Perspective is important. Does life happen to you or are you in control of your life? Are you a victim or do you take control?

The idea that life sucks isn't new. It's been around forever.

The difference is today we have a global media that reinforces this idea to sell us products. A victim is a much more lucrative customer than someone who is empowered because they can be convinced they aren't capable of doing things themselves. Ever notice the "life is hard, pay us to take this off your hands" advertising?

Start looking for the victim mindset or the "life happens to me, I'm powerless" mindset in people. You'll see it all over. Then look at people who are busy and doing things and generally happy, they don't have this mindset. They're more mindful, is one way of looking at it.

If ya wanna be a sad sack victim, go for it, but don't be surprised when happiness passes you by because you never bothered to experience adversity and don't have the skills to navigate life or the ability to inconvenience yourself. There is a lot of happiness to be had, just gotta go find it or make it happen. One person's great experience is another person's bad time, perspective is what changes that. If your perspective is victimhood then you're never gonna have a good time. You're always gonna think you're depressed if that's your perspective on life.

Moreover, what of those retail workers? Are they all lazy losers and we shouldn't bother with them? Or are they, partially, victims of circumstance?

Before I got cancer, I used to believe everything happened for a reason. I realize now that that belief can be very toxic. Why punish myself? Thats a choice.

That doesn't mean we need to be doomer. But we need to recognize some things are not in our control, and some things aren't even in anyone's control. And we shouldn't feel guilty about needing help, and we shouldn't punish ourselves out of some pursuit for bootstrap virtue.

There is a growing movement that says life is too easy nowadays and we're handicapping our ability to develop coping strategies.

Life is incredibly easy nowadays. We have more luxury and access to everything than we've ever bad. Crime is at all time lows. We're safer and have an incredible access to just about anything. This leads to self segregation and an atrophy of basic coping skills.

But the media convinces us of the opposite. People are told from birth that their lives are hard, the system is broken, etc. This conditions people to not bother. This atrophies skills or they never develop.

I recently read an article that something like 25% of Ivy league students have a "disability". They don't, but they think being depressed is a disability which enables them. The author made a good case that they were taking advantage of the system, which cheats themselves out of developing their skills. https://reason.com/2025/12/04/why-are-38-percent-of-stanford...

My friends sex addicts group has also touched on a similar thing lately: emotional comfort is not emotional maturity. People today segregate themselves from people to protect their emotions, then they wonder why they can't handle people who disagree with them. It's easy to avoid things.

The main thing I'm saying here is that today's modern life allows us to avoid things we don't like. This leads to a lack of development in many areas. Then we claim everyone is struggling. Then the media reinforces this.

Over time it can become difficult to gauge people's conditions and legitimacy of those conditions. therapist friend of mine and I talk about this a lot. "What's an actual condition and what do people think they have?" is a big issue in modern therapy. People Self-diagnose way too much nowadays. The media convinces everyone that they're broken.

My life experience also mimics this. In college I thought I had crippling social anxiety. Turns out I just needed to be around people more to develop my abilities. I forced myself to work customer service jobs and voila, after a year or two I became a social person. My stutter went away and I became comfortable in groups.

Our perspective is fucked and it creates a cycle of apathy/complacency. Then everyone is "depressed" because they can't handle their latte having soy instead of cows's milk. This is hyperbole but it isn't untrue.

I don't understand why you think that the fact that exposure cured you means you didn't have social anxiety?

Exposure is something a therapist would suggest for social anxiety.

The issue seems to be that you think saying that someone has social anxiety means they are permanently broken (and maybe will give up trying to do anything about it?) but I'm not really sure where you got that idea from.

Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac.

We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.

This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.

Also a lot of low-paying jobs are customer service in some way. Smiling is sort of a prerequisite for getting paid.

Like for anything in life, it depends on the market you're in, and where you are situated on the acumen distribution (low acumen drivers don't make a lot, while high acumen ones do). Narrative thinking likes cherry picking the worst cases and then representing those stories as normal. But reality is always a bit more complicated.

Many Lyft drivers are immigrants, either between jobs, or are doing it full time. I don't directly ask them how much they make, but I tell them in my homeland of Canada, if you're on welfare and disability, you make CAD$x and it's good enough money for a single person. Most Lyft drivers are like: "that's way, way less than what I make doing this." (some tell me they make US$3-4k/month, working 6 day weeks. This might sound like too little, but realize that not all COL is the same, and for an immigrant, this is a great gig with optionality -- you can always turn off the app).

Then you might say, oh, they're blind to the depreciation hit their cars are taking. But good, high acumen, Lyft drivers often drive second-hand Priuses which depreciate slowly and have great mileage, and they track expenses like a hawk. If you go to the Lyft subreddit, good drivers know all the tricks -- optimize for high yield windows, avoid dead miles, avoid blind quests, and the cap hours deliberately. It's the ones with less acumen that drive a new car with low MPG on financing, and don't optimize.

So don't generalize and catastrophize (catastrophizing amplifies depression -- in cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to guard against that). Just stop it. Everything in life is a distribution.

I'm not saying driving a Lyft is aspirational, but for some immigrants who are doing it to support their family, it's a less-bad option than many others.

I even had a few drivers pushing me to get married (I'm single) because they said, once they get home from a day of driving, they get to go back to family. "It's less lonely," they tell me. In some ways they're happier than I am, even though I make nominally more than them.

Has this approach of ordering people to feel or think a certain way ever actually worked for you? Do you think this is a good way to have a respectful discussion with someone?

> some tell me they make US$3-4k/month

So let's run with that number, say 3.5k/month average. That's $42,000/year: They're independent contractors, so they have independent employment tax which is about 2x of standard w-2 taxes. A quick online calculator tells me that would amount to 8,370.90 in my state. The lions share is federal medicare and social security tax though; state tax on this is practically nothing here.

* They must have a car. Quick search says a 2024 prius is around $25k. Monthly payments at 9.6% (prime rate for a used car, all new immigrants start out with perfect credit, right?) at 60 months is around $550. Let's say insurance is $100. Ignore fuel and maintenance for now.

* So now we have 2800/month after taxes and 650/month just to work. The remaining 2150 needs to cover everything else. Food, housing, utilities.

* This doesn't even consider health insurance. Let's hope they qualify for a subsidized plan, because they sure can't cover it on this income. I guess they have the "don't get sick" plan that's so popular these days.

Oh and all this for working 6 days a week. Which if that's the case they're not clocking 8 hours days. Even conservatively you should assume that's 10 hours a day.

And on top of all that you said they're supporting a family?! So 3 or 4 people on 2150/month?

All that so they can work 60 hour weeks, barely see their wife and kids, and be one accident or medical emergency away from total financial ruin.

But you're right, they're rich in spirit and after all, isn't that what really matters? They really do have it so much better than you.

Unfortunately it's as likely as this being the year of the Linux desktop because Windows 11.

Flock takes the "do nothing until forced to" mentality.

All that these sensor-based systems do is train you to be an inattentive car owner.

Sealed radiators? No way to look for winshield washer fluid? No translucent reservoir of brake fluid?

Acting like all this is a safety concern is just textbook internet comment section lying through ones teeth type behavior. Yes, anything can be a safety concern at the limit but even tire failures on the road to not typically elevate to that level. The following framing of "well just drive an old car if you don't like it" is more of the same sort of dishonesty with a veneer of plausible deniability on top. There's no reason these systems need to be built in a way that they can't be disabled and leak PII. There's no reason just about all the systems you're trying to frame as a "bundle" have to be bundled in the first place.

I'm not acting. This is not a performative display.

But yes: While I'm happier in a world with TPMS, I'd be even happier yet in a world where it was a quick and simple job to disable it in a reversible way. (Perhaps in some manner similar to the incantations used to disable the passenger seatbelt chime in many cars.)

A skilled driver can notice all kinds of other stuff using their senses, too.

For instance: When there's a plume of coolant coming out of the hood in front of them, they can deduce from observation that the engine temperature may be very high. They can also identify low oil pressure by observing the clacks and bangs of an engine that is starved for oil and tearing itself apart, or even by the silence of an engine that has ceased.

Or: Information. A light can illuminate on the dashboard the before these conditions are pronounced enough to feel, and the driver may then elect to use this abundance of information to take action before it snowballs into something that may become expensive or dangerous.

I don't think most people know how to do it, to be honest. Partially because people seem to think reading two pages in a manual is some kind of sisyphean task that no mortal should ever be cursed with.

It's pretty crazy how little people care. Even if you don't care about the safety aspect, keeping your tires inflated well saves you a ton on fuel and tire replacements.

In France, we'd check tire pressure at gas stations on nice machines that had built in dial gauges and were free.

In the US, I had to use one of those hand gauges and the air pumps needed quarters (in most cases, especially if you weren't also buying gas).

In Portugal now, the gas stations also have free air and pretty good pumps.

I landed at JFK and was looking for a stroller to stack my suitcases on. The kind of stroller that is free in every single airport I've been to.

I was shocked to see it costs $7. The guy who (I presume) worked there sardonically exclaimed "Welcome to America."

But yeah, free airport trolleys are are an easy marker of evolved civilisations, and the USA fails this test.

Countries that have passed this test for me that I can recall: Australia, Greece, Singapore, China, UK, Thailand, Italy, Spain…

I (again) have a low pressure warning on one tire (getting colder in the Northern Hemisphere). It looks fine but I'll get my compressor out tomorrow and make the computer happy. A lot of modern tires can look pretty good even if, as you say, they can be quite a bit below recommended limits.

And checking tire pressure was a 1x/week thing.

I do get that it used to be a thing in the past. But that was also when oil was rated for 3k miles (I think? maybe it was even lower) and engines would routinely burn oil (ie consume it without leaving a drip spot on the ground). Whereas in the modern day, 15k synthetic exists.

FWIW, I probably do more of my own maintenance than the median HNer. I'll admit I can let intervals slip more than I'd like and I'm working on that, but this idea that everyone is checking fluid levels all the time just seems wildly off base.

A lot of modern automation is not really automation. A washing machine is automation: it takes a task which would have wasted hours of your day and reduces it down to a few minutes. A lot of modern "automation" doesn't save you any actual time time, but just saves you from being attentive:

- Checking your tire pressure doesn't take much time, but TPMS is a privacy problem and an added maintenance cost that you cannot opt out of.

- A power rear lift gate actually takes _more_ time than just shutting it with your hands.

- Power windows don't go down any more quickly than power windows. The only only benefit here is that you can open all 4 windows simultaneously. However this is a luxury, not something which saves you time. You never _need_ all 4 windows down. So maybe people like it, but it's not like the washing machine that actually saves you labor.

- etc ....

People think that needed to do or attend to anything is wasting time, but often modern automation saves no time whatsoever, and has other downsides. (privacy, maintenance cost, vehicle weight, etc.)

Presumably the fundamentalists think you just need to yell louder. With neo-luddite opposition like this, its no wonder the surveillance society is winning.

The fiesta st is a decent example. An economy car, so very simple, but with a sports package. The only "smart" features, like traction control, can be turned off.

Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades. And the computer can shift a DCT faster than you can. These days a manual tranny is right up there with hand-crank starting your car: if you enjoy it, great, but don’t get smug because people don’t want to manually adjust the spark advance.

No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.

While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).

An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).

So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.

First car I looked up from 20 years ago (I own one), and the automatic does just a bit better than the manual:

https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2005_Scion_xB.shtml

We bought manual version despite that. You shouldn’t have a hard time finding other examples.

If we were in a car right now and I was driving, I'd have to look at the gearstick to tell you if it was auto or manual.

I genuinely don't get the USian obsession with driving manual gearbox cars being somehow "elite".

Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).

You're not really, especially on a long run. If you're doing motorway speeds there is no difference in economy and performance. An auto will be a bit worse in slow driving, when it's using the torque converter which is quite lossy.

> Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).

They will let you rev the engine as high as you like and will engine-brake just fine if you select a lower gear. They might not shift into a lower gear if you've got a gearbox that's smart enough to stop you money-shifting the engine.

Most Xantias had a 1.9 petrol making roughly 50% more power, although with appreciably less torque.