Not a troll post. Why is everything shit?
Corporations. Stop giving them money any way possible.
People aren’t being held to account for doing or making shitty things
This is the bad place.
Oh no what the fork?
Care to spoon?
“One bad apple spoils the bunch.”
We have a lot of bad apples.
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.
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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.
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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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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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.
Money and greed.
But you can help. Grab a grocery bag, go out side and pick up some trash. Talk to your neighbors. Go put change in parking meters that are about to expire. Go through a parking lot and put shopping parts in the corral. Get a bag of frozen peas and feed some ducks (not bread). Get some cheap paper plates and a marker or two from a dollar store, make happy faces and staple them up on telephone poles.
The more we act hyper-locally, the better we can make it. Maybe it will inspire othdrs to do the same. But even if they don’t, you’re still making the world a better place.
Second this. Macro level things are… not great. At home, our neighborhoods though, we can and do make a difference. Your friend group, your family, your close relations, those groups are the same as they were a year ago, and are worth being around. Yeah things are kind of shit right now. You can still go have a pint with your friends though. Or enjoy your favorite video game. Work on that hobby you’ve put off. We’ve been trained that buying is happiness - but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to be content. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what you have and improving your own neighborhood.
People will tell us to hate, and to divide, and I just refuse to. I’ve been going out on walks, saying hello to the neighbors, going to the local coffee shop and bar. Communities are worth building.
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.
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.
We forgot to perform maintenance on everything.
The root source of things being shit nowadays is capitalism. Capitalism only nows one direction: upwards. Each quarter profits have to exceed the preceding quarter. The result is that products and services get worse over time, because in order to make more profit than the last time, corners have to be cut.
The new iteration of a product gets more flimsy, because they use cheaper materials, or they alter the design to save on material. Or products have a built-in life span (e.g. batteries that cannot be replaced or limited software updates or intentional software incompatibility).
When it comes to digital services, features will be stripped over time or the customer has to pay additionally for a feature that was once included. Or they arbitrarily limit the number of devices one can use the service on. They can do it, because most customers are not prone to change a specific online service, beacuse it either is a hassle or existing alternatives do not offer the same content diversity.
The same goes for operating systems, albeit they are rather not stripped of functions, but new bullshit features that no one asked for get implemented (best example is the implementation of AI features into the operating system (Windows - Copilot or Apple - Apple intelligence) that - in case of both - forces users to even replace their hardware). Tech companies know they can pull shit like this off, because (and this mostly applies to professional users) some users need to run specific niche software on their computers that is programmed for a specific OS exclusively.
The whole AI craze is just to make money (selling data) off of the user and also forcing them to buy the new thing, because tech companies took care of deliberately designing everything in a way that it is incompatible with older hardware.One major problem with this is that, although capitalism is the cause of it all, we all grew up with capitalism and are stuck inside the system up to a point where we profit off of it in certain parts. Having the new shiny thing availiable at any time is the nice part of it. Having to work more for less compensation (because company already builds everything cheaper and now comes for your wages/ salary in order to make profit) is the disadvantage of it. There theoretically is a solution for it: Socialism. Theoretically, because it doesn’t account for the desire of people to gain power over stuff and/ or other people.
But what can I do? I’m so tired
First of all - don’t overthink it! There are so many factors that play into this whole ordeal that a single person can’t change. As other posters have said: Not all is bad. Always keep in mind that on the internet, these things seem to be much more dire than they are.
When it comes to the things I described in my post: Try to buy consciously. Assess if you really need the thing (example: If you alredy own a laptop and a smartphone - is there really a need for a tablet?). Try to buy things that last longer. Most products come in basically three price ranges: cheap, mid-price, overly priced. On most occasions it is sufficient to go with the mid-price range. This mostly offers the best price-performance-ratio. If you buy cheap you buy twice in the end (first for the cheap thing, then for the more expensive version that you should have bought to begin with). If you buy overly priced you probably are wasting money for a thing that could have been cheaper in the first place.
If you are not satisfied with digital services, then leave them for an alternative. For instance, I was unsatisfied with my bank. They tried to pull something off, thinking I will put up with it. I did some research and now I have changed my bank, even with better conditions than before. It was easier than I thought. The same goes with email providers or phone providers. If they enshittify their service for you, go to their competitor. Nowadays you can port your phone number with you. Companies are accounting for their users’ laziness. That is why they can pull shit off in the first place.
When it comes to computers and operating systems, there is something you can do already: Go through all your settings and switch off all things you don’t need (e.g. telemetry data, uninstall programs you do not use). If you don’t know what a specific setting does or if it is needed, just look it up on the internet. Chances are great that at least one other person on this planet has the same question (that has been answered hopefully).
If your computer reaches its end-of-life, because the upcoming operating system is not compatible any longer, try to look out for an alternative. With a Linux-bases operating system, your old hardware might get some extra years to come. I think these have come a long way. 25 years ago I experienced myself with Linux, and it was awful! That might have changed now, and especially here on Lemmy there are many resources and users happy to help.Try to use alternative programs, perferrably free- and open source. Or, alternatively, look out for programs that you can buy once and that do not operate as a subscription service. If you own a program legally (by having it bought once), it can’t be taken away from you. When you subscribe to a program, companies always can take features away or make you pay more for them. This also applies for media as well.
With these things taken into consideration, you will feel less powerless and a bit more in control of things. And it probably will save you money in the long run.
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.
😭😭😭😭
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.
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.
