Ask Lemmy

Corporations. Stop giving them money any way possible.

Unchecked capitalism.

People aren't being held to account for doing or making shitty things

Because too many people wouldn’t vote for anything less than a perfect candidate.

And too many people wouldn’t vote for anything more than a rapist conman.

Not enough guillotines

This is the bad place.

We forgot we could regulate capitalism like we did 100 years go. Let's make taxes great again. Then take that money and pour it into education. If the states really want to control that, fine, that's a compromise that can probably still end up working out in the end.

"One bad apple spoils the bunch."

We have a lot of bad apples.

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.

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?

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.

We are losing the class war.

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.

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.

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.

Because the economic conditions of the modern world allow for tyranny and the people haven’t figured out that we need to unite and overthrow the tyrants to build a better society.

Because of the collapse of the USSR. It was the only thing scaring capitalists into giving something to the people.

We forgot to perform maintenance on everything.

We're in the late stage of capitalism.

I went back in time and farted on a puppy. Sorry. You really should have seen the original timeline. We had blimps, universal healthcare, and six seasons of Firefly

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.

Not everything is shit, we're just in a massive downturn, so all the things that suck are growing while all the things that rule are being downplayed.

There is still beauty in the world, and there is still hope. We just have to work together to make sure it isn't buried under all the shit we see day in and day out.

Depends on how you look at things.

Compare your life to the life of people 1 century ago, 2 centuries ago, etc…

News, social networks focus on shit. Lot of things improve. But news only focus on what is going wrong.

Lot if things are shit, but lot other things aren’t.

Private equity buying companies and sucking them dry to make a profit is also big factor

Because greed allows us to ignore the fact we aren't accounting for the limits of this planet. We get to use greed to justify complete moral abandon, which in today's world can be really damaging. A few people are getting rich atm by tearing the world apart, it won't lead to good things.

But our system isn't designed to communicate the good around you to you, it's the opposite pretty much. The good is there it just doesn't brag, or shout or mock. It's quiet but it spreads. But you know when is is gone. It is conspicuous in its absence

Because humans.

"As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." - Agent Smith, The Matrix (1999)

You might have depression

It was always shit. Now we just have technology that lets us see all of it.

There was always a genocide going on somewhere in the world. Cops always brutalized and killed people. The wealthy always exploited the poor. New diseases are always popping up and spreading. Politicians were always corrupt.

The internet tells us about all of it. We no longer have the bliss of ignorance.