Nobody cares

Everyone has a breaking point and negativity bias makes the awful stuff pile on quicker.

Put it another way: Things are getting worse for more people. It may still be "amazing" for most people, but the ones next to the metaphorical "awful" line see it creeping. So it can feel very arrogant when someone a mile out says "why aren't you happy, it's great" as you see the line start to take your amazing things.

I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.

I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.

It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.

I agree 100% with the comment about the McDonald's food ordering system. It is legitimately the worst of all the major fast-food chains. It is slow, ad-heavy, and there are certain things that you cannot order.

> the amount of pressure put on the average worker and their family in the US.

Broken windows. To use his example with bikes: the firms didn't care enough to allow the engineer to properly angle that entrance to the sidewalk. The engineer didn't care to push back because they were underpaid and things are getting more expensive at home. Things get more expensive because landlords are taking advantadge of the situation to jack up prices, because no regulation cared enough to stop that (or worse, regulation cared about money more and landlords "donated" to him to sway their ruling).

This apathy is a virus that spreads. At some point it becomes hard to figure out where it started. It's just this fog that seemingly always existed.

>You want to chase bugs into the sunset and never deliver new features?

I don't get paid to deliver features. If that bug is really critical enough I may push back on it.

Or I simply realize it's above my paygrade, don't care, leave a paper trail down the line for when they inevitably blame me, and do what I'm told like a proper worker.

>Or he cares to avoid the potential interactions with law enforcement that would result from such ridiculousness.

uhh, yes? What was the point of this ridiculous metaphor you yourself created?

>The problem isn't with people not caring, it's that the deepest affections of the heart are selfish

It's a bit more basic than that. If people aren't happy they care less, because their senses dull to focus only on survival and not assisting one's community.

A lot of people are unhappy these days.