I adore you and would certainly love to live in a world where there a more people like you, nevertheless let me argue just for sake of contributing to make some things more clear (or more confusing :-]):

> And then there's spookyness, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401 Look at those replies and how partycoder got greyed out a little for having some humanity and attention span left. Maybe these people generally have rich inner lives, but that wasn't one of their rich moments.

I would say partycoder has been downvoted because people failed to recognize the value of his comment. A comment can be considered useful if it educates you, provokes further useful discussion, provokes a thought, gratifies or inspires you or is at least a bit fun. Consider a news post about somebody having raped and killed some other: a comment saying "that's so horrible, he is such a monster" could get a lot of upvotes somewhere else but not on HN because it says nothing but what is obvious to absolutely everybody and hackers usually dislike this kind of noise. The majority of people probably fail to realize both this example comment and the partycoder's comment could in fact provoke useful thought e.g. about why some people and even societies ever behave so violently (what makes them to even want to, I can't imagine myself wanting to commit violence and it's curious what's the actual underlying difference between us) and what can we do to prevent such incidents in future.

> A person who is alive, and has a rich inner life, does not look the other way in this fashion when others get murdered. They don't have picnics on mass graves.

If I happen to get murdered, I invite you to literally dance and have fun on my grave, re-watch StarWars and tell yourself: this guy was a jedi (whether or not I actually was doesn't really matter), I will be a jedi too; both judging and grief lead to the dark side. Then bulldoze my grave and build a cozy home where a family will live happily. Also go and save an actual living creature from violent death or unhappy life, gift your compassion to somebody who actually needs it, not my dead body nor the shadow of my history. If you let a death of somebody (or mere awareness of how much evil, struggle and ignorance does exist in the world) limit your capability to do anything positive (like having happy time with your family, friends, with random people or in solitude, climbing on an ancient temple for joy and inspiration or inspire others to do so, even just working productively to build a good thing and not giving a fuck) and put you in gloomy mood - that's the worst "spit on the grave" possible.

> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid...

The only thing I'm afraid of is my sacrifice is going to be a waste. Provided I knew for sure it would actually result in a persistent and significant (outweighing my potential and worth inevitable sorrow of the people loving me) change I would not hesitate to sacrifice my life. I'm not suicidal but if you manage to convince me there will be no tyranny in the world any more once I die and I'm killing myself this evening. But I can't actually imagine how my death can actually be a serious contribution so the best way to fight the darkness I could find so far is spreading my vision (which can be flawed or plain wrong but at least it provokes thought) via conversations on HN (a place where many thinking, capable to argue constructively and potentially influential people are going to read it) and everywhere (and I'll be honest enough to admit this sense of potentially meaningful contribution to waking people up feeds my brain dopamine).

> Being broken in that way, which is completely accepted in polite society

There are so many things in the society and in many people that are "broken" and being enslaved by the idea you should just do just anything to address these issues, strategies doomed to fail to actually improve anything (feeling sad included) qualifying perfectly is itself an example of being broken.

> I can't say "that's a brainfart" or "that's nonsense". No, I need to say "can you walk me through the logic here"

That obviously was a joke and your question obviously was rhetorical even if you didn't intend that. You should better have said "That's brilliant" sarcastically and at least that would be some sort of fun.