Gluttony

What could be the reasons people experience stagnation?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “What could be the main reasons some people experience stagnation, even if they aren’t lazy?”

Trauma and burnout are immensely impacting causes of inertia in one’s life. Burnout often precedes depression, and severe trauma can result in Executive Dysfunction. Depression can be debilitating, and Executive Dysfunction is scary AF.

Imagine waking up daily with a laundry list of activities you sincerely want to do, but your “round-to-it” never makes it off the couch for some indiscernible reason. “Yeah, yeah, yeah — I’ll get around to it.”

Weeks later… that five-minute job of daily housecleaning is a prohibitive three-day adventure you decide is no longer worth the effort. It’s better to return to doing nothing while thinking, “Tomorrow’s another miserable day when it can be done.”

Loss of hope for one’s future is a terrible thing to experience that can lead to all sorts of ugly and tragic outcomes. Restoring hope is the fastest way to cure one’s depression and worse.

Our economic dystopia is the main culprit of many of our social ills today, and it’s leading us down a dark road just like it did last century when it gave rise to fascism and the Nazi scourge to ignite a global war.

It’s mind-boggling to me that both the victims and perpetrators of this centuries-long class war so easily overlook such a prominent issue that it never seems to stop being waged against the little people.

It’s harrowing to realize how conceptually straightforward it is to avoid chaos and how impossible it is in practice to prevent it.

There is something so intoxicating about having power that people think of themselves as insulated from all the harm they do to countless others with impunity.

The worst thing about Trump, for example, isn’t the damage he’s doing with his decisions and actions. That he can continue wreaking havoc while he should, by all forms of reason that claim to value the concept of justice, be rotting behind bars right now — that causes us all the most harm. His freedom is the grossest of violations of the social contract imaginable.

His freedom confirms that there is no value in decency, integrity, honesty, trust, or responsibility. His freedom is an encouragement of every rotten behaviour and attitude imaginable by humans. It’s a veritable permission to be our worst selves. His freedom is a purge of our humanity.

Why TF should anyone think they have a future if that future means having to become a grotesque monster who is willing to destroy lives to get some money for themselves?

When push comes to shove, I doubt few people would trade having a loving family and being surrounded by a community of people who care for you as a person for a gold toilet.

Since that’s the world we live in today, that’s deeply depressing. What kind of person can believe a hopeful future awaits at the top of a garbage heap? It certainly isn’t the best of humanity.

It’s the kind of world most decent human beings don’t want to live in. With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that birth rates are plummeting because what decent human being wants to tell their kid to learn how to manage their plastic intake enough to minimize the health risks it poses while admitting they did as little as they could to prevent this shit from getting worse.

“Yes, kids… I decided not to vote because I didn’t care enough to know the difference between parties and just decided to believe they’re all the same, so I said fuckem, let them turn this world into a shithole for my kids.”

In short, the main reason people are experiencing stagnation is the same reason they experienced it during the fall of communism as a system of governance. We are failing ourselves because we are failing to demand better from our leadership instead of holding their feet to the fire. After all, that requires risking one’s perks and benefits in life; w may as well let them do whatever they want so that we can complain about how shitty things are and be able to say, “I told you so.” when it all turns to shit.

In shorter and more famous words:

Will people understand greed is a miserable state?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “When will people understand that their constant selfish reckless belligerent greed is what brought society to its current disgusting miserable state of existence?”

Let’s look at someone like Donald Trump. He has spent an entire lifetime spreading hatred while bullying people to feed shallow desires, and he entertains himself through acts of cruelty he enacts on fleeting whims. He’s been behaving in ways that epitomize constant selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed, ostensibly his entire life.

His response to being criminally convicted was not remorse but to have the conviction overturned.

This question naively presumes that a person who behaves in destructive ways throughout their life will magically experience an epiphany of conscience in which they will transform into the “decent human” imagined by this querent.

Never has any evil monster throughout history found any turning point in their life that magically transformed them into saintly beings. Most who claim to have “seen the light” assume such a position as a fraudulent means of continuing their prior agenda of self-benefit at the expense of others.

The short answer to your question is “never.”

People cannot change their essential nature. They may choose to improve, but that presupposes desire that has always existed and a lifetime of dedication toward that end.

People like Donald Trump see nothing wrong with their behaviour and so will never make an effort to improve.

Epiphanies such as this question presume to be possible constitute wishful thinking on a highly destructive level of delusion that prevents us from addressing the fundamental issues of broken psychology that we must dedicate ourselves as a society to addressing on the most basic levels.

We can never truly call ourselves civilized if our systems enable and empower the kind of evil embodied by people like Donald Trump — and make no mistake about it, we encourage his evil.

Our societies embrace and enable selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed.

Until we can address the fundamentally broken human psychology on a system-wide and social scale, we will continue to be plagued by these behaviours.

Ten percent of the world’s wealthiest are destroying our planet at a rate practically matching the total of the other 90% of the rest of humanity. Instead of doing something to restrain their destructive behaviours, we put them on pedestals and worship their harmful behaviours.

Changing humans in ways that address destructive behaviours embodying selfishness, recklessness, and belligerent greed means we must start at the top and change all of human society.