alt Hacker News> a lot of one-time cashing in of trust.
I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.
Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.
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I agree with what you’re talking about but I don’t agree this is analogous.
I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.
These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!
I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.
It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.
> I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to.
When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.