alt Hacker News// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
Replies
It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc).
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
The subway should be free, and continuous fare hikes when you're already double paying with your eyes because of all the advertising they shove in front of you is more incentive to turnstile jump. Overpaid do-nothing senior adminstrators and lawmakers who are in the pocket of privatization are the problem, not that 17 year old.
the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.
There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it.
Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.