Social signaling is an important part of career and personal life. It also happens on a subconscious level–the type of thing that you have to automate because it would require too much attention to actively think through in every interaction.
Since it is almost an automatic reaction for us, correct social signaling is very hard to learn and almost impossible to teach. You can only pick it up from experience with cultural norms. But the cultural norms that transmit signaling behavior have serious lag time. Reality changes, but the norms of social signaling continue to stay the same for longer.
Those people that fully embody the old norms view people abandoning those norms as dumb, lacking in social intelligence, or in common sense, or just degenerate in some other way. They don’t have the ability to distinguish between dysfunction from the old world or positive adaptation to the new world because they can’t perceive the new world. To them the old norms aren’t adaptations to a specific time, they are rules of good behavior.
The new world may actively reject the old norms, but more often they simply and subconsciously don’t learn them because they don’t encounter the costs of not knowing them.
When you find yourself saying over and over again that people don’t have common sense anymore, it is a signal that you need to do some deeper observation of the world that you live in. It is likely not that more and more people don’t have common sense, but that they simply don’t need or value the outcomes of social signals that were valuable to you at the same point in your life.
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