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The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

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Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#31

Post by mordae »

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

Hahaha, perhaps we are all waiting for the shit to actually get real for a change. After decades of being squeezed out from all relevant games.

Come on, make zombies... Or something.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#32

Post by mordae »

newsclues wrote: post #27
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…

Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.

As are the people who assume revolution means killing or taking.

I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#33

Post by badpun »

jesuscript wrote: post #30
hgomersall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipula…

It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#35

Post by badpun »

mordae wrote: post #32
newsclues wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.

As are the people who assume revolution means killing or taking. I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.

I can’t imagine that. It would require tremendous amounts of global voluntart coordination and discipline, all happening in a bottom-up fashion. Humanity is hopelessly bad at this, that’s why all significant revolutions were imposed via force and not peacefully.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#36

Post by badpun »

Xcelerate wrote: post #12

The fact that money and wealth (and apparently housing) are a “game” is rather depressing, but to some extent it’s always been that way. At least it seems like we are (maybe?) moving in the direction of addressing the problem via political efforts to reduce financial volatility and wealth inequality. As the article mentions, money nihilism quickly gives way to other forms of nihilism when that other thing is less abs…

As a billionaire, you could inject billions into research on your specific condition and have reasonable expectation that something will come out of it within your lifetime.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#37

Post by [deleted] »

badpun wrote: post #33
jesuscript wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipula…

It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.

[deleted]

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#38

Post by guerrilla »

eole666 wrote: post #29
guerrilla wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if billionaire's stopped wanting to earn more and more money, the economy would likely crash... No, this is incorrect. It doesn't matter who owns the stock as long as someone does. It's irrelevant if one person owns the stock or it's distributed equally among workers (or something in between.) The incentives are the same. In fact, distributing stock more widely could lead to better decision makin…

Well I do agree and hope that this will happen some day. And it will be nice that once the stock is distributed more equally, we get other goals than economic growth, like preserving the planet, eradicating poverty, stop producing useless things and creating bullshit jobs to lower the unemployment rate. But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me th…

> But for now the stocks are mostly owned by rich people who want to get richer not matter what and it seems to me that the whole market is so used to that, that it would take a radical system change to make it happen without the economy as we know it crashing hard.

I don't know that it needs to be an instantaneous change. Something gradual could work, at least in theory. On the other hand, I think we need to do something not just for reasons of justice but rather we need to internalize a lot of these externalities just for survival, which wider ownership would naturally do.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#39

Post by onos »

badpun wrote: post #33
jesuscript wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipula…

It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.

I think this is a good challenge. But also nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#40

Post by xyzelement »

bulgur wrote: post #34

[dead]

Comrade, I strongly encourage you to speak to people who grew up outside of capitalism (like me, born in the USSR, in 1981) if you want to talk about intolerable lives.

Capitalism gives you a chance. It is your perverse defeated attitude that prevents you from even trying. So you complain about outcomes.

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