Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.

>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.

....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.

This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.

If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.

It's good advice. I have met people who talk like the post mentions, but the reality is that they just spend way too much time on Instagram and TikTok.

Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!

As an vim and arch user...

Nah never mind I use NixOS too.

Agreed. And about the HN thing, when I worked for a software startup in SF, it became a joke on our team how often strangers ask "what's your stack" instead of talking about the weather. Python 2 vs 3 was the talk of the town for a while.

I’d fucking love a post about NixOS config over this shit any day of the week. Lay it on us fella.

I live in Seattle and have two teenaged kids.

Every sentence of this article resonated very strongly with me and accurately describes much of the culture surrounding me and my family.

> Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!

Only if you have a personal blog in Times New Roman, with an RSS feed, all diagrams in ascii art, no JS, and especially no scroll-jacking, high contrast font (ideally black on white), and keep in mind that we will find out if you’re not self-hosting your email, in which case you’ll have to profusely apologize.

Seattle is brimming with “new money”. I think the article is describing a sort of quasi intellectualism that is common in circles of people who are more educated than some, and paid more than most.

Yes, the author is deciding How People Really Are by looking online, when the distortions of online discourse are also what she is complaining about.

On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.

Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.

I actually have most of this. The blog defaults to the user's system font, I think, and it has an RSS feed + very little JS (maybe none, depends on how hosted Mataroa works), etc.

Unfortunately I don't self-host my email, so I must apologize profusely.

I was joking but maybe I really should do this. I'm lacking a lot of Linux fundamentals, let alone NixOS fundamentals, but I also love my setup so much. Here's the commit that made my wallpaper an animated hobbit house!

https://github.com/Nikhil-Suresh/nixos-configuration/commit/...

I didn't use Nixvim or any of that cool stuff though. I stole a little Bash project called Tilde from my friend Victor Engmark to keep all my dotfiles in a repository and then symlink them to .config/ on all the machines I use.

Not to discredit you, but I see it around me. One of my best friends is getting tired of his girlfriend always being “so introspective” and described what she does and journals about as what the author mentioned

I don't think money has much to do with it. My kids' social circle covers a wide socioeconomic range and this heavy use of psychology is pervasive across it.