Hacker News makes me so sad sometimes.

What you perceive as naïveté is a kind of world-weariness that goes deeper than you can possibly imagine. It turns out that kindness is not in fact naïve. It is the only reasonable response to the human condition, which is far more desperate than you know.

Emotive critiques can easily be hate. Hate is an emotion, so hate-filled critiques like this one are quite emotive.

The historical record of people improving society by critiquing things they perceive to be negative developments in it is not really that great. Yes, that's how we got, for example, the abolition of slavery — but the anti-abolitionists justified their own positions by critiquing the genocide in Haïti, which was itself justified by people critiquing things they perceived to be negative developments in it. For every Civil Rights Movement we have a Great Leap Forward; for every Sherman Antitrust Act we have a Prohibition.

You may not be able to avoid activism, but never forget that other activists spent their lives digging the ditches you're filling up, and others will spend their lives digging them again.

The way out of this is to spend as much of your energy as possible creating positive-sum things rather than in zero-sum struggle.

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