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Is everything falling apart?

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Re: Is everything falling apart?

#131

Post by bladegash »

goodpoint wrote: post #97
DaltonCoffee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

The quote is similar to "what does not kills you makes you stronger", easily disproven by polio. [For the nitpickers: I know, the statement depends on the context] But let's move on: what do you mean with "strong men"? If you mean some sociopath/callous/ruthless emperor or dictator capable of starting massive wars - it hardly constitute creating good times. If you mean men that are successful in current society... th…

> All modern pedagogy and psychology sciences indicate that hardships create a lot of broken people and a few hardened narcissists.

Really depends on who you ask in the field of psychology. There have been several perspectives contrary to what suggest (e.g., humanistic psychology, positive psychology, post traumatic growth, etc) and I don’t agree that “all modern pedagogy and psychology sciences” suggests that hardships yield nothing but broken people and narcissists.

However, I generally agree with the idea that sayings like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” are a bit silly (they ignore the fact that what doesn’t kill you can severely weaken you for life).

I just don’t think it’s particularly helpful to take things to the other extreme either.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#132

Post by machinevision »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #78
goatlover wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there can't be any civilizations in the universe which exist indefinitely? For the past millions or even billions of years? If humans get past the next couple of centuries and start spreading out into the solar system and possibly beyond, what would cause us to have a last generation?

This gets straight into realms of like eschatology and the sources of and constraints on life, areas in which I hold deeply unpopular beliefs compared to the norm here. The most neutral way I can phrase this is that I think life is a planetary expression, more or less fundamentally inseparable from the planet on which it emerges. We may eventually be able to break those bonds but I don't think we're anywhere near as…

Why do you feel we should not try? (genuinely curious in your PoV)

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#133

Post by shadowofneptune »

Shaddox wrote: post #46

I hope I am not being too inflammatory by saying this but it's ... quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country. Bosnia was about to be destroyed and more recently, attempted to be divided by neighbors and they're still fine. Look at anywhere that's not Americas or Western Europe.

I have never known anyone who lived in Bosnia in the 1980s, but I can imagine that the arguments over Yugoslavia's makeup might have felt like 'a little political tension' back then.

It's true that the US has a lot going for it. No enemies to its north or south, still the largest economy, high levels of education, etc. At the same time, standards of living have seen a large drop over the last two years. This appears to be intensifying the arguments over social issues, and increasing incitement to violence. What I see when I look at places that are not the Americas or Western Europe is that the peace and wealth people take for granted can be lost so easily.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#135

Post by titzer »

It's not that things are falling apart, it's that things are not being put back together. Complex societies have systems and mechanisms in them that require people to do a.) do their job and b.) hold others accountable. We're a uniquely distracted and lethargic generation obsessed with titillation, fantasy, and procrastination. Yet a lot of things require sober, deliberate work, and enforcing the rules. With the level of corruption in the US government--the level of open shirking of duties and outright lies, coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes, coupled with prolonged strategic malinvestment and a obvious debt bubble, we're in some serious hot water.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#136

Post by tejohnso »

jimbob45 wrote: post #57
the_other wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get to the next stop?

You wait for the market to cycle again - crash, boom, then crash, etc. Parent poster might have been in their 20s/30s though and implying that waiting for the next cycle would waste prime years of their life.

> waste prime years of their life.

I'm not sure that life is wasted, but I'd suggest financial opportunity is wasted.

You just can't reach the level of financial security that the previous generation could if that previous generation had a drastically lower cost of living relative to income for the first X years of their adult life. Especially as X approaches the length of your entire career.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#137

Post by implements »

lbj wrote: post #6

Quoted post unavailable.

> For millennia every human has known what a woman and a man is, now even supreme court justices in American don't know.

Oh, they do know - but it’s currently politically impossible for anyone other than the most fearless of iconoclast to say, as to declare oneself critical of innate gender identity being both real and far more socially significant than biological sex is possibly the worst heresy anyone can commit on social media at the moment.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#138

Post by throwaway602ee »

4ggr0 wrote: post #114
lbj wrote: post #6

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

Thank you for this comment.

It's so exhausting hearing constant anti-trans rhetoric from all sorts of places that any support at all is nice to see. I am so tired of being a scapegoat and it's becoming terrifying because it doesn't seem to be slowing down. If anything, it seems like the world is becoming less tolerant. I frequently wonder where I can move -- if anywhere -- where my existence will not be questioned regularly.

(You may say: avoid social media, but... it's really everywhere. I don't use social media except for Hacker News.)

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#139

Post by david927 »

I think there are two intersecting issues. The first is the dwindling of easy resources. The second half of the 20th century was so easy it was wasteful, and we don't want to give that up -- that abundance of resources, readily available and on the cheap.

But the bigger issue right now is the end of the US/NATO empire. It matches with the end of other empires like Rome: the spending, the inflation, the corruption and the splintering/partisanship, where groups hate other groups because they blame them for what's going on. They say, "if it wasn't for this group, or if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again," but in the end nothing was going to stop it. What goes up must come down.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#140

Post by NationalPark »

ravenstine wrote: post #111

Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart. In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to publi…

We have some relatively recent public polling data on this phenomenon: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/20/republicans...

For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well.

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