It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too.

I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped.

Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awareness of these things, multi-hour classes with other artists where all we'd do would be to analyze these types of things.

And after a long period of great frustration, all of a sudden, it's like the world went from black and white into color. There was emotional resonance everywhere where I hadn't seen it before. It was like I was finally speaking a language a lot of other people seemed to just be born with. And social interactions got a lot... easier.

I also realized that my emotional surroundings had always affected my mood etc., I just had never been able to pay attention to how. So while I was consciously blind to it, I was still subconsciously 100% affected.

So there's absolutely nothing "wrong" with the author's psyche... but nothing's "wrong" with yours either, you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things. You're not dissociating from reality... but at the same time there absolutely is a reality that you haven't developed skills to see. And it absolutely has nothing to do with age or country.

If it's a skill you want to develop, there's no single answer. The general idea of "emotional intelligence education" is one approach, fields like art history, film criticism, literature and poetry are others. Even activities like yoga and meditation can help since emotional awareness is both mental and bodily. Ultimately the more you expose yourself to things combined with seeing how other people respond to the same things and finding little pieces in common with them, it'll eventually start to "click".

I am going through this process at the moment… at 30. It started when I was younger with art film*, but was stinted for years by a bad relationship. The process started again with an amazing relationship (aren’t wives wonderful?).

I still slip into viewing the world in “comfortable” black and white logic with clear cause and effect when stressed, often without realising. I lose my humanity and enjoyment of life in the process.

I absolutely agree with being consciously blind, but subconsciously 100% unaffected by our surroundings. It felt (and often feels) like everyone is experiencing the world so very differently and yet they’re so often happier! The people I thought had no clue about how the world works… it turns out that often these people understood so much more than I at the time.

We seem so poor at teaching children how to live, how to manage emotions, and ultimately what it is to be human - in the west at least. Too busy spinning the daily hamster wheel to show our children what exists outside of it. Perhaps this is just my experience though.

Thank you for putting this into words so succinctly. It helps.

* I agree with Kermode’s view of film being an “empathy machine”, as he calls it. Spending an hour and a half of your time viewing the world through someone else’s eyes really can change a person and enhance one’s empathy for our fellow humans. Ultimately, as you say, the world takes on colours that you never imagined could even exist. For me, at least.

Just because mixedCase does not find captcha pictures to be depressing does not necessarily mean that mixedCase has problems with emotional intelligence. I have no major issues with emotional intelligence as far as I can tell and I also do not find captcha pictures to be depressing. Maybe I would if I looked at them for hours for some reason, but I do not, and certainly the idea of them being "unbearably" depressing strikes me as quite extreme. I understand the author's points about the lack of people, the strange angles and so on and I am sure that if for some reason I had to live in a strangely-angled reality full of roads and gray buildings and devoid of people, that I would find it unpleasant. But I do not have to live in such a reality - I barely even glance at any given captcha, then I click some parts of it and move on.

The way that the author describes the captcha images reminds me of the idea of "liminal space" - a concept that relates to a certain kind of eerie sensation but is perhaps most familiar to people in the form of art that seeks to evoke this sensation and makes normally familiar things like shopping malls and schools instead look eerie. Often simply photographing such places without any people in the pictures does the trick. I do see the eerieness in the captcha pictures but again, for it to really affect me I would have to focus on them for much longer than I actually do. The author, for whatever reason, has become particularly interested in captcha images, but until I read this article at least, I was not.

> you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things

That is one way of saying that he simply has not allowed trivial concepts like a bunch of boring pictures to affect his mood. Another way of saying this would be "that sounds good, I wish I were not so affected by these things but alas, I am" or "lucky you, maybe I can find a way to avoid these mind traps".

There is no strength in weakness or defeat, there is no virtue in negativity or pessimism nor is the world a better place for people being triggered by a bunch of boring pictures. Just don't look at the damn things if they bore you, I never do - I just click the link for the audio version.

> there is no virtue in negativity or pessimism

if we're oblivous to even the smallest things (boring pictures) that negatively impact us, we hinder ourselves to making the world better. And that's not something we want, everything is shit already.

Oh and this whole "Just don't" dissmissal... Check your privilege, man, and develop some damn empathy.

Privilege is having exposure to so few and so mild negative experiences that the way a CAPTCHA makes you feel seems important.

edit: nevermind

> Oh and this whole "Just don't" dissmissal... Check your privilege, man, and develop some damn empathy.

Soft healers make smelly wounds [1]:

British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, v47 n2 p200-209 2019

Genuine happiness is impossible without authentic concern for and corresponding behaviour towards the well-being of others. Such an incorporation of others into the self refers to a "democratic self" and the related regard for the common good. The author argues that the honesty of professionals who work in or for an educational or vocational setting is vital for the good of the individual and the common good. By introducing "democratic selves", recent advancements in Dialogical Self Theory (DST) point to an inclusion of the common good. However, given the importance of virtues for one's own and the common good, the theory and its applications are in need of integrating virtues *and in particular honesty.*

Also, drop the "privilege" stuff, this is not twitter.

[1] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1216616

If you can "JUST don't" (a privilege), it doesn't mean someone else can "JUST don't". You're being an asshole, not "honest".

also you probably meant tumblr, not twitter.

Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things, your approach is to pat the person on the head. You can try to spin it into a long meandering rant about the vicariousness of life and the eternity of suffering which makes it all so much richer but when all that seems to do is cause depression it is clearly not the right path unless you consider depression to be virtuous.

Also, twitter, not tumblr. I've never been to tumblr and I try to avoid twitter but from what I've seen of the place it is full of keyboard-side vicars full of holier-than-thou attitude which they're wont to express in 140 characters or less.

> Go back to the root cause here: boring images cause someone to become depressed. My advice is to refrain from looking at the things

We are talking about reCAPTCHA, a tool that is used to prevent botting the websites that people sometimes have no choice but to use.

That is why I suggested to use the audio version instead of the images, this is what I always do - I never look at those pictures.

edit: ok.

You missed the point of the comment. It was saying it does affect his mood, he just doesn’t have the EQ to realize it consciously. And to be honest, and someone who finally started getting in touch with his emotions by branching out my hobbies and interests… I see exactly where both comments are coming from.

Saying it doesn’t affect his mood is like a kid who claims they don’t suffer from sugar crashes, or people who claim their diet and mood are unrelated. Conscious awareness of mood is not necessary for it to affect behavior.

> It was saying it does affect his mood, he just doesn’t have the EQ to realize it consciously.

Consider the possibility that someone might indeed not get depressed from looking at a couple of street photographs for a minute. That having to fill a CAPTCHA can in itself be so annoying that the content of the images becomes irrelevant. Or that someone who (in their words) lives “in a third world country” might have bigger concerns which render banal pictures as truly innocuous in their mind.

Use your emotional awareness. Empathy is about opening yourself to the feelings and reality of another, not about extrapolating your own emotions into them.

I'm trying to understand this comment. But it seems to me it boils down to "spend time to learn how to be depressed by the world around you." That doesn't seem like a skill the average person should want or need. There is something with with society if you have to spend time of hours of practice to get "emotional intelligence" from common place items that have no inherent meaning.

I think the point is that stimuli and physical conditions still create certain emotional responses in you. You may or not be aware of these responses or contributing factors, but most everyone is effected by them. Stick someone in a dark room for weeks and they're not going to be very happy no matter how aware or unaware they are of their surroundings.

If it's a specific case of ignorance is bliss then I agree, remain ignorant. Otherwise, it's good to know things that cause problems so you can fix them.

Depression isn't the only emotion you feel when you stop being disconnected from the world. You may come out of it with a greater appreciation for nature, art, literature, etc. You may even have more pride in your work as you become capable of developing a design language and incorporating it into what you build.

As much as to hate to admit you’re right, you’re right.

I’ve become more and more disconnected from user base as time has passed. I think I’ve been stuck at around 2k total karma for years now. I know I used to have more points several years ago. Paying no mind to the points is a good idea. Might be an even better idea to mourn and grieve the HN I used to enjoy, instead of fooling around with its rancid corpse…

I was surprised with how this comment turned out. I thought for sure you were saying that emotional maturity would show you how much people project their own emotions upon any given subject of art. Much of your comment could be read on a way that conflicts with your conclusion.

I became a lot happier after I learned the cognitive skillset of not being hyper-aware of trivial problems, or finding in them some profound meaning or deep emotional resonance.

I don’t think that was emotional intelligence, I think it was bias, rumination, and catastrophizing. Also a lack of perspective. I still feel bad sometimes, but… about things which other people also recognize as serious problems. Which has been a boon for social outcomes too.

I feel like your comment was expressed in sort of a dick way, but I also think it strikes at a truth that’s so deep and needed in our society. So thanks for the comment.

Not sure what's dickish about it to be honest.

Maybe you're right. I could feel the parent comment's pain from that implication that he was underdeveloped, largely because I agree. I have also noticed in myself that I'm often not aware of my underlying emotions, but very often a victim of them. To everyone around me I seem like an unemotional male, but I think in reality I'm low in emotional expressiveness, reactivity, and neuroticism.

> but nothing's "wrong" with yours either, you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things.

Condescension, with no concrete feedback to improve.

Your last paragraph, could you expand? Seems like each time I get close to “color” I get pulled back to “black and white.” It’s clear there is an emotional intelligence not possessed, but usually only _after_ the opportunity to learn has passed.

Sorry, that's not what I meant but I can see how it could be interpreted that way. So let me rephrase.

I intended the word "underdeveloped" not as a value judgment, just a practical sense -- in the same way my own baseball skills are underdeveloped i.e. nonexistent. If you replace it with "less developed" that might be clearer. I meant it just in the context of the goal of someone trying to understand and relate to the article.

My main point being that it's not something you're born with or not, but that you can choose to develop. That the potential is there. But you're under no obligation to, it absolutely is a choice/preference.

> I intended the word "underdeveloped" not as a value judgment, just a practical sense -- in the same way my own baseball skills are underdeveloped i.e. nonexistent. If you replace it with "less developed" that might be clearer. I meant it just in the context of the goal of someone trying to understand and relate to the article.

> My main point being that it's not something you're born with or not, but that you can choose to develop. That the potential is there. But you're under no obligation to, it absolutely is a choice/preference.

Yeah sorry, no, that doesn't fly. Just because someone doesn't feel the same way you do about something does not mean they are lacking some skill or another. Your response is just more dismissive condescension. Maybe keep working on that development of yours.

Perhaps you've learned to be emotionally hypersensitive to things you sense, while the parent commenter only interprets emotions from emotional contexts, like when people or animals express emotion?

Then again, perhaps anytime two people experience a subjective matter differently, they try to grade each other's ability to experience that matter on an objective scale, with their ability to experience it set at the origin. From the parent commenter's perspective, the article and your response are both emotionally hypersensitive, and from your perspective the parent commenter is "emotionally underdeveloped".

What this all comes down to is that applying an objective scale to a subjective matter doesn't yield anything useful; it only highlights the relative differences of the participants. I've always wondered if it's human nature, or cultural imbuement, to inject competitiveness into something that cannot be competed over. It's obvious that you each see this subjective matter differently. How can either of you possibly think that your subjective viewpoint is correct, without also acknowledging that the other's viewpoint must also be correct to them?

I understood what you were saying and didn’t interpret it as condescending.

I also don't agree with the author during the first half of the article. If anything captcha photos have an overwhelmingly suburban feel, probably because (I assume) they're taken from Google's street view. The six points listed are all the same: they're photos taken from a car. While aesthetically that's dull, monochrome, and ordinary I can't call it depressing without calling every drive to the grocery store equally depressing.

I live in a walkable part of a city and to be quite honest every time I go out into suburbs it’s kind of depressing. Local architecture shaped by tradition and climate is replaced by giant samey boxes. Everyone is isolated in a car, streets are largely empty of anything at a human scale. Greyness and concrete.

This is one of the things that really surprised me when I visited North America for the first time. It's less common in the rest of the world.

> I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe?

> A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this?

> I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.

Double +1. And, thank you - you said it so much better than i ever could.

I'll second this seconding(third it?) I cannot for the life of me understand how these photos can invoke dread, perhaps something in their burgerpunk nature, but still i think the more saddening part is that people still use captchas from google!

> Is it because I live in a third world country

Until I got there I was going to suggest that it was because you were too used to the scenes depicted - I'm not sure about the author (NYT contributor suggests but I think doesn't necessitate that he's American) but I think many Europeans find the scenes depicted quite unfamiliar and not in a particularly pleasant/intriguing/exciting way. The way towns & cities (to a large extent I'd even argue it seems North America doesn't have towns in any recognisable way) are organised is just different, designed around cars and big infrastructure, car parks and 'box stores' over high streets, etc.

I might not independently go as far as (or at least not recognise it as) 'depressing', but they're certainly not particularly 'nice' or 'pleasing' images to me either.

That would be my number 7 for the list. To a Dutchman it all seems so incredibly depressing that everything depicted is built for cars. Even the residential areas seem to prioritize driving over everything else. The humans aren't just gone from the pictures, they're not even welcome without a car. For someone who is used to just getting on a bicycle and go anywhere — safely and often faster than by car! — in the city I live in, this is just so depressing.

I think it's a humor disconnect. The author is expounding on something extremely minor and mundane with a large amount of hyperbole and detail, which his readers may not have thought of with that detail before. Some people might find it funny, others will not. I fall in the former group; I enjoyed it.

I think this is a case of hyperawareness/catastrophizing - upon realizing the mindless interruption of CAPTCHAs, the authors have focused so intensely on the minor discomforts of monotonous, poorly composed, poorly shot pictures that the discomfort has grown through hyperbolic focus into a soul-destroying burden.

It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful reaction to a minor disturbance.

I think the minor disturbance is the article and the outsized reaction is calling it a “soul destroying burden”.

I’m primarily a software dev, but clients mostly value my skills in producing visually pleasing layouts and graphics. I’ve come to realise that good aesthetics are extremely valued by most. Even during the development process, nice looking layouts/design integrated early can immensely lift the team’s spirits.

I have observed though there a some people who seem to undervalue the need of aesthetics, are very quick to write it off as superficial, and may even have some very negative emotional responses to this “arty stuff”. I would chalk up much of the perceived divide between front-end and back-end developers stems from this negative emotional response.

So Unbearably Depressing / force you / hate / deeply, overwhelmingly depressing / spirits deflate

And that's just the intro.

Skip to the end: "These pictures erode the soul."

Fair enough, I didn’t really explain my point very well.

I interpreted the authors choice of words more as an emotional critique of things like composition, colors, etc.

If I saw some poorly written code, and I happened to say, “this code destroys my soul” as a figure of speech. Most people would understand that I just have an intense distaste for the code, not I am not having an existential crisis.

From an artistic sense, if I analysed a single frame from the first scene of the Shining, I might use similar language to the author, even though objectively it is just a car on a road.

I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?

This essay must be a personality test, because I read it as satire and laughed manically imagining someone so concerned with this.

> How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this?

I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if German has a word to describe this feeling?

They’re depressing to me because they are a chore - I don’t think much about them, just as I fail to see the beauty in washing up plates.

The first picture is morning or evening sun catching some brilliant autumn leaves. The second picture is some stoplights in front of a building and trees. The third has boats and blue water and a palm tree. Not exactly drab stuff.

At that point I just lost interest in trying to figure out what was even vaguely objectionable about the images. It was like someone was trying to imitate the humor of something like The Gallery of Regrettable Foods with perfectly reasonable restaurant dishes.

Some of us have very strict security settings that cause captchas to be very frequent and I believe more challenging.

I whitelist domains for cookies and I am not signed in to a Google account. These two things really can make the web a frustrating experience. I’ve lost out on campsites from US national parks because a captcha popped up when I tried to add the reservation. By the time I passed the multiple tests, all the campsites were taken.

IMHO the author is saying that these pictures represent one way that we humans have surrendered a piece of our lives to a soulless process and machine. Any human with any photography skills would take lively pictures of interesting things, but these pictures have no life and tell no story. What's mildly depressing about this is that we're missing an opportunity to connect more and see more of life.

Now, if I were to take this piece literally, I would be concerned for the author's mental well being. If I were to record everything I see all day long, nearly every picture my eyes capture would be mostly lifeless. Does that make me subconsciously depressed? Um, no. Not in the least bit. I evaluate pictures based on their purpose before I assign any aesthetic value.

Still, the author has a point: the current state of CAPTCHAs is a missed opportunity for something with more life.

Except the entire point of at least this brand of captcha is to help solve classification problems (or so I thought) and to me doing otherwise seems like a missed opportunity

I think the difference is one of expectations. I get the strong impression that the author of the article is accustomed to images "meaning" something and being presented by photographers who are trying to "say" something.

Fashionable urban types dress up to attend gallery showings at which a bored-looking hipster photographer is displaying his framed images of grainy, empty street scenes of nothing in particular taken from odd angles. Each photo of nothing is a deeply meaningful expression of nihilistic enlightenment or a tour-de-force denunciation of capitalism or materialism or whatever, and if you're sophisticated enough, you can buy one for $10,000.

Hilariously, these captcha images that are just random shots in random directions look just like deliberate dreary, sophisticated, urban expressions of nihilism. But only if you are accustomed to assuming that photos "mean" something, so a photo of nothing must be expressing something: nihilism.

But if you walked down the street and saw most of those scenes, you wouldn't think about it at all. Equivalent, meaningless scenes are around you most of the time, indoors and out. And if you don't unconsciously assume that an image is trying to say something, an image of nothing won't feel depressing at all.

> Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe?

Nope. I know what Captcha photos are.

Photos from the Google Maps car driving around.

It explains the weird... "depressing" angles and largely brutalist/barren perspectives.

They're the view of a camera on top of the car going through urban centers. Of course streets are going to look like streets and a camera above a car is going to give you weird angles as it drives around town taking pictures of the middle of the road.

Much ado about nothing if you ask me.

How many times have you gotten locked out by a captcha?

I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business.

My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.

Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do with the point of the article nor OPs comment.

Sure did. Turns out my experiences inform my emotions on the matter. Who'd have thought?