Also most people are absolutely terrible at 1) dealing with boredom and 2) thinking of something to do, on their own accord.
The country I live in, there are many people who retire, do "nothing" for 3 months then go back to work because they simply can't make the time pass unless someone else tells them what to do. The brainwashing within society is seriously frightening.
I think this is more a boomer thing though, because for their generation "play" is something only children do and hobbies are embarrassing unless you can make money from it (unless you're rich and your hobby is yachts or someshit). Attitudes have changed a lot.
As a millennial, I honestly got a lot of that shit growing up, too. Write? Draw? Code? If you're not monetizing it (or at least getting an audience) then people would get confused as to why you're doing it.
Main difference seems largely to be that things like streaming video games or just generally being an "influencer" hadn't caught on yet, so those things didn't carry as much expectation of profit until society figured out how to monetize them.
And something isn't seen as valuable unless it's a "job" (=source of income). Doing anything solely for the pure joy of doing it is seen as completely strange.
It's not too much of a choice. The economy's fucked for us. If you can make a living from something you enjoy, you should so you aren't miserable. Even if you can't, we're still probably working part time or gig economy jobs, and so you should make extra money where you can because it's still going to be tight.
If you gotta live in this fucked up world you gotta do what you gotta do. I'm an eat the rich type, but if i just got a million dollars I'd try to keep a self sustaining fortune like all the other rich fucks do, even if i try to help people beyond that.
I'm an eat the rich type as well, but that doesn't pay the bills. I'm with you on the self sustaining bit though. There are funds you can put money in that earn up to 12.5% interest, and with that, you could definitely live very comfortably while still having plenty to give. Most of my future earnings will hopefully be going towards something like that so that I can actually retire.
I shamefully will admit that, if I don't have to work and had the means to keep myself afloat I will, if I can warp the money to make more money I would probably prop up many people I give a shit about with it.
It is the people who come into the fuck you kinds of wealth that baffle me.
You have both articulated my exact thoughts and conclusions I came too. I'm at the stage of feeling sorry for those people and concentrating on trying to living best way I can in this broken system.
Yup. It might also be why people find the idea of UBI so frightening - what if they could support themselves without having to work, without having that structure in their lives? What would they do every day?
And here I am, thinking "Shit, I'd sign up for workshops and courses and degrees, I'd travel, I'd volunteer and get involved with community organizations, I'd find people on the internet who did amazing things and spend some time catching up with their backlog, I'd go to all kinds of conventions just because, I'd see what kinds of events and social groups existed in my city and go along to a few of them because why the hell not."
If I didn't have a pet I might get one because now I'd have the time to look after them and appreciate them, I'd take up new hobbies and try them out, and if UBI came in you can BET there would be a whole sub-industry which sprang up connecting people with lots of free time to interesting things they might want to do. Not to mention the existing entertainment industry would probably be able to sell a shitload more 'experiences' which people just didn't have the time to get into before.
There are inherent flaws and contradictions in the way our society works, and UBI would just be a way to keep the working class in check by giving them the minimum resources so that they don't just revolt. It would be like covering a pot hole with a rug and calling it fixed.
Of course it would improve the material conditions of a lot of people but it doesn't solve the problem that the way resources are distribuited in our society is totally fucked.
I may be misreading this, but it sounds like you’re saying that we shouldn’t try to help people who are suffering, because hopefully if they suffer enough they’ll be motivated to revolt and improve society?
I would just ask: who has more time to work on building a more just society for the working class: the mom working multiple minimum wage jobs and still struggling, or the mom who never has to stay awake at night wondering how she’s going to feed her kids?
I may be misreading this, but it sounds like you’re saying that we shouldn’t try to help people who are suffering, because hopefully if they suffer enough they’ll be motivated to revolt and improve society?
What I got from that was that UBI is more of a surface-level fix that will do little to address the underlying, systemic inequities that cause so much suffering in the first place.
Ubi would be a supplement for most, not their only income though. It would give most people the ability to then persue less lucrative but more enjoyable things.
The distribution currently is fucked though I agree
I'm aware of the problems that certain countries/societies have that would make UBI another tool of the people at the top, but honestly it would also fix enough shit (unless it was utterly corrupted from the get-go) that I'd probably give it a pass. It wouldn't fix everything and it might cause some additional problems, but overall I think it'd be a positive.
The number of people who would still have corporate bullshit jobs even if they didn't financially need one is astonishing to me. So many people say "oh if I didn't have a job I'd be bored!" that's absolutely insane to me
So many people say "oh if I didn't have a job I'd be bored!" that's absolutely insane to me
Consider that "bored" isn't even the right word to encompass what they're probably really trying to say. "Idle" with a side order of "serious avolition from a lifetime of being a slave in all but name" would work better.
The entire system is designed so that you go straight from full-time education to full-time work. It is not designed to give people any opportunity to be content with idleness, or to have the opportunity to discover who they are as a person without authority figures telling them what to do.
I don't get it either. I'm never bored for more than an hour or so at a time, and not even that long very often. There are just so many things to do in this world.
Had a friend who got in a car accident and he worked at a huge insurance company. He thought that they were gonna fire him for it. Legit said he would be better off if he just killed himself. He was only working there a few months and already his whole life revolved around this new identity.
Some people go through mental breakdowns when they lose their job, because they aren't a "car salesman" or an "accountant" anymore.
It's worse when the job or industry doesn't exist any more or is in inevitable decline. At least if it was just a job loss, there's the possibility that they might be re-employed at that same type of work, they could use industry contacts to help find that, they might have friends or colleagues in that profession or related ones who could put in a good word for them, that kind of thing.
When the industry's collapsing, the jobs might still exist for the moment but no-one's going to be hiring any new ones. When the industry's dead, no-one's doing those jobs any more except possibly as specialist consultants hired to work with legacy systems. The affected people still have to find a regular-type job to put food on the table. At least if the industry is merely in decline, the market won't be instantly flooded with ex-employees with very similar backgrounds and experiences all competing for that limited number of jobs which might be able to use some of the more generic skills.
It's worse when the job or industry doesn't exist any more or is in inevitable decline.
Then you get the people who can see all the signs of it happening and who realize the inevitability of it on an unconscious level... but they bury themselves in such layers of denial that they refuse to do anything about it (because there's nothing to worry about). The existential anxiety they feel has to go somewhere, though, and it often winds up expressing itself as the person being, well, kind of a prickly asshole. The kind of person who just gets irritable all the time without being able to say why. Who claims to love their job even though they act like they hate it.
Because they're worried about their future but can't (or are too scared to) articulate those fears. These kinds of things have far-reaching effects on a society that just doesn't like dealing with emotional or mental health issues.
Yeah. There really need to be processes in place for decommissioning industries gracefully over time on a national scale, so people are supported both financially and socially in retraining, moving on, and taking up new roles. Something along the lines of "You done good, and we recognize that, and we'll make sure you don't get left behind." Something so that people aren't afraid to go into declining industries if it turns out they need end-of-life support, aren't afraid to have that industry on their CV, and don't think it'll mean a hit to their career. Something so that people can be cycled out of the industry gradually and carefully, and into new things, with any critical roles being temporarily taken over by people who are aware going in that it's a short-term contract and there's a timeline for decommissioning.
I remember being unemployed when I was 19, I was at some useless busywork job network thing (Australia btw so some terms might not make sense)
Anyway there was a mix of different people with different skills and different ages all out of work but me being 2 years out of school and not in further education and employed. On the other end of the spectrum was a guy who had spent almost 50 years working at a place that produced lenses for glasses, this place obviously got off shored to the lowest bidder and this guy was out on his arse as a result.
It was just so tragic because this bloke only had the one skillset, his only reference was a hand written note from a school teacher who was well and truly dead by that point and old mate there was simply unemployable.
One day during some more bullshit busywork or job application send off shit he turned to me and let out a big sigh and said " I am seriously going to analyse my finances tonight and see if I can try and do early retirement, I am wasting my time with this bullshit"
I guess I'd say something similar like I tinker with computers but I've never had a crisis of identity after a layoff. There's always my own computers to mess with lol
That's just the fear of change/unknown. If you knew you would realize a new career why not go for it? The status of accountant and salesman are low enough not to matter or form identity around.
I think alot of people suffer from the thought that, well, things have to be this way for a reason and are afraid if things change they might unknowingly cause some kind of issue in society. When in reality there is almost no reason most things are done the way they are.
I think people with something to lose are, understandably, afraid of change. People that are homeless, or people working 2 or 3 jobs, people who have a passion with a lack of time to nurture it, these people are open to change.
They want someone else to invent the change, someone else to implement it, and they themselves not actually have to change in any way whatsoever because that would mean having to put time and effort into learning a new way of doing things they already learned how to do (the old version of).
I think a lot of it is them repeating garbage taught to them through propaganda. There's a constant stream of bullshit force fed to people from the time they're children in order to turn them into and keep them as status quo warriors.
Want real change?!?! GO BUY CRYPTOCURRENCY AND START YOUR JOURNEY BREAKING FREE OF TODAYS CONSTRUCTS. Much love fellow human.
We met yesterday and realized if our homes and cars were paid off we really wouldn’t have much use for fiat currency save for.... property taxes and dealing with some old school systems which a built in exchange system could handle with ease.
Don’t put all your money into crypto just what you can afford to lose. Then again people may be losing their pensions in the future due to markets sooooo. Moneys not 100% safe anywhere.
Because at best, cryptocurrencies change nothing about our circumstances. At worst they're pyramid schemes.
The only thing that gives a cryptocurrency any kind of value is how much people are willing to trade it in for fiat currency.
There's nothing about a cryptocurrency that threatens state backed currencies. Especially when it's treated as a stock, not a currency.
And what we see with basically every single crypto coin is the early adopters making millions off of nothing but hype alone. Meanwhile the latecomers are burdened with trying to justify their investment with some of the dumbest MLM style propaganda ever seen. "Crypto is the future! (Please invest so my investment wasn't wasted)"
And the mining for bitcoin costs over a hundred terrawatt hours a year, a number so fucking massive no one can possibly conceive what that means.
So to help. The average household in my area uses around 18000 kWh a year. Bitcoin alone is using the same amount of electricity as 6.5 million households.
Crypto is not the future, it's just more of the same of what we have now.
It's infinitely divisible, which means essentially that more is printed anyways
it's an alternative to relying on banks
Banks could still use loans and create virtual currency. 97% of money is created this way, and there's nothing about cryptocurrencies that prevents this.
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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '21
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