Nothing works, everyone's mad, society is a pile of kindling waiting for a match

Isn't this just because the majority of us are not attuned to things that in fact do work remarkably well and it's only when they don't it feels like "nothing works"?

e.g. plumbing in large cities is amazing it's the most thankless thing that we've ever invented (along with dentistry and requesting information seamlessly from across the planet in a couple of microseconds)

This is the kind of article that sounds undeniably true after scrolling Reddit and other social medias for hours: Everyone is unhappy, everything is broken, and we are all buried under an avalanche of terribleness.

Then I disconnect from the internet and spend some time in the real world, with real people, and realize that most people are actually doing quite well. Yeah there are annoyances with some things not working like the article’s credit card example, but the real difference is between those who dwell on it and those who move on. I had a similar experience with a bank giving me the run around for a credit card, so I cancelled the card and moved to another bank. Now every card issue is resolved with a quick phone call and I don’t worry about it any more.

I think these articles appeal to people who are struggling because it makes it feel like everything is broken (literally a key point of the article) and everyone is struggling, but it’s not really true. Get out in the real world, learn to take the annoyances in stride, and you realize that the average person is doing a lot better than the dumpster fire of social media feeds would like us to believe. Doomerism articles like this sell clicks, but it doesn’t accomplish anything other than fostering more doomerism.

> We know that everything is scarce

Now that's a very good point. That's the one thing that a free market is supposed to do - meet demand. Yet that's not happening reliably any more. Think hard about that.

We had a bunch of riots a couple of years ago, don't you remember? The match was lit, the fires (metaphorical and literal) burnt for a while, and then gradually everyone got bored and things went back to normal.

I'll probably make myself an ass here because I can't help myself sometimes. But I have determined that we are being in a way shepherded like individual sheep to individual Shepards. One sheep per shepard. When in my youtube feed if I signal in my various ways that I like a kind of discussion I see more and more of it. It could be music or politics or anything really. Almost always it is reinforced.

Eventually I find my own interests being the only thing I see and whatever principles I have tend to float quickly to the top. And then at that point if the account is old enough all I see is things that piss me off and make me outraged.

But when I look outside the sun still shines, I can still hear ordinary people say I love you, or watch a young man take his granny by the arm and walk with her.

A long time ago higher learning was often exposure to things we didn't agree with at first. But how did we get to that conclusion before hand? We were not born with our ideas.

There is definitely a powder keg here. I know of a huge match to light it coming in less than 100 days and it was in the BBC video I posted. But it might not even be that.

Yes, some things are scarce.

Relatively.

One of the problems with our markets today is that we allow corporations to get to the size where a problem for them becomes a problem for everyone. It's one of the reasons we have monopoly laws in the first place, and we really need to think about amending them. Unless your market is brand new, you probably shouldn't own more than 25% of it, for everyone's sake.

> We know that medical appointments will be hard to secure and apartments difficult to rent, and that we will have to wait in long lines for the privilege of paying plenty of our hard-earned cash to multinational mega-corporations, in exchange for unhealthy food or poorly-made clothing (and we may even have to check ourselves out and bag our own goods, too).

> We know that everything is scarce — from daycare spots to parking, from jobs to money, from friendship to potential mates, from time with family to the mental health care we all increasingly need to treat our distress.

These don't seem like new problems...

If you make enough money you can insulate yourself from most of these issues by hiring a personal assistant.

Also, keep in mind - as bad as things are today - they are still better than ever in human history.

The night is dark and full of terrors.

When I see things go wrong in the world, injustice, lies, exploitation, I feel the need to fix it.

The problem is, I can't fix the world.

What if I gave my power and support to someone with great authority. Surely things will get fixed then!

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But really, I'm coming around to the idea of being more involved in local community. There are problems in your community you can actually address, and you can see people's lives being bettered.

>In the meantime, I had to call every vendor that I deal with and provide a different card, and/or log on to all my online accounts — which I had inevitably forgotten passwords for — and manually update the payment info.

This sounds like an entirely self-created problem that simple (working!) tools can help you avoid if you spent the effort to use them.

Stop buying garbage toasters. You’re welcome.

Success is to blame. Success is a deviation from a billion years of carefully crafted method for getting by in the universe. The greater the success, the greater the deviation.

And like a new chemical in the water, or a novel way for your blood to flow, or an extra hole in your head, that deviation is probably bad.

I think society tends to put just enough effort where things generally work. There is little reward for perfection, and even less in the diminishing returns that happen when you try to optimize for as close to perfection as we can.

We deal with what we are given.

There's an article I saw a couple years ago that theorizes much of our recent productivity gains are just making people do stuff themselves. Groceries, travel, self-serve online stuff, whatever. Add to that the trend to deny people customer service or support and hide behind the internet to prevent contact with an actual person that can solve the problem, I think that gets us closer to an explanation.

Also, a pretty big abuse of flagging here.

Hyperbole, much?

Learn to be grateful with the things that do work rather than focusing on being critical.

“If being woke means being worried about economic inequality, and racism, and discrimination against gay people, then I’m in. If it means being authoritarians, and policing language, and shutting up other people, then f*k that.”

This is a typically shallow take from Gervais

It’s called “capture”.

Why was this flagged?

First off, the reason everything seems awful is because you're hunting engagement, and engagement is easy pickings when you're targeting fear and anger. You're literally asking for anger. People will give it to you in spades. Congrats, your audience is engaged. I hope the paycheck's decent.

Taking the question seriously, however, the answer shit is screwed is the Financialization of Everything. The easing credit environment post-1972 - a weird collision of forces including the invention of EUROBOND, the OPEC thing (which sometimes gets labelled AUUUGHH THE PETRODOLLAR), a broadening (ha ha! I kill me) workforce, and Soviet Union extraction equipment aging out - has had a gigantic cornucopia of add-on effects, the reach of which is hard to make out because it's so vast.

One of them is that the people who have money are increasingly separated from what that money does in the world. I don't really need to bring up 2008, when the private financialization mechanisms dried up and collapsed, but that's a pretty good example of how the endgame goes. More pertinent to this audience, you end up with VCs funding a new . . social hotel eco enterprise data engine . . whatever, without having absolutely any idea of what the business is going to be doing or any way that it has to make money, ever. The end game of this is someone like Sam Bank Fried or whatever his real name is. That guy.

Perversely, at the other end of the spectrum, it makes debt-driven hard industries risk-averse to the point of absurdity. I'm going to point a finger at the 737 here. Logically, the answer to the A320 NEO was a next-gen platform that would basically shadow the 787. Unfortunately, when you're leveraged up to the eyeballs, that's a bigger risk than just BOLTING ON THE WHATEVER to your existing thing. Sure, it might crash and kill everyone, but you have this neat spreadsheet that shows how unlikely that is, and the loan comes through with the teaser rate. Watch that spreadsheet I just mentioned. That spreadsheet turns into one of the biggest administrative employment engines the world has ever seen - every five cent screw, every fifty dollar monitor, every five dollar cable has a multi-million dollar logistics backend to ensure that THIS IS THE LAST THING YOU'LL EVER NEED. Everything to lower the perceived risk threshold, again, so that heavy industry can keep piling on the bonds and worse. This principal extends its fingers into everything from airplanes to movie scripts. Ever wonder why there's a million movies about Spiderman? Less risky, easier loans. Then the debts go off into Financialization Land, packaged, and, hilariously, used as yet more evidence by the Spreadsheet Industries of how the Spreadsheet System is AWESOME.

Digression. Speaking from aerospace, what I call the "spreadsheet industries" - Systems Engineering, Integrated Logistics, Model Based Engineering, Six Sigma, blah blah blabbity blah - have, with extremely rare exceptions, been a terrifying drag on our ability to build big things of any kind whatsoever.

Meanwhile, the VC types drop ill-informed bombs of capital on stuff that takes their fancy.

I guess one of the things I always wondered is where the hell software VC types get all their money, then I count the zeroes and realize that it's a zit on the broad fatty ass of any defense budget. Still . .

Who is saving so much damn money? Wellllll . . this post is too damn long. 1980s, KGB and then the Oligarchs started doing . . stuff . . and then China started to do its "everyone saves most of their paycheck by law because no one has kids" thing. There's more, obviously, but the history books are going to mention how America's standard of living was basically from the sweat and blood of some poor frickin' Chinese guy gluing circuit boards with a chain on his leg.