This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you listen to people open up about their issues without trying to solve them? How do you just comfort people?”
One of the first things a first referral counsellor learns is that you cannot solve other people’s problems for them. Even more so, you don’t want to solve their problems because what you might see as a solution for yourself is likely not a solution for them.
What you end up doing is creating a dependency relationship with someone who now has a scapegoat to blame when your solutions backfire on them.
You end up giving them permission to take the easy route of blaming you for their problems instead of learning how to solve their problems for themselves.
You don’t want that kind of monkey on your back because it could haunt you for life.
Most people want to be heard without judgment. The act of actively listening to them while validating their emotions and the struggles they are experiencing is often the only thing they want or need.
Being able to openly express oneself without fear of being misjudged for their struggles or how they deal with them is all the healing most people need most of the time. That opportunity often gives them enough space to hear themselves through your perspective and devise solutions for themselves by being able to speak freely about their problems.
If you sincerely want to help people solve their problems, you must understand that the best way to accomplish both your goal and theirs is to listen and acknowledge their struggles while validating their feelings and who they are as people.
You almost cannot help someone more thoroughly than by letting them know they matter. Most people only want to know that someone hears them and sees them as a living, breathing, independent human being with a core of reality all their own, just like how you think of yourself. People often only need assurance that they can achieve their goals if they apply themselves.
At most, you can offer ideas for where assistance is available, identify resources they may not be aware of, or repeat their statements to them in your own words. Often, simply saying something they said in different words is enough for them to see their problem with different eyes and in ways they can more easily identify solutions.
It may feel especially tough if you can spot what appears like a simple solution to you, that you would rather hand it to them so that you can continue with other matters, but it’s more important to realize how this is a learning process for both of you. Both of you can learn more about yourselves by allowing the process to evolve naturally and without trying to push it to a conclusion you see as the most optimal outcome.
A solution may appear simple to you, but you can’t know all the underlying variables, and many of which they often don’t recognize themselves. No matter how simple the solution may appear, they must find it themselves before it can succeed.
The challenge this creates for you, which you use to your benefit, is that it takes the focus off your desire to fix their problem for them quickly and puts you in a position of thinking about a strategy for helping them to see their problem from different perspectives, including how you imagine is a solution. As long as they can feel that they have identified their solution on their own and without being given instructions to follow by rote, they will be more able to apply their creativity when implementing their solution without holding you accountable for their failures.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Aside from it being a moral duty, why should I contribute to society?”
As a reason to contribute to society, a “moral duty” represents a form of coercion which garners the absolute least that one will contribute. Referring to contributions made to society as a “moral duty” creates the perception that it’s like paying a tax. You do it because you have to.
That’s the best way to get the worst attitudes and the least value in contributions from people.
“Paying it forward” is a far better way to frame contributions to society because it serves as a reminder of how one has benefited from society and the contributions of others as part of a shared community.
Another context that can help to imbue the concept of contributing to society with motivational meaning is as a team. As members of a species, we are all members of the same “team” in the sense of our challenge to maintain survival. This perspective is why I chose the concept of a bucket brigade to illustrate the idea of working together to put out a fire.
Understanding the difference in perspective between one who feels they “should” versus feeling like one “can” will clarify the attitude we should be cultivating in society to encourage contributions back to society. When a person feels like they’re a valued member of a supportive community that enables their members to achieve their best potential, it cultivates an attitude of gratitude that prompts people to think positively of what they can do in return for their community.
Think of it like gift-giving during the holidays, where people go to great lengths to impress someone with a special gift they know will be meaningful to the recipient, versus the sentiment people demonstrate when put in as minimal an effort into their gift as they can get away with to meet an expectation from someone they don’t care about but feel an obligation to gift them something.
To do what one “should do” invites the minimum effort to meet a bar of expectations set by the lowest common denominator and is characterized in the best of terms as an apathetic form of disengagement from one’s community. Why give something to society when you don’t value it?
Conversely, when one feels closely connected to a community that has cultivated gratitude within their mindset, they want to give as much as they can afford to adequately express their appreciation for what they value receiving from their community.
To do what one can, rather than what one must, is to be motivated by a natural desire to contribute out of a spirit of reciprocity.
This is why the social contract is crucial to our health as a society and why community development is an essential mindset for leaders to adopt and cultivate within society. Community members who feel they belong to a larger dynamic and are valued for their contributions are engaged and self-motivated to do what they can to improve life for everyone else.
They understand and value the meaning of the words, “We are all in this together.”
This sentiment is the glue that will keep society from collapsing into chaos during the most troubling times.
This sentiment is the glue that has given humanity the grace to survive and prosper to such a degree that our short presence here will be as lasting into the future as hundreds of millions of years of a planet dominated by dinosaurs has been to date within a fraction of the time they existed.
When one feels connected enough to something, they have no problem going out of their way to contribute as much as they can afford because they believe their giving is its own reward. They derive pleasure and fulfilment from giving to their community. They will go to great lengths to contribute as much as possible to their society because giving transcends moral duty.
Some people will give to causes, for example, because they want receipts to lower their tax burden through the benefit of deductions.
Other people give to cancer research, for example, because they have been personally affected by the issue. Giving as much as they can afford is a way of coping with the issue by acknowledging a loss or a deeply impactful experience. Giving is rewarded by a cultivation of hope within oneself.
Many people volunteer their time in contributions to a cause because of the social connections they create and benefit from on an intangible level. Giving energizes one’s spirit through interpersonal interactions and cultivates the interconnectedness that defines a core need for the human condition.
In all self-motivated cases, one’s contributions are made without considering moral implications because those are justifications which devalue the experience.
In all cases, people give in greater abundance and more honestly of themselves when internally motivated by intangible and intrinsic benefits than by material and extrinsic ones.
Understanding why one would want to contribute to society out of an internally motivated reason is far more crucial to the value of one’s contributions than meeting an arbitrary degree of obligation.
Understanding how one has benefited from the efforts of those who came before us and how we are each linked in a centuries-long chain of humans collectively contributing to an aspirational future for all of humanity is how to convert an obligation into a desire.
When we are disconnected from our humanity and community as humans, we lose sight of the value of our contributions to an evolving whole.
Learning to appreciate our distinctive differences between individuals and celebrating those differences while embracing the uniqueness of their contributions is how we can justify giving the best of what we can to those who will come after us and allow us to be remembered as individuals who each gave our best to make their lives better.
Cultivating this community spirit of belonging is how we survive our challenges, such as those we are struggling through today. Our connection to community allows us to cope with and overcome being inundated by the toxic influences of those who lack appreciation or reverence for the sacred nature of what we collectively benefit from.
Encouraging the creation of connections between us results in a superior form of morality that organically emerges in society to endure throughout our existence on this planet more successfully.
There is no valid reason why you “should” give back to society. However, without a desire to give back to society, you have lost out on one of the most valuable sentiments a human can experience, which is core to our development as healthy humans living fulfilled lives.
Bonus Question: How do you accept the fact that no one loves you?
Learn how much more important it is to love yourself and life than to be loved.
No two people or living creatures love in the same way.
Love is not about receiving but about giving.
If you want to be loved, get yourself a dog and/or a cat, or several.
If you can love what you do each day, it can sustain you enough to allow other forms of love to make their way into your life.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do liberals feel it’s okay to publicly trash conservatives?”
It’s funny, but the only time I think of myself as a liberal is when an ideologue draws a line in the sand.
Whenever I encounter a nutbar, I think to myself that the idiot I have encountered is a nutbar. I don’t care much about triangulating their ideological affinity. I prefer interacting with people as people and not as idiotologues who are myopically affixed to a flag embedded in quicksand.
Sadly, though, it’s become almost impossible not to assume the nutbars I encounter are ideologically conservative. It has been so consistently this way for so long that I was surprised recently to discover a nutbar group that was ideologically left-wing.
I had to do a double-take because I hadn’t encountered anyone I could remember who had extreme views (from my biased perspective).
If you feel conservatives are unfairly trashed, then you are obliged to speak out against the people who have co-opted the conservative brand. It’s not like the MAGAts among you are the silently incognito types in your group.
You don’t get to complain about liberals mocking conservative stupidity because that’s the only brand of conservative appearing on the horizon.
“All that is required for evil to exist is for good people to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke
If you wish to identify yourself as conservative and be treated with respect, then you have a house to clean up.
Standing on the sidelines and complaining about being trashed isn’t defensible. It makes you a coward and a hypocrite.
If you have a problem with liberals trashing conservatives, then you should be going after the people who are giving liberals something to trash.
You should be screaming at the top of your lungs at the treasonous monsters who are making you look bad.
Complaining to liberals about being trashed only makes you look worse.
Grow some Liz Cheney-sized cojones and fight to take your party back. Clean out the trash clogging up your house and take the garbage people out with it. You need to stop behaving like a snowflake because you bear responsibility for this happening.
You’re supposed to work with your honourable opposition to create solutions to our common problems, not treat them like enemy combatants while mindlessly cheering for your team and trash-talking the other like politics were a sporting event.
Real lives are at stake, and your nation deserves better. The entire world deserves better. Democracy demands better.
Bonus Question:Why do many democrats oppose ICE deporting illegal immigrants?
Your question needs to be fixed:
“Why do many Democrats oppose ICE deporting people without first identifying and proving that they legitimately are immigrants who are in the country illegally?”
You’re welcome.
A bonus question you could add is, “Why does the Trump administration commit human rights violations against American citizens by ignoring an 800-year-old legal precedent from the Magna Carta that’s more than three times as old as the U.S.?”
Yet another question you might want to ask is, “Why am I not scared of being hauled away in the dead of night and sent to a foreign concentration camp?”
Being placed on an International Human Rights Watch list should deeply disturb you. If it doesn’t, you’re the problem, not the people who fight to protect rights you take for granted. Before rewording their protests to suit your biases, you should try to understand what they are saying.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why would anyone be so ignorant as to turn a blind eye to the liberal agenda? It’s very apparent they want to control and not be controlled as they should.” (This answer was originally written about six months before the 2024 election and I’ve updated it but I may have missed a few items that could make it seem somewhat disjointed. I apologize for any confusion I missed clearing up. Thank you for reading.)
You have answered your own question.
You assume the right to control what you demonize as a “liberal agenda” and then hurl a confession of your controlling nature as an accusation.
There is no “liberal agenda,” but CONservatives have been very clear in conveying their agenda of controlling a population. The examples of power-hungry conservatism stretch back to antiquity through a delusional assertion of association with Godhood through the arrogance of a “Divine Right of Kings.”
This delusional presumption forms the basis for driving efforts such as Project 2025 and Trump’s assault on democracy, both inside and outside the borders of his nation. This delusional presumption forms the backbone for the “Dark Enlightenment” proposed by the political influencer, Curtis Yarvin, who imagines restoring a two-class society of rulers and serfs. It is precisely this assumption of power that drives every right-wing organization manipulating a MAGAt army of extremists who are prone to violence and listed as domestic terrorist organizations like the “Proud Boys,” “Oathkeepers,” “Sons of Odin,” and other militia groups.
Right-Wing Extremist Terrorism in the United States
This self-serving and socially destructive delusion sums up the entire character of conservatism. It shows up everywhere in everything you monstrously destructive idiots do.
Every problem you pretend to deal with, you make worse. You create problems with your perpetual violations of the social contract each time you issue an idiotically dictatorial edict to repress people and strip them of their rights on all issues that you pollute with your monstrously vile, misanthropic hatred of your fellow humans.
Name any issue where a conservative barfs up what their perversion of a solution is, and you will see nothing more than a hammer smashing a nail because CONservatives can’t handle complexity or nuance.
Economics? — Tax breaks for the wealthy while claiming the wealthy are altruistic beings and not predatory parasites who were responsible for the Great Depression and World War II, and the rise of the Nazi threat — even though history is repeating itself right from the tax table level to the overt increase of racial hatreds.
Abortion? — Shrink the government to the point of fitting inside every vagina to monitor the state of pregnancy. Force pregnant ten-year-old rape victims to term while endorsing capital punishment for women who abort their development process as per their right to bodily autonomy.
Environment? — Pretend the floating plastic continents don’t exist, and if that doesn’t work, deny they’re a symptom of a much larger problem because the last thing you want to do is hold wealthy monsters who pay for your unearned power in government accountable for their destruction.
Alternative Energy? — Deny the need to transition to an environmentally responsible system of meeting our growing energy needs because that would reduce the grotesque profits of the fossil fuel industry, destroying our planet. Have some idiot monkey perform for optics by bringing a snowball into the chamber to deny the global warming responsible for creating heat bubbles that incinerate towns from the face of the map.
Crime? — Pretend it’s on the increase instead of admitting that crime has become less of a problem because you need to keep your idiot flocks scared of a big, bad world so that you can justify the militarization of a government-sanctioned terrorist organization that kills innocent citizens for sport.
Mass-Murders? — Pretend that children being gunned down in their schools is the price the public must pay to be free, while no other nation on the planet experiences that kind of depravity. It’s more important to you monstrous freaks to defend profits for the weapons industry because weaponizing everything is how you react to being overwhelmed by a world that intimidates stupid people who wallow in fear.
You name it. You pollute EVERY issue with ignorant stupidity and destroy lives.
“Right to Work” Laws — Strip workers of their rights, increasing poverty among the working class. All “Right to Work” states have the highest poverty level in the nation.
The list is endless. CONservative stupidity worsens EVERY issue and creates issues that would not exist without their power-hungry meddling. CONservativism is defined by its bullying antics.
Your president is a 34-time convicted felon who you reinstalled to finish destroying 243 years of democracy. It wasn’t enough, though, that he is responsible for more American lives lost than Osama Bin Laden. You want him to rid you of more Americans you don’t like to help the oligarchs take over the nation and become a mirror image of the corruption that has defined an enemy America has been in a cold war with for over 100 years.
You endlessly complain about the debt when your government isn’t controlled by “your team”, while ballooning it by trillions in giveaways to the wealthy and throwing people into dire straits by stripping them of their lifelines.
Republicans embrace the power-hungry, controlling evil that the founding fathers escaped and warred against for the freedom of the people. Republicans embody that evil and seek to transform the nation into the nightmare that prompted the creation of a nation built on liberty through fraternity and equality.
America was built on the solidarity of the people against the controlling monsters that CONservatives everywhere embody.
During the horrors of your prior CONservative presidency of war criminals, you had Karl Rove blatantly announcing your treasonous agenda by claiming your goal of a “permanent Republican majority.” You have taken all the steps you can in an overt agenda to ensure that’s the case by denying Obama’s right to appoint a SCOTUS judge and maintain an objective balance in the scales of justice. Now, you have succeeded in corrupting the highest court in the land to make it a mockery of justice.
You spit on democracy when you dedicate your efforts to controlling strategies like gerrymandering districts, purging voter lists, and creating barriers to the electorate to ensure you can win elections. Then, when that corrupt strategy fails, you attempt a coup on the nation and kill people who won’t submit to your abusive horror show. None of you care in the least about solving our common problems because the only problem you care about is how to control everyone and everything permanently.
You are all ruled by fear and ignorance.
You have concocted a plan (Project 2025 / Agenda 47) to send the entire nation back to a medieval state of rulers and serfs and blatantly threaten violence against those who don’t capitulate to your monstrously inhuman betrayal of humanity. Meanwhile, you believe Trump’s denial of knowledge of it as he recruits its authors and begins his assault against the nation with a “flood the zone” strategy to implement it, on day one of his re-election.
You people embody evil and embrace it with every word and deed, including this pretend question.
“Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” are values that define a liberal sensibility. It’s not an agenda because values transcend agendas. Only stupid monkeys who have nothing of value to offer beyond horror need agendas. The most famous Republican in history was a liberal. He freed slaves because he valued “liberty, fraternity, and equality.”
You should be embarrassed by your incompetence, if not by your evil and controlling natures or your betrayals of your fellow citizens.
Agendas are what monstrous freaks of broken human nature rely on to conspire against their fellow human beings and assert power over them.
Liberals want power to be decentralized and distributed to everyone, while CONservative monsters aggregate power and attempt to centralize it like every dictatorship throughout history. With clear intent, conservatives deliberately try to reset humanity to a medieval state of society with rulers and serfs and deny it in the same breath.
You can see it in their agenda to make the president’s powers absolute. The SCOTUS took another significant step in that direction before the 2024 election, hoping a decent human like Joe Biden would choose the high road of not exercising that power and permanently terminating a threat to democracy.
You stupid freaks have no clue that you have handed him the right to assassinate your beloved saviour, who pretends to be victimized through a fraudulent assassination attempt to gain sympathy because he’s the most unsympathetic character in recent history. Having him assassinated by the legal means you have granted him would bring a sigh of relief heard all around the world. No one but you, bloodthirsty freaks, wants the ideological divide you’ve been stoking to escalate into a bloody nightmare.
Joe Biden has proven that by refusing to follow your frenemy’s method of eliminating political rivals by nuclear mist. Meanwhile, Trump has been doing all he can to eliminate his detractors by having judges and political leaders arrested, while you delusional freaks cry “freedom!”
Only grotesquely inhuman monsters would support a predatory pedophile like that murderous Orange Nazi… but here you are… endorsing a convicted felon on an agenda to destroy democracy and install him as a permanent ruler while he brazenly claims no one will ever need to vote again.
Ignorance is what defines humongous monsters like you. You should be very glad that we still have the pretense of democratic civilization protecting your stupidity because once that veil drops, all bets are off. You are sowing chaos, and with it, you will reap a whirlwind of regret, which will require the rest of this century for the nation to recover.
Your politics of hatred is not infinitely sustainable and will burn itself out along with you, just like it did almost one hundred years ago, and one hundred years before that. The real tragedy, however, is how many innocent lives you will take with you as you destroy 250 years of progress.
We see you for what you are and what you feed on, while the more people who wake up to the truth of you, the more you dig yourselves into a toxic hole that the world will try to bury in the dust of horrified memory from a nightmare of evil.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Would you tell the truth about something to help the course of justice if it means you’d lose your job by means of corruption?”
I’ve just rewatched “The Big Short” — a film about the cluster of greed and stupidity that made a few people rich and millions poor and poorer. The housing market grew in a stupidity and greed bubble that collapsed in 2008, and a publicly funded bailout ensued while long-term financial institutions were wiped out of existence.
One quote I caught this time around that I’m stunned I missed it the first time I saw it, or at least don’t remember it:
“For every one percent the unemployment rate goes up, forty thousand people die.”
The nation learned nothing and did nothing to prevent this scenario from repeating. The CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) — a corrupt means of bundling bad debts into bad investments to profit from- was not made illegal. However, it has been a rebranded gimmick to create profits for those with resources and market exploitation expertise.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is again heading for a major collapse because the American public seems incapable of learning from its mistakes.
This time around, however, the collapse will not be fixed by stealing from a non-existent middle class after all being robbed by trillions per year for decades.
The “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump named will add a few trillion more to the national debt and deficit, while twelve countries have already announced they no longer accept the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar is losing its status as the world’s currency, making it less secure while the cost of borrowing increases (while investing shrinks).
The next stage is a credit downgrade, and store shelves will be emptier than during the pandemic while product prices go on a gouge fest that will definitely trigger a recession. There is no avoiding it now. How bad it gets is still outside my wheelhouse, but I will not be surprised if it’s deep enough to create a full depression.
The unemployment rate will skyrocket, and the forty thousand casualties of unemployment will break one million.
All of this can be possible only because hundreds of millions are so willing to lie to themselves that they can’t risk facing reality and the prospect of losing the stability they count on to survive in a dystopia.
However, they won’t have any more choices because instability and outright chaos are inevitable.
The arc of history may bend toward justice, but that’s because the trajectory of injustice always bends toward chaos.
There is no way to answer this question honestly because context and circumstances are fluid and unique to each situation. What may be true for a person one day within a given set of parameters may not be true the next day with different variables at stake.
One may hope they will make the moral choice and accept sacrifice, but that’s the kind of self-serving thinking that people often indulge in when thinking they would jump on a grenade to save a crowd.
One’s belief about one’s selfless nature rarely matches reality.
At the end of the day, whatever choice one makes will always be a balancing act between benefits and sacrifices that becomes a lifetime burden to carry.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “One of the arguments against universal health coverage in America is that we are giving poor people something for nothing. So how are European countries able to avoid this while offering universal health coverage?”
They don’t avoid that, but those who argue against universal healthcare are more fixated on hating the poor than they are on understanding how “giving the poor something for nothing” results in superior healthcare at half the cost for themselves.
The cost-based mentality is surprisingly dumb when they can’t comprehend how much they can save when considering expenditures as investments rather than losses.
It is precisely this thinking that Donald Trump has been leveraging to send the nation into a recession.
Conservative thinking tends to be so very short-sighted that when they claim to be fiscally responsible, all they’re doing is showing the world they’re incapable of stimulating growth.
Conservative thinking about healthcare epitomizes their fiscal incompetence.
Fiscal issues are entirely based on a revenue versus costs model, but conservatives seem capable of understanding only one column on their balance sheet.
The capacity for creativity is why liberals excel in the revenue generation side of the balance sheet. Conservatives could learn some valuable lessons about fiscal competence from liberals if they weren’t so close-minded and filled with hateful bigotry.
Caring for the poor is how we bring out the best for everyone at the lowest cost.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think of the Justice Department planning to clear homeless camps and involuntarily hospitalize the mentally ill on the streets?”
This sounds very much like a typical MAGAt CONservative brain child. It’s precisely what Pierre Poilievre suggests as a solution for Canadian tent cities.
Poilievre promises to let police break up tent cities, arrest occupants
It’s precisely the mindset of MAGAt CONservatives everywhere:
The irony in this thinking is so dense it generates a gravitational field.
“To fix a government failure, we’ll sweep it out of sight so that you don’t have to be visually confronted by government failure. You can wait until it escalates into increasing crime waves that we can use to leverage your fear and elect us to solve the problem we created.”
It is precisely this mindset that births abominations like hostile architecture.
It’s always the same heavy hand that creates problems to give them excuses to indulge in their misanthropic treatment of the vulnerable people they victimize into early graves.
No example of this kind of monstrous thinking is an attempt to solve a problem. It’s an excuse to get off on perverted Machiavellian desires.
If they could legalize fights to the death among the homeless, they would.
If they could legally implement a Squid Game television show, they would.
Within the misanthropically short-sighted mindset of reactive thinking that MAGAt CONservatives wallow in, the idea is to pretend to solve a non-problem by punishing the victims of systemic problems they create, creating the non-problem.
I am deliberately describing tent cities as a “non-problem” because they’re not the problem, but a symptom of the problem.
To solve problems, one must look to their causes and address those issues before the symptoms of those problems can ever be addressed.
It’s like affixing a bandage on an open wound while expecting to stem the internal bleeding of a patient.
Making matters even more surreal in the incompetence driving these problems is how the MAGAt CONservative mindset fixates on scapegoats that are part of a comprehensive solution, the non-problems they create with their short-sighted and misanthropic thinking.
In this case, PP blames the “lax liberal drug laws” while completely ignoring how their draconian attitudes toward drugs in society have resulted in an entire host of expensive and socially destructive problems, including punishing the victims of horrible policy while creating an underground growth network for criminal enterprises.
One would think decades of failure in an old problem created by the same thinking which made the same criminal incentivizing problems with alcohol bootlegging about 100 years ago would result in some lightbulbs going off within the dimmest of minds. Still, they seem completely inured against learning from their mistakes.
The kind of self-destructive stupidity that CONservatives perpetually indulge in is like a never-ending nightmare of a Groundhog Day repetition.
The MAGAt flavour of CONservatives wonder why their opposition thinks of them as stupid, and they never stop to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they choose reactionary and destructive approaches toward problems in society. It’s not like the information is unavailable or that educating oneself on issues is impossible. They can’t work through their biases to question their logic.
The mentally ill on the streets has been a problem created by CONservatives to begin with, when Reagan shut down institutions and forced them onto the streets. The homeless issue has grown because people who work full-time can no longer afford to house themselves. At the same time, the billionaire class buys up residential property and inflates prices as their government lackeys continue to refuse to raise minimum wage.
Then they whine that reduced birth rates are an existential threat without putting two and two together to realize they created that dynamic with their misanthropic policies.
The self-destructive stupidity is beyond mind-boggling.
MAGAt CONservatives don’t seem to care about solving problems as much as they prefer to focus on destroying the most vulnerable humans on the planet. Ironically, they often cite how much more money Conservatives donate to charities as they indulge in the same overcompensating behaviours that criminals indulge in when they create laws to ban gay marriages or abortions.
The CONservative mindset seems far more driven by hatred of one’s fellow humans than by working together to build a better society for all.
One day, we might be lucky enough to realize that the mentally ill are not those coping with life on the streets, but are those who walk among us, spreading hatred and voting to destroy lives, only to find the consequences mean destroying their lives as well.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How will emerging artificial womb technology affect the growth rates of off-Earth human populations?”
It won’t affect any “off-Earth” human populations because there will not be any sustainable “off-Earth human populations” any time in the foreseeable future. At best, we’ll see colonies with rotating populations because of simple biological issues such as bone density loss.
Every month in space, an astronaut loses the equivalent of what a senior on Earth loses every couple of years.
For this reason alone (and setting aside numerous other issues like prolonged exposure to radiation, isolation, etc.), any near-future space initiatives such as asteroid mining will depend heavily on robotics and automation technologies to exploit the mineral wealth floating about in our space neighbourhood.
Extraterrestrial human colonies are still very much out of reach and within the realm of fiction.
It’s impossible to predict when such initiatives will be possible because of the varying change factors we are undergoing now that are predominantly defined by our evolving technological capacities.
We could develop technologies to mitigate the biological impact of life in space, such as artificial gravity (which is probably the easiest hurdle to jump, but I’m guessing outside my wheelhouse of expertise here and understand that’s more of an engineering design issue rather than a technological limitation — rotation strategies for creating an artificial gravity are possibly doable now but an expensive and small part of the overall mix of requirements).
Transhumanism may result in a branch of human evolution that permits sustained life in space. However, that’s still quite “science-fictiony” to consider now, and where that technology goes from where we are now is radically unpredictable.
Our knowledge of biochemistry may result in chemically based solutions for protecting and prolonging life in space. In contrast, our communications technologies could result in holographic experiences that psychologically connect people more intimately than videoconferencing does now.
Too many factors influence success in establishing “off-Earth living,” and I haven’t yet mentioned the financial implications. At this point, asteroid mining is the only valid financial justification for establishing some form of presence in space.
Tourism is a complete non-starter, and quite frankly, the arrogance of Bezos and his billionaire clan’s initiative of promoting this vanity stupidity is too environmentally destructive at the moment to justify, never mind that it’s an elitist microsecond Disneyland excursion for no more than a few hundred humans. It’s not sustainable unless a far better way to reach space can be developed… like a space elevator or railgun technology… anything other than polluting our atmosphere more than a year’s worth of a dozen oil rigs does while feeding our energy hunger.
Otherwise, the social impact of artificial womb technology is explored in the movie “The Pod Generation.”
It’s a worthwhile watch for stimulating conversations on technology and how it will affect society.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If older generations tend to get fed up with the following generations, and feel that people are stupider, societal values, music, culture and everything else is worse, how could humans ever deal with living to be 150 or 200 years old?”
This question is based on a flawed presumption and a form of projection because “older generations” is a monstrously huge brush comprising hundreds of millions worldwide.
That number of humans don’t think alike, and they certainly do not all “get fed up with etcetera generations.” However, people who employ broad brushes when making judgments about people they don’t know are also exhibiting precisely the mindset that disparages people and renders broadly negative judgments about “things getting worse.”
Thinking in these negative terms and judgments is often a means of rationalizing one’s negative attitude. By believing age leads to negative judgments, one is permitting oneself to develop one’s negative judgments.
The reality, however, is that many people remain “young-minded” and optimistic throughout their old age and consequently live happier and longer lives.
Here are some examples of people who remained optimistic throughout their long lives:
George Burns 1896–1996
Grandma Mose — Anna Mary Robertson Moses — September 7th, 1860 — December 13, 1961
Jimmy Carter — October 1, 1924 — December 29, 2024
After having pissed away valuable time on another post dealing with toxic incels whining about how unfair life is that they don’t get to control the women they impregnate, I’ve arrived at this question with the attitude that people choose to believe the world is getting worse because they’re not able to control every aspect of it. That frustration wears them down over time, and they develop a negative attitude toward life and people in general.
I was a child during the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” and was a preteen during the flower power generation with love-ins, and an optimistic view of a hopeful future.
Then came the 1980s, when people’s mindsets appeared to change from an open-minded view of society to a rather cynical and dispirited view based on a self-centric model of getting what one could for oneself, even at the expense of others. It seemed the era of sharing and caring was vanishing.
Throughout it all, I still maintained my somewhat naive but hopeful view that we would recover the community spirit I remember being moved by, while reminded of it each night, as the television stations shut down their programming for the evening, with the Brotherhood of Man song, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”
Although I have perceived, throughout the last forty-five years, since the beginning of the 1980s, a general increasing separation between people, many changes have distracted my mind from it. I could sense it occurring, but I mostly ignored it as I went along with it while focusing on the developing technologies and learning to leverage skills and knowledge to carve out a sustainable career for myself. I was caught up in my optimism for a hopeful future for myself, and became increasingly introverted and isolated from interpersonal interactions and a community I could rely on.
Since that was taken from me, maintaining optimism has been quite a struggle. Still, I understand on a deeply visceral level how succumbing to negativity is quite much like drinking poison. The intensity of my experience has made it abundantly clear that a destructive mindset also harms one’s physical health. It creates a feedback loop of self-destruction, which allows one to wallow in broadly negative views toward life in general.
I believe that insight clarifies that living 150–200 years (which no human has ever done) depends on one’s frame of mind and maintaining an optimistic outlook.
If people develop such a negative perception of life that they believe everything is perpetually worsening, they don’t live as long as they otherwise could. Our attitudes toward life constitute a life-shortening way of ensuring we don’t have to cope with hopelessness.
This is part of the reason optimism has increased in importance for me, particularly since I still find myself venting against the prevalence of negativity we see every day and almost everywhere we look.
I can accept that much negativity exists in this world, but I don’t have to accept enduring it, so I get carried away with challenging it. I’ve gotten quite sick and tired of the rampant cynicism. I would like to see a resurgence of hope filling my senses like it did when naive hippy optimism of peace, love, and tree-hugging do-gooders captured public attention, even if it may have mainly been performative or just acting out against previous dark periods in human history, like the Second World War.
I want to believe we’ve arrived at a form of “peak darkness,” and a crossroads in our future as a species and a civilization where we can change course and restore hope to protect our longevity. The alternative is to allow ourselves to succumb to oblivion because we cannot survive an existence sustained by cynicism.
To that end, I do what I can to find examples of young people who give me hope for our future because, with each generation, we have both Kyle Rittenhouses and Greta Thunbergs, just like we have had for generation upon generation before them.
We must choose whether we want long lives of optimistic hope or shortened lives of cynical darkness.
Perhaps I’m just on a high from Canada’s recent election and getting the good news today about Australia following suit. Still, I think — or at least can start feeling some hope that the MAGA madness may finally reach its breaking point. It’s impossible to know if we’re experiencing a sea-change or a temporary lull in the degradation of our values. Still, I’d prefer to adopt an optimistic belief in our future than a cynical one because that’s too toxic a burden to endure. We may still require a world war to break this century’s “MAGAt fever,” or we may have learned something from our history, at least enough not to have to turn our world into a humongous bowl of ashes and regret before we finally start making hopeful and community-minded decisions to grow together instead of tearing each other apart.
At any rate, life may suck but feeling sucky about it only makes it suckier. Even if life sucks, thinking optimistically about a positive future at least makes the suckiness easier to deal with, and that’s why I equate long life with attitude and posted a few well-known examples of people who we can all learn something from.
In short, it’s not about “older generations” but about “old minds.”
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What’s the point of working if you can live through getting “benefits”?”
You’re asking the wrong question.
Instead, you should ask, “What is the point of living like a lazy slug who accomplishes nothing and does nothing to make themselves feel good about themselves or their lives?”
That’s what you’re implying with your question.
You imply a false dichotomy between living one’s life based on laziness rather than doing what motivates them or submitting themselves to an abusively dehumanizing existence as a disposable cog to make someone else rich while struggling with one’s self-respect.
Life isn’t a choice between working and not working. It’s a choice between employment as a wage slave or generating an income for oneself based on doing what matters to them and which motivates them to be excited about their lives.
Employment used to be a motivator when the income generated enough to go well beyond meeting basic needs and into enough disposable income to invest in one’s future.
That’s no longer the case.
Employment today is the equivalent of a lifetime of dog-paddling in an ocean until one gets too tired and drowns.
That’s not a life. That’s a lifetime prison sentence.
What’s the point of struggling in poverty until you die to make someone else wealthy when you can be much happier and less stressed while doing what you love?
Bonus Question: Should there be a universal basic income to address economic inequality?
UBI doesn’t address the issue of economic inequity, and it isn’t intended to.
UBI provides economic stability and gives people room to make the best choices for themselves without having a desperate need to survive leveraged against them.
UBI frees people from the pressures of meeting basic survival needs enough to escape oppressive working conditions. The consequences of businesses losing the leverage of economic desperation to create downward pressure on wages can more easily permit upward pressure on wages.
This change in a negotiating dynamic contributes to a reduction in economic disparity, but it doesn’t address it head-on.
thotbag 