Middle-aged man trading cards go viral in rural Japan town

Knowledge changes. I don't think wisdom necessarily changes. Maybe this is a philosophical discussion, but I think that is once of the key differences of knowledge and wisdom. However, I do think it is false that people necessarily accumulate wisdom with age. I know wise and unwise people of all ages, including people who think they're wise only because they're old.

when I look at voting patterns in particular, I find myself pessimistic that the elderly are wiser than average

Don't stop there, look at the US elected representatives! Washington is, from a lot of angles, a gerontocracy, and I don't think anyone would consider it "wise". The world has passed a lot of these folks by and even aside from that, their stubbornness to not step aside has in cases meant that they predictably die in office, so their seats go unfilled for a while, leaving people unrepresented...

I disagree on the advantages of wisdom as these days I’m thinking the opposite:

1) Lack of wisdom leads to reinvention of the wheel. How many programming languages are there only now doing things the same way as 30 years ago? What is novel versus an unnecessary re-invention?

I started studying Tcl code from back in the late ‘90’s and honestly was surprised. Hell, many people don’t even know what macports is even though homebrew isn’t much but an attempt to reinvent macports with a “cool” spin.

2) Societal language and general problem solving skills are deteriorating. Language, and mathematics evolve ever so slowly, and yet emphasis on their importance is reduced in favor of the whims of technological advancement.

I would rather hire someone with the slow-developing, traditional skills, than the new-age fads.

In addition, with the advances in AI the only people worth hiring will be the ones with traditional education—and the wise, classically trained among our elders will be evermore important.

Isn’t it weird how “old people” are so much like other people? The insecurities, hopes and so on? It’s like stereotypes just don’t work or something.

I think this is true from a pure knowledge perspective but definitely not from a wisdom perspective.

Old people have -through their experience- gained a tacit wisdom that can be very helpful when considering life choices.

Old people are also just a lot more numerous, relative to young people, than in previous eras of history.

Every time I scroll through r/wallstreetbets or r/cryptocurrency I realize that I understand something about risk and patience that many young people do not. I am not disrespecting individual investors and I don't hate btc (tbh I don't invest in it either).

It's obvious that a lot of people feel like they have to find a way to get rich in the next three years or they will be poor forever. I am sure my generation was often the same. But people who have been through good times and bad times understand risk and patience.

people today cannot imagine what it would have been like to have each generation do, experience and believe exactly the same thing. for thousands of years. even just a few hundred years ago, new ideas were basically a waste of time because everything had already been tried. history would swallow you up.

I find many “elders” I know think climate change is a hoax, solar power is dumb , transsexuals are evil, immigration is silly etc, basically they hold extreme views and it effects my ability to trust their word or opinion.

I’m not sure if technology is to blame, I think social media is probably part of their corruption, Fox News too, but yeah, the lack of interest in their opinions is mostly self inflicted and I feel they choose to believe in nonsense because it’s fun to hate things.

What technology has done is give me access to lots of knowledge and wisdom and now I don’t have to put up with all the cruft to get what I need.

Some elders in my life are more balanced and I enjoy seeking their opinion and wisdom and leaning on their experience for all sorts of things.

One exception for me is that in Japan, even opinions are considered to be potentially offensive so elderly people are careful with their words. I’ve very really interacted with an older Japanese person who just spits rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Japanese even are careful to make a statement like “this is the best chocolate I’ve tasted”, It’s much more common to say “I think this is wonderful”.

Japan always does the hard thing. If someone misbehaves and two people are close by you can be sure that they loudly will talk with each other about how the person misbehaves (they are not afraid). The prisons are very strict, with beatings if you don’t follow authority. The police acts swiftly and have small offices everywhere . Green tea and healthy food makes people be able to control their mood (hard to not stuff your face).

The rules are very open and clear. The deincentives for misconduct are strong.

The newspapers focus are different. More fun or actionable news.

People just think they are built different, that is not the case. They just succeed with many small things that makes a greater whole. But people just dismiss it as a culture thing, which is reductive.

You can teach them whatever you want, but the model of the world you give them is also what they will pass on to their kids.

"Family is a burden, and screw old people" doesn't seem that conducive to a good society.

> Should they feel any obligation to help my siblings once the time comes?

Absolutely not, but hopefully your siblings will have been positive enough presences in your children's lives that they will want to of their own accord.

>kids see adults not knowing things about the world that they already do

In the age where anyone can find anything online, experience is more valuable than it ever was. Technology won't replace that.

Thats surprising, I thought moving was less common than now. In either case, is it possible that the single households is the other factor, people choosing more instead of interacting with whoever is around?

All you know about an old person is they’ve lived - and survived - longer than someone who is not so old.

That can have a lot of different meanings.

So do you respect 12-year-olds as much as you respect 25-year-olds? Do you respect the opinions on work and adult responsibilities of a 23-year-old as much as those of a 35-year-old? Do you trust the professional judgment of a junior engineer as much as that of a senior engineer?

Older people, in general, know more and have better judgment than younger people.

How interesting, can you share some pros and cons from the one month experience? Was it always the same person?

Baby Billy’s Bright Beginnings

Well said. If I signed up for this and I knew it was AI calls, I would likely not pick up. But if I knew it was a person calling me, there's a much stronger emotional incentive to pick up and talk to them.

Check out their robots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_robotics

Female companion robot as early as 2005.

Japan has an exception to copyright law allowing for analysis, which has been (ab)used to train AIs to generate Studio Ghibli style content.

> I feel this is one of those times we would learn Germans have a dead on word like they often do.

Yeah but it would be 72 characters long, being composed out of 6 different words difficult on their own (I know German a bit, and some words I have to read in my head loudly to see where they break into subparts)

This is incredible! Thanks for posting.

Westerners in Japan has been a thing for decades:

> Anyone who has seen Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation must wonder for at least a second if there is truth in Bill Murray’s character of a famous American actor in Japan to film a commercial. Well, there definitely is. Huge American and European stars have been hawking products in Japanese commercials for decades.

* https://www.cinemablend.com/movies/western-entertainers-who-...

* https://www.goretro.com/2015/08/sake-to-me-western-celebs-in...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_in_Japan_(phrase)

She was referencing the ones done by her father: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/akira-kurosawa-francis-ford-cop...

> Was this tradition referenced or inspired by []

referenced. Here's a couple suntory commercials dating much older:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyN-aHtAVzs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goUBezKpNmU

oh noooo

> As an American I will say that prepared food served from a vending machine is going to be associated with low quality and possible poor hygiene.

The grandparent post is talking about canned food/drink that's heated in the machine. Vending machines with freshish prepared food do exist, but they're kinda pointless given the existence of...

> I'd equate it with food from a gas station store or roach coach (mobile canteen)- food prepared with little care or quality, destined to be sold for as little as possible while still being profitable

Convenience store food in Japan is fantastic: food from 7/11, Lawson, Family Mart, etc. is probably unironically better than the median restaurant in the U.S.

The foods sold in vending machines make sense though - everyone's already used to instant or canned soup, so throwing it into a vending machine and warming it up makes sense. You're not getting fine dining from the vending machines, you're just getting a quick and tasty snack (although there is also a culture of niche vending machines with serious meals that require cooking at home, which is another story). Just swap out the corn potage with something Americans would already be familiar with, like Campbell's chicken noodle soup in a single-portion can with a twist cap instead of needing a can opener, and it could work.

I think some Americans might object more to the idea of microplastics leaching into your food, or high amounts of preservatives, though. And the ubiquity of vending machines in Japan makes it possible to build a habit around vending machine food, whereas in the US they're fewer and far between, so you couldn't really depend on them.

Yeah, I lived in Europe in 1999 and 2000 and then moved to the US. In the EU you could text people from different countries and it would often work.

Then I moved to the US and the shock of not being able to text between networks was really something. That and writing cheques. I'd never written a cheque in Australia or Europe but you sort of had to in the US while electronic payments between banks were sorted in Australia in the 1990s.

These days it seems when a technology appears it generally spreads more quickly.

Texting in network was a fixed rate per text (later unlimited) and then texting out of network was crazy like 10 cents a message.

You thought blue bubble was bad, it literally cost you money to talk to people who chose another carrier.

The texting culture had funny side effects then because of it. You would get roasted for multiple messages when one would suffice. :)

Facebook was big partly early on at places like CMU because unis were early adopters of ubiquitous wifi -- so FB messenger served as a free texting tool back when you'd have people tell you to put their last name as NOTEXT.

Interesting I thought the main reason whatsapp took off outside the US was the texting costs.

Well, it's called "Emoji" (絵文字, literally "picture character/letter") for a reason ;) Weird how it's often misunderstood as being derived from "emotion" in western media.

There's also the Moyai statue in Shibuya that gave us an emoji: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyai_statue#Shibuya_Station_m...

We had hot chicken soup from a dispenser at school (~2000) too, but it was gash made from powder.

was it just broth? the vending machine at my college, had that where it'd have coffee, cocoa, or chicken broth.

The $1 coffee from 7-11 was my go-to drink in Australia. Came with the added bonus of annoying the hipster coffee snobs in melbourne when I was walking down the street holding a 7-11 cup. Damn fine coffee.

I agree completely, most iced coffee here from supermarkets is hyper sweetened rubbish that barely tastes like coffee at all. You have to go for “double” or “triple” espresso options to get a proper taste of coffee, otherwise you’re just drinking sweet milk (and not even in the guilty pleasure Vietnamese iced coffee way)

As previously mentioned Boss does do a decent black iced coffee though, and there are a few niche brands around putting out less sweet varieties

> This is very jarring when you expect the default “iced coffee” to be black coffee over ice.

Same reaction I had the first time I ordered a cappuccino there. I learned to order Flat Whites cause I kept forgetting to tell them to not put chocolate powder on top...why anyone thought that would be a great idea is beyond my comprehension. The Flat White on the hand easily makes up for their cappuccino faux pas

_Most_ of the coffee sold in cans in Japan is also sweetened. Not all, you can usually find a can or two that are just black and unsweetened, but a majority of the cans will be sweet to some degree.

Profound metaphor for the "uplink" to civilization which we all ultimately depend on.

Pocari Sweat is great. I live in Osaka now and it's hard to resist constantly drinking the stuff. Aquarius also.

The bins near vending machines are almost always _only_ for cans/plastic bottles.

That accounts for ~80% of the garbage you'll produce, but sometimes you'll have a onigiri wrapper, or a dirty tissue that'd be nice to get rid of, and finding a place to do that can be more difficult (ironically, especially so in heavily touristy areas).

[flagged]

There's quite a few assumptions in your comment; one, that men have higher grades of neurodivergece than women (whereas it can also be underdiagnosis or masking through higher societal expectations on women). Women are eccentric too.

That isn't even only Japan. On a global scale men are 1.7 times more likely, in the US 3.6 times, Europe 4.0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicid...

There are so few resources about the topic for men compared to women that comlaining about it is just sad.

Suicide among men is ~4x higher in Canada and the USA in some demographics, too. In some cases, such as men 80+, the rate is 6.5x higher in Canada. This is crazy sad. It doesn't mean other things affecting women aren't sad. It just means this is sad.

Except that’s not in any way their motivation, so this is a completely unrelated comment.

[flagged]

And Japanese people are well aware of this, there is definitely a common youth cultural appreciation of goofy middle-aged men here beyond what I was used to growing up in the USA.

[flagged]

I don't have hard data but from my personal anecdote, I would say yes.

It's true for any intelligent species with sexual dimorphism.

However I agree; it's great that the initiative was started for those men, but they could totally hit up the older women in the area as well for an additional set.

I suspect it's worse in Japan.

If one house is on fire and you spray water on it to put out the fire, do you feel obligated to spray water on every other house too so that the other houses don't feel discriminated against?

You could apply the same logic to "Women in X" groups. It's not discrimination as much as it is support.

I'd say the core reason is more that the person who started it was very much likely to be male and had a few existing connections to the group of men featured on the cards.

We should strive for equality where possible but to hold individuals account to it is tougher; we should enforce in our interactions/beliefs, that's personal responsibility.

But in play or for hobbies it's harder - the group of friends I play games with is all male for example (all gay, actually). But does that mean that I need to "diversity hire" a woman for the group? We'd have no problem with that at all, if a female friend asked to join when hearing about it we'd be all for it. But it's not like we're going to go out of our way to ensure that we have at least 1 woman in our play group. If that makes sense.

Japanese culture has quite a lot of sexism but so do many "western" countries some are better in some ways some are worse in some ways. And divide between "the West" and Japan isn't so huge Japan is fairly westernized in many ways. It's a rich liberal democracy with a lot of similarities to other rich liberal democracies we may label western.

> A lot of visible local businesses in rural Japan tend to be run by men

And you don't think that has anything to do with sexism in society?

Furthermore, the commentor is implying its sexist which totally seems unfair.

As they should?