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COVID-19. People simply refused to do the absolute minimum to stop the spread of the virus. At least in my community, everyone was still socializing with friends and family (without a mask, of course), going out to eat, taking part in recreational activities with other people. Something as simple as “stay away from other people until we get this under control” was too hard for the American public. It certain changed my view of the people around me.
Same, it really bumped up my pessimism regarding people
Actions > Talk. They were telling you their true views. People rarely say the quiet part(their views) out loud so it is valuable to be able to translate their actions into their true views.
When you know how others truly feel, it allows you to decide who is worth listening to. Not to say you shouldn’t listen to people with different views, but instead decide whether they are telling you their beliefs or telling you what they think you want to hear(BSing you) and use that rate how trustworthy they are on the topic.
Haha I remember a talking head saying at the start that this could bring humanity closer together and I sat laughing in my couch for a minute
For me it definitely highlighted how many people in American society think they are the main character and fuck everyone else.
The 2008 bank bailouts. Watching our government spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out some unelected bankers who made some bad decisions and were “too big to fail (true)”. Watching them spend that money on bonuses for their execs, while none of them went to jail. Watching the social response to that (occupy) and then watching a coordinated federal crackdown of those protests across the country. And then watching bailouts happen again and again since then. Meanwhile in Iceland, they overthrew their government over it. The global financial system has deeply rooted flaws, and bailouts are an inevitability in it. We will inevitably, every so often, make another huge wealth transfer like that because so longs as lending exists, particularly private lending, and all banks are interconnected so that if one fails they all fail, there will always be bank runs and bailouts. Even the most well-intentioned bank cannot hedge against all risks and market shocks. And the government will just turn on the money printer every time it happens while you watch your hard-earned money lose its value.
I mean this is a pretty big one for most people, but march 2020 COVID lockdowns. My family and I were bunkered down like the family in the movie Signs, just trying to figure out what was going on and keeping each other safe.
Covid. I used to think people were basically good and caring, trying to do the right thing. I also used to think that everyone besides me was better at dealing with stress.
Turned out my life really is so bad that a global pandemic actually reduced my stress level. And when other people are stressed, they use that as an excuse to treat everyone else abominably. People are fundamentally selfish and self-centered. Kindness is at best a veneer for the vast majority.
Kindness is at best a veneer for the vast majority.
I admire your clarity of thought here.
The pandemic did reduce my stress level temporarily by getting me away from people pleasing behavior but it also made me feel kinda jaded about people for a while.
I like your username. How did you come up with it if you don’t mind sharing?
Thanks!
I really love analogies. People make fun of me for it, and I don’t even mind. I used to have friends play a game where one would name a random object, and another a random intangible and I’d have to come up with an analogy to explain the latter using the former.
All that follows is simply an opinion. Take everything with a grain of salt. Feel free to discuss.
Human are social creatures and relationships is a basic human need. Where I am from, the government enforced a curfew and stopped people from having relationships with their loved one. Stories of people dying alone or women giving birth alone.
When basic needs aren’t met, we revert to survival instincts and try to meet these needs. To me, that explains why people that were seemingly caring turned out to be dicks when their needs weren’t met.
Shitty people were going to be shitty anyways.
For people that need less social interactions, it feels like it’s fucking bonkers how people were getting desperate for social interactions and throwing caution to the wind. It felt like they were crazy.
Just like an hungry man in front of a plentiful buffet, these people tasted social interactions and told themselves never again!
It was a short time in history where less social people were better off than the rest. After covid brought a lot of tension because social persons clawed back at what was acquired by the less social people.
And to me, that explains a lot of what we saw and see right now.
And again, shitty people are gonna be shitty people regardless of the situation, so that observation doesn’t apply to them.
My needs have never been met. Never. Yet I have managed to not be a dick for decades.
I assure you that to someone else, you’ve been a dick without you knowing.
We judge ourselves by our intentions and the others by their actions. So it’s easy to point at everyone around being a dick without realising that in that moment, that person isn’t necessarily thinking that they are a dick.
And again, some people are really shitty people regardless of the situation. So it doesn’t apply to them.
I’m not taking about accidental or unconscious dickery. I’m talking about deliberately being an ass because you feel you have a right to it.
Do you think that the context matters then? Covid or not, these people are gonna be ass.
If you think that people were fundamentally bad and hiding behind a facade until covid, then I am not sure what there is to discuss.
I am not sure what you are trying to convey here.
Yes. I think people were fundamentally selfish and self-centered, and the minute they felt inconvenienced, they took it as an excuse to be assholes.
Before Covid, they didn’t feel the same pressure, so used kindness as social grease to benefit themselves. Covid proved that the average person’s kindness is less a character trait than a cost/benefit analysis.
I’m absolutely on Analogy’s side, as well.
I think where we disagree is that people were merely inconvenienced. Social relationships are a basic human need and there is a lot of ongoing research on the effects of social isolation caused by Covid.
And with that said, I don’t think I can change your mind on the covid situation.
I hope that you can find people that can and will meet your needs.
Let me offer a counterexample. I was in NYC on 9/11. I saw the first tower burning and I saw the second plane hit. I watched incredulously when they fell.
The entire city froze. It was the first and only time NYC went silent. No cars, no construction, no one yelling. There has to have been at least 5000 people packed into a large crowd outside of Penn station, but no one was shoving or yelling for them to open the doors.
NY actually stated like that for a while. It was surreal - it felt like a dream. But the city really did come together. People were more kind and helpful to strangers. They were more aware of their neighbors and their needs. People were handing out food and blankets on the streets, trying to get through the massive disruption. I saw no rioting, no crime surge despite the fact that emergency services were completely tied up.
Yes. People react differently to acute vs. chronic stress. I’ve seen it time and again. People are happy to help if it’s short-term. Then they get the feel-goods. But if there’s nothing in it for them, if they feel inconvenienced by ongoing suffering, charity dries up like tears in the Sahara. Very few are willing to be kind even when they don’t get to feel like a hero doing it.
GWB publicly condoning torture.
I grew up during the tail end of the cold war. Torture was something the Soviets did. We were better than that.
And sure, I knew the CIA did stuff like that under the table, but it was never OK.
It’s what got me interested in politics, and why I feel that we shouldn’t try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history. Knowing what we’re capable of is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the mistakes of the past.
we ‘shouldn’t’ try to hide the bad things we’ve done when we teach history
The keyword here is shouldn’t. Most people don’t do lots of things they should.
Not out of malice but simply laziness, it is a lot easier to just default to the norm and go on. Try comparing what should get done in politics(campaign promises) to what actually gets done in washington. In short what should happen and what actually happens are two different things in a lot of areas.
Snowden file leaks lead me down the path to privacy and to reading books like Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. Lead me down the path to degoogling and linux and now decentralized services like Lemmy.
It seems like every week some article comes out with big tech abusing their rights. This week was Philips hue and last week or so it was a mom getting 2 years in jail because Facebook gave up information about her giving abortion pills to her daughter.
I am using all these foss services myself and making my friends and family use them and be aware of these events. It’s a slow car crash and if people are apathetic and say “I have nothing to hide” and eventually “I have nothing to say”, soon we’ll be stripped of more rights until it’s too late.
“The cells of death row are filled with guys who had nothing to hide.” - Kenneth Eade
Snowden trully opened the world’s eyes bruv…
This sealed the deal for me and went FOSS
Microsoft using “off-shore” dns, like a druglord or something got me pretty annoyed, swallowed the linux pill whole! Bash scripting and all
- 9/11
- Bush v Gore
- GWB re-election (despite war, recession, etc.)
- Trump election
- COVID
All chipped away at notions of stability, fairness, and sanity.
Still have hope, but tend not to believe the hype so much.
For me it was when I was watching Soul with some friends and eventually came to some emotional realizations. I realized that I only had a superficial understanding of how to communicate. I could discuss ideas in the abstract, but I had trouble with expressing myself emotionally and personally because I was always conditioned to repress how I feel. I guess like 22 in the movie I only saw myself as a casual observer. It took a couple rewatches for me to process the difficult emotions I was feeling into something I could explain but when I did it really helped my overall mental outlook on life.
Trump
winninggetting carried by the EVs made me a bitter, jaded, hopeless husk. I lost faith in the republic, in america, in people, in common sense…I don’t know if I ever truly recovered.
Come to think of it, i’ve lived through at least two instances where the direct opposition of the public’s will have lead to death, suffering, and the collapse of represenative democracy: Bush v Gore, and the Trump Presidency. Odd how that’s a common trend.
COVID. Really never understood before how little of a shit the U.S. government has for its people. But they straight up let us fucking die while telling teenagers they needed to get back to work for minimum wage so they could get their shit Mcdildos and mochafuckaccinos and add gold spinning rims to their yachts. I can’t wait until these old fucks start dying off, I don’t care what political leanings they claim to have, we need a fuckin overhaul.
I dropped everything in my twenties to look after a dying family member.
Thought my family would support me when all was said and done. I left a very promising career to do this.
Everyone just kind of went their seperate ways and I almost ended up homeless. While my dad immediately found another woman, took all his money and fucked off.
I’m just starting to recover almost a decade later.
I’m kind these days, I think. But I’m not nice.
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For me, it wasn’t a global event, but a personal one. I had a conversation on reddit with a Texan piano teacher who had the fantasy of murdering and eating people. Her view was that if it was OK to kill any sentient beings, as there was no legitimate reason to draw a line between farmed animals and people. She argued her point well, and I couldn’t come up with a counterargument that didn’t also imply we shouldn’t eat animals.
It was a bizzare conversation, but it made me really reconsider my personal morals, and totally changed the path of my life.
So did you become a vegan or a cannibal?
Yes.
He loves carrot cake. The only problem is, Rob Schneider…is a carrot!
It’s funny that people can’t see this point, sometimes even when told to their faces. Logically, putting belief aside, you are either okay with some sort of cannibalism, murder and rape, or you should turn vegan.
Witnessing a downtown metro area go dead silent, years of ecological damage reversed and folding at home accidentally out computing the world’s fastest supercomputer in the first 2 weeks of 2020 lock downs and all it took was giving 10 days PTO to all non-essential workers (I was essential btw but yes I’ll fucking survive Starbucks being closed one fortnight a year)
Surely, people will see this as worthwhile and positive tradition and we’ll collectively decide to avoid commuting for 2 weeks every March; taking PTO if offered or job hopping at the new market rate created if not, right… Right…?
we’ll collectively decide
We don’t decide. We are coerced. When money is involved the CEOs decide and try to coerce us into their preferred decision.
Once computers went online. It was fascinating to experience in real time.
I got glasses. That definitely changed the way I saw things. Everything suddenly became more focused.
