.
Answering the basics isn't too terrible for me, though it definitely can be a problem if it's the only focus (and if the conversation inevitably keeps looping around to that singular topic. I am a freaking human being, darnmnitall!!)