True. It's bad that these books are usually read by only young people. I remember reading Steppenwolf for the first time since teens and only then I realized how funny it was all around. Dostoevsky's The Devils is hilarious too, being very dark at the same time.
The same goes for basically all higher culture. Popular culture is usually unfunny because humor is considered a commercial risk.
It meant an upper middle class urban citizen, while "Kleinbürger" was their lower middle class counterpart. Buddenbrooks was all about Bürgers, their history and lifestyle. Mann was a member of that class or even of its upper crust, the patricians.
In every organization mature enough busywork will surpass real work for two reasons.
First: it cannot fail an so is not a career risk to anyone involved.
Secondly: because it doesn't produce anything meaningful it is trivially easy to manage and organize. Just like stacking boxes. No risk of missing the original mission or getting unexpected results.
In any organization old enough the main activity is the management and busywork is ideal to its needs.
By always talking only about non specified "problems" and getting people not to expect any further information it is easier to hide when it's a suicide.
See them discuss about how much someone of them gets paid or taxed, if he has medical help if needed or if he can afford to live where he's living now.
He referred to the Thirty Years War where instead of doomscrolling the peasant especially living in southwestern Germany would get his war news by getting killed or starved and his home burned down.
All of this is very easy to filter out while browsing the internet. Not when you are speaking with actual persons. Believe or not, there are still people who watch television and believe in old media.
Television teaches them that the proper response to someone disagreeing is to get angry and shout when the opposing party tries to explain their point of view. Something that is useless or even technically impossible in anonymous net forums.
If you look at the old media, important decisions are mentioned but completely ignored after someone has said something offensive or an accident happened somewhere.
Social media is people and people are the problem, not technology or anonymity. Everyone who has spent Christmas with relatives knows this.
Probably there not enough content. Just the same repackaged in human or machine produced slop.
People are addicted to YouTube but I think the key to the healthy watching habits would be restricting the screen time.
Someone knowing about things he's interested in has few problems separating the new and informative content and if he had, say, two hours a week for watching he'd probably enjoy what he sees.
Two hours is just an estimate I came up with, it can be an two hours a month or hour a day. The important thing is that YT just doesn't create enough real new information and after that it is just slop and brain rot, regardless of your habits and filters.
Generating stuff is very cheap compared to building and training the model. When you have your model done you're incentivized to use it as much as possible. Maybe even considering the sunken costs.
Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.
Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.
The sudden all encompassing popularity of smoking is one of the most astonishing things in modern history. I can think nothing that would show better the power of advertising.
Everyone knew from the start smoking is unhealthy, or at least not healthy and addictive. Nicotine probably happened to help with the new kind of stress and frustration the higher tech world caused and so it kind of answered to a real need.
Now when pretty much nobody smokes anymore, at least nobody who don't belong to underclass, it is weird reading. I remember a film of some kind of an underwater station by Cousteau and people where smoking there! A place where air for breathing is sparse if anywhere.
And when everything is a text file you have (optimally) a human readable single source of truth on things... Very important when things get complicated and layered. In GUI stuff your only option is often to start anew, make the same movements as the first time and hope you end with what you want.
The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function.
Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.