A Love Letter to People Who Believe in People

I've always been a fan of enthusiasm. I find many people react badly to it, though; especially in tech. We have a lot of curmudgeons.

We've become jaded by phony enthusiasm or people hijacking it for their own purposes. I agree it's bad, but this industry does seem to run on the enthusiasm of naive 20-40 year olds, the end result of that is many jaded 40+ year old curmudgeons.

What I have encountered, is a bit different.

There’s a fetching shade of gray, to my well-coiffed pompadour, and I find many younger folks are almost immediately hostile, before I’ve even had a chance to give them a reason to be.

Speaking only for myself, I am very enthusiastic about all kinds of things, and devote a great deal of effort towards helping folks out. There’s reasons for that, which is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that I’ve seen darker times, and that can add a lot of shine, to what others take for granted.

That said, I’ve also seen quite a bit of life, and have learned where a lot of the claymores are planted, so some of that “helping folks out,” is mentioning things like “Are you sure you want to pet that rattling snake?”.

Sometimes that comes with most of the things you were enthusiastic for ending up far from fulfilling their promise.

They often seem to me to be two sides of the same coin: fanaticism becomes curmudgeonly with what does not coincide with your fanaticism.

I think it's the curse of being online. Most IRL based social groups in every culture I've been in subconsciously filter out cynics. These folks often feel disenfranchised IRL and congregate online instead. Their presence crowds out non-cynics, who then leave. These online communities then reorganize around cynical baselines.

Apparently Threads had made a decision earlier on to deprioritize negative and charged political topics because of Meta's belief in this negative flywheel.

(I'd rather not go into a discussion about Meta itself in replies here because I find those discussions on HN to be highly unproductive, and I won't respond to comments regarding them.)

EDIT: r/Coronavirus on Reddit was a great place to observe evidence of this flywheel. My partner started using it when she felt really depressed during lockdown restrictions. All the content on the sub was about how the world was irreparably broken and how society as we know it was about to come to an end. Commenters were clamoring for humanity to be cleansed. Then news of the vaccines came out. At first nobody on the sub believed it would work. But when efficacy numbers were released, the tone of the sub changed quickly and the sub started having a lot fewer people posting to it.

Huh, I was going to post the opposite. We have enough enthusiasm and True Believers in tech work, especially in the USA where even PR pieces read "We are so excited to announce..."

We may or may not have enough critics/curmudgeons, but whether they are there or not, they certainly don't seem to rise into leadership roles where they can use their discernment and wisdom to steer better and to stop terrible projects. I know in my company, the top ranks are all filed with beaming excitement and positivity about everything, and everything we are doing is great, and we are so confident in this, and excited about that...

I don’t consider that “real” enthusiasm, though.

It’s “cargo-cult enthusiasm,” where they believe that keeping an almost manic level of energy will magically transcend the bourgeoisie prison of reality, and poop out rainbow unicorn turds.

Apparently,many people are. I once was in an interview with an aquired company. ( We were aquired... I thanked the founders and only said a few words about the opportunity we had... )

Months later, I was taking to one of he founders, and he said that someone on the board of directors was sitting behind me. He said "keep THAT guy. He has more enthusiasm than the entire rest of your company."

Thanks Richard K and Jim V.