One of the most enjoyable musical experiences I had recently was on a choir exchange in Europe. We were at a concert afterparty with choirs from two other countries, exchanging drunken folk songs. Were we pleasant to listen to? Probably not. It was raucous and out of tune, but it was a bunch of people sharing something we loved.
Singing in adult choirs has been one of my most spiritually and socially rewarding activities. You really feel a brother in arms with your fellow singers. Perhaps it is because singing is such an embarrassing activity in isolation, but then the sheer force of all the voices come together to make something of such power and beauty that you are incapable of replicating yourself. I’ll never forget the tenors I sang Faures Requiem or Beethoven 9th with.
i had a similar experience in scouting. german scouting has a strong singing tradition to the point that there are regular competitions that attract groups from all over europe. also camps where multiple groups meet. imagine your after party experience every night for multiple days, maybe even a week or two.
Most medium-to-long distance trains in Europe have 1st class compartments. These can range from just being quieter because of the increased price, to spacious seats with complimentary food and drink. Italian high speed rail has business class with hireable meeting rooms[0]
The issue with cars isn't that they're not convenient in isolation, but that they cause issues at scale more than other modes of transport, especially when they're the default option for journeys. An efficiently run metro line can shift tens of thousands of people per hour in each direction, but you'd need a multi-lane highway running at maximum throughput to even get close.
We love to debate headlines, don’t we? But along those lines, it seems like they could just say it’s “new” and that would be good enough; a headline doesn’t need to be any more specific.
Regarding 1, the key difference in those days was the barrier to entry. Sure, your post on the gardening forum was fair game for any user to respond to, but every user with that ability had to make an active decision to join a gardening forum. HAM radio hobbyists or political campaigners who don't have interest in gardening wouldn't gatecrash the party to respond to conversations out of context. On global, single-feed social media, you have to sign up, but then every bubble and subculture has the possibility of running into each other with an easy interface to join the conversation with no required context.
One change Alec has been in favour of is a setting to only allow followers to respond to a post. Sure, it takes 2 seconds, but it's that extra bit of friction that forces you to confront more context of who you're responding to.
It can be anything, really. Craft workshops, choirs, charity volunteering (and even things that don't begin with c!) - whatever gets you out interacting with people in your community feeds your social interaction needs and helps build local networks. I've had a good time at the local bouldering gym - though it's ostensibly an athletic pursuit, it's very accessible and a very social atmosphere, since half the people there are waiting for their turn to climb the wall.
A few years back, I realised how bad the addiction was when I deleted a couple of apps. While doing other things on my phone, I'd autopilot going to the apps list and tapping the empty space where Reddit/Twitter used to be. You're right, that little bit of friction is enough to make you stop and ask "what am I really getting out of this?"
I actually found that certain browser equivalents of attention sucking apps were poor quality enough that using them only through the browser was enough friction to wean myself off them. old.reddit.com is especially badly optimised for anything other than a desktop screen.
Old.reddit.com is the only way reddit loads on my se2. The actual mobile website just times out with half the comments loaded every time. A lot of noticeable lag. It is a super heavy site in comparison with old.reddit.com.
For me, it’s that I have a million keyword and subreddit filters on my desktop computer and Reddit is unreadable for me without those filters, so I never read it on my phone
The more pertinant observation is that cars are a great tool for mobility, but going _all in_ on cars causes a whole bunch of issues at society scale. If you zone cities and design infrastructure with the assumption that everyone drives, it forces everybody into the least space efficient mode of transport. You have to designate huge amounts of valuable real estate to keeping all those cars somewhere. People who _can't_ drive will have much more difficulty navigating life. When cars arrived, some parts of the world made sure their cities were still easy to navigate by foot, bike and transit, and I'd argue they're more pleasant places to be.
The point isn't to say that new tech is bad, but that there can be adverse consequences to jumping in wholesale.
The closest you can really get to objectivity is to observe which patterns of attributes tend to correlate well to people saying that that piece of media is good. In the end, "good" or "bad" is just my emotional reaction to receiving a piece of art, and there's plenty of art that have all of the usual attributes I associate with good art that leave me completely cold.
I prefer to ask whether a piece of art is "effective" or not. An EDM club banger, a classical piano sonata, and a rap battle are all trying to achieve very different things with valued qualities coming from their various subcultures, so ask what the artist is trying to achieve (intricate composition, or shifting units etc) and judge it only in that context
