The first time it was weird, I was going to meet this girl on irc about some forum drama, and it felt even more silly telling customs. But we had a fun night and I realised that people have weird fringe interests and that there is literally dozens of us.
It’s never too late
isn't the internet's fault
An argument could be made on a tinder-ization of intellectual discussion. That is, it’s so easy to move on to the next stimulating discussion online that you are less willing to invest in chancy RL interaction.
I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.
It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)
As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.
I remember arguing with a high school teacher that 50 years in the future countries as we knew them would no longer exist. People would cluster online based on shared interests and goals.
That was 30 years ago. I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it ain't happening the way I thought it would.
I find the biggest problem is the lack of time to dedicate to it. Specifically, in my order of priorities it comes in behind a lot of other more important things that I don't have enough time for as it is.
I've noticed this has become a far more important equation with age, how I allocate time. When I was ~16-24 years old I burned up enormous amounts of time doing stupid shit. Time seemed inexpensive, plentiful, unlimited. And of course typically when you're young you have fewer responsibilities anyway. Now I'm far more certain about what matters and what doesn't in terms of ordering how I burn up what remains of my lifetime. As you get older you learn all of this, you learn what matters for yourself, and properly you allocate time accordingly.
Sometimes I think I'm getting grumpier as I get older, but it's not actually that at all. I dislike doing things I don't want to do more as I've gotten older, because I've acquired a far greater understanding of the value of time. How fast it seems to zip by, how scarce it is, how little of it we get relatively speaking. Stupid things that rob me of time, are a far greater annoyance with that understanding, that appreciation. When you're young, you can think you understand the value of your time; when you're older, you feel it in your bones, you walk around wearing the expense of time across decades.
Watching time vanish when you're 18, you don't think much about it. Time is infinite as far as you're concerned. Watching time vanish when you're 40 gets a lot more concerning. You become very aware of how quickly a decade seems to slip by. Blink, a decade goes by, you're 50; blink, blink, you're dead.
Your body also starts to deteriorate in accelerating fashion after anywhere from your mid 30s to your mid 40s, depending. You begin to notice that at 40 as well. Your memory isn't as sharp as it was at 20. You don't recover from damage as quickly. The physical aspect just reminds you that much more of the clock and how you're allocating your time. You can hear the little rusting springs in your telomeres as they keep getting shorter.
Chat rooms don't matter so much when you're 40 and you've spent a collective year or two of your earlier life hanging out in chat rooms (webchat broadcasting system, IRC et al.), bullshitting with people. You've got N years remaining to do things that really, really matter to you, and then you're going to die. And you're going to be dead forever. More chat rooms, to chat about things that you've chatted about 497 times in the past? No. Fuck no. On to the next, something more valuable, something more interesting, a new experience perhaps.
I too mentally miss the good 'ol days of being 18 and hanging out on IRC chatting about things that seemed super fascinating to me at the time. It's one part fantasy, one part longing to be young again, to feel young again (it's the reversal of the experience dulling concept of repetition, that people long for; every time you do something, it fades, exactly the same way many drugs do; repetitive experiences fade in the same way; we long toward the past in part due to that sensation of everything being vigorously new, exactly as drug addicts always miss the early addiction when the high was far better, before repetition eroded it).
We long for the early Internet / Web, because we've done so much Internet'ing, and every time you do it, it fades. It's not the old Internet that people actually miss. The problem is the experience repetition dulling everything, and that can't be rolled back; people miss the glorious experience of a new big world to explore online for the first time, that excitement. You can tell that that's the case, because people half my age experience the same sensation of missing what to them is the 'old' Internet (eg when they first started hanging out on Minecraft socializing online, or similar). Same concept, same longing, different Interwebs, same dulling over time due to experience repetition. Young people today will be longing for the exciting early days of TikTok, when they were doing dumb dance clones and it was stupid and silly and they'll miss the hell out of it, because it was all so new to them; like I might have missed hanging out on ICQ in its early days. And when those young people are 40, they'll still be able to go online and create short videos of themselves doing dumb dances, but they won't really want to, the repetitive experience effect will have dulled it all, it will no longer be new and exciting, and that can't be fixed, the life experience queue moves in one direction.
If you're fortunate, you get to decide what the meaning, the purpose, of your life is. The purpose of my life will always be to seek out new experiences, pursue new things that I find interesting. And that means not burning much more of my life in chat rooms, I already did plenty of that.
http://phroxy.z3bra.org/bitreich.org:70/0/con/2020/rec/energ...
That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?
And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.