I think we are wasting our lives to a certain degree. As kids, we expected more from life than sitting in front of a computer to feed the family. And sitting at a computer is seen as one of the “good” jobs.
hell yeah brother, 30 hours a week, 4 weeks paid vacation, guaranteed and paid for further education courses, protection from being fired while pregnant/ at home with newborn, minimum wage, privacy laws and employee protection laws, unionization, multiple paid federal holidays. I fuckin love Europe.
Imagine this! Before you was adventure, exploration, and danger. Then there was slavery, then there was our period (where there are still millions of actual slaves btw).
Then after you, if anyone survives, and we don’t all get put into an I have no mouth and I must scream scenario by our overlords, the youth after us will never know work. They will be far more functional than us, and will simply not understand working o survive. They will look down on us, senile outcasts, who get to watch “heaven” from afar.
Once everything has been optimized and runs smoothly, there are no surprises anymore, nothing interesting, you just do a routine that you’ve specialized in and have gotten bored at 10 years ago. Our quality of life is unparalleled. Our quality of work less so. It’s safe and all, but so so boring
I’ve heard this described as a velvet rut.
I mean we have it pretty good compared to most of history
I think most reasonable people would agree that there are many objectively good things about the modern world, but progress isn’t a strict good/bad binary. Often, progress results in both good and bad circumstances.
For instance, I think most reasonable people would agree that modern medicine is a very good thing. Vaccines and antibiotics have saved countless lives. Also, more advanced agricultural technology has allowed us to grow more food and feed more people. However, progress has also resulted in significant ecological damage, depletion of natural, nonrenewable resources and a significant loss of biodiversity. I think most reasonable people would agree that these are very bad things.
I don’t think the point is to ignore the very real, important positives about the modern world, but to point out that there are still things that need to improve, and unintended negative effects of progress that need to be dealt with.
I appreciate that for you the modern world is overall good, but that’s not necessarily everyone’s experience. Some people do feel purposeless, depressed and worn down, despite being relatively wealthy and comfortable, especially compared to humans of past eras.
I meant good in comparison to other times. And I don’t mean me personally but people in general.
Found the berry picker
Picking berries can be relaxing but cleaning them sucks
We probably have it pretty great compared to most of the rest of the world currently.
Absolutely. Really, if you’re reading this, you are probably pretty high up on the scale.
Yeah I’ve said this a few times, but honestly anybody who can interact with Lemmy is in the upper tiers of the scale compared with the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.
Obviously that does not mean that individuals cannot have terrible luck and circumstances.
I guess you don’t work under communism.
Yeah, people didn’t. They didn’t give a shit about the “collective” farms. They worked because they were forced to and fucked it up for everyone because there was no difference between giving it your all and slacking off. Hundreds of microfarms worked better than one large collective one because they didn’t think it was “ours” they thought it was “nobodys”.
The same is true for capitalism too, though.
If you work in your own little company or if you are self-employed, then the “mission” of your work might be important to you and a source of motivation.
But if you work in a huge corporation, hardly anything you do actually matters. If don’t perform at 100% and instead slack off, there are other people doing the same work. And if everyone slacks off, then they just hire more people. And even if the whole department underperforms, there are other departments that rake in the money.
And whether the company thrives or goes under, your input as a lowly grunt wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. Even as a mid-level manager your input wouldn’t have made a difference.
Years of my work at my job can be wiped out with one email from the CEO.
Literally the only difference between capitalism and communism when it comes to that is whether the CEO wipes out my work or the state.
But if a CEO does something that actually destroys the company (without question) the governance structure that most companies in most countries have will put a halt to it. If the company is of size to have an actual CEO than they will have a need for a governance structure.
The sad part is that due to whatever reason it doesn’t always work like that.
Heck somebody once told me that in the US you can just fire people for whatever, which is insane to me
Governance structures aren’t without fail either, as exemplified with quite a few big corporations going down over time.
Governance structures are also present in political systems, and also there they can fail.
A government and a corporation are really not all that dissimilar when it comes to managing work, projects and so on.
And yet people work in huge corporations and those are succeeding fine. Yet the collective farms that I mention led to famines and underperformed severely.
Huge corporations also underperform compared to smaller startups.
If a small startup wants to roll out some new thing they just get to the work. If a corporation does the same thing it first takes a year of preparation and internal politics.
Remember the old anecdote about how long it takes to order an empty cardboard box at IBM? That one was an extreme example, but the concept persists.
We had a project, created by two people over half a year. The corporate parent liked it and wanted to expand the product to all the country division. So they planned for a year, then assembled 8 teams with a total of 50 people to copy that project with a planned development time of 3 years. They overran the deadline by 2 years.
Cool. Yet you are ignoring the very tiny fact that collective farms started famines. They didn’t “just underperform”.
Well, I guess the great depression never happened, correct?
The great depression has never starved millions of Ukrainians to death.
I’ve read George Orwell’s account of life in Catalonia during the civil war when the nation was communist, and that’s not the picture he painted at all. He talked about music and art in the streets. People excited about the new economy. People who wanted to work, or to enlist as soldiers and fight the marxist-leninists
And yet over here it is exactly what happened. So we have 3 years during a civil war, and 60 years of a failed state.
I don’t believe your country was ever under communism in the last two thousand years. I think you’re actually from a former USSR state. Not even Stalin ever dared to claim that the USSR had achieved communism, and he was an arrogant git who would have said it if he’d had a shred of evidence.
No true scotsman fallacy. I could say that no country was under ideal capitalism so you can’t criticize it either. You have to look at reality, not make believe nations that never existed.
I just gave you a true scotsman 4 messages ago, genius. You pick those debate skills up at Harvard?
You gave me a singular anecdote from a state that didn’t exist for even three years.
Throwing around the names of fallacies that don’t apply instead of actual arguments doesn’t further your cause just as much as you might think it does.
The no true Scotsman fallacy applies if:
- Person A makes a generalized statement (“No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”)
- That statement is falsified by providing a counter-example (“I know a Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge”)
- Person A does not back away from the original falsified statement but instead modifies the original statement and signals that they did modify that statement (“Well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”)
The main issue here is that using this fallacy, the claim becomes a non-falsifiable tautology. Every Scotsman who puts sugar on his porridge is not a true Scotsman, thus the claim becomes always true by excluding every counter-example.
Let’s apply that to the situation at hand.
- Genius@lemmy.zip made the statement that communism can work, providing an example where it apparently did work. This statement is not generalized, so the first condition for the true Scotsman fallacy already doesn’t apply.
- Maalus@lemmy.world provided a counter-example, where communism didn’t work. This doesn’t actually contradict the first statement, because Genius@lemmy.zip never claimed that communism always works, so providing a single counter-example doesn’t negate the statement that communism can work.
- Genius@lemmy.zip then pointed out that USSR states never actually claimed to have achieved communism, and that statement is true. According to USSR doctrine, the goal was to get to communism at some point, but that point was never reached. While this can sound like an appeal to purity, there’s no basis for a “no true Scotsman” fallacy here.
Please read up on your fallacies before throwing around the names of them.
When you claim that something is a fallacy, even though the fallacy you claim doesn’t actually apply, then you are doing so to discredit the whole argument without actually engaging with it. This is a perfect example of the Strawman argument, which itself is a fallacy.
Actually, I think this is a case of the fallacy fallacy
“I don’t believe your country was under communism, that’s not real communism” is EXACTLY the scotsman fallacy. But by all means, go for a lengthy post that says nothing.
Huh. It’s almost as if all the various alternatives to capitalism couldn’t be lumped into one… Revolutionary Catalonia was Anarcho-Syndicalist, so about as far from the totalitarian soviet system as possible.
Yeah, poor Chinese!
People here seem pretty happy. I guess thd government should do something about the youth unemployment rate, but the average chinese I see on the street seems to be leading a more fulfilling life than the average american. People can afford rent, to go out and eat every day, and save a little, I dont know anyone back home like that.
If yOu aRe nOt uNdEr cApItAlIsM It’s yOuR OwN FaUlT
lmao
it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
there’s plenty of slaves in the middle east right now building shitty stadiums for oil rich kings and queens who would love this WaSTeD LiFe 🤪
Friend, I take it you’re joking … but I’ve done warehouse, construction, assembly line, and other hard labor. The only other country I’ve been to is Mexico, which is a nice place to leave. Believe me, it is entirely possible for a privileged American to know how well they have it.
I wish some people around here had half the experience you do
That’s still capitalism, genius
adjusted for people who cannot see the difference between free market wage labour in a western economy and literal slavery
Problems like infant mortality, disease, manual labour, the human species evolved to deal with those. That’s why exercise releases endorphins. Your body is rewarding you for doing what you need to survive. It has strategies to soften those blows and keep you going. Because you have to.
There are no biological coping mechanisms for cars, city noise, pollution, and financial anxiety. These problems didn’t exist in the ancestral environment. Evolution hasn’t had time to protect us from them. They might not hit as hard in the moment, but we can’t heal from the losses they cause us. That’s why chronic stress, suicide, depression and anxiety are so common nowadays. This is worse. Maybe not in objective germs, but it’s worse for a human being. It hits us in our weak points.
I am not a slave or a starving medieval peasant, therefore I should be happy to waste my life in an office generating shareholder value. Got it.
Go and work for a company that gives more about other stakeholders, you see that often with smaller companies.
Oh I’m actually quite happy with my own job in the public sector. It’s varied and at times challenging work that benefits society as a whole. The pay isn’t all that much, but we’re talking about fulfillment here not salaries. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, I posess empathy and the knowledge that most aren’t as lucky. Companies either grow or die, so massive faceless corporations provide a large and growing share of all employment. And it doesn’t even need to be a big corp for the job to be a bs job.
Save some straw for the animals, geez
How is that a strawman? Sure life could be worse as you said, but life could also be a lot better. The meme takes no shots at the former claim, instead making fun of people who fail to imagine the latter. Talking about how we already live in relative luxury is also a very common deflection from arguments for why we should improve society, without actually countering said arguments.
It’s a straw man because nobody said you should be happy wasting your life away in an office generating shareholder value. It’s possible to appreciate the good things we have whilst still being critical of the system we are in. I personally disagree with the other commenters implication that capitalism is to thank for these things but that’s a whole other discussion.
Usually when people call anything a luxury, the implication is that it’s something to be happy about. Given that the meme is about wasting ones life away in an office generating shareholder value, I would say that that’s the it here.
My reading of the comment was that the luxury being referred to was the fact that it’s indoors, access to clean water, music etc. Nobody said slaving away for shareholder value is a luxury. My point is these are important non black and white issues and to have a proper conversation about them we need to engage with what people actually say. Otherwise what’s the point of even commenting here?
it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury
being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had
Hell, if you’re in this situation you have immediate and convenient access to potable water in your living space. This is a level of privilege beyond almost every other human that has lived in all of history.
Man I already hate it when I can’t drink water out of the tap when I am travelling abroad.
Ya, totally. You make an obvious point.
The only problem with that is that almost all of the humans that have ever existed … exist right now. Until we mastered this planet, there were very very few of us. We are now the most numerous mammal on the planet, and that’s by a far degree. There’s more of us than there are rats.Yeah but most humans didn’t have to live around cars. I’d give up running water to get rid of cars. Cars are worse than running water is good. Sign me up for carrying barrels from the river if I don’t need to worry about being run over.
How much experience do you have with third world conditions? I would tend to assume from what you are saying that you’ve never seen what a lack of sanitation does to a society.
But you might be well familiar with all of this … and just like it?Not the person who you replied to, but if you could trade all the cars in the world to go back to using rainwater to shower/flush toilets and buy drink water I think we should take that deal.
It has already been proven countless times that having walkable/bikeable cities with the adition of public transport is better for our health and the environment. Most countries don’t even have drinkable water out of the tap anyway.
The only issue is that it doesn’t rain enough in a lot of countries to keep up with our water usage for showering/flushing toilets, but infrastructure to move water is as old as the Roman’s, so we would find a way again.
My friend, we have a way. Many ways. We don’t need to find one. But we keep doing that too.
You are proposing civil engineering projects to deliver water to the people. Yes, that is how we do it.
The other fine contributor to this discussion posited dragging barrels of water from the river as if that would be a good thing. This is a perspective that I cannot support.Yes I know we have plenty of ways to get water from A to B, but that isn’t my point.
I am just saying that this hypothetical depends on what we would be giving up. If we can still live our lives, but we have to get water from the store instead of from the tap, I would be fine with it.
Car’s are a necessary evil at the moment, and we need to change that, sadly there are a lot of people in countries like the US or Canada who actively work against biking, walking and public infrastructure.
“We need to remove the bike lanes because the fire engine can’t get to point C quickly enough” meanwhile in NL they just drive over the bike lanes to get to D even quicker …
