How do you guys cope with the fact that the world isn't getting any better?
How do you guys cope with the fact that the world isn't getting any better?
I'm really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I'll coast right through it. I'll also accept "I don't" and "very poorly" as answers
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I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.
It does, but it's accomplished that over the past century by prioritizing short term growth, long term consequences be damned.
As those debts are starting to come due to collect, while it is still accurate to say that there's been an unprecedented good run, that doesn't mean the fast approaching wall ahead that has everyone else worried is a mirage either.
Both can be true.
In the past we could say that humanity is still doing terrible things but becoming better in the larger picture.
Back then it was hopeful to think like this because the things we did were terrible but not long lasting.
The problem now is that the terrible things we are capable of are now world changing and can affect us globally .... climate change, nuclear war, AI technology, biological experimention (or even biological warfare)
50 years ago we had the capability of making decisions or choices that could cost the lives of millions ..... now our decisions and choices are capable of affecting the survival of our species on this planet.
and while things might be getting worse in the smaller scale, the general trend is improvement
ex. A lot of the current issues are related to a little global pandemic we had recently
The pandemic is still on. It isn't over yet.
Hasn't the WHO officially declared it over?
Well, insofar that the pandemic "won", the infection is now endemic and part of everyday life, like herpes or the common cold.
Yes, that is correct. Therefore, it is no longer considered a pandemic. Doesn't mean that the disease doesn't exist anymore.
I wouldn't believe in anything WHO says.
Why not?
The provisional count of all US deaths involving COVID-19 was 48,615 compared to over 200,000 during the same time period in 2022. Of those 98.4% of the deaths were elderly Americans. The pandemic is long over.
March 13 2021 was when around 1/3rd of eligible people in the US received their first vaccines. The vaccines are mostly effective for 6-12 months and then their efficacy wanes due to the new strains that keep emerging due to mass reinfections. New strains are evolving faster now that mass reinfection is standard procedure in the world.
In 2022 covid was still the fourth leading cause of death. Now during 2023 barely anyone is testing, less people are getting boosters, and every reinfection causes cumulative damage and an increase risk of Long Covid so as this is only the second (kind of first) year of mass reinfections and extremely minimal booster rates I think its safe to assume the pandemic is now getting worse due to people ignoring it and governments not mandating masks or increase of air quality in businesses, schools, etc.
Covid causes “serious toll on heart health a full year after recovery including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected” and heart disease is the number one leading cause of death in the US
Covid is a mass disabling event already causing 2-4 million people in the US alone to be disabled and unable to work.).
Covid is far from over.
if Climate Change is our “don’t look up”, Covid and Long Covid is our “don't look around”. Although we do have the tools to easily combat the pandemic, N95 masks and air purifiers or even better are the CR boxes which are DIY air purifiers that are much more efficient and affordable than commercial hepa purfiers.
They didn't say Covid is over
It’s just no longerna pandemic, it got endemic and is now more or less like the flu in terms of death rate and infections and it would be lower if we wouldn’t still have morons refusing any vaccine cause they think cellphone towers will then spy on them -.-
It’s a virus causing increase in heart attacks, strokes, organ damage, brain damage, and permanent disability for people of any age. It’s nothing like the flu other than being airborne and initially showing up as respiratory symptoms.
Endemic just means that its regularly occurring because we’ll be getting reinfected over and over. Endemic in no way means its better, its much worse. The term is used as a way to admit defeat and manufacture consent for us to move on because we can’t stop the spread. We can stop the spread though. High quality masks, CR boxes, far uvc lights like the Nukit Torch, upgraded hvacs, co2 monitoring. These are all tools that can greatly reduce the risk of infection and slow the spread enough to then stop the spread completely.
Governments and the rich rather just say “its endemic go back to the office and live with infinite reinfections and the inevitability that it will disable or kill you” and they will continue pumping propaganda to convince you its fine that they failed at protecting you and your loved ones because they rather you work amidst an active dangerous virus that can kill or permanently disable you than take steps to improve the infrastructure or continue work from home and other measures that reduce the need for commercial real estate
Its estimated that 10-20% infections cause long covid. Thats 10-20% of infections not people. People are getting infected 2-3 times a year. How many years will it take for you to become permanently disabled?
If you haven’t seen what Long Covid can look like here’s a youtube video of the science youtuber Physics Girl showing how shes been living for almost 3 years now after she got covid at her wedding https://youtu.be/vydgkCCXbTA TLDW: She can’t feed herself, walk, and barely has the energy to hold a conversation or read text messages. (She has a followup video posted a week ago where she hasn’t improved)
More info and more sources to my statements can also be found on https://covidwiki.org/
Right, exactly.
Well, not so much on the death rate still, but it's much much lower.
That's not a low number. COVID-19 still accounts for 3% of deaths in the last week. Two of my friends have caught it again in the last month.
And right now there's a huge uptake in infections in Germany, but of course numbers aren't recorded any more and theres no contact tracing. So we don't even know how bad the situation is.
You’re batting a thousand on this thread 🙄
You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I'm not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.
I also rejoice that the largest generation of terrible people will all be dying off in the next 20 years, and the millennials will be taking over control.
Every generation has its psychopaths and psychopaths tend to pursue power. I wouldn't put my hopes in millennials any more than in boomers. I'm happy to be wrong on this though.
Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.
There have already been studies showing that this gradual swing to the right no longer holds for millennials.
The original premise that psychopathy affects a proportion of any population is true though.
Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries.
That is just not true. They do get more protective of their possessions and the status quo as they get richer and hold positions with more influence in society. Currently millennials and younger generations do not get richer in the same way that boomers did though.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
…and then went on to betray everything their parent’s generation fought for (some with their lives) in terms of workers rights in the US because some dumb ass actor President convinced them to throw it all in the trash in exchange for nothing…
The “hippie” thing was a flash in the pan beyond changes in superficial cultural habits when you are talking in broad terms of US society and it mostly sticks in the popular US consciousness because it is a reliable punching bag for conservatives rather than a genuine generational force for good.
Fast forward a thousand years from now and when a child sees pictures of all the animals and habitats that used to exist on earth in kids books and they ask “what happened?” the answer will have to be the boomer generation. Yes it was just the rich ones in power, but zoom out and I am not sure how much that shit matters on the scale of civilizations. Boomers like every other generation of humans inherited the earth to steward it for future generations and they literally did such a bad job of it that it is impossible for future generations to do worse or else we will just all outright go extinct.
Boomers failed catastrophically to steward the earth for future generations and honestly I hope future generations never forget that. I hope they are remembered in stories that retell and retell what happened. They deserve nothing less, especially because half of them are always lecturing young people about how climate change isn’t real, about how the devastation their generation wrought that is bloodily unfolding in front of our very eyes, is just nonsense.
Fewer millennials ate lead paint chips as kids, I know that much.
Boomers are a problem because they took power early and refuse to let go
That's the thing with self-organizing systems like democracy or capitalism... You need constant churn, because if it stagnates, the worst kind of people entrench themselves.
So you lie to yourself, got it.