Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
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alienation
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.
Just you. It’s easy to feel this way with depression honestly. I think it’s also what media you’re consuming.
Yeah, maybe time to go on a news diet. Just read my local paper online (one that’s reputable IMO) and then found something else to do. Not putting my head in the sand, just read the bad news once, processed it (or tried to), and then moved on to something else.
I would recommend you use an RSS reader and only curate exactly what you want. Can include news, YouTube, even lemmy.
Certainly a grim atmosphere across many social platforms. Mainly, the last few days from what I anecdotal experience.
For me, the grim outlook began when studios kept trying to cash in on the stories I loved, and continually ruined them. Games, TV, Movies. Enshittification started there, imo. It makes sense, really, for the product to be mediocre or even bad. And it makess sense why conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency. An efficiently made product is the worst possible version of the product that the market continues to accept.
conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency
They say they are, but their actions are the opposite.
I have such low standards for media these days that it doesn’t really phase me, and I get to be pleasantly surprised when something is good. I don’t really watch much TV outside of a few select shows that I throw on in the background, I’ve never been much of a gamer so I’m kinda glad I’m not really clued in to how bad it’s gotten, and with movies I’ll wait for a recommendation or just work through my server library of old and new. I think I’ve just kind of accepted media enshittification at this point and there’s already several lifetimes of great movies and books I’ve yet to experience that it’s no big loss, and anything truly awesome that comes along in the interim is a welcome light.
Agreed. IRL things seem the same as always.
They may seem as such to you. They don’t feel that way to everyone
Always. I can only speak for myself and those I see around me.
Now playing Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is Exactly The Same
The world may be ending, but I’ve still got work to do.
Not just you. Lots of negative feeling going around. If I could put a word to what I saw today, it would be “grim”.
A combination of both. More bad mood going around, impacting you and causing you to perceive things more negatively.
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.
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.
Not the whole world, but definitely the neoliberalized imperial core and its neocolonized vassal states.
This isn’t a case of viral, grassroots bad mood/fascist vibes. It’s the predictable result of grinding, late-stage/finance/monopoly capitalism, of zombie neoliberalism. Even the incorrigibly liberal Chris Hedges saw this coming fifteen years ago in his book, The Death of the Liberal Class.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. — Antonio Gramsci
So which people are just having a great time right now? /gen
Chinese people, for one https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
Which makes sense as their quality of life has been improving over recent decades while ours has been deteriorating.
I suppose that depends largely on which demographic you’re looking at in China, but its nice that there’s some good news
What the fuck did I just read?
A quote by Gramsci and a loosely sourced opinion on the decaying corpse of neo-liberalism in the imperial core
I’m fine.
Me too! People need to relax and stop doomscrolling so much.
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.
It helps me to remember that informed voters 50-70 years ago were people who read the papers. Not even regularly, just those who knew what was going on in the world on a regular basis. It is not normal or healthy to have a constant barrage of news and input - and more than that it’s not wrong to take a break from it. I had to learn that the hard way, that it’s okay to take a break, it doesn’t make you a bad person, that online is making you anxious. I folded in on myself, I had panic attacks, I couldn’t function - and I got help. That help helped me realize that I don’t have to shoulder this alone, I do not have to keep watching and listening. I’m informed, I know what’s going on, I know what happened today - but that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn my filters off either.
Crabs in a bucket has collided with fuck around and find out about climate chamge. It only gets worse from here.
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.
Solidarity is the word, communists used and Americans banned. Without solidarity you get exactly the USA of today. A nation of egoists.
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.
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.
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 Atheist, 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.
This was a very interesting read
Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!
alwayshasbeen.jpg
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.
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!
