Not a troll post. Why is everything shit?
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.
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 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 ™
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.
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.
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
Did you have vests though?
Humanity went wrong when we abandoned vests.
Why do you want to dress like a European king/aristocrat? If anything, creating vests was where we went wrong. Now capes…
Why not both?
Anyway, I was thinking less ‘european aristocrat’ and more ‘steampunk aesthetics’ when I talked about vests. Dress shirt, tie, vest, and overcoat, all slightly stained with oil from physically impossible doohickeys full of gears. T’is a nice aesthetic.
Private equity buying companies and sucking them dry to make a profit is also big factor
Not enough guillotines
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Because humans.
“As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.” - Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)
Given how accurate that movie was, it seems possible Hugo Weaving is actually the whole problem.
Because we’re monkeys that just came down from the trees. TBH that we’ve gotten this far relatively intact is remarkable.
On the offchance you don’t mean in a current events way, but more cosmically: To all appearances the universe wasn’t built for us, we just kind of showed up in a grimy corner of it. Living things have the brutal kind of existence that often goes along with being stowaways or pests.
Correct. I mean, lifespans are 125 years max. So we had to transfer knowledge down, and amazingly…we’ve conquered a whole planet. But sadly we can’t unite and that will be the undoing of the human race. Until we can put petty deferences aside, and pool resources as a species? We will never be more than a chapter in Eath’s history.
I feel like the transfer of knowledge gets overlooked way too much when people look at big history or technological history. Every time a new way of storing or transferring knowledge arrives technological advancement start going up by like an order of magnitude.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture took several millennia to fully complete, but in the ice age at least the northern hemisphere had a rapid climate disruption every 1500 or so. Any progress would have been disrupted and then quickly forgotten. Once the interglacial begins the transition completes for the first time in human history (although I do wonder why nobody started farming in Australia). That leads to sedentarism, higher population density and hierarchy, which leads to the development of cities. In cities, like-minded people can meet and share, and it was only a couple of millennia more before you start seeing pottery, metalworking, writing and wheels. With the development of writing knowledge of abstract systems begins accumulating, although you see variation in literacy and library sizes based on how cheap and convenient writing materials were.
They exploded with the arrival of paper. At some point in that period advances start happening within generations, so the effect is harder to track. With the arrival of specifically wood pulp paper in the Victorian era everyone had access to education, and now, with the internet, we can have nerdy conversations like this one every day.
But sadly we can’t unite and that will be the undoing of the human race.
What makes you say that? I feel like we’re 95% of the way to united, relative to where we were 50,000 years ago. Consider that Kim Jung Un has sometimes worn a suit that would be just as normal seen on Mark Rutta - that’s pretty significant cultural overlap, even with the stark ideology gap. We have some big challenges coming up, so it’s not guaranteed, but I don’t have any reason that we’re doomed to failure either.
Doomed, maybe not, but it’ll take a while to unite as a species and leave the planet. We could easily do it with the combined knowledge, tech and resources of a united earth. I think we will get there, but we can’t destroy ourselves over petty little lines in the sand and cultural differences. You bring hope and that’s what we’ll need going forward.
😭😭😭😭
Ugh, sorry. In lieu of a hug, I’ll point out that we haven’t failed yet, and there’s good and bad sides to being here by accident. The existentialists were straight up excited about it, actually - you get to define goals for yourself, amazing! I take a more neutral stance. It’s like being rats in Notre Dam or on an early explorer’s boat. It’s tough but boy do we get to see some cool things. And, although there’s no guarantee there’s a happy ending, at the same time anything is possible; no god to look after us also means no god to smite us for our ambition.
Depends on how you look at things.
Compare your life to the life of people 1 century ago, 2 centuries ago, etc…
News, social networks focus on shit. Lot of things improve. But news only focus on what is going wrong.
Lot if things are shit, but lot other things aren’t.
This. How many of your childhood friends survived to adulthood? How many famines have you lived through? Have you ever received modern medicine? Do you know anyone who’s shit themselves to death (a surprisingly common cause of death back when)? Are you literate?
I’ll not try and tell anyone things are peachy, because they’re clearly not. But a lot of things are so so so much better than they used to be. Most of us lead lives that would make Pharos of old green with envy.
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.
We’re in the late stage of capitalism.
You see what you want to see.
Things aren’t great but not “everything is shit.”
This is a serious get off the Internet moment. This place and the predecessor are absolute doom and gloom 24/7, but I took my kids to the park earlier and we threw rocks in the stream and hung out under a bridge, and it was a nice day, and we had fun. I join in my community cleanups, I plant trees, I take part in things, and I love my town. Yeah, on a global scale, it ain’t pretty, but I do what I can to make my little bubble a pleasant place to be.
Exactly!
I went out to some stores and got him driving on an interstate for the first time as a student driver today. It is gorgeous out and we just enjoyed each others company for a few hours.
Come live in a poor country and start being positive when the grocery prices go up every week
Because greed allows us to ignore the fact we aren’t accounting for the limits of this planet. We get to use greed to justify complete moral abandon, which in today’s world can be really damaging. A few people are getting rich atm by tearing the world apart, it won’t lead to good things.
But our system isn’t designed to communicate the good around you to you, it’s the opposite pretty much. The good is there it just doesn’t brag, or shout or mock. It’s quiet but it spreads.
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
