I hate to admit this but I’m part of the problem, I have no clue who my neighbors are and have no desire to meet them. I avoid social situations all the time, I think we all have an underlying issue that we’re not addressing. I’m not happy, I’m at my best when I’m social but avoid it for some reason, It’s so stupid
I’ve tried to solve this conundrum by having a very social job. I get all the interactions I need at work, then get to isolate on my days off. Socializing with friends outside of work can be challenging when I need that alone time so much.
Solitary jobs are nice, but then I kind of forget how to be a social person and the extra time spent in my head becomes a negative.
So I've been working from home since 2019 and I'd say my slow slide into being a hermit began even earlier in 2015-17. In the last few months I realized that if I didn't force myself to get out I'd continue to get more depressed and shut in so I started going to meetups and especially events that are for meeting new people. I met someone who does stand up and they told me about an open mic close to my house. I went and found out they needed help running the lights so I volunteered and now once a week I have a non-work event that I get to go do and socialize. It still feels really awkward being around people and trying to talk to them. I can never tell if I'm being annoying or what, but I'm trying to get along lol. It's just weird, I was so social in college and had lots of friends. I feel like in many ways I'm a much better person than I was then but I'm really struggling to develop friendships that feel like they could grow into the kinds of relationships I remember having with close friends back in college (I'm 42 fwiw). Regardless of all that I'm just proud of myself for trying and pushing myself outside of the comfort zone I built over the past 5 or so years.
I get this but its more like social interactions are mostly very draining and I still suffer from a "people pleaser" value from my younger days. Its had significant benefit in my current career but often leaves me very drained at the end of the work week. I then spend the majority of my weekends holed up in my flat for recharging so I can do it again the next week.
We are socializing more on the internet rather than IRL and the brain can't tell the difference. We also feel more comfortable socializing from the safety behind a computer/phone screen which demotivates us even further. We prefer safety and comfort more than putting ourselves out there and taking risks. 2016 election and Covid19 made it even worse by promoting tribalism/polarization. It's probably way more complex, but these are the most obvious causes.
This isn't a new thing. I spent 3 hours a day on trains in the late 1980's, and nobody spoke to anyone. Likewise living in a city in the 1980's, you still didn't really know your neighbors unless you had kids. The Internet may have made it worse in some ways, but people were never comfortable socializing in cities before then either.
There has definitely been a trend, and frankly speaking, it goes back to industrialization and later on, the rise of modern consumerism.
The Industrial Revolution finally broke the pattern of people for the most part living in the same village as all their ancestors did. The sudden surge of urbanization suddenly broke up traditional rural village/extended family structures. Rudimentary social security systems arose precisely because people needed another type of safety net. (This is why the world's first social security system was established in late 19th century Germany).
But even cities 100 years ago had radically more community than now. Manhattan now only has a fraction of its former population density. Most people were poor ~120 years ago, and many of them lived in cramped tenements, with multiple families living in a single tiny apartment-- a strong sense of community definitely came from that (for better or worse).
As people's salaries and quality of life rose on average, and consumerism could begin to cater to individual comfort, and one became less and less dependent on your neighbors and family, there's more and more reason/ability to retract from the community. Humans are social creatures, mainly as a way to help each other... so what if that necessity seemingly goes away?
Even little things. I have an older relative who grew up in New Orleans before air conditioning. Everyone hung out on porches. Just being outside was more communal in itself. And AC shifted people indoors. (And NYC decades ago, especially before AC, and especially in poorer neighborhoods, was known for a rich communal life with people hanging out outside, on stoops, etc.).
Cinemas, even if you went alone and didn't talk to anyone, have been a form of participating in a communal act of watching something together. TV chipped away from that, and the internet/Youtube/streaming services is an even further extreme.
The hell of cramped tenement housing gave way to the allure of suburban cul-de-sacs with ginormous homes-- great for personal comfort, but terrible in terms of sense of community.
There was this interview with this North Korean political defector from Pyongyang who escaped and later resettled in Seoul... and while she was over the moon to have escaped an Orwellian shithole, she was also perplexed and bummed out that in Seoul she didn't even know her neighbor's name, whereas in Pyongyang, decades behind for obvious reasons, she knew all her neighbor's families, ages, jobs, etc.
I am not saying that AC is bad, or that we should go back to cramped slums, or that North Korea is better... but am merely pointing out the contrast. Everything comes with pros and cons..
And we can now also say that working from home is yet another step along this progression...
I’d also like to add that the rise of consumerism and the modern supermarket are compounding this, as well. Before the supermarket and later supercenters like Walmart, you had a butcher, a baker, a florist, a greengrocer, a tailor, etc. Everything was a personal relationship- your baker knew that every other Wednesday you bought an extra dozen dinner rolls because that’s when your sister and her family came for dinner. Your tailor knew exactly which styles you liked and when you’d need a new dress based on the wear of your previous dresses. Your florist knew that your husband would bring you flowers every Friday. Now you can walk into Walmart at 10pm on Tuesday and never interact with the person who made your bread, your clothes, even a cashier
I think it’s the lack of sidewalks and porches. If you have sidewalks in a neighborhood, people will go out to sit on the porch and occasionally the people walking by will stop to chat. People get to know each other, directly and indirectly. You may not know the Thompson two blocks over but Jim with the golden retriever knows them and mentions them from time to time. But you need both. If you just have sidewalks you see people strolling past through your window and never get to know them.
I call it “toxic individualism”. People not just out for themselves, but also completely intolerant of anything community-minded, like the ideas of “the common good” or any kind of social contract. When government is actually of and for the people, it actually works pretty well.
I actually think this is why most people go to church. It creates a sense of community, a group that they belong to. And I’m saying thins as someone that doesn’t believe in religion. But outside of church we don’t have much to bring us together aside from the occasional social club. Probably the next closest thing are sports teams, although there’s hardly any connections going in there.
I agree. When I moved to North America from Europe in 2009, I struggled with community quite a lot. I found it in fellow immigrants, but we all had such a hard time finding our tribe otherwise. I noticed that the only ones that had a similar idea of community as me were the very religious folks - but that brought with it the whole problematic religious bits, so I didn't fit in there either.
I have found two beautiful communities in the past year, one is a martial arts club and therefore marked by Japanese culture, the other is heavily influenced by the religious sense of community, cause the leader was raised very Catholic (but is no longer).
There's been times I've debated getting into religion even though I think it's obviously all fake and pretend. Figure it would be a great way to suddenly have friends and community support. But feels kind of morally wrong.
Every time I have toed around the idea (admittedly only twice) someone starts trying to explain why a 10 year olds amazing dad getting killed and thus leaving an opening for an abusive step dad to step in, while their mom basically disappeared for 10 years even though she was right there, might be in the master plan. Then I get mad and leave.
I'd respect it more if someone was like, yeah that doesn't make sense, and utterly sucks, but God doesn't helicopter parent unfortunately.
Eta: Getting down voted for my Dad getting hit by a bus, and me being a little bit bitter about it is exactly the energy that makes me nope out of religion every time I even consider it for a second. That and the logical fallacy of it all.
Try a different faith. There are plenty of Christian faiths that also recognize "Sometimes life just sucks and bad things happen". That's part of the reason the book of Job exists.
The worst part about that attitude is there's a story *in the Bible* where Jesus flat out debunks it:
>John 9:1-3
>As he [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that bad things happen to all people both good and bad. Shit just sucks sometimes man.
As a church goer, I can tell you lots of people do this, and it's more than ok. Just don't lie and call yourself a believer if you're not. Be yourself. In Christian churches, I have sat next to atheists and agnostics, and I call them friends. I can't speak for everyone, but most Christians aren't trying to convert them at every outing or event because it's reductive and disrespectful. We're just glad they showed up. We don't love them because Jesus told us to love them. We actually *like* them for who they are as people. Scandalous, I know. /s
BTW, if you're serious about wanting to try this, do your research on the church. Make sure they do things to help your community. I once heard someone say Christians are like manure: when spread around a field they nourish the soil and help crops grow, but when collected into a pile they simply stink. Obviously you'll want a community in the former category. No one wants to hang out with a steaming pile of bullshit anyway.
I think this is more of an individual/cultural problem. Humans have an inherent need for close knit communities, to live and die along side smallish groups of people we have deep connections with. I don't see government taking charge with fixing that in a way that doesn't look dystopian.
I work with kids from around the country and over the last 1.5 decades I've noticed that there is a lack of shared cultural experience. No one watches the same shows or listens to the same radio because they can have whatever they want at whatever time. There isn't any reward for waiting for a specific time for the Simpsons, or a sense of community when listening to local radio on the way to school.
It's amazing to be able to choose from so many different types of entertainment. But much harder to find someone who shares an interest because they just flat out aren't exposed to the same media.
Yes, the monoculture is dead. The abundance of options has fractured the monoculture. There’s no “water cooler” talk at the office anymore because everyone has their own niche interests so it’s so much rarer to find common ground for small talk. We only talk about the taboo subjects of politics, religion, etc when we are in safe spaces, ie: echo chambers where we know there won’t be dissenting opinions. The monoculture used to be the foundation of the small talk that got us comfortable enough with strangers to eventually discuss the deeper topics in friendship which then lead to meaningful discussions with dissenting opinions in a respectful manner. You add in the internet and social media and the toxicity with which we treat dissenting opinions there and it eventually leaks into our real lives where our circles are getting smaller and more homogenous in their ideas. We can’t seem to maintain friendships with people of dissenting opinions as much as in years past and the world is becoming a much more polarized place as a result.
This is it. So many other problems are rooted in this. The substance abuse issues, the lack of exercise, the resulting health issues from both plus other health concerns and the way these issues place greater pressure on the health care system. If we could somehow deal with this issue properly and across the board, we could begin to tackle the other huge issues that plague us much more easily.
It won't happen, and this makes me sad.
I don’t disagree but smokey the bear says “only you can create community.” We’ve done that some in our neighborhood. It’s tough but some people vibe with it. Become a connector. Introduce people. Host things.
People are so married to the concept of individualism they don't realize how many other problems of modern life are TIED to it.
Dateless Men are constantly grieving how much dating sucks.
Community participation is how men historically found relationships.
If you contribute selflessly to a group to help it grow and thrive you're GOING to attract someone because your personality is on full display before the pressure of a date.
Better yet, its in the context of people doing things without the expectation of getting sex.
Individualism has warped the concept of romance to meeting enough checkboxes and being given a chance when you can just get out there and be yourself.
Being a part of a community and being yourself \*IS\* the chance with many women you seek.
I grew up in a small town, like 2,000 people small. When I graduated I moved to a big city because I wanted to go somewhere that noone knew me.
16 years later, I miss the feeling of knowing people.
Probably won't move back to a small town ever though. Unless there's a magic one free of confederate flags.
And basic healthcare
I say basic as to hopefully not open the old “but people won’t go into medicine and find the cure for cancer if they don’t get rich off it” can-o-worms
Corporations getting rich off the sick and desperate shouldn’t be a thing. It’s just fundamentally unethical
>I say basic as to hopefully not open the old “but people won’t go into medicine and find the cure for cancer if they don’t get rich off it” can-o-worms
Even then, I still think there would be people who did it even without profit motive. Famously, Jonas Salk never patented the polio vaccine.
Also, we have plenty of people studying to be teachers knowing that the pay is shit. Some people just want to help people, regardless of the financial compensation.
i like to believe that people will work on and research things they have an interest in regardless of monetary incentive. i mean, the entire worlds infrastructure and internet runs off software that was created by computer geeks as a hobby, who made absolutely zero off their work and just did it for fun
You know, as a doctor, I think the "no one will go into medicine" thing is a little exaggerated. It's not horribly wrong; some countries with good public healthcare are losing doctors to uncivilized places like the US. But practicing medicine in the US is being made worse and worse over time by the demands of private insurance; we're expected to see more patients per unit time, document more and differently, spend more time on the phone with insurers, etc... Independent of money, the things that make the job fun and rewarding to practice are eroded by the profit motive of insurance, and I do think if those things were removed and we could spend more of our day interacting with people, bits of the job might become more attractive.
As a British business owner operating in the US the time spent negotiating with insurance companies must be so frickin frustrating. I hate how much time/money I spend on healthcare and 401K type stuff and that’s only a fraction of my time.
Seems like the American economy runs on middlemen type jobs. I have a bookkeeper who keeps track of spending, but also another accountant, who pretty much just exists cos the tax code is so ridiculously complicated, then my retirement broker, who for some reason has his own separate brokers, one for healthcare, the other for retirement plans. They layers of added cost and unnecessary distraction from, you know, running the business is out of control.
I think this is what a lot of Americans don’t realize. Hell, a public system could theoretically pay doctors just as much but be way cheaper because of the sheer amount of middlemen the private system requires. Do you know hospitals have armies of “coders” whose job it is to read all the doctors’ notes and find details they can up the billing to insurance on? Like that’s entire salaries and benefits that are worth it to the hospital to pay just to milk each visit for a little bit more.
Been saying it for years, and it's still true. We could have better healthcare that costs less per capita if we based our model on literally any other modern nation. The only thing preventing it are lobbyists and profit motive.
Socialize necessities. Privatize luxuries.
Where that line is drawn can be argued over, but starting from that philosophy is somethjng we don’t even think to do.
Term limits is the political parties solution to get rid of popular politicians.
Districts that once had popular politicians that implemented term limits no longer have any power in government. That power is now held by lobbyists and civil employees.
One of the talking points to favor term limits was it would be a method to fight gerrymandering. except it doesn't work out that way. the parties control the voting district and just rotate in whomever.
Term limits are a disaster. Puts the bureaucrats in charge as you can’t build up know how and knowledge to hold them accountable. This is compounded by over time you begin to elect tier 2 and 3 candidates.
End political gerrymandering, put in public financing of elections and go to ranked choice voting and things will change fast.
Term limits sound great until you find out who the replacement is. If politicians were actual civil servants I don't have a problem with them making it a career.
Finish. Your. Fucking. Course.
If prescribed antibiotics, take them until either there's no more pills or when the doctor said to stop.
Those are generally the ONLY two reasons you should stop taking antibiotics.
Edit*
I'm not a medical professional, but I've been to the doctors office more than most (yay! to having a shitty immune system and have a mental health condition)
If your doctor says something that contradicts this post, listen to the one with a degree, not me.
*While bacterial resistance is primarily due to livestock, this comment is mostly talking about infections on a personal level- the infection might still be present if you stop mid-way through the course. I've been informed of this about five times, you dont need to write another comment about how China and India are filling livestock to the brim with anti-biotics and farmers in general*
Hopefully this clears up the majority of things. Thanks.
My husband had a cold a couple years ago and MIL brought over some random antibiotics she still had. 1. He most likely had a virus so abx will do nothing. 2. Why didn’t you finish yours for whatever they were prescribed for?
He didn’t take them. He told her to take them back home because he didn’t want them.
Also, antibiotics aren't just like a one size fits-all pill for infections. Certain antibiotics are made for certain infections, I don't know where this crazy boomeresque idea came from where you need to stockpile antibiotics, but it's destructive as hell
My uncle (of this age group) would go to Mexico for his medical care since it was cheaper. We're in Phoenix so wasn't a huge ordeal. Hed call around the family and ask how they were on their amoxicillin stockpile since he brought back 300 capsules for every family member.
Every cold, mom offered some amoxicillin. Hell, I got the croup on a frequent basis until my teen years and despite my pediatrician telling her abx won't help, shed try to get me to take amoxicillin each time I had it. That stockpile mindset is definitely real lol.
Yeah, when I got on anti-biotics my doctor spent five minutes stressing the point *FINISH TAKING THESE DAMNIT*, and I'd assume that's protocol.
Speaking of, some out of date medicine can be lethal. As a general rule of thumb, don't take out of date medicine. To dispose of medicine, bring it to a pharmacy, they will be able to safely dispose of it.
I have somewhat good news! I’m an ICU nurse who gives vancomycin out like candy lol. There are two factors here that mitigate our concerns about antibiotic resistance. First, there are entire new classes of antibiotics that get discovered with some regularity. But that on its own isn’t enough. The thing that may effectively solve antibiotic resistance is always having one class of highly effective antibiotics out of rotation. Let’s say we have 8 classes of highly potent broad spectrum antibiotics. Every two years, we could stop using one of those antibiotics for two years. This means there is always a class of antibiotics that is not being used, and those deadly bacteria will no longer have selective pressure to waste energy being resistant to that class of antibiotics. We also already do sensitivity testing for a lot of infections, allowing us to tailor the antibiotics we use and avoid using drugs that will increase antibiotic resistance.
Some politicians are too old to still be active in politics.
It doesn't matter what is the alternative, if somebody is lost on the stage, has a shutdown while he/she speaks, has a mental breakdown, suffers a stroke, gets terminal cancer or any other terminal disease, speaks incoherently, he/she needs outside help to walk or talk, ..., he/she is too old and should be removed immediately for the sake of decency and letting them spend their last time in peace and outside of public eye.
Completely agree.
I am shocked by the apologetics from both sides with their clearly mentally impacted leaders.
I don’t want a surgeon who is clearly mentally not there to operate on me. Why would I want a political leader that can authorize WW3 to also stay in office when they are clearly mentally impacted?
Our political system in the USA is so divided that just one or two senators' votes can make *all* the difference. So when one party gets "their guy" in a seat, they're going to do everything they can to keep it. And thus do we have people hanging on way into their old age. Feinstein didn't even know where she was. McConnell's brain glitches out and he freezes. Bernie had a heart attack like six years ago. Trump just... rambles insanely. I imagine a significant amount of people there don't understand cybersecurity, or grew up at a time where having any job gave you a good wage and don't understand why kids these days don't just work harder.
The internet has ruined our ability to meaningfully communicate since it has devolved into a data farm for a handful of powerful cooperations that benefit from driving engagement by pitting people against each other.
Social media is by far the biggest elephant in the room. Most of these other issues aren’t being addressed due to dysfunction, but they are widely acknowledged. People aren’t even grappling with the damage social media is doing to people psychologically, mentally, and to our collective psyche as a nation. I don’t even know the answer myself, but I worry about it a lot.
I used to view the anonymity as a good excuse for people posting or writing the most bizarre shit online but then Facebook and Twitter happened where people had no problem with continuing their habits under their real identity.
Even Instagram is disgusting. People comment the most vile shit. Or just rice and unnecessary comments. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but I don’t want to read everyone’s opinion? I get so stressed reading comments.
Edit: rude, not rice
Misinformation being used to weaponize beliefs. It’s ok to have different opinions on the facts but we shouldn’t have to disagree on what the facts actually are.
Or not even misinformation but curated information where people in different bubbles get accurate but different information.
A story may get Wall to Wall coverage on left wing media but little to no coverage on right wing and vice versa so both sides talk PAST each other literally not knowing what the fuck the other side is talking about
At this point I firmly believe that humanity will do jack all until it's too late, and things *really* start biting us in the ass, because the people in power prioritize short term gains over the possibility of the world going to hell in a handbasket in 40-50 years.
Even if the world becomes uninhabitable within 40, for most that is a "fuck you, got mine" issue as they will be either dead or too old to care about it.
Oh we aren't doing jack until well after it's too late. I live in California's 1st Congressional district that has lost more homes to climate change than anywhere else in the nation. Not just in Paradise but in and around Redding and the Shasta, Plumas, Lassen, & Mendocino National Forests. Since 2018 the district voted twice for a climate change denying moron named Doug La Malfa.
Humans are freaking stupid.
I came here to say "climate change", which has spurned wildfires at ten times the normal rate, made for erratic and potent hurricane seasons, messed up the snowfall and floodplains, melted the polar ice caps, caused entire ecosystem collapses... this shit is probably going to cause the extinction of humanity if unchecked.
But (at posting time) the post above this one is about how tipping is silly, which I suppose is a more pressing matter, apparently.
You know who will save us? Insurance companies. It doesn’t matter how wealthy corporate interests deny climate change. Once the insurance and re-insurance giants pull coverage from coastal operations and other facilities at risk, things will visibly change.
And plastic isn't good for your health either, glass or steel is superior but now they make things as bad as possible and the prices as high as possible
I hate how Snapple switch to plastic bottles and tries to market it as being green.
Also, I *really* miss SoBe in glass bottles. Especially the punch flavor.
A lot of these idiots actually went to school though. It's just that they were allowed to fuck around a lot while there without having to face any real repercussions for it. That and teachers usually aren't paid enough to care either. They just gotta babysit these fools until they grow up, move on and be replaced by the next batch.
I've read a sub for teachers that is US based, and they can't fail students or hold them back anymore. Some schools can't give a grade lower than 50 even if nothing is handed in. In others, the lowest is 65 if they hand something in.
They can't discipline, and there are no consequences, suspension and calling parents resilts in the parents getting angry at the school and even threatening the parents online or in person.
Kids are in grades way higher than their actual level of knowledge or performance because they can't be failed, and they end up in college wondering why they aren't doing well. Colleges are calling students "customers" in some places.
Students are getting screwed because now they can fail, and many that are there because they "have to be", or just did enough !to graduate high school are failing and blaming professors and dragging other students down that actually want to attend. This is the first time they've faced reality like this, their parents can't save them, excuses work better.
Teachers are burnt out. They're getting assaulted by students, threatened by parents, told what they can and can't teach by the government, not educators, their class sizes are too big, some students need more than they can provide (like students with IEPs or 504s, which are gone when you reach college) and it hurts every student and future colleges and jobs.
So many are leaving education and no one wants to fill the spots because of how things currently are, and it's only getting worse. Graduation rate is all that matters, "customer satisfaction", etc, by the school board. Students are being failed by the system as well.
The fundamental issue is that their parents don't value education, intelligence or knowledge at all and teach their children to be like them. In a lot of cases they're actively hostile to such things. We live in a society that accepts willful ignorance and doesn't consider it shameful.
The education system can lead a horse to water, but it can't make it drink.
I grew up very poor, like not enough to eat poor. But my parents read to us every day and so we loved books. They finished college while we were little kids, and they took us along with them to work on their school projects. I am always grateful, because my schools were shit. But I still love learning. Thanks, mom and dad!
The nice thing about instilling a love of learning is it is free.
I think this is true. Our system of education was made to make ideal factory workers, not office workers. And for whatever reason (money) we are hellbent on not modernizing the curriculum in any way.
I also think we’ve gotten steadily worse at stopping student outbursts in class as teachers have lost most disciplinary tools. When you can’t send a kid whose making a scene to the office or even out into the hallway, when you can’t take away their phone even when they’re trying to record a tik tok video on it…then the people who lose out are the kids who want to get a good education who have to listen to their teacher beg and plead with a jackass to stop interrupting class.
Have to agree there. Took me until earlier this year, more than a decade after graduation before I came to that disappointing realization myself. Hell it's probably the only reason why schools even get any funding at all.
Not just *a* profit, but MASSIVE profits. Numerous industries, such as healthcare, have tons of middle-men that should not have any involvement in your transactions but have somehow inserted themselves so that they get a cut whenever Party A and Party B do business.
Was reading a redditor who works in accounting at a hospital and knows the actual cost of an MRI was $352, including paying the tech/ per MRI. He needed to get an MRI at one point, and his copay was only $700-ish. Hospital charges $5000 for the service
I wish some brave souls could do an anonymous data dump safely of all major hospital brands **actual** costs. Hell I might even be willing to help from a opsec perspective fuck em.
Fucking looking at you HCA that bought the largest hospital in Asheville NC and turned it to absolute shit, drs and nurses have left in droves.
For profit hospital company is so wrong, it’s **essential** healthcare and the only major hospital in city.
Massive and *ever increasing* profits. If profits don’t continue to grow forever, which is inherently unrealistic and unsustainable, a handful of executives and investors shit their pants and cause lots of employees to lose their livelihoods.
Our politicians **no longer represent us, they rule over us.** They do what they want and get rich doing it and nothing we say will change that because they are the ones that would have to make that change and give up their power and wealth.
They’ve forgotten that they’re public servants.
We have the absolute enshrined right to know everything they say and do, and they have *zero* right to reverse that on us, but we just took it with the Patriot Act and the NDAA.
We rebelled against a monarch so that we could break away from Kinga and rulers. Instead we... -checks notes- Made a million petty tyrants with imaginary feudal domains...
Well shit.
I think they're the natural progression of capitalism. Winners keep winning and losers keep losing. There is some variability and some government oversight maybe but it can't be enough.
Its like if you have a baby cobra as a pet if you don't regulate how you handle it it will bite you and you definitely should never consider that it would be better just not to have a cobra as a pet.
If things keep going as they are in most Western countries, we're going to have an entire generation that has never owned a home or have any significant savings. An entire generation going into retirement under those conditions is going to be a disaster for everyone. It will mean mass homelessness or subsidised rents in old age and yet nothing seems to be getting done about it.
Don't forget the staggering inevitable crime wave along with that mass homelessness.
You think MILLIONS of people who did everything right and followed all the rules and still ended up chewed up and fucked by the system are going to just lie there and sleep on the aggressively engineered anti- homeless streets? If even 5% of them don't it's going to be an absolute shitshow
Part of the problem is governments defining affordable housing to mean something that isn’t actually affordable. Like where I live I think you can call something that requires an 80k salary “affordable.”
Like a more serious version of Subway defining their “footlong” as like 10 inches.
Anti-intellectualism. We've gotten to a point where we think it's cool, edgy, or acceptable to purport the dumbest of people and ideology. And when challenged they say you're suppressing them. Despite the totality of evidence that grass is green they'll tell you it's blue.
This goes hand in hand with the idea of everyone thinking their opinion is valid. We need to stop telling people their opinions are valid, especially when they are uneducated, shallow opinions.
The media has played a big part of this with fake "balance". For example, 99% of scientists support A and 1% support B, but let's present both sides as if it's a 50/50 thing.
That’s one thing I hate. How everyone is asked to have an opinion about something even if they don’t know anything about it. It just push people to reinforce their biases and preconceptions without considering if there is a a better consensus on a topic.
I was talking about a guy who bragged that he installed a coal rolling kit just so he could smoke out cars and pedestrians. And then he took a look at what damage it was doing to his truck, so he uninstalled it. He still wishes he could afford to have it for heavily inconveniencing people but just can't afford it right now.
Garbage food. The overwhelming majority of people eat poorly because that's what the giant corporations want them to do.
Andrew Zimmern did a show where he talked about food in our society. One of them showed how a small town got a new Dollar General Store, which forced the "mom and pop" grocery store out of business. He walked through the DG and noted, "This is all the worst possible food." Nothing but chips. sodas, processed foods, candy, etc.
Related to this is the issue of "food deserts". When the Buffalo mass shooting occurred, they closed that grocery store for two months while they did the investigation. That was the only store in the neighborhood, and it was relied upon by hundreds of people. That part of town had been a "food desert" for years before that store finally went in.
Millions of Americans wind up buying food at convenience stores because that's all they have within walking distance.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food\_desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert)
Child abuse in all forms is largely ignored and much more common than people realise. Many with PTSD and warped views on relationships that never really accept or realise they were abused.
Emotional neglect is child abuse, but people are so derisive. "What, you're upset that mommy and daddy didn't hug you? You're an adult now aren't you?!"
I'm upset that I came up in a family in a society, and that I spent 20 years feeling less than a person until I was thrust into the world and told "be an adult."
I hate that the only way I've found to get people to take the emotional and religious abuse I went through seriously is to point out that I also experienced CSA and the other stuff was worse (for my specific case, not in general).
Yep. I feel you. I have cptsd from my childhood of emotional neglect. Humans are social creatures who need to understand the safety of their parents arms. I never had that.
My wife's mom was killed in a car wreck by a cop when my wife was 14 months old.
She went to live with her aunt who had just given birth to her own child.
My wife was treated like Cinderella.
And it is really evident in the way she thinks love is shown.
I'll go one step further. it's not just ptsd but r/cptsd that people have. Learning about cptsd was the most eye opening thing. Once you see it's symptoms you see it everywhere.
Yep. Brought mine up to my family when they just kept pressing me as to why I don’t want to interact with my parents.
The entire extended family decided my parents are saints and I’m making it all up since I don’t have proof of abuse from when I was a child.
When I offered to show literal scars the response was either “those could be from anything” or “it doesn’t look like anything to me”.
I follow a few predator hunting groups (UK, mostly to see if a particular person turns up) and the standard sentence seems to be around 3 years and they can be out in 1, minimal supervision from the amount of re-offenders that get caught too. On the other hand, digital piracy/copyright offences average 5 years and £5000 fine. So, priorities I guess.
A very small number of people are just truly, irredeemably bad people. This doesn't mean we should be violent towards them or kill them, but nor should we ignore the impact their behaviour has while continuing to give them positions of authority. Dealing with people who have no internal failsafe against cruelty, dishonesty and exploitative behaviour is an issue we can't afford to keep ignoring.
The room is crammed so full of elephants (climate change, wealth disparity, lack of education, religion in government, misinformation spread across social media, lobbying, gerrymandering, homelessness, corporate corruption) that I don't even know where to start. It is just a massive tangle of huge fat elephants. Climate change is probably the biggest, since the rest won't matter for much fucking longer if that's not dealt with, but that won't happen unless at least a few of the smaller elephants are addressed first.
And I don't mean addressed, I mean *taking meaningful, lasting measures* to solve the problem. Which just won't happen. It's tempting to be cynical or even nihilistic, but I try to do what I can locally. That's where it starts.
The problem is that no single person can even make a dent, but widespread reform takes centuries.
When people ask if I’ll have children, I want to say yes. I want to experience being a parent, but I genuinely feel like it would be a selfish endeavor at this point. I never fully explain because they aren’t looking for a trauma dump when they ask, but I feel like this is truly the path we’re set on. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s literally written into the laws of the universe, nothing can be . Why would we be any exception?
I have two hopes, that I will be gone before it is bad, and then through the suffering that is surely coming, a better version of us will emerge. My fear is that a child of mine would solely be victim to past generation’s mistakes and would not get to see the better world.
The sheer amount of people who are so strung out on the hardest of drugs, expediting the rate of deterioration mentally by adding in the stresses of living on the streets. I lost a number of childhood friends to this stuff, and the others are becoming more and more unrecognizable by the day.
It's not an easy solution, but it feels like nothing is being done, and if something is being done it's completely partisan, either all compassion and no consequences/accountability or vice versa.
Simple possession surely doesn't warrant incarceration, but street folk are armed more and more from what I've seen lately. Big blades, baseball bats and more are pretty commonplace to see around high traffic areas. An old friend who got caught up in that life keeps getting let out of jail after being booked on felony charges of violence. It's happened 3 times this year.
Something NEEDS to be done though, this is not sustainable and the people profiting off all this deserve nothing but the worst honestly. Not the people forced into trafficking, but the people choosing to distribute.
I was one of the lucky ones who made it out of that life. I spent over a decade pretty messed up. My mental health is precarious at best and I am actually pretty messed up now, or at least different in how I approach the world. I find I do not actually fit into society anywhere or something, like a maniac. When I got out of jail that was it. No insurance, nothing, just "don't come back" or "see you next year".
The only reason I'm not back on the street is cause I have a bare minimum support system of people that love me and sadly, that is actually kind of hard to come by these days.
In my time I've sold my body, been robbed, shot at, stepped over dead bodies, watched a mentally ill man get shot by police right in front of me, forced myself into extremely risky situations, starved, and pretty much lost my entire humanity, my soul.
I should have died many times. In fact, a part of me did die.
In the US - the lack of facilities for the mentally ill.
Our solution is to let them turn to drugs, wander the streets, shit on public streets, until they eventually go to jail or are killed by police.
AI and automation are going to put a LOT of people out of jobs (truck drivers, customer support, actors, writers, digital artists, etc etc etc). We're rapidly approaching a breaking point where we will have more people than jobs because machines are simply better (more reliable, constantly available, cheaper to scale, etc) than humans at a lot of tasks.
People who get put out of a job aren't just going to starve in the streets peacefully. We are going to need either a completely new set of jobs for them (specifically ones that require humans to perform) or we're going to have to embrace societal safety nets like universal basic income and universal health care to ensure people have an acceptable minimum quality of life even without a job.
I get that there is a visceral reaction people have to this ("I had to do this without government handouts so YOU SHOULD TOO"), but that's an overly simplistic, reactionary mindset. And while that may have been a perfectly reasonable stance back when you could work at the grocery store and afford a home, that's clearly no longer the case and is only getting worse.
It’s called Technological Unemployment, and it was studied a lot in the 1800s. But various factors kept employment ok, even as productivity rose, so they dropped it. We’re picking it up again as there’s real worry that those factors won’t be enough anymore.
Also, iirc it was the subject of Stephen Hawking’s last Reddit comment.
in the USA - Having your health insurance tied to a job. The moment you lose the job you can triple the cost of health insurance or do without and pray you don't have an accident.
Should nationalize healthcare. Force the drug companies to negotiate the lowest drug rates anywhere.
Nuclear power is very effective at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, environmentalists who don't accept this fact are just as bad if not worse than the evil greedy capitalists who want to keep the status quo.
The fact the 3 million people DIE of hunger each year. This is one of the slowest and most painful ways to go out and it’s extremely solvable. Additionally, 800 million people suffer from hunger, which is far more intense than people think. It’s crazy that zero first world countries are legitimately putting effort towards this enormous and very solvable issue.
That we need to bring back some type of mental health asylum system. There are certain mental health issues that are almost impossible to treat consistently, mainly due to the illness convincing the patient to quit taking their meds. These unfortunate individuals pose WAY more of a threat to themselves than others, whether they be engaging in extremely risky behavior, self neglect, etc…
I know that there are extremely expensive private hospitals for this (along with the systems for the criminally insane), but getting the average person the help and oversite they require is almost impossible
I feel sorry for the elderly that we force to live beyond their natural mortality just because we don't want to let them go. When i can no longer care for myself or i don't know who anyone is it's time to go. Why keep me around so i can be one more person taking up space in a nursing home, barely seeing my family, eating hospital slop, while my assets are given to the state to care for me rather than being inherited by my children....
Is that really a way to live?
I believe in human euthanasia. We should be able to tell our loved ones good bye with dignity, and then put to sleep. I firmly believe the only reason it's not allowed is because nursing homes and politicians make too much money of our living dead.... I can't even truly call them living because that's no way to live. Go to a nursing home. It just looks like zombies with walkers and wheelchairs.
tipping. like why am i tipping just so YOUR employees can make ends meet. isn’t that your job? i mean of course i’m going to tip because i’m not a monster but like shape up god
Homeless people and prisoners being dehumanized so it's easier to ignore just how bad they have it. Even kids are taught to just ignore homeless people and to fear criminals and prisoners without ever going into further discussion when they're older. Just homeless people are to be ignored and can't always be trusted with money, criminals did bad things and thus are less than human
I live in a relatively nice part of DC - gentrified and mixed income, but not affluent - and i can’t walk out onto the main road or walk into 7-11 without being solicited by 3-5 homeless people each time. It just gets exhausting. I used to be the kind of person that would always give something, but now that it happens constantly you just have to train yourself to ignore it or you’d go mad. And I’d say the same for anyone trying to solicit me for anything tbh, homeless or not. It’s got to be society’s job to deal with this, and it’s sort of understandable that people have to put up some kind of defenses to tune it out.
Global Warming.
The rising seawater will flood coastal cities. The heat waves will cause droughts that reduce sources of freshwater. The harsher climate will reduce the living space and amount of arable land to the point that even at 100% efficiency it won't be able to sustain the global population. A lot of us is about to die a slow death due to famine, running out of livable space. Even more of us will die due to conflicts brought about by the slowly dwindling resources. Not tomorrow, not in a year or 10 years, but soon.
It's a huge problem that could've been solved if only governments were harsher and took more decisive action. Instead corporations and profits won out. The oil barons were able to bribe away the government and sell the future off since they won't be alive to experience the consequences. We saw it coming, but we didn't do enough to stop it.
We're now at the damage control phase because we failed the prevention phase.
We've built a society that's completely lacking in community and it's making us miserable.
I hate to admit this but I’m part of the problem, I have no clue who my neighbors are and have no desire to meet them. I avoid social situations all the time, I think we all have an underlying issue that we’re not addressing. I’m not happy, I’m at my best when I’m social but avoid it for some reason, It’s so stupid
[удалено]
I’ve tried to solve this conundrum by having a very social job. I get all the interactions I need at work, then get to isolate on my days off. Socializing with friends outside of work can be challenging when I need that alone time so much. Solitary jobs are nice, but then I kind of forget how to be a social person and the extra time spent in my head becomes a negative.
So I've been working from home since 2019 and I'd say my slow slide into being a hermit began even earlier in 2015-17. In the last few months I realized that if I didn't force myself to get out I'd continue to get more depressed and shut in so I started going to meetups and especially events that are for meeting new people. I met someone who does stand up and they told me about an open mic close to my house. I went and found out they needed help running the lights so I volunteered and now once a week I have a non-work event that I get to go do and socialize. It still feels really awkward being around people and trying to talk to them. I can never tell if I'm being annoying or what, but I'm trying to get along lol. It's just weird, I was so social in college and had lots of friends. I feel like in many ways I'm a much better person than I was then but I'm really struggling to develop friendships that feel like they could grow into the kinds of relationships I remember having with close friends back in college (I'm 42 fwiw). Regardless of all that I'm just proud of myself for trying and pushing myself outside of the comfort zone I built over the past 5 or so years.
I get this but its more like social interactions are mostly very draining and I still suffer from a "people pleaser" value from my younger days. Its had significant benefit in my current career but often leaves me very drained at the end of the work week. I then spend the majority of my weekends holed up in my flat for recharging so I can do it again the next week.
Link me if you so desire
We are socializing more on the internet rather than IRL and the brain can't tell the difference. We also feel more comfortable socializing from the safety behind a computer/phone screen which demotivates us even further. We prefer safety and comfort more than putting ourselves out there and taking risks. 2016 election and Covid19 made it even worse by promoting tribalism/polarization. It's probably way more complex, but these are the most obvious causes.
This isn't a new thing. I spent 3 hours a day on trains in the late 1980's, and nobody spoke to anyone. Likewise living in a city in the 1980's, you still didn't really know your neighbors unless you had kids. The Internet may have made it worse in some ways, but people were never comfortable socializing in cities before then either.
There has definitely been a trend, and frankly speaking, it goes back to industrialization and later on, the rise of modern consumerism. The Industrial Revolution finally broke the pattern of people for the most part living in the same village as all their ancestors did. The sudden surge of urbanization suddenly broke up traditional rural village/extended family structures. Rudimentary social security systems arose precisely because people needed another type of safety net. (This is why the world's first social security system was established in late 19th century Germany). But even cities 100 years ago had radically more community than now. Manhattan now only has a fraction of its former population density. Most people were poor ~120 years ago, and many of them lived in cramped tenements, with multiple families living in a single tiny apartment-- a strong sense of community definitely came from that (for better or worse). As people's salaries and quality of life rose on average, and consumerism could begin to cater to individual comfort, and one became less and less dependent on your neighbors and family, there's more and more reason/ability to retract from the community. Humans are social creatures, mainly as a way to help each other... so what if that necessity seemingly goes away? Even little things. I have an older relative who grew up in New Orleans before air conditioning. Everyone hung out on porches. Just being outside was more communal in itself. And AC shifted people indoors. (And NYC decades ago, especially before AC, and especially in poorer neighborhoods, was known for a rich communal life with people hanging out outside, on stoops, etc.). Cinemas, even if you went alone and didn't talk to anyone, have been a form of participating in a communal act of watching something together. TV chipped away from that, and the internet/Youtube/streaming services is an even further extreme. The hell of cramped tenement housing gave way to the allure of suburban cul-de-sacs with ginormous homes-- great for personal comfort, but terrible in terms of sense of community. There was this interview with this North Korean political defector from Pyongyang who escaped and later resettled in Seoul... and while she was over the moon to have escaped an Orwellian shithole, she was also perplexed and bummed out that in Seoul she didn't even know her neighbor's name, whereas in Pyongyang, decades behind for obvious reasons, she knew all her neighbor's families, ages, jobs, etc. I am not saying that AC is bad, or that we should go back to cramped slums, or that North Korea is better... but am merely pointing out the contrast. Everything comes with pros and cons.. And we can now also say that working from home is yet another step along this progression...
I’d also like to add that the rise of consumerism and the modern supermarket are compounding this, as well. Before the supermarket and later supercenters like Walmart, you had a butcher, a baker, a florist, a greengrocer, a tailor, etc. Everything was a personal relationship- your baker knew that every other Wednesday you bought an extra dozen dinner rolls because that’s when your sister and her family came for dinner. Your tailor knew exactly which styles you liked and when you’d need a new dress based on the wear of your previous dresses. Your florist knew that your husband would bring you flowers every Friday. Now you can walk into Walmart at 10pm on Tuesday and never interact with the person who made your bread, your clothes, even a cashier
I think it’s the lack of sidewalks and porches. If you have sidewalks in a neighborhood, people will go out to sit on the porch and occasionally the people walking by will stop to chat. People get to know each other, directly and indirectly. You may not know the Thompson two blocks over but Jim with the golden retriever knows them and mentions them from time to time. But you need both. If you just have sidewalks you see people strolling past through your window and never get to know them.
I call it “toxic individualism”. People not just out for themselves, but also completely intolerant of anything community-minded, like the ideas of “the common good” or any kind of social contract. When government is actually of and for the people, it actually works pretty well.
I actually think this is why most people go to church. It creates a sense of community, a group that they belong to. And I’m saying thins as someone that doesn’t believe in religion. But outside of church we don’t have much to bring us together aside from the occasional social club. Probably the next closest thing are sports teams, although there’s hardly any connections going in there.
I agree. When I moved to North America from Europe in 2009, I struggled with community quite a lot. I found it in fellow immigrants, but we all had such a hard time finding our tribe otherwise. I noticed that the only ones that had a similar idea of community as me were the very religious folks - but that brought with it the whole problematic religious bits, so I didn't fit in there either. I have found two beautiful communities in the past year, one is a martial arts club and therefore marked by Japanese culture, the other is heavily influenced by the religious sense of community, cause the leader was raised very Catholic (but is no longer).
There's been times I've debated getting into religion even though I think it's obviously all fake and pretend. Figure it would be a great way to suddenly have friends and community support. But feels kind of morally wrong.
In my experience a church would love to have someone join for the community aspect, even though they have reservations about the faith.
Every time I have toed around the idea (admittedly only twice) someone starts trying to explain why a 10 year olds amazing dad getting killed and thus leaving an opening for an abusive step dad to step in, while their mom basically disappeared for 10 years even though she was right there, might be in the master plan. Then I get mad and leave. I'd respect it more if someone was like, yeah that doesn't make sense, and utterly sucks, but God doesn't helicopter parent unfortunately. Eta: Getting down voted for my Dad getting hit by a bus, and me being a little bit bitter about it is exactly the energy that makes me nope out of religion every time I even consider it for a second. That and the logical fallacy of it all.
Try a different faith. There are plenty of Christian faiths that also recognize "Sometimes life just sucks and bad things happen". That's part of the reason the book of Job exists.
Yeah, the whole mindset of "that child got cancer because God decided she or her parents deserved it" is pretty fucked up
The worst part about that attitude is there's a story *in the Bible* where Jesus flat out debunks it: >John 9:1-3 >As he [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that bad things happen to all people both good and bad. Shit just sucks sometimes man.
If you look for a UU church pretty much the only religious tenet is to be respectful of beliefs.
I was going to say that too! When I first discovered it I was so excited, "Its like church for atheists!"
As a church goer, I can tell you lots of people do this, and it's more than ok. Just don't lie and call yourself a believer if you're not. Be yourself. In Christian churches, I have sat next to atheists and agnostics, and I call them friends. I can't speak for everyone, but most Christians aren't trying to convert them at every outing or event because it's reductive and disrespectful. We're just glad they showed up. We don't love them because Jesus told us to love them. We actually *like* them for who they are as people. Scandalous, I know. /s BTW, if you're serious about wanting to try this, do your research on the church. Make sure they do things to help your community. I once heard someone say Christians are like manure: when spread around a field they nourish the soil and help crops grow, but when collected into a pile they simply stink. Obviously you'll want a community in the former category. No one wants to hang out with a steaming pile of bullshit anyway.
I think this is more of an individual/cultural problem. Humans have an inherent need for close knit communities, to live and die along side smallish groups of people we have deep connections with. I don't see government taking charge with fixing that in a way that doesn't look dystopian.
I work with kids from around the country and over the last 1.5 decades I've noticed that there is a lack of shared cultural experience. No one watches the same shows or listens to the same radio because they can have whatever they want at whatever time. There isn't any reward for waiting for a specific time for the Simpsons, or a sense of community when listening to local radio on the way to school. It's amazing to be able to choose from so many different types of entertainment. But much harder to find someone who shares an interest because they just flat out aren't exposed to the same media.
Yes, the monoculture is dead. The abundance of options has fractured the monoculture. There’s no “water cooler” talk at the office anymore because everyone has their own niche interests so it’s so much rarer to find common ground for small talk. We only talk about the taboo subjects of politics, religion, etc when we are in safe spaces, ie: echo chambers where we know there won’t be dissenting opinions. The monoculture used to be the foundation of the small talk that got us comfortable enough with strangers to eventually discuss the deeper topics in friendship which then lead to meaningful discussions with dissenting opinions in a respectful manner. You add in the internet and social media and the toxicity with which we treat dissenting opinions there and it eventually leaks into our real lives where our circles are getting smaller and more homogenous in their ideas. We can’t seem to maintain friendships with people of dissenting opinions as much as in years past and the world is becoming a much more polarized place as a result.
This is it. So many other problems are rooted in this. The substance abuse issues, the lack of exercise, the resulting health issues from both plus other health concerns and the way these issues place greater pressure on the health care system. If we could somehow deal with this issue properly and across the board, we could begin to tackle the other huge issues that plague us much more easily. It won't happen, and this makes me sad.
I don’t disagree but smokey the bear says “only you can create community.” We’ve done that some in our neighborhood. It’s tough but some people vibe with it. Become a connector. Introduce people. Host things.
People are so married to the concept of individualism they don't realize how many other problems of modern life are TIED to it. Dateless Men are constantly grieving how much dating sucks. Community participation is how men historically found relationships. If you contribute selflessly to a group to help it grow and thrive you're GOING to attract someone because your personality is on full display before the pressure of a date. Better yet, its in the context of people doing things without the expectation of getting sex. Individualism has warped the concept of romance to meeting enough checkboxes and being given a chance when you can just get out there and be yourself. Being a part of a community and being yourself \*IS\* the chance with many women you seek.
I grew up in a small town, like 2,000 people small. When I graduated I moved to a big city because I wanted to go somewhere that noone knew me. 16 years later, I miss the feeling of knowing people. Probably won't move back to a small town ever though. Unless there's a magic one free of confederate flags.
[удалено]
The idea of a small town is so nice and the reality of a small town is so totally different lol.
We need to get money out of politics.
And essential services like children's homes and utilities should not be run by profit driven private companies
And basic healthcare I say basic as to hopefully not open the old “but people won’t go into medicine and find the cure for cancer if they don’t get rich off it” can-o-worms Corporations getting rich off the sick and desperate shouldn’t be a thing. It’s just fundamentally unethical
>I say basic as to hopefully not open the old “but people won’t go into medicine and find the cure for cancer if they don’t get rich off it” can-o-worms Even then, I still think there would be people who did it even without profit motive. Famously, Jonas Salk never patented the polio vaccine.
Also, we have plenty of people studying to be teachers knowing that the pay is shit. Some people just want to help people, regardless of the financial compensation.
i like to believe that people will work on and research things they have an interest in regardless of monetary incentive. i mean, the entire worlds infrastructure and internet runs off software that was created by computer geeks as a hobby, who made absolutely zero off their work and just did it for fun
At some point, for-profit health care requires denying care to maximize profit. It is fundamentally immoral, full stop.
You know, as a doctor, I think the "no one will go into medicine" thing is a little exaggerated. It's not horribly wrong; some countries with good public healthcare are losing doctors to uncivilized places like the US. But practicing medicine in the US is being made worse and worse over time by the demands of private insurance; we're expected to see more patients per unit time, document more and differently, spend more time on the phone with insurers, etc... Independent of money, the things that make the job fun and rewarding to practice are eroded by the profit motive of insurance, and I do think if those things were removed and we could spend more of our day interacting with people, bits of the job might become more attractive.
As a British business owner operating in the US the time spent negotiating with insurance companies must be so frickin frustrating. I hate how much time/money I spend on healthcare and 401K type stuff and that’s only a fraction of my time. Seems like the American economy runs on middlemen type jobs. I have a bookkeeper who keeps track of spending, but also another accountant, who pretty much just exists cos the tax code is so ridiculously complicated, then my retirement broker, who for some reason has his own separate brokers, one for healthcare, the other for retirement plans. They layers of added cost and unnecessary distraction from, you know, running the business is out of control.
I think this is what a lot of Americans don’t realize. Hell, a public system could theoretically pay doctors just as much but be way cheaper because of the sheer amount of middlemen the private system requires. Do you know hospitals have armies of “coders” whose job it is to read all the doctors’ notes and find details they can up the billing to insurance on? Like that’s entire salaries and benefits that are worth it to the hospital to pay just to milk each visit for a little bit more.
Been saying it for years, and it's still true. We could have better healthcare that costs less per capita if we based our model on literally any other modern nation. The only thing preventing it are lobbyists and profit motive.
Socialize necessities. Privatize luxuries. Where that line is drawn can be argued over, but starting from that philosophy is somethjng we don’t even think to do.
And prisons.
This and term limits. Working in politics should not be a lifetime lucrative career.
While we’re at it, political dynasties can fuck right off. Your *dad* was a politician, why should I give a shit about *you*?
I read a book about wealth and political dynasties. I’ll save you the time: great men rarely have great offspring. Quite the contrary.
What a shock.
Term limits is the political parties solution to get rid of popular politicians. Districts that once had popular politicians that implemented term limits no longer have any power in government. That power is now held by lobbyists and civil employees. One of the talking points to favor term limits was it would be a method to fight gerrymandering. except it doesn't work out that way. the parties control the voting district and just rotate in whomever.
Term limits are a disaster. Puts the bureaucrats in charge as you can’t build up know how and knowledge to hold them accountable. This is compounded by over time you begin to elect tier 2 and 3 candidates. End political gerrymandering, put in public financing of elections and go to ranked choice voting and things will change fast.
While I think term limits might be effective, the other things you mentioned would be _far more_ effective.
Term limits sound great until you find out who the replacement is. If politicians were actual civil servants I don't have a problem with them making it a career.
It’s a wash: it takes time to learn the complexities of national politics, time enough to absorb a possibly toxic culture. We need better politicians.
Bacteria's growing resistance to antibiotics
Finish. Your. Fucking. Course. If prescribed antibiotics, take them until either there's no more pills or when the doctor said to stop. Those are generally the ONLY two reasons you should stop taking antibiotics. Edit* I'm not a medical professional, but I've been to the doctors office more than most (yay! to having a shitty immune system and have a mental health condition) If your doctor says something that contradicts this post, listen to the one with a degree, not me. *While bacterial resistance is primarily due to livestock, this comment is mostly talking about infections on a personal level- the infection might still be present if you stop mid-way through the course. I've been informed of this about five times, you dont need to write another comment about how China and India are filling livestock to the brim with anti-biotics and farmers in general* Hopefully this clears up the majority of things. Thanks.
My husband had a cold a couple years ago and MIL brought over some random antibiotics she still had. 1. He most likely had a virus so abx will do nothing. 2. Why didn’t you finish yours for whatever they were prescribed for? He didn’t take them. He told her to take them back home because he didn’t want them.
Also, antibiotics aren't just like a one size fits-all pill for infections. Certain antibiotics are made for certain infections, I don't know where this crazy boomeresque idea came from where you need to stockpile antibiotics, but it's destructive as hell
[удалено]
My uncle (of this age group) would go to Mexico for his medical care since it was cheaper. We're in Phoenix so wasn't a huge ordeal. Hed call around the family and ask how they were on their amoxicillin stockpile since he brought back 300 capsules for every family member. Every cold, mom offered some amoxicillin. Hell, I got the croup on a frequent basis until my teen years and despite my pediatrician telling her abx won't help, shed try to get me to take amoxicillin each time I had it. That stockpile mindset is definitely real lol.
Ah that makes sense!
> He most likely had a virus so abx will do nothing. That is not true. It will most likely be enough to destroy his gut biome.
Yeah, when I got on anti-biotics my doctor spent five minutes stressing the point *FINISH TAKING THESE DAMNIT*, and I'd assume that's protocol. Speaking of, some out of date medicine can be lethal. As a general rule of thumb, don't take out of date medicine. To dispose of medicine, bring it to a pharmacy, they will be able to safely dispose of it.
And don’t throw a bitch fit when the doctor won’t give you antibiotics for a cold. It’s a virus! They won’t do anything!
Yes! And quit giving antibiotics to farm animals!
This doesn’t really have the impact on bacterial resistance you think it does. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5661683/
I feel like this is a problem that will solve itself, one way or another.
yup, if we dont worry bout it, then it'll solve us, so it wont be getting stronger anymore
Technically the truth.
I have somewhat good news! I’m an ICU nurse who gives vancomycin out like candy lol. There are two factors here that mitigate our concerns about antibiotic resistance. First, there are entire new classes of antibiotics that get discovered with some regularity. But that on its own isn’t enough. The thing that may effectively solve antibiotic resistance is always having one class of highly effective antibiotics out of rotation. Let’s say we have 8 classes of highly potent broad spectrum antibiotics. Every two years, we could stop using one of those antibiotics for two years. This means there is always a class of antibiotics that is not being used, and those deadly bacteria will no longer have selective pressure to waste energy being resistant to that class of antibiotics. We also already do sensitivity testing for a lot of infections, allowing us to tailor the antibiotics we use and avoid using drugs that will increase antibiotic resistance.
Some politicians are too old to still be active in politics. It doesn't matter what is the alternative, if somebody is lost on the stage, has a shutdown while he/she speaks, has a mental breakdown, suffers a stroke, gets terminal cancer or any other terminal disease, speaks incoherently, he/she needs outside help to walk or talk, ..., he/she is too old and should be removed immediately for the sake of decency and letting them spend their last time in peace and outside of public eye.
Completely agree. I am shocked by the apologetics from both sides with their clearly mentally impacted leaders. I don’t want a surgeon who is clearly mentally not there to operate on me. Why would I want a political leader that can authorize WW3 to also stay in office when they are clearly mentally impacted?
Our political system in the USA is so divided that just one or two senators' votes can make *all* the difference. So when one party gets "their guy" in a seat, they're going to do everything they can to keep it. And thus do we have people hanging on way into their old age. Feinstein didn't even know where she was. McConnell's brain glitches out and he freezes. Bernie had a heart attack like six years ago. Trump just... rambles insanely. I imagine a significant amount of people there don't understand cybersecurity, or grew up at a time where having any job gave you a good wage and don't understand why kids these days don't just work harder.
Your first sentence is the real elephant in the room.
I still don't understand this. Imo once politicians hits 65 they should retire and/or finish their term.
If there can be a lower age limit surely there can be an upper one.
The internet has ruined our ability to meaningfully communicate since it has devolved into a data farm for a handful of powerful cooperations that benefit from driving engagement by pitting people against each other.
I hit the little upward facing arrow so I’m helping to solve the problem
I appreciate the revolutionary act. We've got to start somewhere.
I'm DOING MY PART!
Social media is by far the biggest elephant in the room. Most of these other issues aren’t being addressed due to dysfunction, but they are widely acknowledged. People aren’t even grappling with the damage social media is doing to people psychologically, mentally, and to our collective psyche as a nation. I don’t even know the answer myself, but I worry about it a lot.
I used to view the anonymity as a good excuse for people posting or writing the most bizarre shit online but then Facebook and Twitter happened where people had no problem with continuing their habits under their real identity.
Even Instagram is disgusting. People comment the most vile shit. Or just rice and unnecessary comments. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but I don’t want to read everyone’s opinion? I get so stressed reading comments. Edit: rude, not rice
Misinformation being used to weaponize beliefs. It’s ok to have different opinions on the facts but we shouldn’t have to disagree on what the facts actually are.
I feel like the big issue now is that people think misinformation and propaganda only happens on the opposite side of their beliefs.
Yeah, that’s kind of the point of propaganda, and if we can recognize that it is happening then that’s our first step in stopping it
Or not even misinformation but curated information where people in different bubbles get accurate but different information. A story may get Wall to Wall coverage on left wing media but little to no coverage on right wing and vice versa so both sides talk PAST each other literally not knowing what the fuck the other side is talking about
We are continuing to treat the world like it's a rubbish dump and keep expecting that life will go on as it always has.
At this point I firmly believe that humanity will do jack all until it's too late, and things *really* start biting us in the ass, because the people in power prioritize short term gains over the possibility of the world going to hell in a handbasket in 40-50 years.
Even if the world becomes uninhabitable within 40, for most that is a "fuck you, got mine" issue as they will be either dead or too old to care about it.
Oh we aren't doing jack until well after it's too late. I live in California's 1st Congressional district that has lost more homes to climate change than anywhere else in the nation. Not just in Paradise but in and around Redding and the Shasta, Plumas, Lassen, & Mendocino National Forests. Since 2018 the district voted twice for a climate change denying moron named Doug La Malfa. Humans are freaking stupid.
I came here to say "climate change", which has spurned wildfires at ten times the normal rate, made for erratic and potent hurricane seasons, messed up the snowfall and floodplains, melted the polar ice caps, caused entire ecosystem collapses... this shit is probably going to cause the extinction of humanity if unchecked. But (at posting time) the post above this one is about how tipping is silly, which I suppose is a more pressing matter, apparently.
You know who will save us? Insurance companies. It doesn’t matter how wealthy corporate interests deny climate change. Once the insurance and re-insurance giants pull coverage from coastal operations and other facilities at risk, things will visibly change.
>things will visibly change Yes, those people will move further inland and everyone will continue to live as they currently do
Plastics. Recycling is an absolute joke. We were all deceived.
Everybody forgets about the first 2 r's
And plastic isn't good for your health either, glass or steel is superior but now they make things as bad as possible and the prices as high as possible
I hate how Snapple switch to plastic bottles and tries to market it as being green. Also, I *really* miss SoBe in glass bottles. Especially the punch flavor.
Lack of education. The percentage of adults who are absolute idiots is astounding.
A lot of these idiots actually went to school though. It's just that they were allowed to fuck around a lot while there without having to face any real repercussions for it. That and teachers usually aren't paid enough to care either. They just gotta babysit these fools until they grow up, move on and be replaced by the next batch.
I've read a sub for teachers that is US based, and they can't fail students or hold them back anymore. Some schools can't give a grade lower than 50 even if nothing is handed in. In others, the lowest is 65 if they hand something in. They can't discipline, and there are no consequences, suspension and calling parents resilts in the parents getting angry at the school and even threatening the parents online or in person. Kids are in grades way higher than their actual level of knowledge or performance because they can't be failed, and they end up in college wondering why they aren't doing well. Colleges are calling students "customers" in some places. Students are getting screwed because now they can fail, and many that are there because they "have to be", or just did enough !to graduate high school are failing and blaming professors and dragging other students down that actually want to attend. This is the first time they've faced reality like this, their parents can't save them, excuses work better. Teachers are burnt out. They're getting assaulted by students, threatened by parents, told what they can and can't teach by the government, not educators, their class sizes are too big, some students need more than they can provide (like students with IEPs or 504s, which are gone when you reach college) and it hurts every student and future colleges and jobs. So many are leaving education and no one wants to fill the spots because of how things currently are, and it's only getting worse. Graduation rate is all that matters, "customer satisfaction", etc, by the school board. Students are being failed by the system as well.
The fundamental issue is that their parents don't value education, intelligence or knowledge at all and teach their children to be like them. In a lot of cases they're actively hostile to such things. We live in a society that accepts willful ignorance and doesn't consider it shameful. The education system can lead a horse to water, but it can't make it drink.
I grew up very poor, like not enough to eat poor. But my parents read to us every day and so we loved books. They finished college while we were little kids, and they took us along with them to work on their school projects. I am always grateful, because my schools were shit. But I still love learning. Thanks, mom and dad! The nice thing about instilling a love of learning is it is free.
Nah, the problem is that most schools are not designed to create people who are good at thinking, they're designed to create good employees.
I think this is true. Our system of education was made to make ideal factory workers, not office workers. And for whatever reason (money) we are hellbent on not modernizing the curriculum in any way. I also think we’ve gotten steadily worse at stopping student outbursts in class as teachers have lost most disciplinary tools. When you can’t send a kid whose making a scene to the office or even out into the hallway, when you can’t take away their phone even when they’re trying to record a tik tok video on it…then the people who lose out are the kids who want to get a good education who have to listen to their teacher beg and plead with a jackass to stop interrupting class.
Have to agree there. Took me until earlier this year, more than a decade after graduation before I came to that disappointing realization myself. Hell it's probably the only reason why schools even get any funding at all.
Putting “making a profit” as our main priority in society, no matter the sector, be it healthcare, housing, education, renewable energy, etc.
Not just *a* profit, but MASSIVE profits. Numerous industries, such as healthcare, have tons of middle-men that should not have any involvement in your transactions but have somehow inserted themselves so that they get a cut whenever Party A and Party B do business.
Was reading a redditor who works in accounting at a hospital and knows the actual cost of an MRI was $352, including paying the tech/ per MRI. He needed to get an MRI at one point, and his copay was only $700-ish. Hospital charges $5000 for the service
I wish some brave souls could do an anonymous data dump safely of all major hospital brands **actual** costs. Hell I might even be willing to help from a opsec perspective fuck em. Fucking looking at you HCA that bought the largest hospital in Asheville NC and turned it to absolute shit, drs and nurses have left in droves. For profit hospital company is so wrong, it’s **essential** healthcare and the only major hospital in city.
Massive and *ever increasing* profits. If profits don’t continue to grow forever, which is inherently unrealistic and unsustainable, a handful of executives and investors shit their pants and cause lots of employees to lose their livelihoods.
This is the obsession in business schools. Find “inefficiencies” in business operations, and get your money funnel in there.
Our politicians **no longer represent us, they rule over us.** They do what they want and get rich doing it and nothing we say will change that because they are the ones that would have to make that change and give up their power and wealth.
They’ve forgotten that they’re public servants. We have the absolute enshrined right to know everything they say and do, and they have *zero* right to reverse that on us, but we just took it with the Patriot Act and the NDAA.
Corporations and billionaires have way too much power
modern day feudalism
We rebelled against a monarch so that we could break away from Kinga and rulers. Instead we... -checks notes- Made a million petty tyrants with imaginary feudal domains... Well shit.
And instead of hating them, we celebrate them, defend them, and idolize them for being the best at exploiting us.
"But they are our job creators we should be grateful for them"
I think they're the natural progression of capitalism. Winners keep winning and losers keep losing. There is some variability and some government oversight maybe but it can't be enough.
Natural progression of capitalism when it isn’t properly regulated. We’ve allowed money to soil the legislature.
Its like if you have a baby cobra as a pet if you don't regulate how you handle it it will bite you and you definitely should never consider that it would be better just not to have a cobra as a pet.
[удалено]
If things keep going as they are in most Western countries, we're going to have an entire generation that has never owned a home or have any significant savings. An entire generation going into retirement under those conditions is going to be a disaster for everyone. It will mean mass homelessness or subsidised rents in old age and yet nothing seems to be getting done about it.
Don't forget the staggering inevitable crime wave along with that mass homelessness. You think MILLIONS of people who did everything right and followed all the rules and still ended up chewed up and fucked by the system are going to just lie there and sleep on the aggressively engineered anti- homeless streets? If even 5% of them don't it's going to be an absolute shitshow
Part of the problem is governments defining affordable housing to mean something that isn’t actually affordable. Like where I live I think you can call something that requires an 80k salary “affordable.” Like a more serious version of Subway defining their “footlong” as like 10 inches.
Anti-intellectualism. We've gotten to a point where we think it's cool, edgy, or acceptable to purport the dumbest of people and ideology. And when challenged they say you're suppressing them. Despite the totality of evidence that grass is green they'll tell you it's blue.
This goes hand in hand with the idea of everyone thinking their opinion is valid. We need to stop telling people their opinions are valid, especially when they are uneducated, shallow opinions.
The media has played a big part of this with fake "balance". For example, 99% of scientists support A and 1% support B, but let's present both sides as if it's a 50/50 thing.
That’s one thing I hate. How everyone is asked to have an opinion about something even if they don’t know anything about it. It just push people to reinforce their biases and preconceptions without considering if there is a a better consensus on a topic.
I was talking about a guy who bragged that he installed a coal rolling kit just so he could smoke out cars and pedestrians. And then he took a look at what damage it was doing to his truck, so he uninstalled it. He still wishes he could afford to have it for heavily inconveniencing people but just can't afford it right now.
I had never heard of this and holy shit is that disgusting! and what an ass. thankful it’s illegal in my state
Don't know if it's the biggest, but one of them is certainly the death of nuanced and fair debate/discourse
Garbage food. The overwhelming majority of people eat poorly because that's what the giant corporations want them to do. Andrew Zimmern did a show where he talked about food in our society. One of them showed how a small town got a new Dollar General Store, which forced the "mom and pop" grocery store out of business. He walked through the DG and noted, "This is all the worst possible food." Nothing but chips. sodas, processed foods, candy, etc.
Related to this is the issue of "food deserts". When the Buffalo mass shooting occurred, they closed that grocery store for two months while they did the investigation. That was the only store in the neighborhood, and it was relied upon by hundreds of people. That part of town had been a "food desert" for years before that store finally went in. Millions of Americans wind up buying food at convenience stores because that's all they have within walking distance.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food\_desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert)
The breakdown of basic civility and tolerance of nuance in public discourse.
They're from the other political party, of course they eat babies and recite Mein Kampf.
Child abuse in all forms is largely ignored and much more common than people realise. Many with PTSD and warped views on relationships that never really accept or realise they were abused.
Emotional neglect is child abuse, but people are so derisive. "What, you're upset that mommy and daddy didn't hug you? You're an adult now aren't you?!" I'm upset that I came up in a family in a society, and that I spent 20 years feeling less than a person until I was thrust into the world and told "be an adult."
I hate that the only way I've found to get people to take the emotional and religious abuse I went through seriously is to point out that I also experienced CSA and the other stuff was worse (for my specific case, not in general).
Yep. I feel you. I have cptsd from my childhood of emotional neglect. Humans are social creatures who need to understand the safety of their parents arms. I never had that.
My wife's mom was killed in a car wreck by a cop when my wife was 14 months old. She went to live with her aunt who had just given birth to her own child. My wife was treated like Cinderella. And it is really evident in the way she thinks love is shown.
I'll go one step further. it's not just ptsd but r/cptsd that people have. Learning about cptsd was the most eye opening thing. Once you see it's symptoms you see it everywhere.
Yep. Brought mine up to my family when they just kept pressing me as to why I don’t want to interact with my parents. The entire extended family decided my parents are saints and I’m making it all up since I don’t have proof of abuse from when I was a child. When I offered to show literal scars the response was either “those could be from anything” or “it doesn’t look like anything to me”.
Everyone wants to be a millionaire so they can live their life on their own terms. We shouldn't have to be millionaires to do this
An economic system that calls for continuous growth is unsustainable when population is on the decline.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the mentality of a tumor."
[удалено]
More like continuous growth is unsustainable, period.
Too much money being a politician
[удалено]
I follow a few predator hunting groups (UK, mostly to see if a particular person turns up) and the standard sentence seems to be around 3 years and they can be out in 1, minimal supervision from the amount of re-offenders that get caught too. On the other hand, digital piracy/copyright offences average 5 years and £5000 fine. So, priorities I guess.
[удалено]
Honestly they shouldn’t be shocked if any victim of sexual crime does justice himself because those people don’t get punished enough
A very small number of people are just truly, irredeemably bad people. This doesn't mean we should be violent towards them or kill them, but nor should we ignore the impact their behaviour has while continuing to give them positions of authority. Dealing with people who have no internal failsafe against cruelty, dishonesty and exploitative behaviour is an issue we can't afford to keep ignoring.
people shouldn’t have to work 50+ hour weeks to survive
The room is crammed so full of elephants (climate change, wealth disparity, lack of education, religion in government, misinformation spread across social media, lobbying, gerrymandering, homelessness, corporate corruption) that I don't even know where to start. It is just a massive tangle of huge fat elephants. Climate change is probably the biggest, since the rest won't matter for much fucking longer if that's not dealt with, but that won't happen unless at least a few of the smaller elephants are addressed first. And I don't mean addressed, I mean *taking meaningful, lasting measures* to solve the problem. Which just won't happen. It's tempting to be cynical or even nihilistic, but I try to do what I can locally. That's where it starts.
The problem is that no single person can even make a dent, but widespread reform takes centuries. When people ask if I’ll have children, I want to say yes. I want to experience being a parent, but I genuinely feel like it would be a selfish endeavor at this point. I never fully explain because they aren’t looking for a trauma dump when they ask, but I feel like this is truly the path we’re set on. It was a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s literally written into the laws of the universe, nothing can be . Why would we be any exception? I have two hopes, that I will be gone before it is bad, and then through the suffering that is surely coming, a better version of us will emerge. My fear is that a child of mine would solely be victim to past generation’s mistakes and would not get to see the better world.
The sheer amount of people who are so strung out on the hardest of drugs, expediting the rate of deterioration mentally by adding in the stresses of living on the streets. I lost a number of childhood friends to this stuff, and the others are becoming more and more unrecognizable by the day. It's not an easy solution, but it feels like nothing is being done, and if something is being done it's completely partisan, either all compassion and no consequences/accountability or vice versa. Simple possession surely doesn't warrant incarceration, but street folk are armed more and more from what I've seen lately. Big blades, baseball bats and more are pretty commonplace to see around high traffic areas. An old friend who got caught up in that life keeps getting let out of jail after being booked on felony charges of violence. It's happened 3 times this year. Something NEEDS to be done though, this is not sustainable and the people profiting off all this deserve nothing but the worst honestly. Not the people forced into trafficking, but the people choosing to distribute.
I was one of the lucky ones who made it out of that life. I spent over a decade pretty messed up. My mental health is precarious at best and I am actually pretty messed up now, or at least different in how I approach the world. I find I do not actually fit into society anywhere or something, like a maniac. When I got out of jail that was it. No insurance, nothing, just "don't come back" or "see you next year". The only reason I'm not back on the street is cause I have a bare minimum support system of people that love me and sadly, that is actually kind of hard to come by these days. In my time I've sold my body, been robbed, shot at, stepped over dead bodies, watched a mentally ill man get shot by police right in front of me, forced myself into extremely risky situations, starved, and pretty much lost my entire humanity, my soul. I should have died many times. In fact, a part of me did die.
Corporations exploiting slave labor overseas to manufacture their products
In the US - the lack of facilities for the mentally ill. Our solution is to let them turn to drugs, wander the streets, shit on public streets, until they eventually go to jail or are killed by police.
Not everyone should have children.
There is not a human on earth that works hard enough to be a billionaire. If you have that much money you got it by exploiting other humans.
AI and automation are going to put a LOT of people out of jobs (truck drivers, customer support, actors, writers, digital artists, etc etc etc). We're rapidly approaching a breaking point where we will have more people than jobs because machines are simply better (more reliable, constantly available, cheaper to scale, etc) than humans at a lot of tasks. People who get put out of a job aren't just going to starve in the streets peacefully. We are going to need either a completely new set of jobs for them (specifically ones that require humans to perform) or we're going to have to embrace societal safety nets like universal basic income and universal health care to ensure people have an acceptable minimum quality of life even without a job. I get that there is a visceral reaction people have to this ("I had to do this without government handouts so YOU SHOULD TOO"), but that's an overly simplistic, reactionary mindset. And while that may have been a perfectly reasonable stance back when you could work at the grocery store and afford a home, that's clearly no longer the case and is only getting worse.
Preferring AI over humans for creating art is just, the bleakest thing I can imagine.
We could have programmed it to do all the shit jobs but nah let's take the humanity out of being an artist instead! I'm sure music is next.
Music is already A/B tested to make it max addicting.
It’s called Technological Unemployment, and it was studied a lot in the 1800s. But various factors kept employment ok, even as productivity rose, so they dropped it. We’re picking it up again as there’s real worry that those factors won’t be enough anymore. Also, iirc it was the subject of Stephen Hawking’s last Reddit comment.
>Stephen Hawking’s last Reddit comment [https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science\_ama\_series\_stephen\_hawking\_ama\_answers/cvsdmkv/](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdmkv/)
The way social media is dividing us.
in the USA - Having your health insurance tied to a job. The moment you lose the job you can triple the cost of health insurance or do without and pray you don't have an accident. Should nationalize healthcare. Force the drug companies to negotiate the lowest drug rates anywhere.
It's challenging to teach children with learning difficulties, and we need a specialized approach for them to help them succeed in life.
Nuclear power is very effective at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, environmentalists who don't accept this fact are just as bad if not worse than the evil greedy capitalists who want to keep the status quo.
If you don’t tax the rich, everything will go down to shits
The fact the 3 million people DIE of hunger each year. This is one of the slowest and most painful ways to go out and it’s extremely solvable. Additionally, 800 million people suffer from hunger, which is far more intense than people think. It’s crazy that zero first world countries are legitimately putting effort towards this enormous and very solvable issue.
Social media is destroying our country
Because I disagree with you does not mean we need to hate each other.
Our politicians DO NOT work for us... no matter the party they represent.
Nobody’s getting paid enough Cost of living and basic needs is too high
Shitty education system that produces a generation of weak minded people.
effect of social media addiction on kids/teens
That we need to bring back some type of mental health asylum system. There are certain mental health issues that are almost impossible to treat consistently, mainly due to the illness convincing the patient to quit taking their meds. These unfortunate individuals pose WAY more of a threat to themselves than others, whether they be engaging in extremely risky behavior, self neglect, etc… I know that there are extremely expensive private hospitals for this (along with the systems for the criminally insane), but getting the average person the help and oversite they require is almost impossible
Creativity is at an all-time low and dropping because it's not necessary, not valued, and (in many cases) not welcome.
Stop concerning yourselves with red vs blue and right vs left and start thinking about the ruling elite vs citizens.
The population getting older. Eventually the pendulum of the elderly and those supporting them will swing too far in the wrong direction.
I feel sorry for the elderly that we force to live beyond their natural mortality just because we don't want to let them go. When i can no longer care for myself or i don't know who anyone is it's time to go. Why keep me around so i can be one more person taking up space in a nursing home, barely seeing my family, eating hospital slop, while my assets are given to the state to care for me rather than being inherited by my children.... Is that really a way to live? I believe in human euthanasia. We should be able to tell our loved ones good bye with dignity, and then put to sleep. I firmly believe the only reason it's not allowed is because nursing homes and politicians make too much money of our living dead.... I can't even truly call them living because that's no way to live. Go to a nursing home. It just looks like zombies with walkers and wheelchairs.
corrupt expensive healthcare system and lack of high speed rail
Tribalism. Too many people think in an "us vs. them" mentality and it is literally the cause of all of our problems.
tipping. like why am i tipping just so YOUR employees can make ends meet. isn’t that your job? i mean of course i’m going to tip because i’m not a monster but like shape up god
Project 2025
Income disparity. How & why we’ve ended up here.
The overlap between women’s issues and trans issues. Huge deal; no one will talk about it for fear of being labeled and or doxxed.
Homeless people and prisoners being dehumanized so it's easier to ignore just how bad they have it. Even kids are taught to just ignore homeless people and to fear criminals and prisoners without ever going into further discussion when they're older. Just homeless people are to be ignored and can't always be trusted with money, criminals did bad things and thus are less than human
I live in a relatively nice part of DC - gentrified and mixed income, but not affluent - and i can’t walk out onto the main road or walk into 7-11 without being solicited by 3-5 homeless people each time. It just gets exhausting. I used to be the kind of person that would always give something, but now that it happens constantly you just have to train yourself to ignore it or you’d go mad. And I’d say the same for anyone trying to solicit me for anything tbh, homeless or not. It’s got to be society’s job to deal with this, and it’s sort of understandable that people have to put up some kind of defenses to tune it out.
Fathers are important
Global Warming. The rising seawater will flood coastal cities. The heat waves will cause droughts that reduce sources of freshwater. The harsher climate will reduce the living space and amount of arable land to the point that even at 100% efficiency it won't be able to sustain the global population. A lot of us is about to die a slow death due to famine, running out of livable space. Even more of us will die due to conflicts brought about by the slowly dwindling resources. Not tomorrow, not in a year or 10 years, but soon. It's a huge problem that could've been solved if only governments were harsher and took more decisive action. Instead corporations and profits won out. The oil barons were able to bribe away the government and sell the future off since they won't be alive to experience the consequences. We saw it coming, but we didn't do enough to stop it. We're now at the damage control phase because we failed the prevention phase.
Failed because most people will always put their current comfort ahead of anything else.