>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place
It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment.
And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.
It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment.
And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.
You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.
Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." - Agent Smith
In my experience (as someone who grew up with extensive food insecurity, parents who barely kept the family afloat, etc.), it’s hard NOT to have the bar shift too if you end up in a cushier place later. The promo can feel as bad as it used to feel not knowing where food was coming from, even if objectively that is ridiculous.
We’re very adaptable even if sometimes weirdly so.
Through a lot of reading and therapy I got better, but I agree that there is a tendency to move the goalposts and not be grateful for what one has. Even though it is more materially distressing to not know if/where/how one will eat, the problems usually have tangible solutions (e.g. go to grandma's house to eat...again, or know a sympathetic employee at some chain restaurant who will give you a bunch of unsold food that would otherwise be tossed). The problems to "how do I make the leap to become a senior dev?" are much more nebulous and uncertain, and indeed that is more psychologically distressing.
This seems like incredibly useful behavior. When things improve it allows us to tackle new problems with similar conviction as before. It also helps us not get completely overwhelmed when we end up in worse and worse situations.
Man does it suck sometimes though if you’re on the ‘push even if it hurts’ part of the spectrum!
Something that has helped me over time is the awareness that the stories we tell (both ourselves and others) are almost always post-facto attempts to rationalize what we fundamentally do not understand or control (our own thoughts and reactions, and those of others).
This is often for safety - both the illusion of control for ourselves, and to spin a safe and beneficial story for others to magnify the good or hide the bad of what happened. It gets even more interesting when the possibility of influencing others (or yourself!) to your benefit comes into play. Also a necessary and useful survival trait! There are a great many things it is helpful to believe that may be plainly contradicted by evidence.
If you cut away the noise produced by this process, ignore what people say, and look at action/reaction and reverse engineer it a bit - it almost always produces a far more reliable and predictable model for understanding people and the world overall.
Either way it takes a lot of experience and data points to have any accuracy, so it’s going to be confusing as hell for a long time. Especially if you haven’t figured out that almost everything anyone says (especially yourself!) is fundamentally self serving and post-facto - not due to malice even (though that happens), but because that’s the way it has to work!
Like it or not, the reality is that for some people, the anxiety of the latter is much greater than the anxiety some other people experience for the former.
Your experience may be the norm, but it is not all-encompassing, and your life experience doesn't give you the authority to speak on their behalf. While your experience and perspective may be the more common one, you are also dismissing a fair amount of suffering that many have.
There are people not far from me who handled poverty and war fairly well, became doctors, and eventually attempted/committed suicide because of the pressures on the job. One of the survivors even said that poverty and war were much simpler to comprehend than the hostility of his fellow doctors and the environment he worked in.
And no, it wasn't because of his background. Several of his coworkers attempted/committed suicide while coming from privileged backgrounds.
You may find this interesting:
I am not bothered that this is a false dichotomy as much as the fact that, intentional or not, it forbids taking a positive view of the world to anyone who also happens to be materially underprivileged.
> Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them. -Epictetus, Greek-born slave
Just to clarify:
> He spent his youth as a slave in Rome to Epaphroditos, a wealthy freedman and secretary to Nero.
> Epictetus obtained his freedom sometime after the death of Nero in AD 68
He was a slave to people of wealth and power, that permitted him to study philosophy, and was freed around 18 years of age. So it would be disingenuous to imply Epictetus had the perspective of an impoverished slave when he founded his own school of philosophy.
Good thing is that I made no such implication. It would be equally disingenuous however to imply that his school of philosophy would be completely isolated from the experience of his formative years as a slave.
Most people simply attribute the author of the quote without qualifying or emphasizing some aspect of their life. So it seems arbitrary to mention this without any rhetorical motivation. Could have well said Greek Stoic Philosopher, which is mostly what he's known for and what the hive-mind of Wikipedia settled on
By your logic, if a slave who is tortured every day thinks the world is generally an OK place but his situation specifically sucks, they're speaking from a position of privilege.
The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate.
If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been.
You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on.
This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that.
Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged.
- [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.
Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.
People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out.
The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy.
I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
That's a weird lens to see the world through