Not a troll post. Why is everything shit?
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?
Well written, and exactly what I needed today, thank you sir.
It’s designed that way so that your work goes to others. That’s the base of all of the world’s problems.
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.
Not enough guillotines
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Maybe you’re depressed, maybe you’re looking in the wrong places for happiness, maybe you’re right, maybe something else…
Unchecked capitalism.
Yes. The US used to work to prevent and break up monopolies. This allowed some of the optimistic promises of capitalism to work. There was competition that worked to bring prices down and quality up.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed dozens of competing businesses merged to form conglomerates with little more than speed bumps from government to slow them down, presumably to line the pockets of the would be overseers.
We lost the competition that drove innovation. There’s little need to do anything to gain market share when there’s no real competition. Instead these mega corporations focus on efficiency to bring costs down, because they’re answering to shareholders now instead of consumers.
The result is supply chains have become fragile. One supply chain disruption results in a total shut down, because redundancies have been eliminated. When you have competition, you must have redundancies to ensure you can remain competitive. No need for that when you have no competitors.
Because of the collapse of the USSR. It was the only thing scaring capitalists into giving something to the people.
People aren’t being held to account for doing or making shitty things
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 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.
Hey hey hey, that’s autocratic megalomaniac rapist conman, can’t leave out his best stuff.
If everything I see in the news all the time makes me feel like the world is shit, well that’s just unhealthy.
So I’ve subscribed to some good news channels on YouTube, and I try to limit the amount of bad news that I digest.
Staying informed of what’s going on in the world is great, but not if it comes at the price of your sanity.
So read some good news, write a list of things you’re grateful for, take a walk in a park, meditate in the sun a bit, and remember that overall people are kind (free open source software exists, volunteering exists, food banks exist, etc).
This is the bad place.
Oh no what the fork?
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.
This, exactly.
Boomers grew up with a 91% top-tier tax rate.
Nobody ever paid that rate; anyone who was close to that line found some tax deductible way of spending their excess. That “tax deductible way of spending” was, ultimately, someone else’s paycheck.
Without that punitively-high top tier, there is no need for them to actually spend their excess income. They invest it, creating a debt owed back to them.
We tolerate this horseshit out of fear that “they’ll go away, and take the jobs with them”. Which won’t happen: When we restore our 91% top-tier tax rate, the rest of the world will follow.
“One bad apple spoils the bunch.”
We have a lot of bad apples.
This tree is “Oops, all bad apples!”
Sometimes the barrel is bad, not even the apples (eg. police)
Om a micro or meso level, there is still plenty of good to be found. Look there for your daily sanity check. If you only look at the macro level, you’ll just get more depressed.
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.
Second this. Macro level things are… not great. At home, our neighborhoods though, we can and do make a difference. Your friend group, your family, your close relations, those groups are the same as they were a year ago, and are worth being around. Yeah things are kind of shit right now. You can still go have a pint with your friends though. Or enjoy your favorite video game. Work on that hobby you’ve put off. We’ve been trained that buying is happiness - but you don’t need to spend a lot of money to be content. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what you have and improving your own neighborhood.
People will tell us to hate, and to divide, and I just refuse to. I’ve been going out on walks, saying hello to the neighbors, going to the local coffee shop and bar. Communities are worth building.
