crypto on Nostr: He's saying it's a culture. An American culture. But it's not. It's all cultures. ...

He's saying it's a culture. An American culture. But it's not. It's all cultures. Everywhere. All the time. Because it's a reward mechanism for finding your place in your tribe that's built into your head and you are trying to make it irrelevant and will ultimately fail at the task. That part of the brain is what builds all cultures. The problem isn't with American culture. It's with the idea that you can eliminate a serotonin based reward mechanism from your brain and that by doing so, living as if you have 8 billion friends is suddenly possible. It's not. Dunbar's number is a real thing. It exists for a reason. I'm not talking about zero sum survival or anything like that. I'm talking about a social heirarchy that's built into your brain to help you recognize your place in the world. Ignoring it will get you into a lot of trouble. Using it to find your place in 8 billion people is a losing game. Using it to find your place in a community of about 150-500 people works most of the time. Modern technology has wrecked our idea of who we are and where our place is. That doesn't suddenly make comparison and bad mechanism. It means we need to limit who we compare ourselves to to people that we will actually interact with in person day to day and find a way to fit in with them.