It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diverse city. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently in Michigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t. Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.
- spend more time in civic spaces like libraries and public parks. Or just being outside in public with an open mind.
- speaking of civic involvement, active participation in your local government will for sure broaden your social circles.
- religious organizations -- at least, good ones -- are cross-sectional in this way too. Quoting MLK Jr, "... any [church] that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold thing, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."
- community work, like habitat for humanity or the like, will put you in a new sphere of folks too.
I'm glad I read the article, I thought this was about the death of sysadmins at first glance.
Speaking to the content though; and it may seem dismissive or odd but: I tend to make friends with random people I meet. For instance going the extra mile to be friendly with service workers (remembering names, asking about family and following up later, generally having good memory for birthdays etc) has landed me a fair crop of friends.
People are rarely in the service industry long and they tend to be wildly different, person-to-person, and they have extended friend groups too which if you get very friendly may end up increasing your circles even further.
It sounds weird typing this out, like I consider them some kind of resource to be tapped, but what I'm trying to get across is to be kind to people and friendship will happen. I've never gone looking for friends and almost my entire friend group (outside of IRC) has nothing to do with tech.
Some of the people I was just friendly with and became friends with are now personal trainers, nutritionists, nurses and architects. It's almost a problem because we have very little in common, we can only share lamentation about things like open offices and the country we live in. :P
This may be my lack of social skills speaking, but would you mind sharing a little more information on how this works in practice?
In general when I interact with service workers, we tend to be focused on the service at hand - there isn't very much spare time for making friends. And I can't help but feel they are being paid to be friendly. (I am not from the US, if this makes any difference)
Also, how much time would you say you spend with new friends? I find that between work, family, personal projects, and a stable of few but close friends, my time is pretty well spoken for. But the idea of having more friends is certainly a nice one.
I'm more than happy to answer, but it might sound sociopathic in isolation and without context. Also I used "service workers" as an example of people I interact with daily, but it can be anyone really and my point was more general.
Regarding my service worker friends specifically (usually they work at my local food places): if I go places more than once I'll ask how things are that day, if it was busy, if there's any time that is overly annoying, basic small talk stuff.
Maybe another day I'll ask their name, but I must have already asked a question on another day, so that a question like this doesn't come out of the blue.. it's a natural progression, and this is so that I can greet them by name next time I see them.
After I'm talking with names then I'll ask weird questions like if they had a favourite customer, maybe make a cheesy joke about it not being me because I'm annoying with questions.
Maybe later I'll ask if they have any family in the area, or something stupid about star signs. If their birth month is coming up I'll comment on it and make a mental note to bring it up later to figure out their birthday and get them some small gift.
Even later, if I have an event planned or something I'll invite them out- I always offer 2 or 3 different times/things before I stop offering, when/if they reject it can be a reason to ask more pointed questions about what they normally do as activity; the last time you offer you can suggest that they show you what they're interested in or something.
It helps that I genuinely care for the people I interact with, I really consider everyone a friend I haven't gotten to know yet.
I know it sounds formulaic, but it's not and I'm just recollecting.
As for hanging out, maybe once every 2 weeks? not sure, certainly not often. I have a girlfriend who is very demanding of my time.
And, for context, I live in Sweden, so- also not US. :)
This is awesome. For my part, I've generally set the goal on "Can I make them laugh?" A genuine belly laugh. In order to do so, you often have to build some camaraderie. You also have to be creative to discover what discursions may make them laugh. It's really been enjoyable for me, and hopefully others as well!
As a service worker, here's the thing: the power dynamic is asymmetric. If you ask about my family, I can't treat you like i do a stranger who asks me. That is, it's none of your business. I have to keep in mind that my goal is to keep you as a paying customer and avoid you getting mad at me and complaining to my boss.
My goal is for you to buy the things you want and get out of my store for you to come back another day. I won't be rude and I'll try my best to help you, but I don't take my customers home with me to have a beer because I like my work to be separate from the rest of my life.
Be really careful that you aren't abusing a captive audience when you do this.
Everything you're saying is true. It's something I really worry about which is why the inquisitiveness is very gradual.
If someone shows discomfort then you stop, if they were just caught off guard and want to continue to be friendly then they will instantiate the next conversation.
This sounds awesome, and I'm glad it's worked well for you. Too many people dehumanize "service workers", or abuse them in their role as the face of a company that cares even less for its employees than its customers.
This can be a pleasure for both sides if done respectfully, I want to caution the reader that this walks a very fine line next to harrassment, particularly where the person you're interacting with is of a different gender. If it doesn't come naturally to you, don't try it.
Monoculture basically just means upper middle class men in tech coupled with the argument of implicit negation that less diverse == bad. This self flagellation from the PMC and tech is just really... I don't know what to make of it, but I would say is harmful. If you really want to break out of your professional cohort, pick up a hobby which requires other people like sports/music/civic activities/religion/car meets/quilting/neighborhood gardening/whatever. You'll find most of those folk tend to be somewhat like minded as well, but how we spend our free time basically boils down "doing what I enjoy doing around others that respect me on some level". You do you, and let's not get too caught up with having the correct friends.
I didn’t read it as a moral argument. It’s simply that if you only hang out with people that are very similar to you, you are very unlikely to encounter a diverse set of viewpoints and are more vulnerable to group think.
This isn’t isolated to tech, it would apply to any insular community. To use a tech analogy, if you trained a machine learning model based on the preferences and viewpoints of only people who worked in tech, you’d end up with an overfitted and not very general model.
Your brain is trained on viewpoints you are exposed to as well, and you risk over fitting your brain to a narrow set of viewpoints if you never leave an insular community.
I don't want to befriend people who are different from me for some weird moral reason or because I want the "correct" friends. I just think it's boring to be surrounded entirely by people who are too much like me.
I'm wondering how much of it is a form of filtering based on a social bias. There are a lot of hobbies in the world (that the author would potentially enjoy), but the ones that first come to mind are ones that have an examples nearby (e.g. my teammate Dan mentioned he went rock climbing on Sunday)
for me it’s far more an argument against tedium than any highfalutin moral scolding.
i spend all week dicking around with my fellow pedants solving fiddly problems. I don’t want to play board games or factorio all weekend because i want to have a weekend that feels like not-work.
I hold this view from a selfish place, programmers and other technical people can get really tiring to hang out with, especially after being steeped in technical bs all day.
Alternative worldviews are refreshing and rejuvinating.
I dont even care about the hive mind aspect, its the relentless tedium of 'rationality' that thrives amongst the type, its just not human to try to be "right" all the time.
Lol, I wish I had that problem. Where I live, it's finding like-minded geeks that requires actual effort. IT people are largely social pariahs, unless they are on the business side of things. And it's really been the case for most of my life, over two different countries.
It's just that the Bay Area is an economic district, that's all. There are districts in Europe where everyone is somehow involved in making pipes and faucets, others where everyone works in the clothing industry, even some where everyone is into the business of fantasy miniatures....
SF "makes bits", so chances are that if you throw a stone there you'll hit 3 developers, 2 "product guys", and 4 devops (insert a basement-dweller-sysadmin-joke here). I actually found it pretty exciting the few times I was over there - a land where nerds don't have to be ashamed of "being in IT"! Talking coding and gadgets over dinner is socially accepted! How refreshing!
Obviously there is a degree of class selection in place, but it was always such. Did your parents know a lot of homeless people or fruit-pickers? I wouldn't think so.
I don't even know what it means to "force a false dichotomy". Obviously nobody, least of all me, believes that all homeless people are millionaires or baseball players. The point is, most homeless people, in general, have family, relatives who are "normal" people, who may have any sort of profession or economic class.
In an Internet world, you can find friends who are a perfect fit, so you might never need to find others.
I was visiting my grandparents a couple weeks ago and they were baffled at how young people never know their neighbours. And it is true. I know the one neighbour that has lived to the right of my parents house. Nowhere else that I have lived have I even known the names of the people across the hall.
I tend to just have 6 friends at any given time who consume 3 hours a day in total. There isn’t room for more people without sacrificing other conversations. And yes, most are software engineers/otherwise in tech.
My brother-in-law is a plumber. Guess what? All of his buddies are in the trades. My mom was a school teacher. Guess what? All her friends were school teachers. When I was a software developer, I ran in circles with a lot of other tech people. Now that I'm in real estate, we hang out with a lot of other real estate agents (especially given that my partner was formerly in real estate and all her closest friends were in the business too).
Point being - for a good many people, given well-documented challenges of making adult friends, our work / industry creates a natural social circle.
Our best friends from outside those work circles came from when she ran an AirBnB back in the day and met people from all over the world.
Half of my friends are landscapers. Why? Hobbies and volunteer work.
A friend of mine was best friends with someone she sold a piece of crafting equipment to. Showed up and didn't leave for four hours.
If all you do is eat, sleep, and drink software, then you aren't going to know anybody outside of software. It's one of the things we mean when we say that doing software as a profession and your main hobby can be harmful.
Doing other things doesn't mean you never work on software outside of work. It means you do it when you have other things sorted out.
>I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries. Preferably a more elegant sport that doesn’t require a bunch of awkward equipment. Maybe Ultimate or rock climbing– Wait, crap.
hit the gym and do some weight-lifting, solve two problems at once. Also just go out and hit the bars. (okay maybe not the greatest advice right now). Unlike the author my parents were solidly working class so I always was very aware of straddling two very different social circles, between academia and tech work and the people I grew up with. There's no reason to live in either bubble really and in a big city it's not that hard to have a healthy social circle, just requires leaving your comfort zone.
As someone who has this problem to a lesser extent than the author, the question is how to have that healthy social circle.
I’ve never met anyone at a gym or bar before. Other than hitting on girls at bars, I’ve never seen anyone else in my social circle meet anybody else at any gyms or bars. I’ve certainly never seen anyone approach me at a gym or a bar. Has your experience been much different?
I don’t mind leaving my comfort zone, but to do what, exactly?
Me neither, gym seems an especially weird place to meet people. Aren't most people at gyms just trying to get their workout in and get out? I can't imagine trying to strike up conversation at the gym. Feel like it would be like trying to start a conversation on public transport. Another big no no.
> Aren't most people at gyms just trying to get their workout in and get out?
This is what I always thought too, but I've been told there is a very sizeable amount of people who actually go there to hook up. Still not a "make friends" situation though.
I think you are better off with a more technical sport if you want to make friends. One where a significant part of it involves learning a technique rather than repetition.
For example it could be martial arts, where getting to know your opponent is really important, and it can turn into friendship once the fight is over. Or maybe climbing, where there are many occasions to talk with others, maybe discussing your technique while you are resting between climbs. And of course, team sports.
Ive met people at bars, but it was because that bar had weekly techno shows and you would see the same people over and over again. Sometimes I would go up to them and say hey whats your name or they would do the same. Its best when other people from each friend group starts introducing each other and a natural group starts to form, you all become interested in getting to know people within the circle.
Im at the point where, if someone happens to be in the same location at the same time as me, thats enough of an excuse to reach out to know them. If we share the same space each week, I should definitely reach out.
I am 145 lbs, live in San Francisco, I used to be a programmer (basically retired now). I met the mother of my son while bouldering at Mission Cliffs. She has nothing to do with the tech sector. Bouldering requires just a pair of shoes.
The author of this post is just a whiner. It's never been easier to meet people outside of your bubble than now.
My solution was to find an international/group home. Your roommates friends become your friends and suddenly you are in a diverse group.
Over the last year I stayed with 9 people in 1 house. 2 school teachers, 1 in CSR, 1 lecturer, 1 grad student, 3 in tech (and only 1 in big-tech: Me) and 1 in pharmacy.
To-be-fair, I was in Boston . But, my peers ended up in far more homogeneous peer groups when they just stayed with people they knew or other 1/2 random strangers.
Pick-up sports or Adult-sports-leagues have worked well for this purpose too. I play(ed) soccer, but Basketball or the like would also work.
Lastly, just date someone not-in-tech. Dating apps are great for this. If it turns into a relationship, your partner will make sure their friends become your friends. It is a story as old as time. Although dating-outside-tech can be tricky for some. Not every group is as open to brutally honest and logic-1st/ empathy-2nd style of communication in tech.
Try volunteering. I had this exact conversation yesterday on a firetruck on the way back from a hazard reduction burn, that one of the things we all valued most about our volunteering experience was that we were exposed to people we wouldn't normally hang out with in our professional or social circles.
That said, on this particular truck three people out of the crew of four were programmers. We thankfully pulled up the conversation about the merits of Jupyter Notebooks for BI tooling before the fourth crew member, who is studying forensics, got so bored her eyes rolled right out of her head.
Clearly not considered: new acquaintances may be filtering out the author. I was in SF less than a week and found locals were friendlier if they didn't know I worked in tech, doubly so with the Bay area natives.
If you don't want to be pigeon-holed as the stereotypical Tech worker ('the ones ruining SF'), then show you have other interests and qualities. Author has done a fine job of defining the edges of that particular mould. The fix is the same as the other comments - break the mould, get outside the comfort zone.
Hacker News (or indeed anywhere online) is probably not going to be the space to resolve this issue! Those who weren't at the dinner party are not here to provide insight!
> "Obviously not football, since I’m barely 150 pounds and don’t like traumatic brain injuries."
That's exactly something a programmer (or an academic) would say. I box and I hear the same words from my coworkers.
If you stopped treating your brain as the most important fucking organ in your body (not that it isn't), you might open yourself up to hobbies that emphasize other aspects of your person. You would probably meet new kinds of people in those activities.
The football comment struck me as wildly out of touch. In my entire life I’ve never heard of any organized adult football- its obviously way too dangerous and inconvenient to be anything but a pro or school sport.
I've got a double-digit number of friends who play Australian rules football, and elsewhere in the country a lot of 20-somethings play rugby, both sports with a reasonably high risk of head injury, not to mention broken bones and torn ligaments. It's not obvious to me that gridiron is so much worse as to be unplayable.
Amusingly enough, there's a USAFL team in San Francisco, although it's almost certainly full of programmers.
Rugby is also dangerous but I think it is still better than football, at least from the little rugby I’ve seen the tackles and collisions aren’t nearly as high impact (whether because or no helmets or the rules of the game I’m not sure). Also the equipment is basically a striped shirt and cleats.
Do a combat sport. I've been doing various combat sports for 20 years now and I hardly ever run into people in tech. Plus, it's incredibly fun, useful (self-defense) and interesting; there is a lot of strategy and creativity involved.
Jiu Jitsu is super popular most everywhere now, but Judo is really fun too, as well as wrestling. Striking sports are great as well, but you can't really go live in practice in a striking sport. You can spar in striking at 50% a few times a week (and that's pushing it), but you can roll at 100% in Jiu Jitsu up to every day. I always found the latter much more fun.
I get round this by doing amateur theatre. Most of my friends are from theatre and they're a varied bunch. Doctors, Teachers, Vets and Lawyers are the most common professions but also lots of random jobs such as train Conductor, HR manager, entrepreneur, music instructor, charity worker and marketing execs.
There are a few techies but it's rare, and those that are tend more towards management type roles that IC engineers.
Unfortunately theatre is likely the last industry that'll recover from covid but once it does I thoroughly recommend it.
I have childhood friends whose personal life was literally changed (for the better) by theatre. For some of them, their "real job" is now basically a side activity to their theatre stuff. But it takes a certain type of personality, I think. Actors can be super-annoying to me.
That pretty much describes me to a t. Discovering theatre was the best thing that ever happened to me and I absolutely work so I can go do theatre in my spare time. I aim to FIRE so I can go to drama school for fun.
Well, it sounds like the author is 1) single and 2) above 30.
That's going to screen most "families" out of your social circle and that's a LOT of people. Most folks (tech and non-tech) start getting pressured to have families by the age of 30.
However, the whole premise of the article is that only being surrounded by techies is bad. Why?
Would he feel the same if he was only surrounded by musicians?
I found that doing activities not related to nerd culture really helps you connect with non-programmers. Dancing, sports, volunteering (aside from Code for America, which is great, but filled with programmers) all help.
Also, regularly socializing with non-programmers seems to be a check against some of the anti-social habits we're all prone to pick up
There is a definitive social glue that will introduce yourself to lots of people with a wide spectrum of different interests and is a crazy, always smiling, thing called dog
Dogs are NOT for everybody. Having a dog is a 10-15 years commitment and shouldn't be done by impulse, specially if you work from home. Could bark at 4AM, the owner will need to remove a lot of s*t and wake up early each day of the weeks, (Sundays also) and definitely can damage seriously your capability to focus in remote working from home.
But nothing prevents you to volunteer to walk a pooch or just borrow one once a month from a friend or grandma to go out and take a walk. A friendly middle sized dog will love to tell everybody how awesome is their father. Is the second best visiting card that a human can show after babies (Money would be the third).
It might be that I live on the other side of the world to the author but this hasn't really been a problem for me. I've been a developer for 10 years or so and find that in Brazilian jiu jitsu there's a pretty even split between university/not-university educated people resulting in a social circle that is pretty diverse, at least from a formal education point of view. In my case the city is somewhat expensive to live in so most of the people that can afford hobbies in this area will earn a similar income and have similar schedules. The article also felt like there was a weird bit of class focus and as other commenters have said the author needs to expand their thoughts on what sports are available and the lives other "non-tech" people live.
It's odd because I have never really felt this living outside of sf. my personal circles include lots of other professionals like doctors, lawyers, consultants, accountants, (non software) engineers, etc. Don't these people exist in San Francisco too?
I'm also a programmer, but I have quite a few friends who are very different from me in a lot of ways. For instance, my main hobby brings me into contact with a lot of people who are 20+ years older than me.
I did not engineer this, nor do I have any particular interest in knowing a bunch of older, white men. It just happened that way, because my hobby is popular with this particular demographic. If the author is bothered by their lack of non-programmer friends, surely the easiest way to correct that would be to find a hobby that attracts a different sort of folk. That might not be a viable solution right now due to COVID restrictions, but we're not going to all be stuck in our homes forever.
No, nobody else moved to the same city I moved to, so even if I kept up with classmates remotely, it wouldn’t be the same as in-person interactions.
And also no, I never really interact professionally with any of those other roles at my company. And even if I did, they’re still working inside the tech industry, so that’s not really breaking out of the bubble all that much. Plus, I don’t hang out with most people I work with anyways, nor do they hang out with each other.
I’m guessing your experience been quite different?
I was at my engineering college reunion around the time this piece was written. It was shocking the number of people that had pivoted from chemistry, physics, biology, or engineering into "software engineering", including people who hold PhDs in non-CS fields. It does feel like the programming profession has been sucking up talent left and right.
I live in a non-coastal tech center and have the opposite problem- I love my friends, but almost none of my social circle programs for a living. It would be nice to be able to talk tech more outside of dedicated meetups or hackathons.
I played adult baseball for a few years. Incredibly enjoyable and kept me grounded with a bunch of people from all walks of life. We had a doctor, a programmer (me), an assistant prof, a plumber, a couple of carpenters, an auto body tech, a DJ, a security guard, and a couple guys who filtered in and out where I didn’t know their jobs. It wasn’t gender balanced at all, of course.
Adult softball gives a slightly less diverse in some ways but adds gender diversity. Neither is particularly dangerous among sports. (I’d put them as less risk than hockey or soccer and way less than football.)
Interesting read. Honestly I never took stock of my "social network occupational diversity" but after reading this I feel lucky. Almost no one in my circle of friends shares the same industry, let alone job title. It has a wide range of age groups -1 decade / + 2 decades which may explain it. I'm rural so age isn't very homogenized and any local bars or clubs have a wide spread. We don't talk much about work... I'm now wondering if this is because our professions don't overlap.
It’s because the author isn’t an independent, rational thinker and still hasn’t realized that.
You aren’t a slave to your current social setting. For instance, sports. There are far more than football and ultimate. Kind of irrational to stop at 2?
That was partly the point he was making. When selecting a sport, he immediately gravitated to sports that are popular with tech people (i.e. ultimate, rock-climbing).
No. I know the poster’s point. It’s argued badly. The poster is trying to argue that tech is a monoculture using their perspective as a lens. The author instead looks like a sheep and doesn’t notice all the other tech that are not like them.
“The author doesn’t realize that football... is dangerous.” You really missed his meaning when he said “I don’t like traumatic brain injuries.” What he meant was that he had no interest in playing football because it’s dangerous.
Contact football even if restricted to people 150lb and below is STILL dangerous. It’s not the weight disparity which is partly how I read that. It’s that the force that even 120lb people generate is enough to cause concussions amongst people the same weight.
After college a bunch of lightweight kids from high school would get together and play football. Two straight meetings ending in concussions ended that. We were virtually all less than 150lb.
The 150lb thing was pretty clearly because he thought his weight would be a disadvantage. Like saying he wouldn't play basketball because he was 5'4" and had a bad knee, the weight and the danger weren't related to each other, they were different factors in the final decision not to play.
If that is the case, that just shows that the author is on very tall stack of misconceptions. No one plays full contact football recreationally. It’s completely too dangerous. People mostly play flag football. Also most sports have leagues grouped by size or ability. The author dismissed the sport out of hand with wrong information.
Adults usually don't strap on gear and tackle each other at your local park. When I played, we most ran routes, which is passing plays, if we weren't playing a pick up game. When I read this part of OP, I guessed he or she didn't do too much research on recreational sports.
It's possible to be independent and rational and still come to the same conclusion.
Have I had a need to choose a sport without keeping that diversity question in mind, I'll probably have ended up with ultimate anyway. Cheap, safe, fun, team spirit - it checks all the boxes for a pragmatic mind
I regularly go to the climbing gym. I couldn't help noticing that there are so many programmers in the climbing gym. People talk about programming related topic all the time.
I also went to a dancing school for a year, but I hardly saw any programmer there.
I also like snowboarding but it's hard to interact with people around you so I don't know.
Outside of sports, I like board games and there are more programmers than average.
Maybe don't rule sports out entirely. I accidentally joined a hockey team full of lawyers in Oakland. I guess similar people tend to clump even outside of the tech bubble; it's easiest to recruit people in your network. They would get their summer interns to fill in if we were short players.
I also know several teachers who rock climb though of course there are plenty of techies too.
If you have to whip up R to confirm your social immaturity, what hope is there to break out of the shell and experience life's diversity? But you can be glad for the friends you have anyways.
Join a church (or synagogue or mosque). Secularism has a societal cost, one of which is the loss of community institutions like churches, where you have a wide variety of people, from different classes, mixing in a common space.
Knowing Ben, following this advice would probably lead him to join a Quaker meeting house in his area. While that would probably lead to some interesting discussions about Agile[1][2], I think it would have the same problem.
Your suggestion to join a church doesn't really make sense unless you're proselytizing. If they don't believe in any religions, then they wouldn't join a church no matter how good the social benefits might be. If they do believe in some religion, they have probably already joined a church.
> I don’t know of any atheists in my church, or any atheist friends that go to church
Maybe they don't tell you. For instance, my grandmother didn't believe in god but was culturally attached to the catholic church and traditions. It's quite common (at least in western Europe where I live)
Yes, I agree that church is an excellent group of friends.
Also putting the teaching into practice, by feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, welcoming strangers into your home (CouchSurfing/BeWelcome).
I analysed my Facebook Likes, and drew some symbols of the things I enjoy. Some of them have plenty of geeks (hardware, software, education, games), others do not (travel/environment, NGOs, music concerts, church). There are common-interest groups beyond sports.
It's a good advice, but non-believers would have a hard time joining a church. As an atheist European living in NYC, I attended a couple of religious meetings (I was dragged there by a friend and thought it would be interesting).
It was interesting indeed. I can definitely see the value of these meetings. I got to meet new people from different fields and areas, but I couldn't just pretend I shared their religious values.
or play co-ed sports, and you can meet from recent immigrants to trust fund babies and everything in between.... and from all kinds of profession (at least in NYC).
A good team will organize the ocasional drinking/get together, parties, etc...
you don't have to go to church to meet different set of folks
It's not at all guaranteed that joining a religious community will diversify your social circle. It may very well have the opposite effect depending on the particular community you join.
>” In fact, just the fact that I’m interested in doing sports for leisure is associated with class, since it’s not something that would be so easy for, say, manual laborers or shift workers.”
I think the bias here is the opposite: the author is politically biased to believe this “classism struggle” somehow doesn’t enable manual
Labors to play sports?
I think the author should visit the developing world more frequently to realize how common futbol is here, for example.
I’ve been invited to pickup futbol (soccer) games in Mexico and Panama. From what I can tell, it’s a sport played around the world, including in the poorest parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
This is all too frequent—- a politically biased author is unable to face their own biases and instead attempts to enforce them?
Yes, there are socioeconomic differences between world regions. But that doesn’t preclude people from enjoying sports.
Not everything is a consequence of neomarxist political thought. Perhaps explore the world, before making biased presuppositions, author.
> I think the bias here is the opposite: the author is politically biased to believe this “classism struggle” somehow doesn’t enable manual Labors to play sports?
It's funny coz statistically speaking these "manual laborers" are likely to kick the author's ass in whatever sport he wants to do for leisure.
The tech community does everything in its power to set up echo chambers and marginalize outside views as much as possible, then somebody wonders why everybody in their in-group is all the same as them... It’s not terribly shocking.
Perhaps the tech community is simply better at it than everybody else. But I find that hard to believe. The monoculture in the tech community is blindingly obvious to anybody who cares to notice it. It’s especially true in the Bay Area, but not much different elsewhere. Personally I’d suggest that intolerance is the most important ingredient in establishing a robust monoculture, of which Silicon Valley certainly isn’t lacking.
- join the YMCA or other community gym:
It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diverse city. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently in Michigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t. Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.
https://www.outsideonline.com/2403867/ymca-local-gyms-good-w...
- spend more time in civic spaces like libraries and public parks. Or just being outside in public with an open mind.
- speaking of civic involvement, active participation in your local government will for sure broaden your social circles.
- religious organizations -- at least, good ones -- are cross-sectional in this way too. Quoting MLK Jr, "... any [church] that violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold thing, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity."
- community work, like habitat for humanity or the like, will put you in a new sphere of folks too.