And I can’t imagine feeling the same about any group of people. It’s been odd, to me. I’m just trying to support myself and the people in my life, and now there’s a looming fear that I can’t do that anymore… business owners are drooling over that, and other sectors are laughing.
Hard times, I guess.
I think the average person lives a much harder life and has been doing so for a while. Should we really be surprised by the lack of empathy when folks in tech had little to show for the common man this whole time?
For some reason I'm stuck in a real depressing, doomer algorithm / homepage on Twitter. But everyone on my homepage seems to have a take on the HNer comments along the lines of "see, this is why you don't make your job into your identity".
But that's such an antihuman response. The only reason you can put decades into a field to grind and build expertise is because you have an identity-level interest in a subject.
It's also not a good thing if the optimal way to live going forward is to have no passion for anything lest it changes so that we won't feel bad. I don't think that's possible unless you remove the human part of our brains or make life so horrible that we're happy just to survive another day.
Source? There has not been a statistically-significant increase in middle-aged male suicide rates between 2023 and 2024 confirmed data [1]. (2025 breakouts aren’t out yet, but top-line data show decreases.)
In 2025 in the UK men age 45–64 had a suicide rate of about 24 per 100,000, which is the highest it has been in the past half century, and is higher than other age categories. In the mid 2000s, the rate was like 17 per 100,000.
From your link, in the USA the overall rate for men of the same age is about 30 per 100,000, but varies dramatically between states.
At the risk of taking this off topic, the reason is Twitter. Don't go on Twitter and the doomer algorithm disappears from your life.
They are showing as much care for mathematicians as they received themselves, which is not much.
when mathematicians complaining about losing the part of the job that they love, people think "if you love doing it, why is anybody paying you? you're describing a hobby."
If AI got significantly better at performing surgery overnight and doctors started crying about how they were going to be replaced, what do you think the public response would be? Non-doctors want the best possible care; they aren’t interested in protecting an industry. The same will be said for pilots and lawyers, too.
People dislike self-serving whingeing, end of story, but that’s doubly true when it comes out of a profession (theoretical mathematics) that is mostly practically useless.