How Bad Are Things? (2015)
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
People tell me I'm a wonderful listener due to my lack of judgement on their problems (more than once, people, including my therapist, tell me I'd make a great therapist), but really I've internalized the idea that everyone is living a life less than what they hoped their life would be to various extents and that there is also a near infinite combination of ways to achieve this effect such that no one can be dismissed for their misery in any respect without also dismissing the "legitimate" misery of a wide swath of people.
When I come across people who are willing to dismiss others' concerns, either by dismissing them as oversensitive, or dismissing them as evil, I wonder if they've internalized this logic too. And if they have, what their experiences are to cause them to conclude that dismissal is the reasonable choice.
Now this, to me, would have made a much more interesting subject of investigation.
There's a downside to this logic, one of the enabling sort. I consider myself fairly empathetic, but with a very pragmatic tint. I find many, many people take on complaining and a victim/underdog status with an almost hobby-like approach. And I watch how others react, which is exactly as expected: sympathy, attention, allowing those complainers a way out of personal responsibility or true introspection (specifically into their role in managing reactions to external events). It's a never ending cycle. And it hardly ever promotes growth. And almost never results in true happiness (happiness is probably the wrong word...maybe contentedness is better, tho maybe not).
So, the same way you wonder about those people who "dismiss others' concerns," I wonder about those who kowtow to others' words and fail to consider the reality (perceived, of course) behind them. It often feels lazy to me. And short-term thinking. Truly caring about another person sometimes means forsaking short-term "feel goods" for long term growth.
But the idea that what's best for people is always tough love and a job is just as reductionistic and oversimplified.
And at scale, neither blanket solution is perfectly effective, but one at least leans towards kindness.
Very kind of you :)
Pragmatism is relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters. (That's a dictionary definition.) But yeah, in war for example, you are very much not thinking about taking active steps to manage your mind, or managing the way your mind works, or anything of that nature. You just become very pragmatic. Your desires become almost the only thing you consider at the pragmatic extreme represented by combat for instance.
I think you're speaking more on a certain type of idealism maybe? The practice of following ideals, or living under their influence. But romanticism works too.
That's the definition. What I outlined - granted, without the specific action steps - is sensible and realistic. And it distinctly is not about happiness. Romantic would be "just be happy." Would you consider behavioral therapy romantic?
Edit: I'm really hoping you guys aren't saying that anything involving a person managing their mind/emotions is romantic and impractical.
I think pragmatism fits least because of your clarification. Managing one's mind, or ridding oneself of desire, and especially dealing with reality without bias or judgement, are just not terribly realistic in nature. We should certainly strive to deal with reality without bias or judgement for instance, but, I mean, we obviously don't do that in practice. None of us do. Despite the protestations of the number among us who would claim to be completely non-judgemental. Especially not when we find ourselves at a pragmatic extreme. In combat for instance, there is a whole lot of bias and judgement because people start to become almost too pragmatic.
But we can just agree to disagree. No worries man. Just wanted to explain my thinking.
> Managing one's mind, or ridding oneself of desire, and especially dealing with reality without bias or judgement, are just not terribly realistic in nature. We should certainly strive to deal with reality without bias or judgement for instance, but, I mean, we obviously don't do that in practice.
From that point of view, I get how you're looking at this. You're certainly not wrong. I'm likely letting my own bias color my thoughts here because I practice this more aggressively (and actively) than most. So I've seen how realistic it can be. But generally speaking it's not very realistic, you're right.
To try and fix that by understanding your mind might not be a bad idea, but it remains a theoretical solution until you can presume some success rate. Going to therapy might give you that if you have the means, social stability and trust to do so. Which might then result in you leaving the pool of people having problems.
But if you don't have the conditions to go to therapy successfully, or don't end up succeeding anyway, that solution also remains theoretical. The further down this rabbit hole we go the harder it gets the solve the problem and the less pragmatic understanding your own mind becomes. Instead pragmatism would be to get people in a position where they can realistically work on implementing that, or another, solution successfully.
In that sense I could agree that your position could be considered idealistic rather than romantic. As my objection isn't that it isn't pragmatic because it couldn't work, but that it isn't pragmatic because it wouldn't work in many situations that would also required other things.
Eudaimonia is the word you're looking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
There are a lot of arguments against it. I think there are good points in these counter arguments, but come down on the side of Eudaimonia, personally.
Counter arguments:
https://bigthink.com/the-moral-sciences-club/eudaimonism-is-...
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/646/is-virtue...
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004395794/BP000003.xm...
Professional therapists often fail in this, which is one way that people can see a therapist for years and never make progress on their issue.
I consider genuinely listening to merely be good manners. I have had to learn to be more stand-off-ish because this is apparently not some universal standard of good manners.
In fact, it's apparently some bizarre aberration that signals "use me" or something. All manner of people imagine I am the solution to their problem and I am required to fix their problem, all completely for free while they don't do anything whatsoever for me.
This was true even when I was literally homeless and going hungry.
I don't get it. At all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Like, don't you have a conscience? A sense of social obligation? A sense of quid pro quo? The tiniest inkling that simply using me up and never ever giving back is likely to either alienate me or kill me and, either way, I will stop being a resource for you?
Another aphorism is, "some people are givers, others are takers". It's a function of personality, not resources or circumstances.
> All manner of people imagine I am the solution to their problem and I am required to fix their problem, all completely for free while they don't do anything whatsoever for me.
It's also been my experience that if you don't then suddenly you're being selfish, a jerk, etc. It's as if you're being judged by an entirely different metric of social acceptability.
My two adult sons are the only people who have gotten it through their heads that if they value what I bring to the table, they need to be good to me and give me reason to stick around.
Everyone else seems to have some broken social concept of pecking order where being nice to them means you're their bitch and they are important, you are nothing and you are required to keep catering to them, no matter how badly they treat you. Like how when humans feed certain kinds of animals and now those animals think you owe them tribute forevermore.
Actually, this might explain a whole lot about ugly human history.
Meanwhile, in my life, my sons are the only people still close to me. Everyone else keeps being given their walking papers because, no, I'm not your bitch.
When I moved back home during my divorce and lived with relatives, I got to see all kinds of stuff going on that I had no knowledge of when I used to visit, keep in touch by phone, etc. I moved out, to an apartment a mile or two away, and went back to getting the whitewashed view of their lives.
I don't think they were even trying to particularly hide things from me. It just didn't come up. It just wasn't possible to convey every bit of minutiae about their lives to me all the time when I wasn't there seeing it firsthand.
You typically have far more limited information about the lives of people around you than you imagine. You don't really know what your neighbors are doing. You don't really know what your coworkers and boss do all day. Etc.
Think of the endless news stories where the neighbors are simply shocked that their next door neighbor was a drug dealer for the Mafia, a serial killer, etc. We often know people a lot less well than we imagine we do.
I wonder to what extent the setting in which the author works selects for people who will feel isolated/regretful and therefore develop the kinds of problems s/he encounters.
> The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it.
The underlying assumption is that white and wealthy must not be worse off than the alternative.
But what if the environment itself creates problems that less affluent environments don't?
- Children can afford to move out of the house and so they do
- Couples can afford to get divorced, and so they do
- Individuals can afford to experiment with behaviors that lead to addiction, and so they do
- Families don't need their children economically, so they spend their time in the care of others or alone
There can be no regret without choice. The more money you have, the more real choices you get to make. And the more ways you can come to regret those choices.
It's less an assumption and more a nod towards the meme of white male privilege - the most popular case of “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.” on Tumblr, and on the Internet in general.
> But what if the environment itself creates problems that less affluent environments don't?
It probably does. Scott touches this in the paragraph that starts with: "This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days.", but he doesn't expand on it. However, it reminds me of another of his articles, "Burdens"[0], which expands on this more in context of people suffering from depression.
> There can be no regret without choice. The more money you have, the more real choices you get to make. And the more ways you can come to regret those choices.
Caveat: not all (or even most) misery comes from regret; moreover, this line of thinking applies more to society at large than individuals. For instance, if you're born in a developed world, into a family that embraced urbanization, it's quite likely that through no fault of your own, you won't get much care from the family in your old age and end up in care of strangers or alone.
--
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/article/marriage-and-divor...
> Moreover, the “divorce gap” between college graduates and those with less education was larger in the NLSY79 cohort than it was for the 1950–1955 birth cohort. In the NLSY79 cohort, the divorce rate for first marriages is nearly 20 percentage points lower for those who have completed their bachelor’s degree compared with those who have completed high school, regardless of whether they have some college or not. The gap is even greater, approaching 30 percentage points, when comparing those with a college degree to those with less than a high school diploma. Just as with first marriages, college graduates were more likely to stay in a second marriage when compared with groups that have less education.
Couples that get married after degrees have waited longer to get married than couples that either drop out of high school or marry after high school. College grads tend to earn more.
So it seems any income difference must account for bachelor's degrees and the extra time before getting married that requires.
Again, just taking a stab at what the author meant. Not claiming that I know or anything.
That being said that doesn't mean our problems are any less real now but for example, lynching is much less of a problem in the US then it was 100 years ago, and the risk of someone losing a limb during a blogging accident is substantially smaller than the risk of someone losing a limb whilst working with heavy manufacturing equipment. Over course I don't mean this in every case, but across the board many of these conditions have improved.
Now it seems that many of the problems we face are much more mental and emotional than physical, That doesn't make the suffering they present any less real for those experiencing it but it does mean in some ways things have gotten better, even if we now face different problems.
I'm not sure it's his conclusion. From the article:
> This is also why I am wary whenever people start boasting about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But people have a bad tendency to follow it up with “And so now most people have it pretty good”
I think his point is that things might be better, subjectively, but they're still not that good, objectively.
Even without looking at data, the author should consider that his patients come to him to specifically talk about their problems, and not what is going well in their life. It gives him a skewed perspective.
https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
The second chart of the page shows the share of people who say they are either very happy or mostly happy, click on "Map" in the bottom right corner to see all the countries for which data is available.
Sample: US: 90 percent say they are happy China: 85 % Ethiopia: 63 %
>I have three non-mutually exclusive theories for this:
> 1. The people who come to a psychiatrist are disproportionately the unhappiest and most disturbed. This is obviously true to some degree. But I got the same sort of people when I worked in general medicine and primary care. Even the people who come to a primary care doctor are going to be a little biased towards the sorts of conditions that produce or result from sickness, but people were still much worse off than I thought.
Later on he runs a sample of twenty people to get an idea of the type of issues others around us might be facing using the statistics he provides earlier on.
If someone cuts me off while I am driving, I come up with alternate explanations. Maybe that person really has to use the bathroom etc. Rather than think a person is just being evil.
Something I have noticed before, the physical demeanor of people you see walking around you has a psychological effect on yourself. Many years ago this came up in a conversation I was having with a retired Math professor.
Over the years, I got seriously burned personally and professionally by malicious people that I made excuses for in my head. It hardened my heart and caused me to be less understanding and forgiving of people.
Now I've come full circle. I'm back to your approach, but I play more defensively. People likely have a reason for being malicious that is out of their control. I don't need to judge them, but I do need to protect myself and my loved ones.
Yeah, if I get killed by someone who was not malicious, I'm just as dead as if I get killed by someone who was. To use the aggressive driver example: I don't need to be angered or insulted by someone cutting me off, but if I end up near them down the road, I'm going to try to change lanes or otherwise try to not end up near them.
I think the main thing is to not be angered by the (assumed) maliciousness. I've seen people generate a lot of anger because they assume every slight is intentionally aimed at them: they cut me off just to piss me off; they didn't wave back because they hate me &c.
Which is not to say that things are great, but I think the badness is fairly concentrated on a relatively smaller set of people than the script's results indicate.
As someone who lives somewhere that's very blue collar and works somewhere very rich and white collar the difference is incredibly stark.
Where I live you see the signs that some people have problems, people living out of cars, the occasional mobility scooter avoiding the potholes on the sidewalk, houses will go unrepaired for long periods of time you stand in line to check out at some store and there's fat people, the cashier sounds like she smokes a pack a day and you can't tell if she's 30 or 50, the police don't blink twice when someone's smoking weed in public or rolling a stop in a rusted out 30yo shitbox, people bitch about not having enough money for all the shit you have to do in life, Walmart is just another place to shop.
Then I go to work and there's not a single car over 15yo sitting in the gridlock, there's women carrying brand name shopping bags and out jogging on the sidewalk, ever lawn is meticulously maintained and every window and door is cleaned daily, nobody smokes, nobody is overweight, nobody has regrettable tattoos, nobody is carrying beer while riding a bike, bored cops feel the need to check out anyone who dare drive something that's economically out of place through the wrong neighborhood on a weekend (the help don't come on Sunday), people bitch about other people using plastic straws and bags, Walmart is regarded as someone you don't go if you can avoid it, etc.
What bothers me isn't that the urban wealthy (definition of wealthy to include upper middle) don't understand the problems the urban and rural poor (no, I don't live in the boondocks, I commute in from a small rust-belt-esque city) but that they act like they do and that they have all the solutions.
In some poor areas people have particularly strong social ties - in part because they haven't moved to the area. That can have real value.
"Everyone you know is practically drowning in suffering"
SH brings up this point to contextualize our own suffering. It's hard for us to socialize with others and make connections, but if we consider other peoples' plights and struggles, it gives us more perspective and may aid us to talk, converse, and collaborate with them.
I tried to apply this in driving. If I am honked at, I usually feel it's not justified and it slightly harms my mood. Therefore, when I see other drivers doing something unsafe or unskillful, I try to spare the horn and simply slow down myself. This is likely another suffering, late person with back pain, bills weighing on them, possibly phone addiction or something urgent going on, and the least I can do is slow down and give them space.
Looking around us and appreciating the suffering of others is a very useful exercise.
I've taken this further and I try to harvest waves in my commute. I consciously let people merge, etc and I'm always glad if I get a wave. I aim to get one on every trip. I hand them out too.
Its increased my mental wellbeing by the time I get to work.
For instance, some driver doesn't want to get in the queue at the back, so they drive up and cut over in front of me or a car or two up. There are a lot of thoughts on that that could go through your mind. These range from "no fair" to "jerk" to other things.
But, I've come to realize the best way to deal with that is to detach. You can either not let the person in and then go down that range of thoughts/emotions (primarily negative) or just let them in and not dwell on it. Observe it (assuming it's not jeopardizing anyone's safety) and let it go.
This is a very simple exercise, but it has the potential to be carried on to larger experiences in life. I'm not here to judge if you don't think it is, I just know what makes sense to me. And this is not something I have come up with on my own. This and similar techniques have been highlighted in quite a few books I've read, people I've listened to at various events.
This for me is a much deeper discussion and I think completely personal to the experiencer. I tend to fall on the side of being mindful of yourself and the struggles/suffering of existence are of your own doing and choices (obviously, this is a simplistic statement, but to me true on a high level).
I've been listening/watching quite a bit of Naval Ravikant podcasts/videos. I think he has a lot of good wisdom to digest and he definitely covers this subject. I highly recommend anything of his you come across. https://nav.al
One of these is not like the other. You can have it good by being white and still have real problems.
To a good degree of approximation, the talk about one group having it better than other is a discussion about one group's mean and/or right tail being greater than the other's. The statement you want the author to recognize is equivalent to that in a probability distribution, some samples really do fall on the right side of the mean.
"White males are privileged" is a reasonable statement to make with plenty of evidence to support it. "You have it better than me because you're a white male" doesn't, because there's a significant amount of overlap in the bell curves of "better off" (regardless of how you define it) between white males, and black women (to give an example).
It's more-or-less the same argument as assuming that any given man is physically stronger than any given woman because on average men are stronger.
Is it though? I think you're going to need to be a lot more specific than that to make a reasonable statement. You can try to support your original statement, but that's so vague it could mean whatever you want.
But on that same dataset it was found that Asians and Whites get more disproportionately more job offers than Black and Hispanic applicants in America. So while things might be shifting or evening out for some characteristics, like gender, in others they are still going strong.
[0] https://i1.wp.com/talent.works/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/re...
And aside from that employment is one dimension of 'privilege'. How could you possibly calculate all the privilege across a human life... there are endless dimensions
- You can't be privileged in getting a promotion in a dead end job where no one gets promoted.
- You can't be privileged in social acceptability if you have a mental health issue that keeps you from going outside.
- You can't be privileged in educational opportunities when you had to quit high school to pay for a parent's medical bills.
It goes on and on. Privalage is real, but it's mostly real for those who are successful, and have a whole pile of luck and privalage backing them up. It's a lot less applicable for everyone else, the suffering masses.
It's not like America has a white police force that discriminates against black people and a black police force that discriminates against white people. We have one police force and it's a white one (in the sense that it tends to be run for the sake of white people and embodies white values).
It's not like we have a white tech sector that discriminates against black people and a black tech sector that discriminates against white people. We have one tech sector that is run (disproportionately) for the sake of white people and embodies white values.
Does that mean that every white person has it good? No. But being white does have privilege associated with it. You're part of the dominant group and have an easier time navigating the social world because of that.
That being said, it's possible to be white and also mentally ill (for example). That doesn't mean you don't have white privilege, it just means you lack the privilege of people without mental illness. Saying someone is privileged doesn't mean that their life is good, it just means it's better than it would otherwise be.
What do you mean by “white values”?
I think it's unremarkable to say:
People who are not straight and/or white tend to have worse outcomes than people who are straight and/or white.
-- and --
Straight white people can have hard, miserable lives.
His specific anger is at the notion that members of minority groups suffer THEREFORE members of majority groups do not suffer. But as you said, you can still have it better than people in a minority group--on average--and also suffer.
There's so much annoying crosstalk when it comes to these issues. That being said, his call to empathy is a good one.
Yeah this is where his anger comes from, but perhaps he's being a bit too sensitive. He doesn't seem to recognize the validity of the idea that some people really have it better.
Deprivation is a necessary dimension of human experience. I was looking at setting up one-month trips for snowflakes through Canadian muskeg guided by special forces veterans, but it turns out that only the government can legally form a meeting of minds sufficient to conclude a contract where one party agrees to what amounts to boot camp.
Empathizing with people whose only problem is that their experience does not include overcoming adversity is a challenge that I think is best met with tough love. More of the same clearly is not going to do any good.
You could fallaciously say I'm sorry you had your legs eaten by bears but did you hear about joe, joe was eaten alive by ants!
Your anecdote regarding your would be boot camp is probably off topic but allowing people to abrogate basic human rights so you can have a camping trip seems like an atrocious idea.
It would be the worst idea I'd heard this week but I just conversed with a guy planning to deliberately make chlorine gas to go to war with the weeds in his garden.
Suffering is more likely to stunt then enrich.
My perspective on this is somewhat unusual; I chose to canoe across Manitoba because I felt like I was a weakling who had never truly confronted necessity. It took three weeks, and I remember thinking, many times, "this absolutely and completely sucks, but I'm going to remember this as a great experience." Sure enough, that is the case.
There is a lot of masochism in my life because I depend on it to keep depression away. It is for my spirit what gravity is for my body - in the sense that long term zero-G exposure is unhealthy. I can't help but think a persevering experience would help these folks, whose lives are apparently so unchallenged that the mundane necessities of day-to-day existence grow untenable.
That's a result of my perspective, which is the perspective of a masochist. I am aware that pain and pleasure are linked for me to an unusual degree. I feel like it should be that way for everyone, and they're really missing out! I guess I'd be a pretty terrible therapist.
If only we all had suffering as an immediate consequence of not living up to our potential, you know? It would be better. So I'm prescribing shock collar controlled by an iOS/Android app that monitors subject behavior... It could really help these people realize that they were correct to think that they ought to be happy with their non-shock-collar lives! And they would be!
Veterans, former political prisoners, post-war countries, poor social classes etc have a lot of mental health and depression related problems. They may enjoy world of plenty the way we don't, but they have issues we don't.
Ethnicity and wealth are physical things. Happiness is an emotion you feel. They are related only insofar as one depends on physical things for happiness. This is a spiritual issue really (not to be confused with religion or any sort of belief) and this is something that our (otherwise very successful) modern way of life is very much neglecting.
These patients, with the exact same circumstances, could have found some peace by accepting and working within their constraints - the 70-year old woman could accept the situation with the granddaughter and find other outlets for caretaking or being with children, or tried a legal way to address the situation, accepting the outcome whether it works or not ("I took my best shot, the rest is up to fate"). The man with PTSD could learn techniques, CBT perhaps, to cope with the anxiety triggers and expand his comfort zone in the world again, found ways to deal with his anger so it didn't turn into violence, etc.
Not saying these circumstances are easy, but everyone's life has particular challenges and avenues of growth, and in the grand scheme that's often a good thing. Everyone's life has constraints, without exception - I can't teleport instantly anywhere I want on the planet by snapping my fingers; if I spend my days lamenting that and thinking that I should, I'll be miserable.
On the one hand yes we should help each other better our external circumstances; but on the other hand I believe most external things aren't truly necessary for contentment, and indeed the belief that they are causes more misery than the circumstances.
Here's a typical case:
Meth addicted neglectful mother has dozens of reports from several sources of varying credibility (e.g. reports from an ex-boyfriend are immediately discounted as likely retribution). Each time, Child Welfare Services shows up checks that there are no bruises on kid, food in the cabinet ,and a bed for the kid and then leaves.
In the good cases, CWS gets lucky and shows up while the mother is using and the child is removed. In the medium case, someone (e.g. a drug dealer or boyfriend) will hit the kid and leave a mark, which will cause a more thorough investigation that may turn up evidence of drug use. In the bad cases the kid manages to put together enough self-sufficiency to not die and will end up addicted/pregnant/dead/homeless/in jail by the time they are 18.
[edit]
Don't let the above discourage you from reporting this! The best case happens only because of reports from multiple sources force CWS to keep showing up. Almost all kids that get removed from bad situations before kindergarten happen because people care and report.
The actual social workers that I've interacted with are reasonably well trained people. However, they are overworked and underpaid, so a lot of the good ones move to the private sector.
Also the heavy caseload means they tend to remove based upon ease of substantiation rather than severity of the situation (i.e. if it's easy to prove a minor infraction that will get you tripped up more quickly than a hard to prove major infraction). This definitely appears to be a function of the system rather than any individual maliciousness.
That's social workers. As far as case-aids go I can't think of a single positive thing to say other than "there are a few good ones." It's a low paying job where the only prerequisite is that you can pass a criminal background check. A friend I know ended up as a case-aid by accident! She checked with the county to see if they had any job openings and they said roughly "We need someone to provide transportation" and it wasn't until she showed up to work that she learned she would be transporting foster kids to family visits, and in some cases would be supervising those visits!
Wow, what a simultaneously disgusting and ignorant sentiment. Disgusting, because it assumes children, family and relationships are fungible, and ignorant, because it assumes grandparents have rights of some kind, when they don’t.
Also I just said "legal", e.g. child protective services or notifying police, not Legal Rights of Grandmothers On Their Grandchildren or whatever you're assuming.
> about how much better we’re doing than back in the bad old
> days. That precise statement seems to in fact be true. But
> people have a bad tendency to follow it up with “And so
> now most people have it pretty good”. I don’t think we
> have any idea how many people do or don’t have it pretty good.
We do have it good. Would you rather be middle class today or a king in 18th century?
We have it amazingly good. The fact that we can't see this ("we" as in society) tells me that our appetites are impossible to satisfy.
At least 90% of all problems I've seen between people are unnecessary and result mostly of lack of compassion and selfishness.
There are problems that are truly unsolvable and tragic - where death or significant health issues are involved - but other than that, people create problems themselves either by being selfish or being the victim of someone else's selfishness.
What would it take to say "I am satisfied with what I have; with the friend near me; with the family near me; with the material possessions that I have; with the values that I own; and I don't need anything else" ?
Everything else being finite, why would our appetites be infinite?
I know some rich people - they are unbelievably unhappy people. You probably can't tell due to their lavish lifestyle, but if you are close to them - you'd know. And they have it all for god knows how many generations henceforth. Really amazing, once you think about it.
>
> We have it amazingly good. The fact that we can't see this ("we" as in society) tells me that our appetites are impossible to satisfy.
I completely agree with your first point.
I think your second point may be wrong; rather, people have very little knowledge of how things used to be, so every stubbed toe feels cosmic. (Remember your history class that mentioned the Hundred Years War? WTF does the name of that war tell you???)
Today, war is total, nothing is off-limits, and global conflicts reach levels of destruction unimaginable in the 15th century. And a few nations possess enough firepower, in nuclear and conventional form, to essentially end human existence on earth if they choose.
King in the 18th century. As if happiness and a life-well-lived depends on what century you were born in, rather than the available opportunities…
I wonder if an objective misery score is possible, maybe with a portable continuous brain scanning device. I'd think that the data is in there, if only we had the tech to extract it.
Resulting in something like:
"From perspective <x>, this group could be considered unfairly disadvantaged by <quantity X>."
"From perspective <y> this group could be considered unfairly disadvantaged by <quantity Y>."
"Unfairly", and all other terms, would require very strict definitions.
The crowd sourcing part would come in by people pointing out logical flaws or missing perspectives.
I wonder if this might improve people's ability to more "correctly" evaluate reality, as well as make the boundary between matters of fact and matters of opinion more obvious, rather than all opinions being little more than a mishmash of subconscious heuristics based on personal experiences and a partial understanding (likely unbalanced) of the relevant facts.
I would consider this an attempt at finally applying the same academic rigor (that has yielded such success) in the hard sciences to the far more complicated soft sciences. Does anyone know of any undertaking that does this in any way?
1. The implied belief that there is a cosmic measuring stick for how good someone has it, but, more importantly, that this measuring stick matters. The judging accomplishes nothing, other than to let the person judging feel internally superior for a moment. The more relevant issue is letting that judgement cloud any rational decisions you need to make later with respect to the people you're judging.
2. If you're making policy decisions, then this cosmic measuring stick of suffering would matter (like taxing gardening services, I guess?), but are you making policy decisions?
3. Do you need something from them, and does that inform how you'll behave towards them regardless of what you actually think of them? Startup founders who didn't come from rich backgrounds experience this all the time around VC's. But it's not really possible to keep the functional motivation and the desire to fit in entirely separate.
4. Are they just complaining because shared lightweight misery makes for fun socialization? People who aren't rich do that too. The content may just be a function of their environment.
I - strongly - disagree.
First of all, like the author says, these statistics are most likely inflated, "since I took them from groups working on these problems and those groups have every incentive to make them sound as bad as possible".
Secondly, even if you take the numbers given as fact, this is incredibly bad statistics (like most statistics not done by actual statisticians.)
Specifically: Most of these problems go hand in hand. If you were physically abused as a child, there's a higher chance you were also sexually abused as a child. If you were abused at all, there's a higher chance you'll go to prison. If you have chronic pain, there's a higher chance you'll become a heroin addict. If you're a heroin addict, there's a higher chance you'll go to prison. If you went to prison, there's a higher chance you'll be unemployed after.
I have made it one of my main life goals to meet all kinds of people. Really _all_ kinds: homeless people, extremely rich people, devout Muslims, devotees of all religions (Bahá'í, Hare Krishna, you name it), "normal people" around the world, farmers, writers, surrealists, artists, drug dealers, geniuses, idiots, assholes, extremely kind people...
One thing I've found is that the good (and the bad) seems to clump. If you get lucky and end up with some of (good friends|good family|good partner|good financial situation|good career|good health|happy) you will often end up acquiring some of the others. The reverse also works. If you had a terrible childhood, that often leads to crime/drug use, which can lead to prison, which most always leads to further problems in life. So, in a room of 100 people, maybe:
- 9% were abused as a child - 1% were in prison - 7% were depressed - 2% were addicted to heroin/meth/prescription pills - 10% were very unhappy with their life - 7% had chronic pain
...but 90/100 had none of the above, because most of those overlapped.
I'm not saying that the world is perfect, but rather that many negative things clump.
TL;DR: If one person in 10 is sad, one is poor, one is sick, one is a heroin addict and one is in prison, that doesn't mean 6/10 people have one of these issues... perhaps 9/10 are fine, and it's just one person who's got all of those issues. Which of those 10 do you think is going to a psychiatrist?
Further note: In America, the cycle of poverty/jail/addiction can trap entire families for generations. In other countries, government assistance can take the worry of housing or medical care off your back either permanently or long enough to work on other problems.
The big hitters are Drug addiction and Chronic Pain.
I don't have a solution for drug addiction, but I can't blame our generation for not finding a solution. No generation has, and given caffeine addiction, it's extremely hard for others to help with.
Chronic Pain needs to end. Between Doctors of Physical Therapy and medications, there are little reason for people to be experiencing chronic pain. Take note that the author was very generic about their meaning on that.
The rest of the stuff are significantly smaller and usually involved a traumatic event.
What can we do?
Caffeine is not addictive. Physiological effect of constant coffee drinking go away without side effects after two weeks. It has no (known) negative effects on health or sociological function as actual drugs have.
I can't figure out why you mentioned caffeine at all
Part of the problem is that we don't even fully understand how pain works.
The simplest solution to both of your problems on a societal level is assisted suicide.
It's not the solution, it's a solution, that many people would take.
Life is constantly fighting entropy, and always eventually fails. It makes sense for disorder and even misery to be fairly common.
I do tend to dismiss the concerns of others, simply because I've come to the conclusion that I cannot fix the vast majority of the problems of other people. I can't fix any of the issues mentioned in this article, for instance. I'd rather work on my own problems, and the issues of people closest to me, because then I have some chance.
Sorry, I don't understand this logic. I cannot solve world hunger but I recognize that poor food distribution is a problem. Similarly, I cannot solve someone's traumas but I can recognize they've been traumatized. Are we operating on different concepts of dismissing someone's experiences or concerns?
The leading therapeutic modality, CBT, specifically says not to do this -- to basically ignore and try to get past trauma by attempting to live a better life moving forward, rather than rehashing the past and perpetually opening old wounds.
You can "recognize" that trauma occurred without analyzing it in depth.
Sounds like you are attributing a definition to that word in other's comments and replying to that, but maybe when they say recognize, they mean exactly what you are suggesting here, and they read your use of dismiss as not even "recognizing".
That doesn't mean you have to help it.
(Happiness is the greatest of conquests, one which we achieve in spite of the fate which is imposed on us)
Imagine that 70 year old lady he describes lacking access to proper health care or shelter. Not that I am unsympathetic, but first world problems are first world problems, get enraged at your own peril.