Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
I feel the same but if I look back, there are just as much problems as now. I think that is because the ‘now’ is always more intense than the past events. Just think about it, do you remember every sad day or fight that you had in the past? Hopefully not but you do remember it if it was in the last 7 days.
Some problems from the past are: The crime peak of the 90s. New York City had 2245 murders in 1990. Since 2012 it has not been over 500 per year.
Or take Gaza and Isreal. That region has been a war zone since forever but peaked in 2023,2024.
Or Ukraine. That has only been independent since 1991. Tension in eastern Europe is not new. What is new is that it has been stable for the last 30 years.
Fascism, wars, corruption, etc will come and go and will continue to do so.
Certainly, there is a grim atmosphere across many social platforms. Mainly, the last few days from my anecdotal experience.
Our wealth is taken, no one does anything.
Our health is taken, no one does anything.
Our privacy is taken, no one does anything.
Our voices are taken, no one does anything.
Our citizenships are taken, no one does anything.
The reason is apathy, which feeds inability, which feeds apathy, which feeds inability to do anything.
When our lives are taken, most people will be both ultimately unable and unwilling to do anything.
Even if people don’t know it outright, they feel it.
More than this, we feel a disappointment and a shame in our bones that can’t be shaken off because it is that outrageous and primal fear of losing anything more that drives our inaction, and so we feel ourselves to be cowards at our very core.
This is what grinds away at our souls daily.
When you eventually decide to do something, you will see you are no longer apathetic or unable. Your fears will begin to heal, and in this way it will save your soul. This is the power of courage. It is something you have to make for yourself, but hope is what drives it and hope is given.
I think apathy is a part of it, but its not that people shrug and arent moved by whats happening. They dont have anything meaningful or tolerable they can do about anything
Yes, I suppose I could have worded it better, but what I intend to say is that because people can do seemingly nothing (are prevented, or feel as though they will find no meaningful result from their effort), they figure there is no reason to try to do anything in the first place.
I don’t mean to say that they shrug anything off or are not moved. Quite the opposite actually.
Username checks out
You may be right, but I’m not sure which comparisons you are making specifically and am interested to hear what they are if you are interested in explaining them to me.
Honestly it was just a vibes thing. Golden because I agree with you and think it’s an important perspective, and zealot because of your almost religious manner of speaking. You’d make a good orator.
I see, thank you!
I keep having this and similar conversations with my wife and my friends and family …
The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.
The only difference is that us in the rich west have been recently affected and are facing a near future where our comfort and freedoms are going to be affected. We are starting to feel what the rest of the world has been feeling for a long, long time.
I say all this from the perspective of an Indigenous Canadian because I grew up poor and in a circumstance where me and my family were always made to feel less than the rest of the Canada.
The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.
On one hand, there is absolutely harsh struggle around the world for the vast majority of the world.
On the other hand, it’s not as if most people are never in a good mood. Australia’s state broadcaster (ABC) had a show where people in small or disadvantaged groups answer anonymous questions, and when it came to Sudanese Australian refugees, a few were saying that life in Sudan was often happier despite their material struggles. IIRC a main part was that they had a collective culture, in some places outside of the cities even a communal village culture, and where good fortune was cause for celebration. Some contrasted that with our largely individualist, money-centric culture here.
All that to say, money doesn’t buy happiness, poverty doesn’t guarantee sadness. Money and other resources really really help, but it’s far from the whole picture.
True there are different types of poor and different types of people that see life as completely normal in any circumstances. We are all very adaptable creatures in whatever situation you place us in.
I grew up poor and I didn’t know it for about the first 10/15 years of my life. We had enough food but it was just that … enough … we never had extras, no snacks, no guilty pleasures. I have good teeth because I didn’t have the opportunity to eat a lot of junk food when I was younger which then led me to not really want it when I got older.
A lot of people around me were the same or similar … it was just the way things were and we were more or less just happy and content with it all. It was normal so there was nothing too upsetting about it. Unfortunately, not all families were as capable as ours. In a community full of people in the same boat, about half couldn’t do it and they fell into extreme poverty, addictions, bad health and just generally miserable lives. Then in my life, I started venturing out into the world and saw how wealthy everyone else was and I wanted to do the same but as a brown skinned Native person, the entire game was rigged against me … I couldn’t get schooling, I couldn’t find work, I wasn’t wanted, I wasn’t needed and I was just different. I had to work really hard to get anything. People also claim that my school could have been paid for but it only works when you work the system and are connected to everyone and everything in that system … I wasn’t and I had to fight my own leadership, my own community and the non-Native government about everything in order to get anything done. I barely scraped by and found work on my own, made a bit of money and barely made it to become an adult. Of all the family and friends I grew up that were like me … I think only about a quarter of us made it to something, a handful got post secondary and became lawyers and doctors or something important and the majority of the rest just ended up at home in varying levels of poverty from just getting by to literally living on the streets with small children. All in a situation where it is believed that we Native people get free money and have the world handed to us.
Money may not buy happiness but it sure helps and no matter how you frame it, poverty makes everything harder to do.
I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).
Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.
Yeah this is pretty much what I’m doing. My subscriptions are pretty much spaces about my interests that post positive content, and even then I filter out keywords for the bullshit that leaks in. Trying to spend more time reading books and unplugging from the internet. It still feels so hard to avoid the depressing bullshit though.
Climate change is getting worse and the world in general is sliding into fascism. The odds of things getting better in our lifetimes is very low. I’m only happy when I’m focusing on what’s around me and not the big picture, because the big picture is bleak.
I agree that things are bleak. I also try to focus on practical, local things on which I can have a positive impact.
I’d like to think that some things will get better, and others will be less bleak.
Climate change is occurring quicker than we had hoped, but we are making progress towards mitigating the worst effects, even of that progress is slower than we had hoped.
It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.
What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions
Don’t know why you were downvoted but you’re absolutely right. We thought we were moving in the right direction, only to have the foundations blown out from under us.
Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.
To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.
Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.
Solidarity is the word, communists used and Americans banned. Without solidarity you get exactly the USA of today. A nation of egoists.
We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.
Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.
Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.
So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).
They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”
And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…
This was a very interesting read
Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!
You have put very well in words what i have been feeling for a long time.
“Theory of Baseless Forms” is a phrase i must remember. “I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…”
Yes, exactly, the world used to be a magical place, guided by magical principles, but nowadays everything is rationalized, superficial, and driven by the law of mass action (also called “economies of scale”).
There is no myth in the modern world, no story told except that of capitalism and endless greed, and the soul of people seems to be silent.
Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.
Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.
They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.
As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.
THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!
The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.
i see your point. i consider ideas to be like stars - they only shine in the darkness. our current world is so full of stress that we have no time to consider silent things anymore.
i think of “progress” and capitalism and the current system as an intense sunlight that burns us, but some are made for the night.
I would also point out that “greed” is the problem, not “egoism”.
Egoism is a healthy attitude to take care of yourself.
Greed is the unhealthy attitude to do so at other’s expense.
The problem is that meaningfully helping others often requires self-sacrifice. Solidarity is a shift in perspective, to extend the self around others and act in the collective interest.
Not just you. Lots of negative feeling going around. If I could put a word to what I saw today, it would be “grim”.
I dunno man, genocides and overtly fascist takeovers just have a shitty affect on the vibe.
We felt it last year. A building up of something. A sense of impending doom. Feelings of grim.
Things are worse especially with Trump making noises about using the American military to take resources. I don’t know who put the Panama canal and Greenland into his head but here we are. He is a guy who would do it too. Making us axis and not ally this go. That’s grim.
Pick and choose your outlets but don’t stick your head in the sand.
I don’t know who put the Panama canal and Greenland into his head
Seriously, it feels like he just crawled out of his basement full of bizarre obsessions.
Over 20 years ago I started to see the many problems with the world. Over the course of those ~20 years I saw more and more problems begin, none of them are ever resolved. There was a point where I believed I wouldn’t live long enough to see the full ramifications, but now it seems like those problems are compounding faster and faster.
every day that tub of elemental lead looks more and more delicious
Mercury. Be mad and dance at your own parties while everyone else loses their head.
wouldn’t you believe it, there’s a tub of mercury RIGHT NEXT to the lead!
please don’t tell the EPA
Rent is due in 11 days
God how I hate that I don’t know if that’s a diffuse model or by an actual artist. And we’re just at the start of this!
Thanks for sourcing it! I found it a long time ago and it definitely was not on Instagram when I found it.
Figured it represented the black dog of death, but it really does feel like this fucker is chasing me through time as my rent bill.
Month after month. Day after day. Every day, I run and run. But one day I won’t be fast enough, and it will catch me. And then I will be homeless (again).
Nice. Insta is blocking me though :/
Oof dat ui on mobile
Does matter tho?
What is Guts doing to that poor man
Gutting rent outta poor folk.
The whole world is indeed in a bad mood and the reason is we’re all addicted to social media, which makes people miserable.
It’s impossible to fully patrol one’s territory in cyberspace. That means our hippocampus never sends the “all clear” signal which would allow us to relax from fight or flight mode.
As a result, the entire population of humanity is in an unprecedented state of hypervigilance.
Buddy, I don’t have territory to patrol IRL. That’s why I pay to exist (rent) everywhere I go. Everything is temporary.
Meet the neighbors? Who cares! I’m moving at the end of my lease because rent is going up.
Sense of community? The one that refuses to solve the housing crisis with council housing?
Be patriotic for our shared nation state? You mean the country that spies on me legally and illegally? The country that relentlessly attacks me and my people via the war on drugs? It hungers for what few civil liberties we have left.
Escaping into the net, substance abuse and enjoying art is the only thing that gives me relief from existing in the shitter multiverse. The only thing that stops me from counting the moments I have left until I am abused by my shitty jobs.
Go outside to touch grass? Sorry, I don’t own the grass and it has a “keep off the grass” sign. Trespassers will be shot on sight.
@UltraGiGaGigantic
“Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving friends.”
I feel that too. Doesn’t seem like anything good is coming anytime soon, and it’s -25 with 150k winds outside where I live.
Well humanity is dying a little bit due to climate change.
