Having taken SSRI for anxiety, it feels more like a second order effect. The brain is anxious, the serotonin goes in, the serotonin is not exactly "anti-anxiety" signal but "feel-good" signal.
Repeat constantly every day for months and the brain thinks, "ok we constantly have this euphoria going on, time to turn the anxiety off no need for it anymore"
This would also be why the serotonin increase is instant when starting SSRIs, but anti-anxiety effects take months and are gradual
> but anti-anxiety effects take months and are gradual
Everyone is different, but the anti-anxiety effects happened almost overnight once I fixed my dosage, and I don't remember anything approaching euphoria.
Here's a paper with highlighting that shows the same:
It all makes sense once you consider a tech company to be a money printer.
Once the initial builders have built it, it will keep on printing money barring some absolute mismanagement. This attracts the grifters, the useless people, the talkers, you know the type. These people don’t care about building. They don’t care about the product. They care about their own self-interests and the money printer is a way to advance those interests.
The inevitable end result? Enshittification.
The only way to avoid this is to have an actual engineer as CEO. See Meta, Tesla, Nvidia
It’s extremely easy, cheap and stress-free to travel nowadays due to smartphones.
The untapped market potential in western countries is still crazy.
I’d say 80% of the people I know live stuck within their immediate home area or region, they don’t realize a taxi to the local international airport and 5-10 hours on a plane would change their entire world view.
Kind of a tangent, but this is a more nuanced topic than people usually imagine, and not necessarily always a good thing. Widening your perspective sounds great, and often it is, but it also tends to isolate you from other people in ways that can't be undone.
You won't get this effect from being a tourist abroad a few times a year, but it's something that comes with territory after you've traveled extensively, kind of a more literal version of the "you can't go home again" proverb. I expect lots of digital nomads are probably familiar with this, but it's not something they talk about.
Life is a process of stacking up experiences that others are increasingly unlikely to be able relate to. But someone who leaves a small rural community for college in the big city is losing a large number of people who can relate to them, and gaining a new community of people that can. Same story for most radical perspective-widening experiences, like how soldiers may struggle with aspects of civilian life, but at least can enjoy new solidarity/understanding with their brothers in arms. Usually with these things, one door opens and another closes.
The situation is very different for some types of expat or diaspora populations, or just your dedicated wanderer. Those who are earnestly involved or experienced in multiple cultures may find that they can relate to everyone, but never feel understood themselves.
As someone who moved a lot growing up and for my career, not being in one place long enough to really bond with people may be the cause of feeling isolated/not understood, maybe even more so than having more experience with different places and cultures...
Isn't the entire tourist industry essentially based off the Grand Tour[1]? That is, an idea that became in vogue among the wealthy European aristocrats that your children must tour the grand cities of Europe to become worldly and "enlightened". It became a sort of right of passage and a signal of how wealthy your family is and how worldly and well-traveled your children are.
Businesses, liking money, noticed that if they could sell the masses on this idea it would be immensely profitable. You too - merely wealthy or even middle class person - can be enlightened like the aristocrats! A trip could change your world view! Show the world you're not a dumb, ignorant, small-minded serf-child by traveling!
And sure, I'm being overly cynical, but for a mere library fee you can probably expand your world view even more than through consumerist behaviour.
> but for a mere library fee you can probably expand your world view even more than through consumerist behaviour.
My view is that learning a new concept is a lot like traveling. To me it feels the same. I like to do both a lot.
There is an exception with traveling that is hard to find in books (directly, indirectly it is also available in books). One can form social relationships with people from another country. In many cases, the relationship that forms is with another tourist. It seems to be one of the few times that people are genuinely open to meet other people. There are other ways to go about this, but this way of truly meeting potential new international friends is hard to beat. Though, another way of doing it is university.
I think traveling has little that is unique, but so does everything else. There are always other ways that one can go about to meeting their needs. It just so happens that traveling is a pretty good and convenient way to do it with, but by far not the only way.
Convince me otherwise: I don't travel because I see it as the pinnacle of vapid consumerist excess.
People who regale me with tales of their travels will recount the great food, the nice people, the architecture, the views. You burned all that fuel, money, and time to travel halfway around the world just to eat someone else's food and shit in someone else's toilet? To walk someone else's streets? Why? If you think this experience has enhanced your worldview, I think you're a fool who was marketed to. I think travel has been productized and hawked to you as a "world-view enhancing" high-status marker by the tourism industry.
The higher status attributed to "one who has toured" is particularly abhorrent. Oh, sorry, I'm just stupider with a meeker worldview because I didn't go hiking in the Alps or eat authentic Italian food or something. It's unwarranted elitism.
I think it's a superficial outlet for consumerism and a misguided attempt to attain some ostensible "worldliness" status.
My ideal is to dwell in and steward for my own village. Why do I need to go around visiting other people's villages?
Here's an ideal, from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 80:
> You burned all that fuel, money, and time to travel halfway around the world just to eat someone else's food and shit in someone else's toilet? To walk someone else's streets? Why? If you think this experience has enhanced your worldview, I think you're a fool who was marketed to
We are all fools marketed to in different ways.
That said, I don't really remember in much detail things I did in 2016. I remember still in vivid detail the things I experienced in the 3 weeks I spent in Japan. Including, ironically enough, the toilets I shat at.
So you haven’t traveled yet think it is vapid and useless. You’re like the child who refuses to take a bite of a new food because you’re certain it will be terrible.
I can’t speak for anyone else but when I travel I meet people of different cultures and I appreciate them. I see interesting sights the world has to offer increasing my awe and wonder. The new foods I taste give me an appreciation of different cultures and help me recognize that mine is not the only perspective, the only way, the only right answer.
But sure, maybe that’s all vapid consumerist nonsense. I’m sure you would know, small village expert on the state of the world. Actually that’s pretty harsh. I’m sure you have a lovely perspective from your little village. It’s a shame you’ve revoked my invitation and I can’t come learn it from you.
You say you don't travel, but have you travelled before? Have you attempted to answer your own question experientially, rather than rely on rhetoric?
Because you could make the same arguments for basically any activity: would you reduce playing a sport or learning a craft as mere marketing by their respective industries, and make judgements on them based on philosophy, rather than just try out playing the sport or doing the craft for a while to see for yourself what it's like? Philosophy only goes so far, it's practice that allows you to become embodied in the activity and gain insight.
I've never traveled far, but I would imagine the most remarkable thing about it is that it's simply good fun, like sports. I just don't buy the notion that one's worldview is necessarily constrained without physically touring different places around the world.
If you go deeply enough into a sport or craft, it will also change your worldview profoundly, you will look at things in different ways, due to both the activity itself, your relationship to the activity in both mind and body, and also the people you meet and places you go due to the activity. Same goes for travel - you can travel far, and never expand your worldview - the average person in my country (UK) frequently holiday in Spain, but stick to British-centred resort packages where they never stray from the hotel complex and eat British food and drink British lager. I wouldn't say that's worldview-expanding travel. But that's like engaging with a craft at a hobby level, you're (probably) not gonna get your mind blown occasionally doodling a stick man with a pencil either.
But ultimately the point I wanted to make is that if you've never done the thing you're making assumptions on, that people who have done the thing say has a certain effect, you denying that effect is exactly what you said: your imagination.
I think you are right. Depth of experience has always seemed more rewarding than breadth of experience.
I think there is value to vacation and travel for relaxation purposes. But you are definitely right that "world-view enhancing" is travel industry propaganda.
Maybe if you live somewhere for a year and integrate with the culture there is something to be gained. But a week in Italy is just for fun, I think it's silly when people claim otherwise.
Building a community and established roots seems much more meaningful than travelling to many different places, at least to me.
I feel like I would miss out more if I wasn't there to experience the daily changes here. I do travel sometimes, but when asked about my dream destination, that's where I am now. We do get so pulled into traveling to other places that we forget to appreciate and explore the one we come from/are in.
There is a lot of value in experiencing other cultures, especially away from tourists. If nothing else, it's easy to say "bomb Sanaa" because Houthis attacked a US ship, but a lot harder once you've been waiting for a while on the side of a Yemeni road and locals brought you food and tea because you must have been hot and hungry.
I don't have a big house or fancy car. I don't dine in fancy restaurants or stay in fancy hotels; sometimes I sleep on the ground. I never pay for more than coach. But I do need to go places and see things. Sometimes that's out in the forest or the mountains or the coast. Sometimes it's local. Sometimes it's very distant.
The world! The people! It is amazing! I stand agape at the scope of it all. I'm sorry I will not be able to experience every single bit of it.
But that's just me. I don't intend or expect you to be convinced it is right for you. Likewise, you can't tell me what has or has not enhanced my world view. :)
> You burned all that fuel, money, and time to travel halfway around the world just to eat someone else's food and shit in someone else's toilet? To walk someone else's streets?
You're gonna eat anyway. Might as well be stuff you've never tried before in some exotic location.
You're gonna shit anyway. Who cares where the toilet used is located?
If you get outside at all, why not walk some streets / take a path you've never taken before?
So it all comes down to the cost of actually getting there. If not far from home, that cost can be low to zero. If further away: there's expensive destinations / ways to travel, and cheap(er) ones. Going on a single long vacation may be better value than a weekend back-and-forth every year.
I've taken the taxi, and the flights, and unless you work at it, most international flights land in parts of the world that kind of just look like America but they speak funny.
You have to actually dig and get outside the "tourist" areas to really start to get something different, and you can do that in the USA, too.
This is a good point too. Areas that are really touristy start to converge on a shared "vibe". I don't know if this is always how it's been and I finally realized it, or if it's a consequence of the more recent boom in travel.
I think it's somewhat both, but mainly the latter.
Decades ago, even touristy places were very "native" for lack of a better term.
But now, things like McDonalds and Starbucks and other American chains have expanded all over the world, the locals like them for various reasons, and you find them in the richer areas (which are often clustered around tourist-attractive areas, too).
However, if you stay in an area for a week or two, and/or get outside the cities, you quickly realize just how different places are.
It's a lot cheaper than you'd probably realize thanks to decades of competition.
It's unlike necessities like a roof over your head, education and healthcare. These are all increasingly unaffordable thanks to a war on the working class driven by the financialization of essentials.
My family is fortunate enough to be able to take a European vacation later this year.
It's going to cost over $10k, and most of that is going to flights (economy) and hotels (decent, but not stellar).
A very large percentage of Americans wouldn't even be able to afford the ~$1k/person to fly to Europe, let alone any of the other costs involved.
If you think that every American (or even nearly so) would be able to afford an overseas vacation if they just did the research, then I'm sorry, you really are out of touch with reality. Hell, a depressing number of Americans don't even have enough paid days off to be able to afford to take a road-trip-and-camping vacation within the country for any significant length of time.
International travel has gotten a lot more expensive over the past few years. I'm literally paying double for the same flight and hotel compared to 5-6 years ago.
It’s interesting how the thread starts off by expanding your worldview and then ignores the fact that international travel is often a luxury for the well off.
It's interesting how many people who engage in expensive luxury travel are unaware of the cheaper world of hostels, etc. exist.
They belong to a privileged class. They might be able to afford vastly more expensive luxuries like a roof over their head that belongs to them and healthcare too.
And you still have to pay both of those if you're on vacation. Unless you're suggesting that people pack up everything they own, move out of their house, and go on vacation for a month?
I know tons of people who worked minimum wage jobs who saved up and packed up and went on vacation for a month somewhere where the basics are much cheaper than back home - e.g. a hostel in Thailand while living off street food.
I did it too.
If youre the kind of person who flits between luxury airbnbs and cruises then yeah, "travel is a luxury".
There's people that rent out their house a la AirBnB, while out on a month+ stay in a LCOL country. And in some cases come out ahead doing so, while having a vacation.
Of course it varies from household to household whether it's practical (or wise) to do this.
I have previously rented my house out on AirBnB, and it's not a switch you can just flip when you feel like taking a vacation; there is a lot of work you have to do to get your house ready to rent, and you have to establish (or maintain) relationships with people who can handle turnovers and other on-site services. A month would not be long enough that I'd feel like it was worth the hassle.
Probably way more than that but they fly for essential reasons. Business travel, funerals & weddings, or once-in-a-decade relocation. Beyond that of course the majority is short-term domestic vacations that are in search of beaches or mountains, not cultural enrichment
No sorry I was writing in a hurry. I meant something else but couldn't come up with a good definition quickly.
I mean flown somewhat routinely and "recreationally" not for work, school, or emergency. I think 30% is probably about right with those constraints? Among tech people everyone has flown several times at least, but a lot of my family and social connections are inner city working class and many of them have never flown except possibly when a family member was hospitalized. Others fondly recall the single trip they took to florida or whatever decades ago.
A lot of americans don't fly ever and it's definitely for financial reasons even though tickets can be very cheap. The flight is the cheapest part of a vacation and people making $30k at hourly labor are just not taking time off work to fly to new places.
I think it makes sense that there's some X% of Americans who fly "recreationally somewhat routinely" where X<100, but I'm not sure what X is. As a counterpoint to X=30, as of last Fall 48% of Americans had a passport [1] from which I think we can reasonably infer that nearly 48% of Americans have had an international trip in the last 10 years. The bar for recreationally flying in general is quite lower because it includes domestic flights. But also maybe the international trip was a once off.
Right it's the thought of the opportunity cost. That money could go to paying off debt obligations instead of adding more to the pile.
Some people (probably a very low minority) are also of the thought that unnecessary consumption travel is a high impact on environment ~ something about climate change.
I have travelled extensively, and my assessment (along with other people who have travelled extensively) is that you end up travelling to see people, not things or experiences.
This requires you to know people where you travel to.
In the end, it is not travelling that opens up your mind, it is knowing and interacting with people of different culture - It is being open minded that opens up your mind.
I think that you are missing the pile of money that these people stuck in their home area would need to hand over for that plane ride, accommodation, and travel expenses.
Travel is now, arguably, more of a luxury than it was precovid.
Here's the expense that doesn't change: That will cost me a month of vacation days. Yeah, I can afford the money, if I choose to. But the vacation days are a huge opportunity cost. For me, at the moment, that's two years of no other vacations. That's expensive.
A lot of replies are claiming it’s money, but honestly I think there’s just a lot of people that don’t care to see the world beyond their town.
I have a friend that grew up, went to college, went to law school all within 20 miles of his hometown. As soon as he graduated law school, he got married and started talking about having kids. That was a few years ago, but he was basically 45 and settled into his suburban life at the age of 24.
1. People who don't travel because they can't afford it
2. People who don't travel because they're intimidated by it
3. People who don't travel because they don't see it as important
These groups definitely have some overlap -- you may not be able to afford it because you don't prioritize it -- but I think most people wouldn't self-identify as being part of Group 3.
Maybe I made it seem like I was implying that’s a universal rule.
What I meant was many people jumped to say it was only money that caused people not to travel. Everyone knows a friend like mine. I have no idea of the breakdown, but my personal experience makes me want to question the idea it’s always all money.
They don't realize it would, or they don't believe it would? Are you so confident about your assessment of what life experiences would have what effects on each of those 80% of people?
I don't think it's that people don't care, it's that the hurdles of traveling feel high when you have no experience.
How do I plan logistics, like flights, hotels, transportation, and activities? How do I get around when I don't speak the language at all? And, of course, how can I afford this trip for my family, reaching a balance between comfort and cost?
Sure, anyone can learn to do these things, but it's definitely intimidating to do it the first time.
Oh god, 'untapped market potential' whenever I hear that it always comes from people that have the most narrow minded worldview, unfortunatly those peoples worldview wont't change no matter how far they "travel" around the world.
They are like "Look at this nice little italian village no one knows about, we should send thousands of tourists there everyday. I'm sure the villagers will love it."
Lots of people travel to places that may also distort their world view though? My 2 week visit to Disneyworld taught me as much about life in the US as did my daily fix of BBC news coverage. In other words, it is distorted.
I lived in Spain for a couple of years and have a good idea of what life is like there. Many of my fellow Brits who have vacations at the same Spanish resort year after year have not one clue.
Air travel is responsible for 4% of warming to date[0], so an 80% growth would make aviation… responsible for 7.2% of current warming, or warming going up 3.2% compared to reality — sure, that's still bad, but it's not huge.
That said, if "80% of people aren't using aircraft" were true (I don't think it is), going from that to everyone wouldn't be "80% more air travel", it would be 400% more air travel, boosting global warming by 16%. Which is even worse, but again, not what I'd call "accelerate global warming hugely".
Not everyone views themselves as being stuck and not everyone wants to spend a significant portion of their income to visit a place for a tiny fraction of their existence and gamble as to if it will have some lasting meaning.
But then you have to fly on an airplane. Having accumulated a at least a million air miles in my career I am sort of done with them except for emergencies. I just have a strong aversion to airplanes and the air travel industry these days.
Guess my horizons are already expanded anyway, been all over and find hanging out in my home region fine.
I do think everyone should do at least a little safe international travel. Visit Europe once or twice. Visit a country or two in Asia. But I mostly found it made me want to be back home. I like my house, hobbies, and friends a lot. I know that sort of travel can be transformative for many, though, which is why I encourage people to do it, but I also completely get not wanting to :)
go read about the percentage of the population that have less than $500 emergency savings and then you won't wonder why they aren't going to Greece for a week
HN SV types don't realize most people working hourly jobs don't have the concept of longish vacations...if you leave for a week your job is given to someone else
Have you actually used an LLM? GPT-4 is (well was before turbo) an anti-bullshit machine.
You could ask it any question, ”why does my hair look dead if using a hairdryer” and it actually gave an on-point 100% relevant no-bullshit answer. Try googling that, it’s a million seo spam results, none which answer the question
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but this is a really bad example. Google does pretty well with that exact question, including this at #8 (for me at least):
If you feel so, it is a massive red flag that your brain is in a depressive state.
Source: fixed my mental demons and now the world is suddenly full of color and life, as if I was a child again