I've noticed on HN lately we're getting this wave of self-promotional self-submited blog posts whose pattern is effectively, "I'm 20 years old, the CEO/cofounder of SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com and let me share with you the wisdom of my vast accumulated life's experience and insight, from my struggles in an elite private US high school to my challenges overcoming too-frequent iPhone 4S use, to my ephiphany involving Mac OS X graphic design. And I'll name drop a few times. And you should follow me here, here and here."

But yeah, I tend to think that some of these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something and submit to HN. It's getting tiresome. I also sense a recent wave of Redditors that have signed up, based on many comments with Reddit-style comment patterns. Which I actually like on Reddit, but hoping to not see here.

This is entirely why I haven't been submitting my own content.

So, right, I sometimes discourse in HN comments on these sorts of topics. We're facing a crisis where authenticity is vanishing from the everyday life; and the traditional protector of authenticity -- religion -- is sapped away by technology, entertainment, and poor design choices. I may someday request to do a TED talk called "TED is the Problem" about this, but I can't as yet fit both an engaging discussion of the problem and what we can do about it into six minutes.

The point is, I'm 27, and I'm too young, and I'm not special. I'm working on it, practicing writing on how to be heartfelt and authentic in the world -- and the sort of crankiness at the Mistakes of Society which was once the domain of prophets and is now the domain of bloggers. But really I am only just learning to stand within it on my own. I don't even have any formal academic qualifications of any kind yet (though my Master's thesis in Physics will be presented next month). I don't have any successful projects on GitHub. I'm just little-old-me. So I refuse to submit because banality still fills my insights. The rush to be famous also, frankly, terrifies me. (Since I'm not special, I feel a great freedom to be Real.)

I guess I'm working my way around to a question which I want to ask the community. It looks something like this: "What do we do when simply talking about authentic living is an inauthentic form of life?" What do you do when the very act of saying, "here is how to Really Live" looks like a shameless attempt to gain a cult of followers because you're afraid that you're not Really Living?

Heck, I've reread this very comment a couple of times, and darned if it doesn't look like I'm committing the same error that I'm complaining about. But I really want to know. Does authenticity eat itself? Is there any room left for us to teach others to be authentic? Or is that a relic of the bygone age of gurus and rabbis, a victim of the Hollywoodification of Western culture?

What's with the downranks? Can someone provide an explanation? The guy provided a rather useless comment that comes across as insulting to most people trying to develop a start-up. Any 20 year old using rails and Heroku to try and create something new is automatically bereft of useful life experience? There's plenty of 60 years olds that despite decades of experience have more insipid, pessimistic, and unoriginal thoughts than intelligent middle school students.

I get tired of the constant pessimism on the internet. Sure, in real life there may be "pity" awards and "everyone is a winner" attitudes, but it is far more extreme in the opposite direction online. Every article I read nowadays is "you're not special", "the chance of you succeeding at anything is somewhat better than buying a lottery ticket", etc. Can anyone name ONE positive effect of these sorts of articles? They don't make me think, "Oh gee, this author's a genius!" They instead make me think some middle-aged programmer is upset he never created some grand vision he always had and wants to bring everyone else down along with him. So yeah, SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com may be popular, but IAmAnOldFartThatHasNothingBetterToDoThanWriteDemeaningAndPessimisticArticlesAllDay.com is just as popular.

By the way, I don't use rails, Heroku, Macs, Twitter, and iPhones, nor did I attend an elite private US high school in case you were thinking I am upset because I might fit his description.

""I'm 20 years old, the CEO/cofounder of SomeTwitterBootstrapWidgetOnRailsInHerokuIBangedOutOverAWeekend.com" ... "let me share with you the wisdom of my vast accumulated life's experience and insight, from my struggles in an elite private US high school"

Your comment really made me laugh and I thought how I wish my wife knew about HN so I could share it with her.

"these "amazing insights" are chosen tongue-in-cheek, just to have an excuse to blog something"

Maybe some are. But I think the social proof exists where someone sees that items like this are well received on HN and they go to lemm-mimick the same behavior to feel special.

With all due respect, what keeps your wife from learning about HN?

I've been battling this for...years on here.

I gave up. There are many corpses leading down this path.

These people want their affirmation, not reality or actual knowledge.

If they did, they'd be reading a book, or a paper on databases instead of HN.

You must be a joy to hang out with.

I think you're being unnecessarily harsh. Sure, that quote is not the best or most subtle summary of his own point, but in my opinion the basic insight and the clear, memorable illustration still make this a worthwhile read for plenty of people, even if not for you.