This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.

Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.

While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.

"an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values"

This just seems normal and expected.

Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

> Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation.

> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.

Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.

You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.

"you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them."

Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.

You called it "normal and expected". When not everyone has it happen to them, that's not "normal and expected". (It's not necessarily abnormal, but "expected" at the very least is a stretch).

"becoming an adult" is a thing people do, this will include no longer agreeing with everything your parents taught you. This is mundane and what you have described.

"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.

Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.

This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.

"have a right to my own body and choices?"

Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.

I am not surprised. I'm aware that the US never adopted:

https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no?

Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general?

If you have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?

These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.

The laws are to complicated to go into a full yes or no. But they mostly are. There are some things not covered by law which generally are controlled, such as the clothes, toys, and food bought for the kid.

Why do we allow people to teach a religion that requires someone to be old enough to have informed concent before they can decide to follow it for themselves, when at the same time we disallow sexual activity with those same individuals because they are not old enough to offer informed consent.

I recommend you spend more time reading about jurisprudence. I’m not sure where you’re based, but in the US, for example, children below even age 13 can make autonomous decisions about their health when it’s determined that they have the capacity, even when the consequences may be life-ending. And, less relevantly, I personally believe this is the most moral option in such situations. If you have a 15% 1-year survival rate, all treatments either come with a small decrease in mortality, a large increase in risk for detrimental side effects, or both, and you can demonstrate to me that you understand the interplay of these factors, I don’t care if you’re 10 or 100, I believe you should have the right to bodily autonomy.

Except conservatism, religion, and religious conservatism in particular do not seem to value open-mindedness, discussion and consensus, or a non-judgmental stance.

It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.

Which religion?

Christianity is arguanbly the irritating grit that created the pearl of modern science. A strict text that had to be taken literally ... this led to great intellectual progress in order reconcile it all. Bacon, Darwin ... lots of science was done by Christians.

Christianity isn't the only example. Islam and Judaism also have been heavy hitters. As have other cultures but I don't understand enough about them to comment.

I'm not sure the cause and effect are accurate here. It's very likely more the other way: that folks curious about the world and how it works did that research in spite of religion which often attempted to suppress new findings that countered church doctrine or beliefs. Or even suppress findings that happened to be different from earlier mental models.

To be fair, other scientists sometimes do this to. However most begrudgingly accept new findings if they hold up to the scientific method.

I appreciate the response, and I can relate. Perhaps I'm too sensitive to some rumblings I'm perceiving in the US at the moment. I don't know. I genuinely do not know.

The rumblings as in - the push back on the enormous takeover by christian conservatives of the united states, taking away women's rights, voting to teach the bible in schools, and doing their best to mass disenfranchise voters?

Fuck 'em honestly.

There has got to be a way to be strong against a cause without being strong against the people who represent it. I believe this devolves to violence otherwise.

If I talked about how I needed to recover from being raised in a progressive environment, it would not be so well received in well-respected tech circles.

There's an assymetry here no one wants to acknowledge.

I don't know anyone who had to "recover" from being raised by "progressive" parents. Is this actually a thing? What would there be to recover from exactly?

See? I can't even mention it without scare quotes and downvotes :)

"Recover from my dad beating me" vs "recover from my dad not beating me".

Yes, really makes you think.

lmao. fish, water, etc.

These are just regular quotation marks. Sorry if they scared you.

I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

This viewpoint is preposterous to me in the first place.

I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

From my perspective, I do not perceive the world as "falling apart" and I wonder how much of your perception of the state of things (as if there was a universally defined "perfection" to strive towards instead of humans creating these concepts) falling apart is derived from your faith, which has a vested interest in presenting itself as a real-feeling thing in order to promulgate its existence. As a meme, it appears to be persistent in the environment for roughly 2k years, so clearly there's some fitness to its host species. And contrast its feelings of apocalyptic end times to Buddhism, where things are more cyclical rather than ending soon, and I wonder how your feelings would be affected were you to have been raised in that environment instead.

I feel like religion is the original corporation. You even have weekly 1-on-1s with your manager!

I don't often laugh on HN, but when I do, it's a big LOL.

first noble truth = life is suffering

yeah the Buddha totally didn’t mean that the world is falling apart.

i don’t have to wonder how my perception would have been affected because i was a buddhist for over a decade before coming to Christ.

While I can't speak to the universality or novelty of the world falling apart, I feel the same way.

Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.

We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.

Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.

A thing you might want to consider is that how "good" a person is is largely independent from their level of religious faith.

It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.

Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.

could you please explain your reason for posting this? it doesn't seem related to the preceding comment.

I was mainly replying to this sentence:

" Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. "

may i ask a bit more specifically why your comment evaluating the abstract concept of goodness and its relation to faith is related to this sentence? i'm still not seeing the connection.

"who failed to live their faith" - ie if they had lived up to their faith would have been good. I'm saying that the practice of "faith" and being "good" are largely unconnected. There are plenty of faithful Christians in prison.

By "good" I mean nice, polite, not murdering people. Generally accepted moral behavior.

if someone agrees on what it means to be good, their definition of the term has been subjectively qualified. muslims agree its good to cover their women, you probably dont, both these statements are true. seems to be a central aspect of religion, agreeing on codified morality. im fairly confident that not killing is a moral purported by christianity, therefore it doesnt seem logical to label murderers as christians - based on their murderous behaviour, murderers do not agree with christianity, regardless as to what they verbally state. would you label buddhists as immoral if an individual decided to call himself buddhist post-massacre?

I was raised atheist/agnostic and was one for decades. Now that I'm not, I frequently get unsolicited comments like the one you're responding to. People assume that I haven't considered foundational tenets of my religion, or that they're the first ones to raise basic ethical questions after thousands of years of tradition, teaching, and catechism.

There's a noticeable difference between those who are concerned but care about what I think, and those who have already made up their minds that I'm ignorant. It's tough, especially when it surfaces in longstanding relationships. I've had friends and family jump to all kinds of crazy conclusions about what I believe and why.

I'm not perfect, and I often reflect on whether I'm setting a bad example or being a poor witness to something that's a powerful source of strength and charity. Many times I've fallen short, and I ask for forgiveness. Christ asks me to pick up my cross and follow Him, and I pray for the humility and discernment to do so.

its a gracious outlook of you, to assign ignorance as the root cause of this behaviour. to me that dude looks like any other proselytizer - a man attempting to sway others views, without concern for their concerns. although if you try showing atheist proselytizers how similar they behave to preachers, or indeed compare any of their behaviour to religious zealots, this inevitably short circuits the proselytizer viewpoint and forces fight mode, resulting in termination of any productive discussion.

at the end of the day people say a lot of things, and until life teaches how little words matter, people do care about words by default. it is only those understanding life who look past words to see what truly matters. everything that anything living does in this existence is inherently selfish, otherwise it wouldnt happen, based on science and neurochemistry. this seeming impediment to becoming christlike is not an insurmountable obstacle, rather a beautiful choice we are offered - to accept animality, or to humbly push through the impossible and seek something more ...

laughably incorrect

one of the things i am very incapable of judging is whether someone is “good” or “bad”

>I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days

You people have been telling this for the last 2000 years.

> You people have been telling this for the last 2000 years.

Imagine I was Jewish and you referred to Jews as “you people”

strange days we live in indeed.

> I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!

Well, the world is exactly as "God" created it.

Thus, if the world is falling apart, then the God - observably so - has done a real shoddy job.

If you come upon a piece of well written software - you can infer that it's written by a good and competent programmer.

And if the software on the other hand is shitty, then more likely than not - made and created by a shitty programmer.

World as is - is obviously created by either somebody extremely incompetent or downright malevolent as far as UX for living beings is concerned.

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bread hanging drywall or driving a solid waste truck.

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

I do not. He spends his time working on a language used by and supported by several startups and a few major corporations, a language that seems heir apparent to C, at least among a lot of developers. The ICO in your name leads me to believe you're a cryptoscammer, so...seems like maybe you're not in a position to be throwing stones regarding how people make a living.

The Linux Kernel is also a hobby project completely supported by the charity of others.

And what exactly do you do for a living?

> He dons the jester’s hat

Or maybe it's not an act, and he's just naturally funny :)

> to keep his easy job

He had an easy corporate job. Then he quit and spent half a decade burning his savings to work on his "hobby project", in a belief that one day it would become useful enough that the project would become self-sustainable. Now he can afford air conditioning again. Should we not be congratulating him?

I liked the talk and was about to post a link to it in the $dayjob slack, but this threw me off as well. Still watched it to the end, and I still recommended it to a friend (along with the Youtube channel of the "Software should work" conf), but I'm saddened that the talk paints Christianity as something that is inflicted upon you and that you should strive to get rid of.

It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.

What if we treat all religions as programming languages for humans? Then a degree program for programming humans at the Omniversity would likely put you through several different religions and then through syncretisms of them.

Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.

You’re talking in general about your faith, when this presenter was talking about their specific experience of being raised by conservative Christian parents. I’m not even Christian, and it’s plain to me that there’s massive variation even within one denomination’s congregants, let alone a Baptist vs a Lutheran, for example. It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.

> I’m not even Christian, and it’s plain to me that there’s massive variation even within one denomination’s congregants, let alone a Baptist vs a Lutheran

That's a fair point I agree with. Still, I've met many people who seemingly put all "flavors" of Christian faith in the same negative bucket (implicitly negating the diversity among Christians you call out in your comment). In light of that, my intention was to contribue to the conversation with the very same point you are making, backed by a data point from my own experience: that there are many Christian communities in which faith is practiced in a way that enriches your life, rather than shackling you to a cult.

> It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.

Was it Andrew's intention to talk about Christianity in general? Now you mention it, he might indeed have been focusing only on people "raised by conservative Christian parents".

He changed what he says his values are when dating women, to make dating woman easier for himself. Why he mentioned it, I don't know. He holds IMHO strange views on internet culture and portrays it as morally superior to not be part of any group mentioned; PUA/any forum/Christianity as a whole. A strange introduction for a software talk.

Idk how that was what you took away from the talk, and I think it says a lot about how you might approach dating, interacting with women, and personal values. He seemingly changed his views/approach to life and dating based on a re-evaluation of his values and experiences, whereas your framing makes me concerned that you believe the only way someone would/could become more attractive is by performing some sort of charade. It’s obvious when this is the case and I am aware of some people becoming frustrated by the experience, thinking that there is a “cheat code” to becoming more interesting/pleasant for others to interact with when it actually requires a radical rewiring of how you view and participate in social interaction; becoming more attractive is really just the side-effect.

Further, his views on PUA in particular might seem strange from the perspective of someone deep inside “internet culture”, and if this is you, from someone raised as a man, who is attracted to women, and who spent many years in the dark corners of the internet, please give broadening your horizons a try. You may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.

> makes me concerned that you believe the only way someone would/could become more attractive is by performing some sort of charade.

I am unapologetically my authentic self, I find that works best. If you had broadened your horizons as you say; you'd find the same.

> you may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.

There's no need to tell other posters what they think. As for women; I love women, and have always been in long term relationships. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy. I think it's odd though to try and appear superior to these groups as he does. You are right there are toxic people, especially those seeking to earn income and status off of male loneliness. I agree with you fully. Having said that, I stand behind what I said earlier.

I don’t think he’s trying to gain your approval, if that’s what you mean.

After reading some other comments on what I wrote, I guess I'm just surprised if/that he doesn't know this will offend people, and I see a simple way to make his point without doing so.

Thanks a lot for the effort you've been putting into your comments! It's not often you come across someone on the internet who wants to have a honest conversation and at the same time has empathy with the real-world people at the other end of the cable. Keep it up!

> Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian

Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".

And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there

When you say "listen before rejecting," what would you have me do differently? To call what I'm saying "rejection" seems a bridge too far from what I am intending to say, also. I am making an appeal to civility and compassion in the event that he intended to say what he said knowing that people might feel badly by it.

The comment was not "uncivil" and it was not "lacking compassion". Yes people can feel bad when you say them actions of some in their group affected a person negatively. That does not mean it is uncivil to say "a thing conservative person did affected me negatively".

The "you cant talk about something that negatively affected you, because a conservative person might feel bad" is not compassion. Its effect is biasing what people can say in very much one sided way.

I don't feel that the way you are paraphrasing me represents what I am trying to say at all, and I feel misunderstood. I do think the phrase "appeal to civility" was fine, but the negation of that phrase doesn't exactly equate to an accusation of being "uncivil," if you know what I mean. I don't disagree with what you're saying in the abstract, and I've had this conversation elsewhere in the thread.

Man, we’ve come a long way from the halcyon days where the HBO Silicon Valley gag about coming out as Christian was genuinely hilarious. Time to shove the Bible thumpers back in the closet.

He shouldn't talk about his own experience? Why not? Why is it in poor taste to talk about a difficulty he went through?

When you put it that way, I have no issue agreeing wholeheartedly. He’s making an example of incel culture as it appears to him to apply to software culture. After I describe it that way, I think he didn’t have to stoke the religious right in doing so. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until your reply (thank you) was that he might not be aware he’s doing that, and that is where I may be wrong in assessing the “taste” of the messaging. But I will be firm in my initial reason to post: knowingly aggravating each other is a problem in this country. We need compassion and mutual respect. Cooling the temperature of discourse will require a surplus in patience. Maybe even faith. (I am not religious, this is not a dog-whistle.)

I was so pre-occupied with someone being offended by what he was saying that I didn't see the clear positive angles you're showing. I appreciate that.

I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. From my limited experience Mr. Kelley often adopts a confrontational stance, sometimes to the point of appearing antagonistic, but I listened past the intro and did not interpret what he said as “religion bad” or even “conservatism bad”.

It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.

I feel like a lot of folks have bought into the Christian nationalist position that they are always under attack. Someone saying, "I had a hard time in a conservative Christian upbringing and I had to do some work to find a way to be happy and successful at the things I wanted" is, in no way, an attack on anyone or anyone's beliefs, and to frame it as such kinda just shows how wildly successful that particular propaganda tactic has been.

A few extremists are constantly rattling on about the "War on Christmas", the "War on Christians", etc. Meanwhile, Christians hold literally every lever of power in the US, and saying you're not a Christian in public is disqualifying from most public office in the US; not by law, but de facto, based on the prejudices against other religions and the non-religious. If someone raised in a conservative Christian household saying, "that was hard", is "aggravating" to anyone, then I would say the aggravated party is 100% the one in the wrong. I'm not going to pretend along with Christian nationalists that they need protection from any speech that isn't praising their beliefs and actions.

Its a set up for part 4 (27:45 or so) which talks about irrationally choosing to have faith in humanity. I see it as a sort of "full disclosure" disclaimer. I'd summarize:

> In my past I've dabbled in sorts of faith that I later found to be problematic, but there's also this other faith that I think is good.

It's definitely cultural critique that people who don't agree with his broad political stance will find divisive and mean. I also completely believe that Andrew Kelly is talking sincerely about his own beliefs and experiences, grounded in his own life history - that is, I believe that his own experience is that unlearning some of the conservative Christian values his parents taught him made his own dating life better, at least with respect to the different values he came to have.

I think the lesson here is that you can't divorce a potentially inspiring and positive talk, from the underlying ideological stances that ground that talk, and indeed determine what the speaker thinks count as inspiring and positive. There are a number of points in this talk where I think Kelly's claims that some aspect of computer technology are tempting to blackpill over, are really just that computer technology being useful to people who don't share his political stances. So a listener who doesn't actually share his political stances won't find the argument he is building in those sections of the talk convincing at all.

Of course, coming from that background one has to learn to recognize some new concepts to even use online dating - stuff like short-term relationships, folks going for high bodycount, that sort of stuff.

Yet, stating that in an open source talk has the subtext of someone wearing a t-shirt "I know HTML - How To Meet Ladies".

I don't think it's meant to be mean or divisive, he clearly had trouble dating and he feels his conservative Christian upbringing was partially responsible for that. If you think he's wrongly attributing it to those things, fair enough, but his experience is still valid.

EDIT: just saw your reply to a similar comment below, appreciate your response!

Religious trauma is documented in psychology. People suffer when they are indoctrinated by their parents.

> this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian

If they feel offended maybe they should ask themselves some hard questions instead of demanding the speaker to hide his experience.

What does "indoctrinated by their parents" mean? Everyone learns from their parents and is "indoctrinated" by their values.

If you grow up as an adult and discover that you disagree with their values, it doesn't mean that they "indoctrinated" you.

It's a gradual distinction for sure, but I consider it a "I know it when I see it" situation.

Parents try to impart their values, but indoctrination for me begins where they won't allow their children to come to their own, potentially disagreeing opinions. Prohibiting contact to peers with other views, that sort of thing.

You can impart values on children and try to lead by example, but ultimately, they're sovereign individuals, not their parents' property. It's the unwillingness to accept that where I see education and guidance cross the border into indoctrination.

A far better qualifier than my "I know it when I see it", for someone pretty certain they weren't indoctrinated, would probably be a grown-up's reflection on their own upbringing. If they're lucky and become an independent person, they will have a good feeling about whether their upbringing involved unacceptable levels of coercion and isolation.

"indoctrination" means teaching people what to think instead of teaching how to think critically and skeptically.

If you haven’t interacted much with people raised by conservative Christians in the United States, they often have strong feelings about how they were raised.

Funny enough, I find myself closer to the conservative Christian upbringing I received as a child than ever before, but I totally agree with him on needing to unlearn some things when it comes to dating. Different world in the past I guess, conservative Christian or not.

Taken as a whole, the intro to his talk was pretty cohesive in my opinion, albeit controversial. It made sense when taken together, even though some people will take issue with the subject matter. The point wasn't the little details about his own experience, that was just to get you invested in the story about the degeneration of certain types of communities when people who "graduate" from them leave, and the people who never moved on remain.