Not a troll post. Why is everything shit?
Corporations. Stop giving them money any way possible.
Unchecked capitalism.
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 socialists were damn about to do a revolution.
then the capitalist world stopped caring about worker well being after the soviet union went kaput, and started slowly dismantling it.
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
Uncheckedcapitalism.This is the one true root cause answer.
it isn’t
if you are assuming everything’s shit and looking for justification then i would say it’s probably caused by chakra mis-alignment
People aren’t being held to account for doing or making shitty things
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
Be the change you want to see in the world.
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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
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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.
I think your last paragraph hit the nail on the head. As with any drug, moderation is key. Social media is a dopamine drug 100%, and just like some drugs, people cut it with shit that’s bad. It’s an odd analogy, but I think folks (myself included from time to time), spend way too much time here, and if gets in your head. But winter is cold and windy and wet and inside just seems to keep leading back here.
I often argue that Reddit and Lemmy are not the same type of social media that Facebook and the like are, but they’re just as susceptible to influence. Individuals need to think more about themselves and their micro existence, before diving into global issues so much. At least, that’s how I try to avoid the crippling depression that comes from post after post written by chicken little.
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I think that social media (which is much broader than most people think) isn’t really the issue. It’s a tool being leveraged by the real danger. As you say, Lemmy hasn’t been bought and sold by special interest groups.
The way social media is leveraged is very harmful, but those groups are also leveraging other media (particularly the news). I would blame our ibcreased social division on the special interest groups that benefit from, and promote, social division.
IMO blaming social media itself for our woes is like blaming the ocean’s plastic on straws. It ultimately let’s the real damage continue while blaming the everyman’s suffering on their own consumption.
social media. It’s a mind virus
I agree. Ideas in general are like a virus living in our brains. (They mostly consist of small packages of information. They require a host for metabolism / real effect. They spread from human to human.) The internet facilitates the spreading of these viruses; which often overwhelms the participating humans. In theory, it can/will also lead to a lot of innovation, because ideas spread more rapidly/easily. In practice, i think it does, but it also leads to virus-infection-like / fever-like symptoms, including: nausea, feeling of weakness (whenever reading political news).
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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.
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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.
This, exactly.
Boomers grew up with a 91% top-tier tax rate.
Nobody ever paid that rate; anyone who was close to that line found some tax deductible way of spending their excess. That “tax deductible way of spending” was, ultimately, someone else’s paycheck.
Without that punitively-high top tier, there is no need for them to actually spend their excess income. They invest it, creating a debt owed back to them.
We tolerate this horseshit out of fear that “they’ll go away, and take the jobs with them”. Which won’t happen: When we restore our 91% top-tier tax rate, the rest of the world will follow.
“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.
I think it’s short-termism combined with capitalism.
Capitalism tells people that success equals money. Short-termism tells people to focus on how much they can grab right now.
Look at the actions of C-suite level people. They do what they can to increase profits this year to get a massive bonus this year. If that means laying off half the company that’s ok because they’re incentivised to maximise profits now. So they do. The next year they’re off to a different job at a different company and they will get that job because “When I was CEO of Mongoose & Felcher I increased YOY global profit by 270%”. Their focus is never on the actual well-being of the company or its employees or on the social or environmental impact of the company because their bonus isn’t dependent on those things.
Politicians are much the same. If they’re not in power they want to get into power. If they are in power they have to act as quickly as possible to achieve their aims because they might only be in power for a single term.
One of my favourite ‘business’ ideas came from Gus Levy who was CEO of Goldman Sachs back in the 1970s. He came up with the term ‘long-term greedy.’ The idea was that you dealt fairly and honestly with your clients, never gouged them, kept your word, and did a good job. Sure, you might make slightly less profit from those clients this year but you would keep them as clients next year too.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
The CCP seems to factor this into at least some of their decisions. Their infrastructure projects (like any infrastructure projects) take years, sometimes decades, to pay off, but boy howdy do they pay off.
They also pay off in a lot of ways besides the pure “dollar in/dollar out” kind of way that I think people forget about a lot. Things like soft power, economic growth, and cultural alliance are all incredibly powerful things.
Its a shame the current administration is trying to gut the last 80 years of work the US has put into those things.
I don’t consider myself to be any type of greedy, but that’s how I ran my business. At least 97% of my clients were regulars, and almost all were recommended by a neighbor or coworker. I did very little advertising, but was busy 12-16 hours a day, every day.
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.
People are often rewarded with power or money for doing/saying shitty things.
If you are rewarded for something, you are likely to continue the pattern.for doing/saying shitty things.
for making “hard” decisions.
We are losing the class war.
It apparently is human nature to select leaders who are susceptible to corruption and incentivized to propagate the corrupt systems. I believe we need a solution where we have full traceability and hold leaders accountable, I have never seen anything close to this in my lifetime. Perhaps it is because we have collectively left the wolves to guard the henhouse? Replace the wolves with dogs who are aligned with human best interests.
Because you are staring at the pain rectangle and being bombarded with every bad thing that is happening in the entire planet nonstop.
Your ape brain was not meant for this. Imagine if you lived in the 1300s – Plague, famines, wars, pogroms. They had it all. But any one human being would only ever hear about whatever bad things were happening near to them.
That’s what I keep telling kids, we’re not evolved to live this way. It doesn’t feel right because your a round peg in a square building. We’re evolved for tribe life, telling stories around the fire, cooking food for each other, helping out our small communities, together. Singing and dancing and story telling, caring for our soil and water and animals. Yes we should go to the stars, and test the boundaries of reality, but we won’t get there and feel like we really did something worth doing without being who we truly are, free to love, free to wonder, free to explore, free to be alive, free to be just happy. It isn’t worth it if we aren’t happy. We need to find out happy place again if we’re going to survive the next few centuries.
I agree with you.
who we truly are, free to love, free to wonder, free to explore, free to be alive, free to be just happy. It isn’t worth it if we aren’t happy. We need to find out happy place again if we’re going to survive the next few centuries.
What you’re describing here, i call “self-determination”. Being who/what you truly are. It’s incredibly important, maybe the most important thing we have to consider.
Idk I don’t even follow the news anymore, and I don’t need to to see that everything is shit all around me, everywhere
But you don’t need to be following the news personally.
Many people around you are.
Those people have this perception, and so they act accordingly. You are looking at memes? Well it’s a matter of hours until you see a meme about wanting to die on 196 or whatever. You watching TV Shows? Yeah TV Shows are entirely drunk on the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is one of despair.
Ergo. You are surrounded by people who think everything is fucked ™ – And therefore you’ll also feel like everything is fucked ™
Idk, every close person around me seems to be (mostly) ok with the way things are, or at least much more so than I am.
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The last one is easily fixed.
The first three take some work.
