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Going to need to rename this channel to “Lemmy Cumpost”
Oh man, that sucks.
I never understood my generation’s obsession with “growing up”
When it’s perceived as attainable, there’s a real appeal to joining the independent ownership class of professionals. Live in your own house, cultivate your own personal fortune, pursue your own career goals, hit those iconic milestones of adulthood that reward you with comfort and convenience and luxury.
Now that we’re here, all grown up and middle age, what do we do now?
I know quite a few people who still party, well into their fifties. But they also got the jump on family life early and saw their kids off to college years ago. They’re rich enough to work part time, go on vacations regularly, and enjoy nice food, a beautiful house, and various household luxuries.
I also know a few people who never stopped partying, straight out of college. I’ve got a friend who is a professional fire spinner at the Renaissance Festival. Perpetually broke couch surfer who regularly hooks up with girls half his age and never wakes up before noon, then pulls together just enough money to make it to the next Burning Man Festival and cash in on other people’s willingness to sponsor his spectacle.
Who is living better? Idk. I’m a desk jockey with a wife and a dog and a little guy of my own to take care of. And I’m happy for it. But I could have been just as happy under different circumstances. There’d just be trade-offs. You can’t help looking at the grass in the neighbor’s pasture and wondering “What if?”
Fuck Around
Find Out
Trying to explain lower back pain to a 20 year old.
Operation Epic Tendies
If you’ve stepped outside the US, you’ve seen a very different picture
Most of us will probably not live to see the end.
There is no “end” to live to see.
things are about to get a whole hell of a lot worse
I get this line every fucking day on here. It really seems to deny the reality of the post-industrial era. One of shrinking poverty, enormous surpluses, and a backbone of infrastructure that benefits the entire planet.
Like Kromptkin recognized over a century ago, we have already won as a society and a species. We just need to recognize it and dole out the winnings equitably. What Westerners see as a terrifying decline arrives just as much of the Eastern Bloc and the Global South are finally cashing in. And much of what Westerners dread is this equanimity - this international muscle enjoyed by nations not in the privileged Early Adopter group taking a slice of the pie they thought was always going to be theirs.
And even then it isn’t really bad news for Westerners in the aggregate, because so much of that pie was going to an elite plutocracy in their own backyards.
What people in the US and the UK and Germany and Japan are coming to terms with is the dead-weight loss of their own monarchies. Whether they choose to carry this baggage into the 22nd century will determine how they end up living. But the days of colonial extraction are closing. The Free Lunches paid for with the surplus labor of East Asia and West Africa are coming to an end.
climate change and pollution are legitimately unfixable problems in my opinion
The Late Devonian mass extinction was likely caused by the evolution of oxygen producing plants. This fundamentally altered the chemistry of the atmosphere and kicked off the Hangenberg event which is estimated to have killed half of all life in the world’s oceans and around a quarter of all life on dry land.
Incidentally, the sudden and massive spread of plant-life during this period is responsible for the rapid accrual of fossilized carbon that has become the fuel we’re currently killing one another to secure.
Everything else could hypothetically be fixed
We can’t ever really go back. We can update our social responses to climate-wide events. But industrialization isn’t just going to stop happening even if we check our fossil fuel consumption habit. Humanity’s propensity for engineering our surroundings to meet our comfort needs is an unstoppable evolutionary tendency. That’s not something we can ever “fix”. Pandora’s Box was opened millions of years ago. We’re going to have to play this hand out until we hit another ecological balancing point.
Its a slow burn.
“The world is ending” is easier to accept than “The world has always been a hard place and also I’m not getting any younger”.
Easier to believe you’ll live to see the end of the world than that the world will keep spinning without you.
The ultimate victory is living well.
I like Messiahs who aren’t dead.
One death is a tragedy.
14 million? A statistic.
It’s very funny to see Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines complain about China, given that China’s not the one that had a boot on their necks for the last 80 years.
Because I need oxygen to live and they’re the ones selling it.
:-/
Planned Obselence was pioneered nearly a century ago. You might have individual service reps or salesman with a soul. But no company has ever carried about more than profits.