my main problem is I compare life now to in the US in the 50’s through 90’s instead of the dark ages.
When I do that, I think about medicine in general and dentists in particular. Our age wins here. Though I don’t know, maybe regular folks in the US can’t afford medical and dental help, so it doesn’t matter to them.
Yeah I don’t see much change dental wise. Its again sorta gotten bad since 2000. Flouridation had a big effect but finding an independent dentist as a doctor whose main interest is the health of your teeth and mouth seems to be harder and harder. Now we have these corp things that feel shady as fuq. The US is a bit strange in that we had obamacare and like right after things got much better but then the mandate was kicked out and that upset the balance of pay with insurance companies and then we allow corps to own insurance and provider and pharmacy and hospitals. but then biden got the no surprise billing thing. its been a bit of ping pong but since the millenium. I mean technical advances always are better as time goes by but of course if they are not available or guaged so much they are not (something as basic as insulin) thats not really better.
I would imagine that those starving bricklayers in Africa know the value of what they have, are grateful to have it, and would gladly share it with anybody they felt needed it more than them. Their life is probably difficult at times — whose isn’t? — but they have family, friends, and community who look out for them, because in the end they know they have nothing without each other.
I have read in the past that depression is very rare in Africa.
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You deleted your comment but I read it and I appreciate the context, thanks.
Can’t really delete anything on lemmy. I don’t even see the point in having it as a feature at this point. Anyone can look up what it was.
I’m a lazy bastard that can’t be bothered to check the history. I guess that’s for the likes of me?
BS. They literally risk their own and their children’s life to emigrate to somewhere where they have a fighting chance not to starve. Like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in dinghies
I have no doubt that there are those who wish to (and do) emigrate to other countries for more opportunities. I also have no doubt that there are those who stay and are happy living the lives they have, despite being impoverished. They are not mutually exclusive.
Are you thinking of Cuba?
Alienation from labor and isolation from your community cannot be solved through pleasure and consumption
… Bet.
Productivity has risen as well. Anon likely has a mind-nunbing job that produces more economically in a year than a village or two of those ancestors would have.
Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only need a 15 hour workweek as technology would allow people to work less. Many others predicted similar throughout the 1900’s. When you look at a household perspective, Keynes was writing in a time when huge populations of women were expected not to work already.
What we see now is that it is incredibly rare for multi-adult households to have singular incomes. For the household, the 40 hour workweek might have actually grown to 80. Or more, as individuals engage in gig work or get 2nd or 3rd jobs. Plus forced overtime is becoming an issue, and of course wage theft.
Wages have stagnated while productivity has increased. Pensions (and unions) are gone (at least in the US). Inequality is constantly increasing - the rich use their power to get richer while the poor are stuck getting poorer.
Anon mentions his freedoms, but neglects to mention he probably spends 50 or more hours a week either working, on break from work, getting ready, commuting. He cannot criticize his employer publicly. An arrest and a night or two in jail could throw him into poverty. Unless, of course, he is rich enough that he doesn’t need to work, in which case simply tossing his name around with he police can often get him out of any trouble.
He mentions healthcare - US life expectancy not, and I do not believe has ever been, 90 years. Maybe for ultra-wealtjy women? Currently the average is 76 years for the whole country. But even then, women live longer than men, and the top-1% of income earners live almost 15 years longer than the bottom-1%. . So if anon is a low-income male, his life expectancy may be in his mid-60’s. Which is comparable to the average life expectancy of the late 1700’s- early 1900’s in Europe.
He has a lot of fancy toys at his disposal, but his life is still being consumed by the wealthy in power.
US life expectancy not, and I do not believe has ever been, 90 years.
Closer to 80, but even then that’s tilted by youth mortality and chronic health issues (and race and height and gender). But if you’re going strong after the age of 30, you’ve got much better odds of making it to 90 than an infant who hasn’t survived through some of the most dangerous years to be alive. If you’re old enough to be shitposting on 4chan, you’re probably doing well enough to at least think about making it that far.
Anon mentions his freedoms, but neglects to mention he probably spends 50 or more hours a week either working, on break from work, getting ready, commuting. He cannot criticize his employer publicly. An arrest and a night or two in jail could throw him into poverty. Unless, of course, he is rich enough that he doesn’t need to work, in which case simply tossing his name around with he police can often get him out of any trouble.
“Anon” is appropriate. It really is security through obscurity for a lot of Freedom Loving Americans. You’re not protected because you’ve got rights and freedoms. You’re protected because nobody considers your stupid shitposts to be worthy of their time. You’re non-threatening not free.
As soon as police or management or some national security goon thinks you’re a clear and present danger, the game changes significantly.
He has a lot of fancy toys at his disposal, but his life is still being consumed by the wealthy in power.
One might even argue the toys he has were created to distract and alienate him from his peers and neighbors.
Nobody said he is US… we even have some job security here.
Look up Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Anon is enjoying every creature comfort the planet has to offer, but they are still missing the entire top half of this pyramid. And you need that to be happy.
Edit: to anyone returning to this thread.
It’s easy to see how the worst mechanisms in our society cut into this model. Not having enough money for basic needs, being too isolated, or not having enough time to yourself, are all issues that track through the very shape of our society and employment issues in general. I don’t have answers for everyone. But it sure is easy to spot the problems.
What I do know is that it’s important to keep trying to fight for your best life and don’t settle for long if your needs aren’t being met. Also, invest in people power even if you have money. After all, you can’t buy friendships, it takes time to build them, you actually need other people to be completely happy, and it’s probably the best safety net you can get.
thats fucking wild how we live in the same country and yet the top half of this pyramid is ALL i have
Man it’s wild that I have only really every had the top and the bottom of that pyramid and even then not always.
I wonder what it feels like to have a full sense of self, if anyone even actually has one.
Why is this a screenshot?
Lemmy won’t let me hotlink images, and I couldn’t be bothered to save and then upload a file. :/
Hotlink format
Here’s how I put images in Lemmy comments:
- Right-click on the image and copy it
- Left-click on the text field
- Ctrl-V
- Bish bash bosh
Right-click on the image and copy it
VERY old browser habits are biting me here. I didn’t realize I could copy images directly to the clipboard - screenshot app does that, which is how we got here. Thank you.
What I’m doing wrong? I have the top two and 1/2, and I’m missing most of the bottom half? (I’m basically standing on a glass strand, which is constantly on verge of collapsing)
Funny I used to have those things but then someone that acts like they are God fucked with my life.
Royalty had agency and power. Anon is just doing the movements, but can’t sculpt the future.
Also it’s a bit naive to think royalty didn’t have their fair share of depression and mental illness
Hunter gathers (which human are from an evolutionary perspective) worked 4 hours a day and would have had a lot of exercise.
They were around similar, closely related people, with a united culture and strong community.
Their form of stress would have been “oh fuck a bear. Let’s get away”. “Wow remember when we spend 10 minutes this week stressed about a bear”
Humans work a shit load, including getting ready for work. Don’t have time to sleep enough. Human society is largely devoid of anything that it should be, not enough of the stuff that mattered and too much of everything else. Low level stress is constant.
I’m sure they also had community infighting, gossiping, feelings of unfairness, jealousy etc. You know like all humans in all parts of history.
They also had a short lifespan where a broken leg, bad tooth or infected cut could kill you. Not to take away from what you wrote but to add that it probably wasn’t as ideal of a life as we may think.
I’m not on about ideal.
It’s about what we are built for.
Like you could say no suffering, i.e. no physical exertion is ideal. But we know physical exertion is good.
Maybe all the shit we had to deal with back then was good for us, or okay for us. But the bad things for us now are mentally much worse, even though they don’t seem as bad.
Like maybe occasionally being starving and coming together as a community then later having a feast and everyone being super happy is mentally better than you stressing out because you were planning to make chicken nuggies and chips, then watch TV alone but you forgot to stop in the store on the way home.
Can you give any other example(counter argument, whatever you wanna name it) but science, especially life sciences? I always try to find it myself, but nah. Are medicine-adjacent fields the only inherently good things we have made?
Well maybe not other examples, but my comment was more along the lines that I think that we (modern humans) idealize hunter-gathers. When what was probably more reality was that they had difficult times as well. That is wasn’t a utopia by any means. I would say that agriculture and animal domestication came out of a need to reduce the task of having to hunt down your food.
If you get to just walk out of your hut and harvest plants or you don’t have to run down a wild pig, instead just butcher one in the pen you’re going to do that. But the downside then is you need to spend more time tending to the animals and plants to make sure they survive. So you give up some downtime.
Yeah but now you gotta spend MUCH more time because of simple biology and logistics: You wanna eat the muscle of the animals, but the muscle tissue only develops if the animals move… you need much more animals and your feed is going to simple scaffolding stuff like bones and fur. Now you gotta grow more feed to feed your livestock. Welp, now you have smaller area per animal so they move even less (i.e., muscle growth is reduced even further)… what do we do? Vertical farming!
Which can be summarized by “we work too much”
Can relate. On our coast we have some of the most laid back village people in the world, yet here in the city with all our amenities we get upset with dumb things like people making noise in the tennis court across from our condo. Priorities are shot.
Well, for a start, 90% of young men can’t relate to the first one. That is a major and growing problem
What can we do to solve it?
As someone who formerly suffered from that problem I think a big part of the issue is that the world is incredibly isolating and alienating, so you get stuck in your head and can’t just talk to people normally. We need to stop creating suburbs that act like prisons for developing minds. We need more third places. And we need to find some way of teaching people to have healthy relationship-building interactions with other people without making anyone feel unsafe.
Travel helps a lot. Gives perspective. Also there’s a whole ass planet of people that will boink you out there. No need to geographically lock your romantic life. Just ya know, don’t go to brothels and shit, that’s no bueno.
Brothels are fine. Treat the workers with respect like you would anywhere else and maybe it will teach former incels to unironically not put the pussy on a pedestal.
Yeah I got no issues with sex workers, and maybe it would work for incels, it’s just not my thing. I was more specifically saying I’m not advocating for sex tourism. Just go have a good time, eventually someone will want to see you naked.
Have guys who post dick picks add those pics to their dating profile
It’s fairly easy to see the problem here: The dude has way too many obligations.
Most people would be happy just to go to a beach and poke the sand with a stick. The privileges of “upper middle class” are the real schackels preventing people from going to the beach.
All the luxuries of the world, but vanishingly little time to indulge in them.
The lack of purpose my dude
Who told u kings from the past, and bricklayers in africa are not depressed ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Also, from an existentialist point of view, we’re inundated by so many choices that almost nothing could satisfy us. We’re always seeking more. Here is a quote from Soren Kierkegaard:
Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.
“I have all these materialist things and still not happy”
Yeh, this absolutely hits the nail on the head. Good summary.
