Posted by redbell 9/14/2025
And yet those where the generations that by care and force of will eventually birthed ours.
Yes, it is a very scary time in the world right now. But it's not as scary as the Great Death, the Great Depression, or WWII and we were able to get from those to the prosperity that we have today.
That is my own RNT. If only there were a way to escape from this reality. Death, taxes and global population collapse while a huge proportion of the voting population loses their ability to do basic tasks while still clinging to political hegemony in the nations they destroy. What a great time to be alive.
Increase your time horizons to see things aren’t even close to as bad as they can be. Our lifetimes are a vapor.
What personally has me worried is the derivative and 2nd derivative. How much is my current comfort sustained purely because of the momentum of systems made possible less than a lifetime ago (post WW2 reconstruction). So ironically your comment induces more stress in me. The idea that just as recently as the 20th century, times that my grandparents were conscious for, that many people lived through that much suffering. To me it seems incredibly easy to end up right back there.
In this century everything was cut and privatised due to globalization, neoliberalism and the financial crises. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, social security is less, national healthcare keeps being cut. I don't care about getting rich but I do want to live my life without worry.
Go outside and interact with people.
There is enough “content” IRL or otherwise on this planet that is immeasurably beyond a single person experiencing that affords you the opportunity to choose the life you can live.
Teach yourself how to choose
It's (much) less work to obtain this info than other options (like walking to a store and buying a newspaper, or talking to your neighbor/friend, or doing a hobby instead).
That's my very quick take. Conserving energy once benefited us greatly, and now that feature is being used against us.
There is no profit in it. We've let corporations have far too much influence in our lives.
All the older generations found ways through. We'll find ways through.
As for finding ways through, I don’t believe that for even a moment. Why? Because we’re still struggling with those same issues.
There is no out. There is no through. Keep that can kicking down the road. That’s what we do.
At the turn of the last century 80 percent of the world was illiterate. In just a few generations the average Westerner has gone from subsistence farming to living in a nigh-indestructible air-conditioned box littered with supercomputers that let them transact financially and socially with billions of people around the world. We're living in completely uncharted territory and it isn't a huge leap to speculate that human brains aren't adapted for modern society. A few hundred years ago the average person's attention was devoted to pulling turnips out of the ground and hugging their family; now they must contend with high finance, complicated machinery, ever-evolving fashion and social mores, etc. The proliferation of smartphones and algorithmically-curated entertainment are merely accelerants of this trend.
Of course one must take the good with the bad. I'd rather have cool music and exotic cuisine than live in a lean-to in the woods, so my solution is twofold: I aggressively curate my interactions with media (no socials, no traditional news outlets, etc) and always try to keep in mind that most people in this world don't do this and are therefore in a constant state of cognitive exhaustion. When you consider how much more shit the average person has to deal with these days their negative behaviors suddenly become a lot more understandable.
I'm optimistic that the current wave of dopamine depletion pop pseudo-science will lead to substantial changes in our society's media literacy but that remains to be seen.
The screen thing has been going on for a century or more, whether that be the nonsense we have now or the nonsense we had when TV ruled the world, or the silver-screen before that.
Arguably the aftermath of 9/11 was crazier than what we have now, before that we had the joys of the Cold War, before that WW2 and, before that WW1. Right now, we still have whole cities getting razed off the map, but, in the WW2 days that was a daily occurence.
Everything must be destroyed for there to be a 'new ark'. This is the story with many a religion, and many a religion was founded in 'end times', hence there is this common eschatology. Normally there is some heaven-sent messiah character that magically fixes all the problems caused by man by undocumented means as part of this story. We even have some fundamentalists that want to blow up the world just to bring on this scenario, and you can't reason with these people.
The parties of the left and the right have died intellectually in the West. DJT is in the White House ruling by decree and tweet right now, which we can deal with. However, the Democrats and the Republicans are both as dead as a dodo, with it being the same in the USA's mini-me, the UK, where both Labour and the Conservatives are finished.
The secret services have successfully managed to nip in the bud anything that could be an alternative, in particular any eco-friendly save-the-earth ideology. That was easy for them to do, they just had to infiltrate whatever was going and present those guys as crazy. For an example, look at what happened to 'Extinction Rebellion' - they went extinct.
It is glass half-empty or glass half-full, and, if you want to look at it positively, the decks are getting well and truly cleared for something new, and the new does not necessarily mean a choice between a Hitler, a DJT, a benevolent dictator, Skynet or whomever the promised messiah is.
There are plenty of countries that have lived through terrible times to come out of it with a sensible grown adult taking the leadership role. I am loathed to provide examples of that because anyone that lifts millions out of poverty will be negatively portrayed in Western media, but there are examples today in Africa, South America and Asia.
However, one example I can give you is that of the post-war UK. Despite everything being destroyed, the post war Labour government built the health service, built the schools, built the houses and got the country back on its feet, with the accomplishments recognised by those today on both the left and the right. Sure, it has been decline all the way since then, but the bad guys didn't win and there was a 'new ark'.
Trust the process. The post 9/11 repetitive negative thinking, when every day had a colour-coded terror alert level led to moral and cognitive decline, with this excellent situation where left-right Western politics is dead, which is where we want to be for the new.
I've moved, in 6 month, from a pretty pro-OTAN, "liberal" point of view toward an anti-OTAN, anti-Atlantist position, and i think i'm right. I now would even vote for an anti-atlantist right wing party rather than for the left of center, pro-US party i've voted for before (well, since an anti-Atlantist left wing party exist, and despite its radicality, i will probably vote for them, but i'm now a single-issue voter, and my issue is how omnipresent the US is in our culture).
DJT made me realized i'm part of the problem, and now i can take steps to fix it.
One, figure out why you're "anti-Atlantist", and anti-defense pact. Two, think about how radicality created the US problems, and why you think radicalism is the answer in your case.
Yes, Europe needs to change its stance, but electing a "burn-it-to-the-ground" faction is not actually going to do this in a productive way.
As for the "omnipresence" of the US, that is and has always been a lot of individual choices more than a political choice. By all means, fixate less on the US yourself, but I promise you that trying to force that on others by electing a more authoritarian party will backfire spectacularly.
Soft power isn't countered by hard power. The two working counters are increased soft power on your own (i.e. a culture that's more attractive than US culture), or said soft-power self-reducing. You can trust DJT to achieve the latter.
You don't have to "cut ties". You have to learn to think on your own.
Do a mental experiment. Suppose that the US disappeared. What would Europe do differently?
I am curious about whether your model of how the current Administration in the U.S. has benefited various countries so strikingly includes the United States itself.
Bodies do not "benefit" from fever. A fever is a signal that pathogens have recently entered the body, and the body is desperately at work trying to kick them out again. If it fails, you die. The fever is a direct mirror of the inflammation caused by that fight.
So, yes, the current administration certainly caused a fever. And the only thing the US benefits from are the antibodies fighting that pathogen.
But outside of the freedom in how you spend whatever money you are able to 'earn', I'd argue that the Western model of life (i.e. work) is pretty damn authoritarian. It's entirely possible that people in the past felt that they had more freedom than they realistically do now.
edit: To the coward who down-voted me without deigning to engage in debate, here's some evidence that when empires (like the west) collapse it can improve the lives of the 99%: https://aeon.co/essays/the-great-myth-of-empire-collapse
From the site guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
The period we are living through is a time of rapid technological change, whatever you want to call it, and suicide rates have been increasing for the past 25 years. Although I would take any studies and statistics on this with a large grain of salt I think it is not unreasonable to consider these things are related.
Considering the United States only for a moment; the distribution of national income has not been so unequal since the robber baron days. At the same time the visibility of wealth to make upward comparisons has never been greater due to complete permeation of media, both traditional and social. If my share of income in real dollars was slipping as is the case for many, while watching the .1% pocket it, I’d be pretty doggone dysphoric.
So, yeah, I'd rather carry on as we are than go back and live through it all over again.
It would be nice if our wellbeing increased monotonically but events (covid, the financial crisis, the war in Ukraine) get in the way.
There are constant attacks, backstabbing, sues, etc.
What if something else causes negative thinking and then in the long run cognitive decline...
...like... eating excessive amounts of carbs and seed oils while also having a sedentary lifestyle and no exposure to the sun.
[and/]or, a contributing factor to the rightward shift of Western society?
Noticing your own cognitive decline is bound to be depressing.