"Social Media" seems to be a scapegoat for the underlying causes: children are in particular affected by this because they haven't had years/decades to build up mental disorders yet where they justify it to themselves that it's "okay", and the unfairness in the world through the lens of social media, taking the emotional toll head on. Children are very sensitive to their status in society, but we forget this because we grew out of that. Those of us on the successful side of things anyway.
Social Media isn't the boogeyman. It's that no matter how hard you try, your life will never be as good as what is usually portrayed through these channels. You are swarmed with people who lead far better lives than you do, have way more fun than you do, and so on and so forth. Your only escapism at home, in a pandemic, is to go on the internet where you're spammed with these successful people (posers or not, doesn't matter) selling you things by showing off what they have.
So no, it's not social media that damages teenagers mental health. It's worse than that. Ignorance is bliss? There's an argument to be made for that.
It starts before they even hit teens. That YouTube channel of the kid unpacking toys and other things is the kind of early stage precursor to things to come. The kids watching this viscerally live through him for some years, until it dawns on them that hey, wait a minute, he has all those toys and I don't have anything.
It's no wonder exercise makes things better - it's a great distraction from the illnesses of the world. Assuming that children are somehow not aware of it, or are not susceptible to it, is being naive at best.
> Children are very sensitive to their status in society, but we forget this because we grew out of that. Those of us on the successful side of things anyway.
We don't outgrow that. Adults are very status conscious too.
Social media is engineered to be addictive and creates media bubbles that prey on kids insecurities.
Social media takes every challenge that kids face and amplifies it.
My anecdotal experience is two daughters whose normal teenage challenges have been made worse through social media.
Social media could have been a utopian technology bubbling up unique experiences to cultivate hobbies and interests in the young. Instead the algorithms cater to our base instincts and is amplifying the risk of turning the next generation into mindless addicts.
> Social media takes every challenge that kids face and amplifies it.
I don't see why any kind of urbanization or improved communication/infrastructural technology wouldn't have this effect. The more people you can reach, the more people you have to compete with.
Maybe some of you will find this beneficial if you have slight vision issues. It’s anecdotal, I don’t have scientific backing here. It worked for me, and I think it’s harmless to try. What I’m about to describe is what I think is the Active Focus method.
I’ve always had perfect vision but my dominant eye degraded slightly over the years so I looked into how to bring it back to full. No one in family wears glasses or anything like that, although the elderly use reading glasses of course.
Practicing reading on both monitor and in front of a book with the good eye palmed and trying to shift the focus back and forth while gunning for more clarity for a longer period of time, it took me very little to get rid of the issue - I must have practiced probably 30 times of a few minutes each over the span of a few months, so maybe once every 2nd or 3rd day as I felt like it. I went from having a hard time reading the numbers and letters to very carefully observing the edges of fonts rendered by ClearType antialiasing on Windows.
At first the eye muscles got strained from me forcing it to focus, but then it got better. Minor soreness and redness at first is nothing to be concerned about IMHO. I still practice but not as often, since I’ve trained the ability to focus at will which is really what active focus is about from my understanding - intentional focusing with enough speed.
I’m not a big fan of EndMyopia but the subreddit has people claiming they fixed far worse problems than I have (if slight blurryness is even worthy being called a problem).
I highly recommend Todd Becker’s presentation on Active Focus for anyone wanting a breakdown of the approach. Some people seem to have a hard time with being able to finely control where their focal plane is. It gets easier with practice is about all I can say.
The full “method” that Todd Becker and EM recommend is to try to keep distance to whatever that you’re reading so that it’s just slightly out of focus, but I haven’t had that severe of a myopia. From time to time I read sites like HN from slightly further away than usual just to provide a bit of a challenge to the focus practice, but I think long term it probably isn’t healthy to try to read HN at normal font size from across the room.
I summarized the EndMyopia/Todd Becker stuff at losetheglasses.org if anyone wants a short, readable version. The method continues to work for me, albeit slowly.
One thing I forgot to mention is that when I started, I didn’t even have actual blurriness for the most part (unless it’s really far away). I had double vision along the vertical axis, and I did what Becker recommended to do which is to try to focus on the actual object (in my case mostly text), and ignore the ghosted copy so that two of them can converge. I would then intentionally defocus by looking in front or behind the text, and then try to refocus again. It keeps it slightly interesting/amusing.
There’s way more stuff out there on this topic today then there was when I first started practicing it, but it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. People are still very skeptical about it and I guess optometrists still don’t talk about it.
Endmyopia is real. It works, and I’m not a shill. I went from severe myopia to 20/20 vision; although you need to put the effort in (took me 2 years to get to 20/20, but improvements have been steady).
I genuinely believe that optometrists are either evil, or horribly misguided with hubris.
My mother believes that stuff, so I did not have glasses as kid and could not see much
It worked well enough that my myopia did not progress. However, I got bad astigmatism
Optometrists are really bad at measuring anything. Endmyopia probably works best for people who never had myopia, but the optometrists just measured some temporary accommodation as myopia. They always kept measuring my astigmatism as myopia for years. Only now that they have modern wavefront aberrometers, the device could tell them that they have measured the cylinder as 2 diopters too weak
I’m talking about nearsightedness. But in all honesty I don’t know what the underlying causes are as I haven’t been to an optometrist about it. I think my last check up was when I was in grade 6. Horrible, I know. I noticed it a few years ago and it bothered me enough to do some late night googling to see what snake oil I come across, but I decided to give it a try as a “I doubt I’ll permanently injure my eye trying to get it to focus”. I’ve been staring at a computer screen for well over 25 years, almost every day. I think that at this point it’s more of a genetic lottery that I’m not wearing glasses for severe myopia more than anything.
It’s not perfect like it was when I was younger, I don’t know if it’ll ever be to that level of clarity but I did develop the ability to rapidly focus which for me is “good enough.” I don’t always have to force the focusing - relaxing the eye and not blinking also does the trick, but I combine both of them since I think of it as stretching the muscle out slightly, making it more elastic by ping ponging between focal planes a little bit. Either way, as long as I can impress the plebs by being able to read road signs at a distance that they can’t, I’ll be alright.
I wanted to make the original post because, HN being inquisitive into longevity and health research, I’m very surprised that over the years very few people discussed active focus or other “alternative” vision correction methods. I’m sure there must be lots of people who wear vision correction here. I’d rather not, so I decided to try the weird stuff first and see how things go.
Can’t upvote this enough. HN has turned to shambles over the years as people here are way more concerned with “getting out” than they are with building companies. It’s not surprising the place is a cesspool of jealousy whenever someone succeeds.
I’ve called them out on this shit years ago. It still hasn’t changed.
This seems like a case of randomness plus sample bias equals overgeneralization. In case of indignation, multiply by 10x.
Separately: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
This kind of attitude comes up on HN a lot. They have lots of internal tooling and jobs that have to be done, especially at their scale.
WhatsApp with 50 employees is an anomaly. In reality, companies need lots more employees just to get by. Not all industries are equal when it comes to responsibilities and programmers are the most ignorant but arrogant class, thinking that all you need is software. Spolsky covered this 2 decades ago in his “Developer Abstraction Layer” article.
Not surprisingly, software engineers think that the only thing going on with a company like Uber is software engineering. Which is way more complex and requires way more people than it is frequently given credit for. (Uber isn't just an app; it's a bunch of apps, supporting a 2-way marketplace with complex dynamics and many millions of participants.)
But the vast majority of Uber's employees are not software engineers. Running a physical service in ~70 countries is /hard/ and requires a lot of people. Support and operations eat up a lot of the headcount, and can't be scaled like software. Similarly you need a lot of accountants and lawyers to operate globally, along with all of the infrastructure to support a global workforce.
They're doing complicated things, but is that headcount in proportion to it? For comparison, Apple's HQ headcount is under 20k, and entire state level governments for small to mid-sized states are in the low tens of thousands of employees. We all know human things generate lots of work to employ lots of people, but the scale still feels a bit off, even if no one can point to exactly why.
It doesn't feel off to me. As others have discussed in considerable detail, operating in a lot of countries worldwide is a lot more complex than it intuitively seems to be, and the complexity scales superlinearly.
I suspect they might be a few percent overstaffed, but I don't think that hurts a company focusing on growth over all else, and I don't think it's even all that uncommon for such companies. It wouldn't surprise me to see a round or two of layoffs once that growth tops out, but it would surprise me if they added up to more than 10% of headcount.
I work for the a huge financial institution, its the largest exchange by volume, we operate in multiple markets all across the globe and have our trading platforms distributed across many locations such as NYC, London and Tokyo in datacenters we own, manage and operate, our matching engine matches more daily trades than there are daily Tweets all with a guaranteed sub 50 microseconds latency with 99th percentile sitting around 20 microseconds.
We have about 4500 (up to 2 years ago it was around 2500 a bunch came in when we acquired a company nearly our size, it will probably shrink to about 3500-3000 over the next few years) employees, and about 1000 of them are engineers who develop and support a few 100’s of applications.
We have to comply to dozens of different regulations in dozens of regulatory regimes, so it’s unlikely that Twitter needs more compliance and lawyer than we do.
We are considered critical infrastructure, if we have a hiccup the world’s financial markets will be having a stroke. If we go down or worse that’s not some lost ad revenue but bilious to trillions on the line.
It never ceases to amaze me how easily the attitudes of finance folk so easily leak out. It seems performing a worst-case O(log N) lookup and spitting out the resulting 100 bytes over UDP counts as harder than Twitter, parent comment clearly has no idea how much work Twitter needs to perform for every tweet (URL previews much?)
Meanwhile, could have simply said you work for NYSE.
I don’t work for a stock exchange, stocks are not particularly high volume nor particularly that important for the market as many other instruments and asset classes.
Your comment shows you clearly have no idea how modern QDM and ODM markets work if you think that sending 100 bytes over UDP is all there is or even what we do, we don’t even use UDP...
An exchange like that by definition is quite focused on tight non functionals with slim functionals, aka it does a small number of things very well. Vs Uber which does a very wide set of things at a high level of consumer polish.
In my mental model of the two problems to solve, Uber is directly consumer facing to
Millions of humans and that alone creates so much work in engineering that doesn’t exist when you can craft an api with sub 50 ms latency consumed by thousands of other machines.. the humans create the complexity. Solving for their problems is why you need way more people.
Order matching, order execution, credit and limit controls, reporting, multiple APIs and interfaces for order entry, market data and many other things supporting everything from legacy FIX clients coming over leased lines to modern restful web APIs and SBE over websockets, identity management with highly complicated RBAC model for traders and firms (who can trade what on behalf of whom under which conditions), highly complex and robust logging especially for regulatory requirements, maintaining alignment with regulations across the globe...
And if you think normal end users are picky you haven’t met traders that still want to use a 25 year old keyboard with non-standard ASCII codes that’s barely recognized as an HID device on your new electron based trading frontend and if you can’t accommodate for that they will leave.
So you have millions of clients all of which are adversarial and you have to maintain market fairness and integrity to ensure no manipulation is possible with trillions of dollars on the line that can be wiped off in a heartbeat and that is before you start thinking about nation state actors who would love to be able to cause major economic damage to the US, Europe and other major western economies.
Yeah the complexity is insane, millions of users is surprising tho I thought it would more be an aggregation of larger agents.
I guess unicorns optimize for delivery capacity not cost
> If we go down or worse that’s not some lost ad revenue but bilious to trillions on the line.
What products are exclusively traded on your exchange? If NASDAQ or NYSE goes down for half a day it’s just an article on WSJ at best. They shut down every night and for entire days on holidays. What financial exchange truly has a meaningful impact when it goes down?
Equities aren’t a real economy choke point. They are also, as you observe, federated.
A more critical and delicate financial artery is the tri-party repo marker. If BoNY Mellon or JPMorgan’s repo desks went offline, it would almost certainly shut down large swathes of the American economy, prompt a credit crisis and merit urgent Federal Reserve and possibly Congressional intervention.
But what is the timeline here? If JPM goes down for 2 hours it will cause a congressional intervention? That’s honestly really hard to believe and it borders in delusions of grandeur. Congress intervenes after days at a minimum of an ongoing crisis.
My point is that your strange Internet dick measuring contest of micros to match up an order book is only one tiny aspect of engineering. Your uptime numbers have lax requirements, your geographic distribution is severely limited, and your client counts (as in clients directly accessing your software) are orders of magnitude smaller than the Twitter/Uber you compare yourself to.
Operating a financial exchange it not trivial by any means, but to compare your challenges to a massive public-facing service is apples to oranges. There are likely more adversarial clients connected to twitter’s services at any given time than the peak concurrent connections to any given exchange.
> * If JPM goes down for 2 hours it will cause a congressional intervention?*
It will create a crisis meriting Congressional intervention. A hiccup in the tri-party repo market automatically sends, within twenty minutes, a large fraction of the American financial system into default within twelve hours from almost anywhere on the clock.
> That’s honestly really hard to believe and it borders in delusions of grandeur
Are you saying JPM going down means there is no alternate provider and everyone defaults in 12 hours or if the entire tri-party repo market fails? Those are not even remotely the same thing.
I would be shocked to learn that Exxon mobile will go bankrupt in half a day because one bank has an outage. It would speak volumes to how piss-poor financial networks are architected.
More realistically, JPM goes down and within an hour all of its large repo clients have already called BNY or whatever and are ready to go. Billion dollar businesses have contingency plans for headquarters being taken out by a bomb, you better believe they have a plan for their repo provider taking a shit.
> Lovely
Do you not see how ridiculous it is to suggest that the entire functioning US economy hinges on a single service run by a single company being available 24/7? If it were true, it would be a bigger terrorist target than the Whitehouse.
Apparently the entire US economy is dependent on the uptime of the work of a few engineers at one company. Better hope that information doesn’t become public or else they will be prime targets for coercion, bribes, nation state level manipulation, etc. These engineers are literally more important than Congress to keep alive and working.
> Are you saying JPM going down means there is no alternate provider and everyone defaults in 12 hours
Yes. Look up how tri-party repos work [1] and then look up the Fed’s commentary on their fragility.
One of the three legs is either JPMorgan or BoNY. These are short-term but critical loans. If one of those two fails or goes offline, which practically means failure since others can’t verify the other two legs’ liquidity, large swathes of the rates, credit, futures, regular repo and stock loan markets go offline which quite literally will lead to, maybe not Exxon, but the likes GE having payments failures. You can’t “hot swap” JPMorgan to BoNY after the contract has been initiated. It would be like saying it doesn’t matter if your brokerage fails, just call someone else. Sure, for your next trade that’s fine, but in the meantime the failed broker has your assets.
> Better hope that information doesn’t become public or else they will be prime targets for coercion, bribes, nation state level manipulation, etc.
Friend is a senior IT guy at BoNY. They are regularly in touch with the Fed and FBI. It’s a known vulnerability, and there is constant scholarship and policy work on nationalising or reforming the tri-party repo market. But it’s never failed, and it’s profitable work for the two champions, so for now there are higher priorities for legislators.
Also, there are loads of these centralised pressure points in our system. In every modern financial system. Cede & Co., the Fedwire system, ADP, et cetera.
Yep, repo and swaps are huge, our euro repo market alone is in around quarter of trillion a day..
People don’t understand what happens when some things go down, and how it would affect them.
Futures are critical to you being able to buy milk eggs and bread at the store day after day and not having the price fluctuating on you by 100’s of % or worse those items simply being unavailable because the price either spiked too high or completely crashed so the supply is nonexistent.
Same goes for many other commodities. A cock up in the futures market can and will send ripples through the entire commodities market which will have a direct impact on the world’s supply chain.
> It lasted half an hour, caused a trillion dollars to be wiped off the US economy and was followed by investigations and a congressional hearing.
A bunch of things:
- that wasn’t an outage, that was actual trades taking place at significantly decreases prices. Not even close to the same category. Those same exchanges involved in that crash literally go offline every evening and on holidays/weekends and nobody cares. In fact, if the exchanges had gone completely offline during that time period, it wouldn’t have even made the news because there wouldn’t have been a place for those trades to occur.
- it didn’t cause a trillion dollars to get wiped off the economy any more than my friend transferring a share of Apple to me for $0.50 causes a trillion dollars to get wiped off of the economy.
- nobody gives a shit about a “congressional hearing”. Do you realize how many congressional hearings tech companies have been pulled in front of now? A hearing != action and if you think otherwise, there has been significantly more “congressional action” over tech companies in the last couple of years than financial companies.
> If you think Twitter has a problem with adversarial clients connected to its network I think you don’t understand the modern financial market.
Show me the public IP address of NYSE or whatever major financial exchange you want that I can connect to from any IP in the world. If exchanges were open to the world, they would get DDoSed out of existence in a heartbeat.
Derivatives and futures a lot of them are exclusive contracts not available on other exchanges, if we go down during trading hours we take the market with us.
Where did you get the 100 number from? I think Nintendo is an interesting company for comparison here but I do find it hard to believe they only had 100 employees as recently as 2011.
Lyft had minuscule global presence. Uber has enormous global presence, it is a top 2 player in India , not to mention it's presence in Europe and other parts of the world.
The sheer number of languages they have provide user support and staff for driver management in these two markets alone is enormous.
Lyft has only US and Canada operations. Vast majority of Uber employees will be in customer service and operations. It it no way comparable to GitHub and Nvidia
the two largest employers are both the number one players in their market, being the number 1 player in a market may require that you invest for "first mover advantage". This would lead to a lot of failed/re-tooled initiatives over time.
Being number 2 often just means copying the number 1 player in a more capital efficient manner, product descriptions become "X did it this way, customers want it this way". In a winner takes all market, being the first mover matters a lot.
Also, diminishing returns. In many markets you can "get to the table" with a small crew, but to actually win the customer you'll need bodies almost entirely dedicated to it. And it's that sort of margin, multiplied over and over, that makes one company the undisputed n.1.
Does it have to be one or the other? This is an equally ignorant response. 21k is a lot, and to hand-wave any questioning of this as "ignorant" and "arrogant" is... those things. Lots of companies have bloat, and this is especially apparent if you've also worked somewhere that's competently managed. Recently someone was telling me about a shoe auction company employing hundreds of engineers (sorry, I forget the exact figure, want to say 300-600). I don't care how much traffic you're doing or how many shoes there are, that is a ridiculously unnecessary number.
This is sort-of hand-wavey. The truth is there are many companies with order-of-magnitude too-many employees (and software eats them). And there's some that aren't.
There's no way to know which one uber is without exactly breaking down those numbers a bit more. But call me unconvinced for one.
I don't have the experience to back my opinion, but my gut agrees.
Intuitively, it would seem to me that hiring past a certain threshold increases need to hire more engineers rather than quenching it — that is, the complexity resulting from changes made to the projects to keep such a high number of engineers productive approaches or even outstrips innate complexity and becomes unsustainable, demanding ever more engineers to keep it all afloat. Following this, a company that isn't keeping an eye out for net productive decreases as a result of hiring could end up with far more engineers than they actually need.
But I've always been an individual contributor, so my perspective may be limited.
they also haven't made a single dime in what, 11-ish years? Writing software is fun, but usually companies do it to earn money. If they were building the death star it would be one thing, but they're making a taxi app. The entire company feels like a jobs program for software engineers run by Softbank instead of the government
or you turn out to be the next MoviePass because selling a dollar for 75 cents isn't a business. I would not make the mistake and compare everything that grows fast to Amazon or Netflix. The former has logistic centres and half of the servers that run the internet, the latter a ton of content. It's not clear to me what Uber actually owns. They even sold off their self driving unit.
Don’t get so caught up with what a company “owns”, what matters is what they do. Owning something isn’t a guarantee that it won’t become a worthless asset later.
Also MoviePass was at a good start by selling tickets at a loss, what killed them was that they couldn’t leg into the profit generating phase of their strategy and burnt out.
I have a deep suspicion that this is mostly about risk management. With just 50 employees, what you have is essentially a board of directors that have enormous leverage over you.
> With just 50 employees, what you have is essentially a board of directors that have enormous leverage over you.
How true this is. I've seen what happens when you have a small number of very wealthy engineers in senior leadership roles in a small to midsize tech company that has gone public. They make it as difficult as possible to hire senior people from industry that's needed to fill critical skill gaps within the engineering org. Then all of the talented mid-level folks who have no internal mobility jump ship for Facebook.
But it's not "in reality". It's "with the mindsets and experience and architecture and tooling that are prevalent in the industry"...that's what takes more.
Any given project might not require large numbers people, the headcount driver might the process.
Where you have control, would recommend rethinking the model to look more like Whatsapp than to dismiss as an anomaly.
It would be handy to understand how many of those 21,000 employees are local operations vs centralised ops (like development).
I'm sure it takes more developers to build and support Uber than you might initially guess, but I'm also sure that Uber just has more employees than they need "because they're successful".
And all the software to support and enable users to make use of it... as well as a ton of cutting edge research in the fields of IC design and manufacturing, computer graphics and artificial intelligence.
I would guess a sizable fraction is regional policy, legal and marketing teams. The whole point of Uber is to operate everywhere and you simply can't run all of that in Silicon Valley without access to local knowledge. Not to mention the incredible bloat that comes from building in market-specific features across the whole planet.
There are very few overweight people past the age of 80. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you a bridge. Agenda pushers and idiots who parrot for free what others are selling them are responsible for the “body shaming” nonsense.
Cut back on the ice cream and hit the rack. Your body will thank you, even if your politically minded “friends” don’t.
> There are very few overweight people past the age of 80.
How much of that selection is due to voluntary lifestyle choices, how much is due to genetics or other involuntary factors? The answer has a pretty big influence on how appropriate it is to look down your nose at others for not fitting your ideal.
Refreshing to see that the top Ars comments are supporting this. I’m looking forward to the tables turning around when “they” take control of the situation again, and remember all of this, and the events that have yet to happen.
I remember a few months ago one of the YC alumni building a website to document anyone who supports the RNC for the quoted intention of shaming them and making their lives/livelihood harder. They were so proud of it and advertised it on Twitter. I’ll see if I can dig up the name of one of the authors. They took the tweet down when they realized the audience found them no better than the Nazi supporters of the 30s putting together lists of the Jews.
This doesn’t end well, and people won’t forget this.
I don't think the Hacker News crowd likes this and that is reflected in the top comments.
I can see why someone had the urge to build this seeing as this capitol riot was perhaps the biggest threat to american democracy in recent years. What really irks me though is not only how many people brought their phones but also how many actively posted and boasted about their participation on social media.
There is a social media site called "Clapper" that is kind of like TikTok but describes itself as a "free-speech" alternative. Naturally, it is pretty much filled to the brim with conservatives. When the capitol riot happened, hundreds of videos from the event appeared on Clapper. But Clapper acted quickly and seemingly took down all of the videos with geolocation data close to the event at that time. Now, almost nothing can be found there about it.
But the platform is still filled with conservatives who post videos of their laptop screens about the Q conspiracy and "encouraging" videos where they ensure each other that Biden is not yet president and it is not yet over. They seem very technologically illiterate and also very unconcerned about how easily they could get themselves fired for racist or conspiratory content, because they think that this "platform" unlike Twitter and Facebook is somehow on their side. They don't realise that social media platforms cannot advertise when their content isn't "clean" and thus act in their own interest when they ban this type of content, and not in the interest of some opposing party.
So honestly, I think this is just the beginning of such projects, because somehow the people who would do something as ridiculous as storming the capitol keep documenting their crimes and releasing the material themselves... they make it extremely easy for any political opponents.
These sort of articles need a gigantic preface: you’re talking about a minute portion of the population who gives a damn enough about things to legitimately push themselves hard enough to suffer consequences from doing so.
For rest of the population, they aren’t pushing themselves anywhere near close to their limit. They don’t even know where their limits lie.
People can stress and get ulcers from whatever. But to be wired in a way where you are stressed because you’re not at the top of your game and you think you’re losing it, is a certain kind of personality.
This article is directed at people who consider pushing themselves hard (whether or not they do). As someone who doesn't do shit, but thinks about doing lots and pushing myself hard, I still found it an insightful read.
Across the course of a lifespan, the number of people who have pushed themselves that hard is much higher. Some get disillusioned by the process, others get full-on burnout.
That said, the people who have it in their future are not reading persuasive writing about it, and haven't discovered hackernews. Possibly never will. Some of the people who are currently living it are within the HN demographic, but only a fraction, in either sense. So practically speaking this is more of a nostalgia piece for much of HN instead of persuasive writing.
I would sincerely like to get a breakdown of all the factors that contribute to the Japanese living to such an old age, rather than the usual "this one weird trick" bullshit that Economist and others try to swindle on the Western readership. It's quite frankly annoying, although I've lost the last ounce of respect I've had for the Economist years ago so I'm the idiot for expecting them to be any better.
I've gone through pop diet literature like How Not To Die, Blue Zone, and others, but it's mostly just people trying to push an agenda in one way or another. I just want the facts, in somewhat of plain as English as possible but I don't mind some technical fluff if it will help clarify things. I tend to find in a lot of this sort of literature that the technical fluff is useless to majority of the readership and yet takes up 80%+ of the content, as the authors try to use as many half-baked analogies and metaphors as they can to explain technical concepts that nobody cares about. At the same time, something more substantial than "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" would be welcome. You know, how does exercise play a part in it. How does ancestry that has also lived to an old age play a part in it. Is it kind of a big deal, or nice to have? How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis. These sorts of things. Holistic analysis that compares more than just "Wim Hof has slightly more brown fat than most people and that's the reason why he is superhuman" level of nonsense.
The latest bit seems to be from longevity research where cold showers and fasting are in vogue again, for the Nth time. Oh, but our company is the only one that provides this one unique test that checks your age biomarkers. We didn't just name drop the company in there for the sake of baiting you into it or anything.
I think the short answer is quite simply nobody really knows.
Your best bet IMO is to ignore genetics (can't change it), pick a "Blue Zone", and emulate what you can- within reason. This is something we still haven't solved, so the next best thing is to try to follow a proven playbook. You could call it cargo cult'ing, but until we crack the code it's the best we've got.
Then you can sprinkle in rock-solid conventional knowledge, for example we're pretty much dead-certain that exercise is good for you and time in nature improves your well-being.
Your criticism about cherry-picking is relevant if you are trying to distill the secret ingredients of longevity. However, I'm saying just forget about all that. Pick a healthful region of your choosing with proven long-term success, and emulate it as possible/reasonable. The end.
Follow this advice and you'll increase your chances of growing older increases quite a lot, and you'll stay healthier in your older years as well.
There is only so far these things can take us though. A lot of (but still too little) research is being done on slowing down or maybe even reversing aging, which could increase our lifespan to 150 (or maybe even longer). Not only would we live longer, but we would stay healthier for longer as well.
If you're interested, make sure to check out the longevity subreddit[0], some longevity discords[1][2]. Also make sure to read Lifespan by Dr. David Sinclair[3] and/or Ageless by Dr.Andrew Steele[4]
Some other things to keep an eye on:
- Blood pressure
- Resting heart rate
- Brush teeth twice a day
- Reduce meat
- Don't smoke
- Reduce alcohol
- Avoid stress
- Your mental health
Modern lifestyle makes you chase technohopium based ideas. Often they'll sell you complex solutions for a non existent problem.
Modern life is never calling for bad ideas loudly, but tons of incentives that make you go the wrong way slowly.
Bad job -> stress -> comforting with premade meals too tasty due to sugar and additives. No more walking because you want to leverage your car. You delay sleep to work later (bad work practices) to have leisure.
When I did simpler but physically demanding jobs, I ate simpler, went to bed early because I was simply cooked but it didn't feel like stress, but good fatigue (the kind you have after long swim session).
Modern jobs also turn you against each other way too often. I firmly believe there's a huge amount of benefits of doing simple chores in team, rather than ruminating in your cubicle delaying answers in mails..
You two are talking different things, you originally said "modern lifestyle advice", but now you're saying "modern lifestyle", which are very different things, the "advice" agrees with you, that's what the guy was asking about it.
Let's not play on words. Consumerism sell you promises of better life which turned out to be false most often. It might only be an implicit advice but anyway.
Seems like you have some divergent ideas here. On the one hand, you ask about practical, actionable stuff; on the other hand, you ask "How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis.". The answer to the latter question is not something you can really use for anything.
I sometimes wonder if the right thing for westerners wouldn't just be a big sequence of photos of mid-tier Japanese restaurant food -- like what's served at train stations -- with all the components broken down, along with a description of how a person fits those things together every day to have complete story for food. After going there a few times, I was surprised by how much healthier I ate, and figured out how to reproduce some of the effect back in the United States.
One category of difference with Japanese diet is things that are somewhat healthier at baseline. That is the way Japanese junk food is. A mochi is pounded rice, sugar and beans; and many sweets are actually filled with bean paste. A common kind of savory Japanese snack is grilled seaweed.
Another category of difference is eating the same thing but just in slightly different proportions. It's quite common in the USA that you go somewhere and get a meal and it's literally a piece of meat and a potato. Even at a good restaurant; but especially at less expensive restaurants. This isn't about Japanese food versus other kinds of foods. If you got a German restaurant in Japan (they are somewhat more popular in Japan than in the USA) and you get a plate it will be like three different kinds of sausages (in small sizes) and one or two salads and one or two vegetable items.
This is not due to some kind of technical balancing or something like that; Japanese consumers just demand somewhat more varied food with more vegetables.
There isn't a recipe or some weights or formulas. I just went there for 1-2 weeks at a time 5-6 times and tried a bunch of food and got used to it, came back and then wondered about what I could do differently. Everything that has changed in my diet as a result is entirely a matter of small adjustments -- adding vegetables at certain times of day or something like that -- but I did lose weight and have enjoyed other benefits like no acid reflux, no food coma, &c.
Do all Japanese actually eat that healthy? I can believe it of some of them, but there’s little fruit and many salarymen seem to live on a diet of fried chicken, hard liquor and cigarettes.
What's an alternative to the Economist? I can't find a better publication short of an academic journal or literature. Someone recommended Foreign Affairs but I've yet to buy one.
I tried searching for one a few months ago when my Economist subscription was expiring. Unfortunately, not even a single one comes close.
The Atlantic is often advertised as the other high-quality publication. The target audience, however, is overwhelmingly the US. Economist makes me feel like other countries exist, and there is enough going on outside the US.
On the ideological front, I fell into this trap of finding a periodical with little bias towards the political left or the political right. While Economist touts itself to be centre, it would be naive to take them at face value as they clearly are centre-left. The silver lining is that they are far better than others who make absolutely no efforts to quell their suppress their ideological biases (e.g. New York Times).
I call this a trap because I've since realized that it is virtually impossible to expect a "truly" unbiased publication. As long as I feel that I am not falling into an echo chamber, I am fine with biases. Politically charged articles generally have more than one perspectives.
One would be hard-pressed to find a single publication as diverse as the Economist. I think this is primarily a historical artifact - they just have had a significant first-mover advantage (I think) and have accumulated a solid bunch of human capital. I'm slowly inclining towards subscribing to more niche publications instead.
Financial Times is a reasonable contender, though far more costlier.
The Economist is quite simply the best news magazine in existence. Imperfect but the least bad. Foreign Affairs is entirely an entirely different publication made of collections of topical essays on foreign policy
It's not a competitor to the Economist, but for general scientific topics including some health information Scientific American would be a step up in depth and coverage, while not being as dense as real journals or Science, Nature, etc.
If something is truly genetically linked then dieting for you might as well be lipstick on a pig if you don't have the right heritage. There are a couple other places in Asia with similar levels of longevity. Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea come to mind. Maybe look into what similarities they share with Japan. For Europe there are the usual Mediterranean countries, including Israel. (For European demographics, remember to adjust for large numbers because population size vary wildly.)
Isn't Okinawa a good place to start? You get two interesting comparisons: Okinawans vs other Japanese during the last century, and Okinawans then vs now. It reduces the number (or at least the scale) of differences so that you can better pinpoint the factors, right?
Interestingly enough, Okinawa has the highest life expectancy in Japan. They also really got the short end of the stick during WW2 though (a third of the civilian population died during the US invasion), so this may be a statistical/survival of the fittest type quirk too, plus the historically the local diet there was fairly different to the rest of the Japan (lots of pork, less seafood, sweet potato/taro instead of rice, chillies, bitter melon, etc).
That's because lots of US troops are stationed in Okinawa and with them came lots of fast food chains. Young(er) people in Okinawa eat lots of junk food, and they have shorter life expenctancy than their parents.
The blue zone studies and conclusions seem, to me, to be the opposite of “one weird trick” and run in the face of pop diet literature.
At some point, a holistic lifestyle offering statistically higher quality of health outcomes could risk sounding like an agenda, I suppose, but perhaps only if something about that lifestyle makes one feel guilty.
As you go into particular questions, you might find the material around blue zones goes more into those than most. Along with temperance and mostly plants, commonalities included natural exercise and positive disposition, for example.
Or perhaps, is our disdain of the simple holistic findings a result of our convenience culture? Are we actually just unhappy there is not one weird trick, preferably in a tablet form, that wouldn’t inconvenience our own “modern” ways?
Disclosure: My mother’s side had many siblings making it to 100, some were part of the California blue zone, while others lived in Scandinavia, farming and fishing by the sea. The realization these lives are differently healthy is hardly pop: there’s a body of health knowledge behind that tracing back to late 1800s, Kellogg (the family behind the cereal whose home page now says “one of the original plant-based wellbeing companies”), and the like.
> I would sincerely like to get a breakdown of all the factors that contribute to the Japanese living to such an old age, rather than the usual "this one weird trick" bullshit that Economist and others try to swindle on the Western readership.
Why is it that the term “western" is so often at some point introduce with some implication some culturally cohesive unit called “the west” exists any time Japan in particular is mentioned somewhere?
I find that very often when this happens, and when attributes of this supposed “western” culture are listed, it seems to mostly mean “The Anglo-Saxon world”, not so much “the west”.
The last time it happened on H.N. where someone complained about a sensationalist “western" article about Japan, it was pointed out that it was posted in a Japanese newspaper, and a translation from an original Japanese article, however sensationalist it might be.
Other than that, yes, there is probably not a single simple rule that governs it but a myriad of factors that contribute with many no doubt also working in the opposite direction, such as Japan's famously stressful workplace life and the high suicide rate of office workers.
Like you I've had the same experience, then I started using an app recently called chronometer [1], you type in what you eat and it tells you how much of the RDI of vitamins you get. There were a lot I was missing out on I found, also, at the same time I was trying to move to a Mediterranean diet.
A diet of a lot more plants like the Mediterranean diet meant I met all my RDI's, whereas a normal meat and 3 veg, cereal for breakfast western diet didn't - things like vitamin E and so on were a lot easier to get with the Mediterranean diet, though for things like Zinc I had to start eating nuts and so on - something I'd never done much.
It surprised me that the things that seem to stop cancer (according to some studies) were exactly the same things that are more prevalent in the Mediterranean diet, it became a bit of a no brainer. Give it a go (I'm just a happy customer - its free any way with a paid tier)
The Mindspan Diet, by Preston Estep has a lot to say about the Japanese diet. I think he makes many convincing arguments. Some key take-aways: Iron is very bad for longevity, refined carbs that aren't sugar and that have relatively low glycemic indexes (long grained rice and many pastas) are actually quite good (rice/pasta), meat bad but seafood ok, don't over do the saturated fat in general, drink moderate alcohol if at all.
I got a lot from How Not to Diet. I also got a lot from the Mindspan diet. I think the truth is out there, but as you have already put it, it's pretty bloody hard to get anything definitive. It's hard because it takes decades to prove anything and it's hard because food is big business and entrenched food production pipelines protect themselves against disruption the best they can (looking at you, sugar industry).
Seafood specifically can't be judged as some ideal one 200 years ago prior to oceans pollution. If you want to pick up seafood which is not heavily contaminated by heavy metals, various regional spills, factory drains, near deltas of biggest rivers in Asia/Africa etc. you will find out you just play russian roulette with your food. Mercury poisoning with ie tuna can be achieved relatively quickly depending on the brand. Pregnant women should probably avoid things like salmon & tuna completely, the benefits are far outweighted by the crap. Farmed sea fish are properly bad food.
Freshwater fish can be better but they are almost 100% farmed, and good luck trusting some farmer with what he feeds them, since infections in overpopulated ponds are very frequent. Fish meat reflects what its being fed, so crappy food makes previously healthy fish into more bacon one.
Also meat is not an uniform substance, cheap beef is most probably less healthy than lean bio free range turkey. Also depends on the cuts, pork has very lean and very fatty tissues in the same animal. And so on.
I'd say for the food the quantity, timing, being active every day for longer stretch, calm peaceful life and obviously not much poisons/addictions makes up more than rest. We have centenarians in the west too. At least that's the best effort, if one has crappy genes with high probability of cancer or heart attack before 50, there are sadly some limits these days. But one can and should still maximize their own potential.
I'm mostly a vegetarian except that I do take molecularly distilled fish oil. Very simple way to get some of the health benefits of seafood consumption but take no risk.
However, I actually feel mercury isn't nearly the bugaboo that vegan proponents often make it out to be. High ocean mercury levels have been a thing for over 100 years. Yet a great many studies have found seafood to be beneficial to longevity and overall health.
All of your points sound like vegan talking points, but to each their own.
I'm assuming one underestimated facet is the nonviolent culture. Many injuries due to violence in the U.S. go unreported, leading to chronic health problems which can further cause mental health problems.
It takes 100 years to get one data-point. For us to track a person's habit throughout their life that eventually ends up living to 100 years is not an easy or quick task.
And even if you had the best tracking in place, isolating cause and effect given how so many variables are involved is no easy task either.
So instead we have to rely on small experiments, low sample size studies, and studies where variables are hard to isolate.
But there's a lot that's known that's pretty clear, exercice is good, cardio or strength or flexibility, they all seem good. We don't know how much of it is needed, but more doesn't seem to hurt.
Having lower body fat, eating at a slight deficit, that's pretty clear as well.
Cutting out bad nutrients, chemicals, processed foods, etc. That's not totally proven, but at least it helps with weight control, and it definitely doesn't seem to be beneficial, so at best it's neutral at worst harmful.
Pollution of all kinds has negative effects. That's pretty well established. Nothing much you can do about it since about everywhere and everything is polluted it seems nowadays.
Having low stress and good nights of sleep, that seems pretty well established as well.
Genetics, ya genetics for sure. But can't do anything about it so no reason to worry about it.
Now eating good foods also help. There's ton of micro-nutrients with small studies that show benefits. So just make sure you eat plenty of all kind of good micro-nutrients. You'll get the most out of vegetables, legumes, fruits, herbs, seeds, nuts, and all that. Fatty fish are good, and other fish and seafood have some good micro-nutrients as well. Except the larger the fish, the more pollutant it contains, so don't exaggerate either on fish.
Meats are uncertain. At least keep them on the lower side, especially red meat since there might be links with some form of cancers. That said, if you do eat meat, make sure it's grass fed and all, cause meet from grass fed animals have way more good micro-nutrients in them.
Also seems you want to keep your brain active as well, continue to learn new things, helps prevent dementia and other brain degenerative issues.
Apparently good company, having people to laugh and socialize with is good as well, but unsure how much, again it clearly doesn't hurt and might be good.
That's it, but, the sad part of all this, all those things just help a little bit, mostly with quality of life and not that much with longetivity. What has helped the most with longetivity has been modern medicine and surgeries, which is pretty much the single reason why people live longer now then before.
Edit: Oh and it also seems that there are other things that can affect you a lot, like which bacteria and viruses you've been exposed too thorought your life at different stages. Exposure to these can be good or bad depending.
I also forgot good amount of fibers can prevent diverticulitis and other possible digestive issues. Proper levels of vitamins (best if obtained from foods), including D (which is best obtained from the sun). Good hydration (helps some of your organs function). And amortize sugar intake, so you don't spike your blood sugars.
read deep nutrition, i can summarize sinple.
eat all kinda meat, organ, muscle all of it, egg and milk also good.
plants have evolved to protect themselves using chemicals so they're bad.
seed oils are the root of all evil and illness.
good nutrition of ancestors means better looks for next generation.
Eating “chemicals” designed to defend against nonhuman species isn’t going to be bad for you. That includes capsaicin and caffeine which are if anything healthy. There’s also the xenohormesis effect, if you believe in that, where small amounts of poison are good for your defenses.
Could be, but it sounded more like a naturalistic fallacy. Though lately people opposed to plants are upset about phytoestrogens turning them into women, which they don’t do, as far as I know.
Seed oils being bad may be correct, but I haven’t looked up specifically what’s supposedly bad about them.
Social Media isn't the boogeyman. It's that no matter how hard you try, your life will never be as good as what is usually portrayed through these channels. You are swarmed with people who lead far better lives than you do, have way more fun than you do, and so on and so forth. Your only escapism at home, in a pandemic, is to go on the internet where you're spammed with these successful people (posers or not, doesn't matter) selling you things by showing off what they have.
So no, it's not social media that damages teenagers mental health. It's worse than that. Ignorance is bliss? There's an argument to be made for that.
It starts before they even hit teens. That YouTube channel of the kid unpacking toys and other things is the kind of early stage precursor to things to come. The kids watching this viscerally live through him for some years, until it dawns on them that hey, wait a minute, he has all those toys and I don't have anything.
It's no wonder exercise makes things better - it's a great distraction from the illnesses of the world. Assuming that children are somehow not aware of it, or are not susceptible to it, is being naive at best.