Doesn’t sound like a massive loss, friend. People grow apart, even if they are your blood relatives. The family you choose is far more important, especially if your family gets angry and even writes you off at your lack of equivalent suffering. Americans are so weird about suffering being a positive, “character building” experience for its own sake.
I’m jealous of you btw, you did what I was too chickenshit to do and you reached the promised land.
This belongs in the lemmy version of r/ihadastroke
Probably because our society has chosen to live in service to our rigged economy, instead of having our economy as a tool to distribute goods and services for the benefit of society as it’s supposed to be.
I wake up every day for work knowing most of my labor will be used to enrich some assholes on Wall Street who consider peasants like me to be subhuman. I wake up every day for work for nothing more than survival so I don’t end up on a street corner, but beyond that, my work saps me of purpose.
That is why I imagine this as it is. Most of us are part of a vast underclass that exists solely to enrich the already rich that underpays us so we cannot even fund the hobbies we could derive any meaning from.
Gee, I wonder why so many struggle to find anything but sadness subsisting as exploited capital batteries for wealthy sociopaths.
Sigh
unzips
Its worse than that. A corporation starts a charity or gives 100k to one. Real nice right? Nope.
They will:
use that to decrease their tax burden, robbing the commons of their share of taxes to repair the infrastructure their semi-trucks and businesses disproportionately use and tear up, the public educated, pre-literate workforce they have access to, and then…
they ADVERTISE how noble they are, spending millions upon millions in ad buys to tell you what how awesome they are for donating that 100k. They use the guise of what is supposed to be giving with no expectation of return, ie “charity,” as a marketing strategy, and then…
They use such initiatives as lobbying tools to explain why their industry doesn’t need to be taxed to institutionally, societally address the issue that is currently subject to the transient whims of charity.
There is nothing a publically traded corporation does that isn’t done out of greed, that isn’t calculated to provide more return than dispursment. Nothing.
Charity with any expectation of return, beyond a warm fuzzy feeling inside, isn’t charity at all, but there is a word for it: a transaction.
That’s the thing though, the Republicans already broke that machine by refusing to consider Obama’s appointment, with no repurcussians of any kind.
At this point, obeying rules and norms and not doing what you can get away with in federal government to achieve your goals just makes you a sucker.
Don’t worry, Mr. Oligarch, the peasants will always be too busy tearing one another down over petty social issues that the economic prison you own causes or exacerbates by design.
Your division propaganda machine is working as intended. Half of the working class is so deluded and confused that they’d take a bullet for a “job creator” like you. In most of this prison camp, saying an unkind word about the owner class will be met with ignorant ridicule and scorn. You’re fine. You got us good.
If you want to worry, worry about the climate change your class caused wiping us all out. You can’t bribe, divide, trick, or bargain with that.
It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.
Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.
Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.
I will switch if something better comes along that is decentralized.
The profit motive poisons everything and turns it to shit. I won’t join a social again if it can be purchased to turn me into another metric on a spreadsheet for someone to sell.
Someone born to wealth can fuck around for years as a junkie, get sent to a luxury rehab with programs like equestrian therapy that is basically a stay at a luxury spa, and then waltz into a boardroom, bark orders, and collect millions of dollars they will then claim to have earned due to their strong work ethic.
Meanwhile a poor person that pursued a degree for a societally necessary profession like teaching or nursing only to find out that our society doesn’t value society and won’t pay them well enough to dig themselves out of trying to better themselves from the day they turned 18, and have at least half this ignorant, dipshit country condescend and blame them for their bad decisions.
Our incentive structures are perverse, and we root against our fellow citizens instead of cooperating and elevating one another like a society would. Honestly I’m glad the whole fucking system is mid-collapse. The pain of this collapse pales in the face of the generational servitude and misery this insatiable greed driven economy would inflict if it had found a way to persist.
A lot of class traitors will defend their lifelong, generational oligarch oppressors to defend that pathetic dopamine hit.
The oligarchs rule without end with 2 simple tricks:
Stoking social division between the peasants, ie abortion back and forth, civil rights back and forth, and…
making the labor class dependent on shallow social opiates, like for profit social media, to make them afraid that disrupting the system that crushes them will cost them that next shallow dopamine hit that is the only thing they have to look forward to.
Keep kicking at that football, Charlie
“Schools need to stop teaching my kids about how their crotches function! That’s the parent’s job!”
So when are you going to teach them?
“Fuck you! That would be uncomfortable so never! And if their ignorance gets them in trouble I will be there to condemn them for their mistakes and never let them forget it like any good parent!”
To me its tragic that the smartest human to exist in living memory had his societal, socialist worldview swept under the rug by the capitalist pigs. We acknowledge he laid the groundwork for our understanding of physical reality itself, but sure lets pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about with regard to improving our relatively simple by comparison exploitative inter-monkey social systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein
I mean, at least the first sentence is true, since we will have destroyed ourselves by then.
You don’t become a billionaire without being cool with exploiting people. Modern society rewards antisocial behavior.
We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.
It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.
Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.
Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.
Gold plated shithole for those of us unwilling to delude ourselves with that crap.