Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing a lot, and we're trying for better than that here.

Also, 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.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others 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...

Hyperbole. The distilled version of the post is things have changed since these two wrote their paper, not necessarily for the better, and these two paradoxically opt out of the future they created because they have the luxury and wealth to do so.

Hyperbole is a literary tool to get you to think for yourself and relate it to your knowledge and experiences to agree or disagree. So, by nature of your attention to read it and then take a further action to respond, the writer was successful.

Thanks. That does make sense.

> Is this guy also a millennial or is he just trying to emulate one?

Carr was born in 1959.

I don't think it's intended to be taken literally. They're just illustrating a kind of lifestyle that doesn't genuinely exist anymore--now we're just memes within memes shrouded by emoji spam.

You seem to be misinterpreting the comment. I wasn't making a desperate cry for help on HN so that someone would provide me with random unsolicited advice which is somewhat obvious and unhelpful. The comment was just sharing an interpretation of what the author is saying, and it refers to the cynical way in which the newest upcoming generation relates to the internet and technology. I don't personally feel that way about life, but I do think much of social media has been reduced to that.

I think it's important we don't accidentally buy into the temptation of playing the role of an armchair internet psychologist for strangers with whom we have little to no context. If someone seriously needs help, anyone who isn't a professional is likely to just cause more harm than good, and if they don't need help then the discussion just ends up getting derailed.

Millennial angst...? He didn't even assert it or anything

'dang dislikes people making new accounts for every comment. You've made like three in this thread alone. Why?

I second this. Why do writers use hyperbole to make points when their hyperbole is not an exaggeration, but rather just false? It makes me as a reader not trust anything they say afterward.

Writing is a tool. Think of this article like a runway, and you the reader as an airplane trying to take off. Hyperbole can and did introduce a bit of turbulence to induce lift in your mind to get you out of follower mode and thinking critically whether you agree or disagree with the author. To complete the metaphor achieving lift off and thinking your own thoughts on the topic.

It's not dishonest because anybody can clearly reason the statement is tautologically false, there are no tricks like numbers or misleading statistics or anything explicitly duplicitous and dishonest.

You may dislike that the author effectively caused you to do this, thinking for yourself is dark and scary versus gently pulling you along for the ride but then would you have even read or commented? All I see is a skilled writer ruminating on an interesting topic. The comments on this thread already greatly outweigh the length of the piece, it's a pretty nice piece of writing.

I don't think there is any objective metric for whether Page and Brin where the last "truly happy" people, so I'm not sure what it means for that subjective statement to be just false. If Carr thinks they might have been because he believes the "idealism and confidence" that they had is not possible any more, then maybe they were, according to Carr's definition.

> "The millenial angst"

It's called depression.