Not a troll post. Why is everything shit?
I went back in time and farted on a puppy. Sorry. You really should have seen the original timeline. We had blimps, universal healthcare, and six seasons of Firefly
You see what you want to see.
Things aren’t great but not “everything is shit.”
Not trolling: social media. It’s a mind virus used by both sides to ignite hate and culture wars. It uses 9 second video clips to project the actions of the few onto the many, making you hate entire groups of people without understanding basic statistics. The “feel it in your gut” crowd chose those words for very specific reasons.
Social media is a curse.
How do you reconcile that with how social media platforms like Lemmy allow people to collaborate across groups also? Or to educate?
Like, I do agree that social media plays a hugely pivotal role. But that’s because humans are social creatures with pliable perspectives and are reactive to the views of those we call our peers.
That means special interest groups can tell us what our views should be and sway millions, but it also means that small towns have always been extremely insular and would reject ‘out-group’ people, with or without social media. The ‘liberal redneck’ can only exist now because they can have contact with diverse and nuanced people outside of their local communities through online platforms.
I think humans have stunted relationships with their local communities in favour of fragile online ones, but I believe bad actors are leveraging the power of humanity’s propensity for community groupthink. Social media expands the size of our ‘tribes’, but it’s engagement algorythms that are enforcing echo chambers, to keep us on platforms in profitable ways. That is a property of for profit Capitalism, more than of remote peer-to-peer interaction.
Everyone knows that racism and hate was invented in 2006 by Mark Zuckerberg.
Social Media isn’t innately harmful. But it’s been abused by the powerful to control the masses. The same as religion, print, radio, and television before it
Yeah thanks for repeating what I said
Yep. Extremist groups use it to spread misinformation and recruit people. It’s scary, and everyone in this thread will have seen some at some point.
The short answer is our legal system was not designed to withstand the stress the ultra rich can put on it as a result a lot of laws were over turned.
Im on mobile so it’s hard to type and explain in more depth.
And that’s only one facet.
But there are good things in the world too. And there are people fighting for what’s right. It’s easy to slip into despair but as mr rogers use to say
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping
Unchecked capitalism.
Uncheckedcapitalism.Yes. The US used to work to prevent and break up monopolies. This allowed some of the optimistic promises of capitalism to work. There was competition that worked to bring prices down and quality up.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed dozens of competing businesses merged to form conglomerates with little more than speed bumps from government to slow them down, presumably to line the pockets of the would be overseers.
We lost the competition that drove innovation. There’s little need to do anything to gain market share when there’s no real competition. Instead these mega corporations focus on efficiency to bring costs down, because they’re answering to shareholders now instead of consumers.
The result is supply chains have become fragile. One supply chain disruption results in a total shut down, because redundancies have been eliminated. When you have competition, you must have redundancies to ensure you can remain competitive. No need for that when you have no competitors.
and lets be clear that the us only did this for a while because the unionists and socislists were damn about to do a revolution.
then the capitalist world stopped caring about worker well being after the soviet union went kaput.
If something bad came from the Soviet dissolution (besides the extreme decline of living standards in many of those countries) is that it completely killed any left-wing ideals in the west. Unions, welfare and common good were seen as “defeated” ideas, because capitalism had won. People still haven’t recovered from the “capitalism won” mentality, so anything that comes even close to left wing is immediately shut down
You might have depression
More like suffering from capitalism and the global decline into authoritarianism.
No medicine can fix oppression.
That’s possible. Or you could be paying a lot of attention to world news.
You are focusing on negative news. Stop doing that. There are also plenty of good things as well but they rarely get talked about. For example, we now produce more new solar power production in a day than we did in a year a couple of decades ago. Production is increasing. The average person in the UK (where I live so I would focus on that a bit more) produces less than half the CO² than they did in 2000, which is its self a bit less than was produced decades before. We actually produce less than the global average now.
There is an increasing push on heat pumps now, its likely still in its early phases. I got one a bit over a year ago and its great. So much misinformation about them online though. Which I wouldn’t be surprised if its pushed by the gas industry.
I do. I was offering an explanation for why someone else might be feeling depressed.
Personally I think the aim should be to focus on neither negative nor positive news, but to try to get the clearest, broadest understanding of the true state of things, which means trying to focus on news that has systemic relevance (I think your examples do).
Unfortunately I do think it’s pretty reasonable to be … maybe not pessimistic, but at least fairly worried about the state of the world. Some things are definitely changing for the better, but some things are really fucked, and looking like they could get a lot worse, really quickly (looking at you in particular, US politics). My personal reason for optimism is that a) it could mean the end of US capitalist hegemony, and b) it could open the way for a massive progressive backlash. But who knows? We’ll fund out soon, I guess.
People aren’t being held to account for doing or making shitty things
Not a troll post.
Fair enough. I’ll take your question seriously.
Without any context, it sounds as if everything that you’re perceiving right now is shit. Maybe your relationships are strained and you feel lonely or guilty. Maybe the news hits you harder every day. Maybe money is tight. Maybe you’ve suffered a great loss. Maybe nothing has happened at all and you’re sitting there, contemplating whether life is worth it. I don’t know your situation.
And whatever it is, it’s valid. Heck, I sometimes feel like life is shit.
Now, I’m not here to say we should look at reality with rose-colored glasses or to look at reality with naive optimism. No. I’m here to say that we have a choice. We can choose what to focus on and how to respond to reality.
Is it really true that “everything is shit”? Is the fact that your body has managed, against all odds, to sustain your life shit? Is the fact that humans can grow and change shit? Is the fact that we can be better as people shit?
Still, shit happens. And we have to be ready to accept that. Regardless of how much shit there is, we can always choose how to respond to it.
For one, we play a massive role in our interpretation of shit. There’s solid science behind this. You could look at theories of cognition such as the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Relational Frame Theory, or even the shallow but effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy frameworks. All of those theories think it’s crucial to notice the lens that you and I are looking at the world through. Not only should we notice the lens, but sometimes we should clean it or direct it elsewhere. Otherwise we spend our whole lives stooped over a pile of crap, when we could stand, look around, and notice the world around us from a different perspective.
But that’s not the only thing that matters. We don’t just want to see the world differently. We also want to live valued lives. Once again, this is possible regardless of how much shit there is. How so? Well, what kind of person do you want to be? A kind person? A person that is reflexive and open minded? A person that notices and appreciates beauty when it appears? A person who is proactive about their future and that of others? A person who is compassionate towards others? A person that’s curious about the world and how to improve it?
It’s not easy, being kind, appreciative, and proactive when you’re bogged down by shit. But you’re not alone. There’s brilliant and insightful people who have dedicated their lives to finding out how to do it. If you’re interested, I’m happy to talk about empirical ways of doing it. For now, it’s more important to ask what the alternative is. Is a life spent stooping over shit a good life?
Well written, and exactly what I needed today, thank you sir.
This dude explains(in a couple minutes) why boomers are how they are and why they are breaking down society
Because too many people wouldn’t vote for anything less than a perfect candidate.
And too many people wouldn’t vote for anything more than a rapist conman.
Hey hey hey, that’s autocratic megalomaniac rapist conman, can’t leave out his best stuff.
Not enough guillotines
This is the bad place.
Oh no what the fork?
Care to spoon?
We forgot we could regulate capitalism like we did 100 years go. Let’s make taxes great again. Then take that money and pour it into education. If the states really want to control that, fine, that’s a compromise that can probably still end up working out in the end.
“One bad apple spoils the bunch.”
We have a lot of bad apples.
This tree is “Oops, all bad apples!”
Sometimes the barrel is bad, not even the apples (eg. police)
Om a micro or meso level, there is still plenty of good to be found. Look there for your daily sanity check. If you only look at the macro level, you’ll just get more depressed.
