At work the junior engineer sends you some code to review. The code was clearly written in a first draft, and then just iteratively patched until the tests passed, then immediately sent to you to review without any further improvement. They do not care.

The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.

The doctor misdiagnoses your illness whose symptoms are in the first paragraph of the trivially googleable wikipedia article. He does not care.

People don't pick up after their dogs. The guy at the gym doesn't re-rack the weights. The lady at the grocery store leaves the cart in the middle of the parking lot. They. Do. Not. Care.

I could continue in this vein for another few pages, but it would be boring and you get the point. We are surrounded by antisocial bastards.

Some of them like the people who don't pick up after their dogs are legitimately just assholes.

Others, like the bureaucrats in the city who mess up our lives in more indirect ways are more victims of The System. But they are still guilty of lacking the personal agency to fight it or leave in protest, and I still — potentially unjustly — condemn them.

We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.

When I joined my former Big Tech job, everyone cared. Over time, incentives attracted a different set of people who didn't care as much. Eventually those people became the majority. It's painful to work with people who don't care if you care a lot, and eventually I left because of it.

Now, I'm at a small startup full of people who care. Customer bug reports go right to our chatroom. We fix them immediately. I feel guilty I wrote the bugs at all. We reach out to users to see if we can make their lives better. We care.

I want to live in a community where everyone cares.

The one place in the world you get this vibe is probably Japan. Most people just really care . Patrick McKenzie refers to this as the will to have nice things. Japan has it, and the US mostly does not.

In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat. And the result is obvious if you visit both places.

Nobody Cares

grantslatton.com • Nobody Cares

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