We are losing the class war.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Either greed or hate, depends on the thing that is shit.
I am of the personal opinion that life is a meat grinder, and we're the meat. A small percentage of people are born or become lucky enough to turn the crank or load the grinder, but most of us will suffer, and that's just the way it is because it has always been this way, for all of human history, and will presumably continue to be so. There is no why. There just is.
Greed and self interest.
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.
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Because humans.
"As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." - Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)
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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.
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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.
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We had a huge population of genuinely evil people who were locked away in the rural south so they could only abuse black people around them.
Then social media gave these people a voice and politicians realized they could pander to the trash with funding from the billionaires and that's enough to keep them in power indefinitely.
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
I see everything as a risk, since I'm living a double life. It is often that the road for me to leave as an apostate is narrow, and chances of me being free is close to none. But I don't stop there. I remind myself that I have friends who looked after me, and I mourn those who passed away from terminal illnesses. Grief seems to talk to me not in stages, but as a constant companion. I balance everything with the good and the meditative. It doesn't always work, but I like to try them everyday anyway. Good luck buddy.
You might have depression
More like suffering from capitalism and the global decline into authoritarianism.
No medicine can fix oppression.
Both can be true.
F'course, pills won't fix society, but medics can't really fix the social systems. Best they've got is pills that make you not want to die.
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.
This dude explains(in a couple minutes) why boomers are how they are and why they are breaking down society
Not everything is shit. It's just not as good as it used to be
We used to be looking forward; those have always been the good times. Now, we either look backwards, or at the immediate. It's hard to be optimistic and drive in the right direction when you're constantly staring in the rear view mirror.
Also: corporations and governments learned a lot from Nazi Germany, and Goebbles in particular. Not in the usual Godwin's Law sense, but in how to manipulate the populous by controlling messaging. And they improved on it; rather than doing it through fiat, which breeds resistance, they've done it through good old Capitalism: the biggest media are owned by big concerns, and the messaging is controlled by editors.
There is free media, but that's a mixed bag. That gets you InfoWars and Rush Limbaugh, too.
The key is to live in the moment. Looking backwards or forwards is a rookie mistake.
The correct answer is usually the most boring one.
Maybe you’re depressed, maybe you’re looking in the wrong places for happiness, maybe you’re right, maybe something else…
It's designed that way so that your work goes to others. That's the base of all of the world's problems.
If everything I see in the news all the time makes me feel like the world is shit, well that's just unhealthy.
So I've subscribed to some good news channels on YouTube, and I try to limit the amount of bad news that I digest.
Staying informed of what's going on in the world is great, but not if it comes at the price of your sanity.
So read some good news, write a list of things you're grateful for, take a walk in a park, meditate in the sun a bit, and remember that overall people are kind (free open source software exists, volunteering exists, food banks exist, etc).
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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.