N.B. I'm in a mood tonight, so this will be less of a well-considered essay and more of a rant, partially in the vein of Fuck Nuance. Don't take anything here too seriously.
Why does nobody care about anything? The world is full of stuff that could be excellent with just 1% more effort. But people don't care.
Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
Ever used a piece of software that's buggy as hell, looks bad, but still costs money, presumably because the company behind it has found some regulatory capture to justify their existence? The programmer who wrote it probably doesn't care. Their manager definitely doesn't care. The regulators don't care.
You might think "something something incentive systems". No. At my big tech job I had the pleasure of interviewing a few programmers who worked for a a large healthcare company that engages in regulatory capture. Let me assure you: They. Do. Not Care.
I've met a few people that work for municipal governments. Not politicians, just career bureaucrats deep in the system. I ask them what their favorite part of the job is. They all say "stability" or "job security" as their #1. It takes 18 months to get the city to permit your shed? They. Do. Not. Care.
Here's a dumb example. This bike lane ends at the bottom of a hill near me. It merges onto the sidewalk at a crazy sharp angle. Cyclists are coming down this hill at 20mph or so. Tons of people can't make this angle at that speed and hit the vertical curb face, damaging their bike and injuring themselves. If they're unlucky, they go flying into the signpost.
Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
This isn't even a pro- or anti-bikes thing. The ramp was getting built by whatever mandate. You're the engineer. Do you make it bad, or do you spend 1% more time thinking about it and make it good for literally the same cost? You make it bad, because you do not care.
I actually pointed this ramp out to the director of the Seattle Department of Transportation during a walking tour. He made a note of it over a year ago that I assume was promptly forgotten about. He does not care.
Here's another example. Street lights. Seattle has been engaging in a program to reduce everyone's natural melatonin production up to 5x by replacing the sodium lights with harsh-white LEDs.
These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving. If your house is near one, they suck. If you're walking your dog at night (which starts at 5PM for much of the year in Seattle), they really suck.
But whoever made the decision to switch the lights does not care. It's entirely possible they don't even live in the city, but instead live in a pleasant exurb. Or maybe they don't walk at night and have never considered that other people do.
White LEDs reduce car crashes by 0.1% and that is measurable, but sleep quality and aesthetics are not measurable. You just have to care about them. And nobody cares.
But that's enough city stuff. Plenty of people don't care about plenty of other things.
You put on your turn signal in traffic to merge. The person who could let you in is looking straight ahead, zoned out. Why would they look around to see if they could cooperate with anyone? They're already in the lane they need to be in. They. Do. Not. Care.
You're at the airport. There's a group in front of you on the escalator taking up the full width, preventing anyone from walking by. They do not care.
You're on the sidewalk and someone has headphones in, walking in the center of the path. A mom and stroller are behind them. They can't hear her "excuse me" to get their attention. They have not even considered the possibility that anyone in the world exists but them. They do not care.
The McDonalds touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
At work the junior engineer sends you some code to review. The code was clearly written in a first draft, and then just iteratively patched until the tests passed, then immediately sent to you to review without any further improvement. They do not care.
The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The doctor misdiagnosis your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.
People don't pick up after their dogs. The guy at the gym doesn't re-rack the weights. The lady at the grocery store leaves the cart in the middle of the parking lot. They. Do. Not. Care.
I could continue in this vein for another few pages, but it would be boring at you get the point. We are surrounded by antisocial bastards.
Some of them like the people who don't pick up after their dogs are legitimately just assholes.
Others, like the bureaucrats in the city who mess up our lives in more indirect ways are more a victim of The System. But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them.
We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeat armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.
Now, I'm at a small startup full of people who care. Customer bug reports go right to our chatroom. We fix them immediately. I feel guilty I wrote the bugs at all. We reach out to users to see if we can make their lives better. We care.
I want to live in a community where everyone cares.
The one place in the world you get this vibe is probably Japan. Most people just really care. Patrick McKenzie refers to this as the will to have nice things. Japan has it, and the US mostly does not.
In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat. And the result is obvious if you visit both places.
Is it possible for us to care in the US? To foster the will to have nice things? I think we actually had this in the aftermath of WW2. The country was mostly on the same page about progress, values, the future. But over a few generations, more and more people defect. Living among defectors is demoralizing and causes more defections (much like my own departure from my Big Tech job!). Eventually society is full of defectors.
But I don't think this is a full explanation. Most people aren't assholes, they merely won't go out of their way to add to the world. And I can feel myself getting pulled in that direction.
I used to go a lot more out of my way to add to the world. A few years ago, I installed a bunch of dog bag dispensers on the telephone poles of my neighborhood. I still keep them stocked.
I was, somewhat naively, hoping that somehow I could get a snowball of care going. I built curb ramps on legacy curbs that lacked them. I lobbied the city to open new park space. Improve crosswalks. And much more!
But the snowball never started. Nobody cares. Rather, there is a tiny minority of activists who care. They spend all their free time doing activist stuff — basically fighting the city to try to make the bureaucrats care about little bits here and there.
But I've come to accept that I just don't have the disposition to fight all the time. I'm not a fighter. I care a lot and I just want to live in a place where other people care.
We're not going to move to Japan, but would absolutely be willing to move within the US.
Does such a community really exist? Where everyone cares? Or at least a supermajority? Or does it need to be built?