Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
Certainly, there is a grim atmosphere across many social platforms. Mainly, the last few days from my anecdotal experience.
Agreed. IRL things seem the same as always.
Now playing Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is Exactly The Same
New NIN tour coming. Not much but its something
The world may be ending, but I’ve still got work to do.
They may seem as such to you. They don’t feel that way to everyone
Always. I can only speak for myself and those I see around me.
For me, the grim outlook began when studios kept trying to cash in on the stories I loved, and continually ruined them. Games, TV, Movies. Enshittification started there, imo. It makes sense, really, for the product to be mediocre or even bad. And it makess sense why conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency. An efficiently made product is the worst possible version of the product that the market continues to accept.
I have such low standards for media these days that it doesn’t really phase me, and I get to be pleasantly surprised when something is good. I don’t really watch much TV outside of a few select shows that I throw on in the background, I’ve never been much of a gamer so I’m kinda glad I’m not really clued in to how bad it’s gotten, and with movies I’ll wait for a recommendation or just work through my server library of old and new. I think I’ve just kind of accepted media enshittification at this point and there’s already several lifetimes of great movies and books I’ve yet to experience that it’s no big loss, and anything truly awesome that comes along in the interim is a welcome light.
conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency
They say they are, but their actions are the opposite.
Our wealth is taken, no one does anything.
Our health is taken, no one does anything.
Our privacy is taken, no one does anything.
Our voices are taken, no one does anything.
Our citizenships are taken, no one does anything.
The reason is apathy, which feeds inability, which feeds apathy, which feeds inability to do anything.
When our lives are taken, most people will be both ultimately unable and unwilling to do anything.
Even if people don’t know it outright, they feel it.
More than this, we feel a disappointment and a shame in our bones that can’t be shaken off because it is that outrageous and primal fear of losing anything more that drives our inaction, and so we feel ourselves to be cowards at our very core.
This is what grinds away at our souls daily.
When you eventually decide to do something, you will see you are no longer apathetic or unable. Your fears will begin to heal, and in this way it will save your soul. This is the power of courage. It is something you have to make for yourself, but hope is what drives it and hope is given.
I think apathy is a part of it, but its not that people shrug and arent moved by whats happening. They dont have anything meaningful or tolerable they can do about anything
Yes, I suppose I could have worded it better, but what I intend to say is that because people can do seemingly nothing (are prevented, or feel as though they will find no meaningful result from their effort), they figure there is no reason to try to do anything in the first place.
I don’t mean to say that they shrug anything off or are not moved. Quite the opposite actually.
Username checks out
You may be right, but I’m not sure which comparisons you are making specifically and am interested to hear what they are if you are interested in explaining them to me.
Honestly it was just a vibes thing. Golden because I agree with you and think it’s an important perspective, and zealot because of your almost religious manner of speaking. You’d make a good orator.
I see, thank you!
Just you. It’s easy to feel this way with depression honestly. I think it’s also what media you’re consuming.
Yeah, maybe time to go on a news diet. Just read my local paper online (one that’s reputable IMO) and then found something else to do. Not putting my head in the sand, just read the bad news once, processed it (or tried to), and then moved on to something else.
I would recommend you use an RSS reader and only curate exactly what you want. Can include news, YouTube, even lemmy.
You can find people in a good mood, but not on Lemmy :P
But what if I don’t want to go to a nazi rally?
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Seems like mostly just people in the west because western world order is now visibly collapsing.
America is not the Western world.
It does, however, control a lot of the Western World’s media, and there’s a clear agenda to make people frightened.
The US is at the centre of western world order. The rest of the west is tied to the states ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily. The global hegemony that the US created in the 90s is now starting to unravel and that’s having a negative economic impact on all western countries. Europe in particular has been hit very hard. And hence we’re seeing political discontent running all across the west.
Ah yes, middle earth
The EU countries had a chance to cleanly decouple from the USA and mostly continue being neocolonialist and subsidised in the same ways, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Probably could’ve corrected it with the correct diplomacy or just looking the other way. Now the integration with the USA has been strengthened and all the messaging needs to be slowly undone and pivoted if we don’t want to sink together. And even then no one will be able to trust us. Trust matters more for financial and service industries than it does for manufacturing economies.
Maybe USA in their stupidity will try to cut us loose, and we can be forced into a miraculous late pivot just in time. Israel’s genocide crusade was a perfect excuse to aggressively decouple, since by Oct 2023 it was obvious USA lost. But we didn’t take it, getting to be Nazi’s again was too nice a treat I guess. So it’s perfectly possible USA starts exploiting us worse, and we just decide to cope with a lowered vassal tier status rather than actually clawing back some sovereignty. And the obvious result of that of course is more allies and members will want their own sovereignty enforced, and will break with or be pushed out of the EU-unity, which will make the remaining partners even weaker.
It’s not just America. Look at the political climates in a lot of Europe, and there’s economic and housing crisis in much of the west, especially the anglosphere.
sound’s like a western leftist problem for me
alwayshasbeen.jpg
There is nothing to be optimistic about, so yes.
Plenty to be optimistic about…
Rent is due in 11 days
What is Guts doing to that poor man
Gutting rent outta poor folk.
God how I hate that I don’t know if that’s a diffuse model or by an actual artist. And we’re just at the start of this!
Nice. Insta is blocking me though :/
Thanks for sourcing it! I found it a long time ago and it definitely was not on Instagram when I found it.
Figured it represented the black dog of death, but it really does feel like this fucker is chasing me through time as my rent bill.
Month after month. Day after day. Every day, I run and run. But one day I won’t be fast enough, and it will catch me. And then I will be homeless (again).
Does matter tho?
Oof dat ui on mobile
Not the whole world, but definitely the neoliberalized imperial core and its neocolonized vassal states.
This isn’t a case of viral, grassroots bad mood/fascist vibes. It’s the predictable result of grinding, late-stage/finance/monopoly capitalism, of zombie neoliberalism. Even the incorrigibly liberal Chris Hedges saw this coming fifteen years ago in his book, The Death of the Liberal Class.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. — Antonio Gramsci
So which people are just having a great time right now? /gen
Chinese people, for one https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
Which makes sense as their quality of life has been improving over recent decades while ours has been deteriorating.
I suppose that depends largely on which demographic you’re looking at in China, but its nice that there’s some good news
What the fuck did I just read?
A quote by Gramsci and a loosely sourced opinion on the decaying corpse of neo-liberalism in the imperial core
Who are you referring to as “the whole world”, specifically? People on Lemmy? Leftists? Your friends IRL?
Well humanity is dying a little bit due to climate change.
It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.
What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions
Don’t know why you were downvoted but you’re absolutely right. We thought we were moving in the right direction, only to have the foundations blown out from under us.
Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.
To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.
Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.
Solidarity is the word, communists used and Americans banned. Without solidarity you get exactly the USA of today. A nation of egoists.
I would also point out that “greed” is the problem, not “egoism”.
Egoism is a healthy attitude to take care of yourself.
Greed is the unhealthy attitude to do so at other’s expense.
The problem is that meaningfully helping others often requires self-sacrifice. Solidarity is a shift in perspective, to extend the self around others and act in the collective interest.
We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.
Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.
Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.
So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).
They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”
And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…
This was a very interesting read
Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!
You have put very well in words what i have been feeling for a long time.
“Theory of Baseless Forms” is a phrase i must remember. “I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…”
Yes, exactly, the world used to be a magical place, guided by magical principles, but nowadays everything is rationalized, superficial, and driven by the law of mass action (also called “economies of scale”).
There is no myth in the modern world, no story told except that of capitalism and endless greed, and the soul of people seems to be silent.
Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.
Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.
They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.
As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.
THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!
The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.
Crabs in a bucket has collided with fuck around and find out about climate chamge. It only gets worse from here.
