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Comment by abcde666777 | Hacker News Reader

Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.

The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.

The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.

Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.

It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.

View on HN

Reminds me of a very old essay on Cracked that says something very similar: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...

An old classic. Thanks for reminding me about this article.

Good god, serious life advice targeted at young men (but applicable to anybody) before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over. Unimaginable stuff today. What a relic.

This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).

That article is crating the ground for manosphere, incels and culture wars. It tells the men they have no value and don't really matter as people. Have young men read that article, believe it and you will end up with them joining manosphere, incels and culture wars.

Also, it does in fact matter whether a guy is nice.

I think the article's central point is that being nice is the bare minimum. In fact, probably less than that. If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field rather than a random nice guy. I will say that I in fact agree that people are innately valuable, but that's more of a philosophical/religious debate here.

I think there might be that aspects, but not really the central point. On the niceness, the article claims that being nice or honest does not matter. And also that they are completely common. Neither are true.

I did not liked the surgery argument either. Of course you should not operate if you do not know how ... but that is issue of overblown ego and arrogance. Not of the niceness. No matter how awesome you are, there will be things you cant do. And framing a guy into as a useless idiot because he is a carpenter rather then surgeon and thus cant operate right there in the street is nonsense. The surgery issue simply wont happen with honest nice guy. That guy will call an ambulance which is certainly better then trying to operate.

Read article again: it literally tell guys that yes, they should be sociopathic and go get some money. That is manosphere in nutshel.

> If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field

In around about way, the automatic assumption that arrogance = capability did allowed quite a few cranks skate. The manosphere is fully into that point.

It matters to me. Therefore I try to be nice. I know it costs me some opportunities and some “success”. But I sleep well at night.

I think this perspective is false. You have no way of knowing how many more opportunities and success you would cost yourself by being not nice.

The author directly confronts and scolds incels in #4 and also plainly says that it isn't about money there so you clearly have the wrong impression of what the essay is about.

Well... it was 2012 so makes sense.

> they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer.

Ha! That reminds me that I, somewhat unknowingly, in the past have emulated the good parts of a jerk to be more attractive myself.

What are the good parts of a jerk?

They are: adventurous, spontaneous, in the moment, doesn't take everything too seriously, thrill seeking and confident. It made me much more pro-active as I'm a fairly passive person (romantically speaking) normally. Oh and I still was nice too. And I emulated those things because they sounded fun as well, I just never thought of amping it up a bit.

> Oh and I still was nice too.

That is a judgment reserved exclusively to third parties, I’m afraid.

In part, but my intent of being nice didn't change. It stayed the same. Also some women explicitly called me kind and nice, not all of them to be fair. I definitely had some women being like "I normally don't go for nice guys but", but I was the exception :)

Which is why a lot of people are called jerks when in truth they're not actually doing anything wrong.

> before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over.

Those are convenient boogeymen that give basically the same advice, just sometimes in very crass and very rude forms.

The advice stood 50 years ago, in 2012, and still stands today. What doesn't seem to stand is that american culture seems to have abandoned holding people accountable and responsible for anything ever.

Thanks for sharing that article!

Thanks very much for sharing this - despite his declaration of his majority audience, this is excellent, hard-hitting advice for anyone who feels lost in the gap between their achievements and their "potential."

I feel like that article contradicts the meaning of OPs article in almost every way.

The Cracked article comes from a very neoliberal, self-optimization hustle-grind culture: work on yourself so you're worth more for others: an incredibly, if not exclusively, extrinsic motivation. While OPs article seems more focused on your internal presence, your relationships and being with people, not for people. Cracked says to work hard and complain less, produce more so your skillset is more worthy to other people. OPs article says to practice presence and true connection.

The only thing I can find that connects both is that they have a mindset of anti-passivity, but that's all.

Ahh, edit: thought you replied directly to OP, that's why I thought you meant that the Cracked article is similar to OPs article. Sorry!

I read that relic just now for the first time.

There's some truth in there about in case of a serious emergency you mostly need competence over empathy. But, to me, it's always love, empathy and connectedness that wins. Why are you commenting on HN? Is it for bringing value in return for money or services or material goods? I don't think so. It is about human connection. In absence, life or death makes not much difference anymore.

Love, empathy, and connectedness are something you have to put in effort (lots of effort in some cases) and skill ( that has to be learned and honed) to express to the recipient in a way that gets through to them.

Your mention of "return for money or services or material goods" shows you didn't get the point of the article; the author plainly explains why it isn't about money in #4.

Well i wrote services as well. But anyways, since you were so kind as to take the effort of pointing me out the pointe, I took the effort of watching half of Baldwin's monologue and read the text below in more detail. Very interesting, it makes me understand better why the article today still is referred to. The douchebags for which some pretty women - knowingly or subconsciously - fall, often have a skill, other than just their slick douchebag appearances and schwung. So just being mister nice guy doesn't cut it. I can't help being a nice guy - - Thanks for giving me food for thought!

Reading content written by humans and not AI is a breath of fresh air. Thanks for sharing this.

This comment defines value as what people pay for things, then comes to the conclusion that they way to value people must be based on what people will pay for them.

That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.

Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?

[1] I imagine OP has never given birth

Just going to poke you a little for the statement about not having children ;). It strikes me as a little elitist and I'll tell you why:

You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.

I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't cared, or felt loss. That would definitely be presumptuous.

I was only commenting on the "easily produced" comment. I don't think I've heard someone describe pregnancy and childbirth that way ;)

I believe they were trying to push back on the easily word in "easily produced". While, thank god, modern medicine makes birthing dramatically safer than at any time in history, it is still an incredibly taxing process on the human body and still fundamentally dangerous. It is not "easy" per-se.

C’mon now, let’s not be intentionally obtuse to try and sound smart adding “yes, but” to a perfectly solid argument. Children are easily produced, that’s a fact. The process of child bearing is not in question, but rather the availability of willing partners (hell, even unwilling, if we’re getting that dark) and how little effort it generally takes to get the conception process going.

They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).

Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.

> One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process

Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.

> years of effort, toil and sweat

Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.

The "not having children" part of the comment was clearly marked as a footnote attached to the quote about how children are "easily produced".

> and it fails to explain normal human behavior.

...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.

I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.

My intention was to imply that normal human behavior involves doing things that aren't economically beneficial.

Why play piano at home when you could use that energy to work? Why go to the bar and pay more for a drink than you would at home?

Because of this, equating all human value to monetary value doesn't accurately reflect the world.

Yeah, exactly! Market value and personal/relational value are completely different axes. Conflating the two is a category error and not insight..

I think it's more trying to say, if an individual cannot support themselves or provide value to others who can support them then those other intangible factors don't matter too much.

In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.

But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.

We go back to "fair" very fast.

I think that is a more clear framing of what the OP was saying, and if they had written it that way I probably wouldn't have bothered replying. It just had a very fatalistic tone I didn't agree with.

I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.

And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...

If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.

Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.

We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.

Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.

This comment brings me so much joy, it might be the most "hackernews" thing I've ever read.

I don't disagree though. Everything is physics, and physics is applied math

I look at it from the other side. Life, and by extension human civilization,is a local entropy minimization mechanism.

In fact entropy is relative to what we define as chaos vs what we define as ordered. When we can't explain the order, we define it as being chaotic, and for convenience we model it statistically in stead of in absolute terms. I learned that few months ago from a HN posted article.

They aren’t valuable to markets, but like I have neighbors who are treasured by the community and genuinely bring joy to everyone. But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.

True as well. I've had similar communal experiences where you get a taste of the old way, the way humans would have operated when we lived in tribes. And on that level I think we are capable of valuing each other as beings - the instinct to look out for each other kicks in.

But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.

And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.

It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.

> Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food

And, you know the sad part? A lot of places don't allow you to even try to learn. For example, my current place that I rent has a yard (it's a nice little trailer home), but I'm not allowed to have a garden. They even chopped down the nice tree that was growing in the yard when I first moved in.

Oh, I can certainly try to grow stuff inside in containers, but that means I gotta get containers (which I can't afford) and I get an increased risk of bugs & dirt being in the house (not a fan thanks).

To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient. Agriculture is one of the places where economies of scale shine very very brightly.

> To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient

Life is not an optimization problem.

However, had we not tried optimising, Malthus would be right and we'd all be dead.

So let's hear it for optimisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...

No, but staying alive is, and food is for staying alive.

Not really. Only if you discount all external effects on the environment. There are more productive agriculture systems with more yield per sq* but more manual input, but less side effects. E.g. permaculture.

You can't afford a $10 plastic container for growing plants? If that is true (which I doubt), I would be willing to drop you a few bucks via PayPal.

A $10 plastic container doesn't have nearly enough space for sustenance farming. Neither does a typical city home's garden. And for health reasons they're not going to let you raise animals (there are pretty funky diseases you and your neighbours can get from even just poultry, never mind pigs and cattle)

You can certainly grow various fun things in buckets - tomatos, herbs, etc. But you can't survive on it. Not with a small city garden.

And that's the point - in pre-industrial times, you had to survive off what you could grow, and you had a lot more land, which you used most of to grow your own food, and used most of your own time to grow food, and you were fucked at the first bad harvest (though you would likely have been part of a social contract where your local landowner took a portion of your crops to cover for these eventualities)

In post-industrial times, peasants found they could work in factories and earn much more than they could selling a portion of their crop. Countries stopped being 90% farmers. Normal people could specialise, not just the landed gentry who didn't wonder where their next meal was coming from.

And here we are typing to each other on websites.

It's sad if the city or your landlord won't let you have a garden. Gardens are wonderful things. You should try and grow something. But we're in a discussion context of "people don't even know how to grow their own food any more". Thank goodness for that, because if we did, we'd be spending all day tending to our crops, living in abject poverty, at constant risk of starvation, and we'd have no time for computers. Thank goodness for modern agricultural practise.

The person I replied to wrote about indoor gardening. So sustainability was always out of the question. Besides, you dont have to go back to preindustrial times. My parents had enough "land" to grow food for us. It basically ended around 1985 when they finally realized it was far easier to just buy stuff at the supermarket, because, as you already mentioned, growing your own food is very time consuming. Around that time, almost everyone I know stopped to try to be self-sustaining.

Nah, it's okay. I'm not gonna be homeless thankfully. My bills are getting paid, food is on the table, and so forth. But that also means I don't really have much money for nonessentials. For example, my _monthly_ "Fun" budget? Only $8.10.

What can I say? Retail does not provide a living wage.

Ha! I grew up in a rural area, "communal" if you may. And leaving that hellhole of dishonesty and depression was one of the most important moves in my life. I guess it really depends on how you deal with communal life and how much you are able to ignore people who think they have the right to comment your lifestyle/situation. Well, maybe I am too harsh, and this phenomenon isn't obvious to non-disabled people. But the amount of patronisation I usually get in communal situations makes me LOVE my urban life.

When we lived in tribes, people knew who did what job, and those who were taking more than they were contributing were punished harshly.

Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.

Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.

Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.

> But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.

Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.

> Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources

Even a little bit of anthropological study shows this is false.

Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?

Modern society has the luxury of surplus resources at the moment, and we are able to take care of the old and weak, which we indeed choose to do. If/when that ceases to be the case, the harsh reality will apply to everyone, me included, yes.

Another thing humans are arguably good at is making a longer term plan and investment: if we see that old people simply get shot, we won't be investing surplus value into our retirement funds — at least not of the same sort. Perhaps we'll be building fortresses when younger, accumulating wealth to be able to pay soldiers to protect us etc...

Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).

It is a luxury we can, as a species, afford!

We actually have the capacity and capability to house, feed, and clothe everyone on the planet, and then some.

The frame can shift because our capabilities have increased.

I mostly agree. We have the capacity at present, but only because we are burning a ton of non renewable energy.

You and your neighbors might mutually provide joy for each other, but there is a third party in this exchange: the massive industrial complex that provides the food and shelter you need to live. Unfortunately the industrial complex does not accept joy as a form of payment, so this whole system isn't going to work out.

It does not work as long as you stay strongly intertwined with the capitalist complex, correct. But I'd argue that in basically every region of the world, you have the choice. It may be harder or easier, but you have it.

the capitalist complex is strongly intertwined with reality and power.

You have the choice to stick your head in the sand for a while and try to ignore it, but eventually your sand castle will get bulldozed by a group of people that don't.

Doesn't that work its way into property values. People want to live in a good neighborhood and community and are willing to pay more for it.

Yes, if you try to force a material value on everything, you will get a material value.

I would pay a shit ton to have loving and supporting friends, but this is not how it works. Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.

This works for "good" neighborhoods if you replace "good" with "low-crime", as people with a higher income tend to do less crimes, if we count out tax evasion and other anti-society behaviours.

But this is not what it's about. You reap what you sow. You try to increase your value for people to like you and want to be friends with you? This can work, but the price for it is (1) purely extrinsical motivation which more often then not does leave you feel empty and (2) friends who will leave you as soon as your worth decreases, e.g. with age or illness, or if a different person with more value comes around and offers their friendship.

>Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.

The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.

> The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.

Making friends = paying a service to find friends for me?

> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

To your friends and family as well? Or just your employer?

You're describing things that may well be true for a lot of employers, but fall apart outside of that context.

That may be true for a lot of families and friends as well. They may not dispose you outright but they will try to cut you off every chance they get.

But it may not be true for family or of employers… so we are back to square one I suppose.

For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.

For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.

On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?

Is that not enough?

It is (and even if it is not, it's just the way it is...).

what I'm arguing is that it's not only the workspace where we all are disposable and replaceable. It happens in friends and family context, too.

What to do with this information... I'm not sure. But usually it's a good first step to see things clearly.

There still is value with the casual acquaintances. Just because a person is replaceable doesn't mean they are not valuable when present. My neighbor who I barely talk to has helped me out when I am in a bind. Even if a new neighbor moves in and replaces him, the original neighbor was valuable and gave me a sense of security, peace, and community while he was present.

> I can count those on one hand.

What's the problem about that?

I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.

That’s not the point. The point is that the number is small. They are not making a judgment on the value of such relationships but rather that that number is and will always be small that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, it only matters in a person’s immediate sphere.

People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.

The number is small in comparison to the whole humanity, yes, but this is not at all what it's about in this post. Did you read the article?

Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.

> For most casual acquaintances

You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.

I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."

My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.

I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.

There's a been a few similar instances in my life that have led me take up the personal practice of "Always say hi or wave to friend when the chance comes around, because there may not be a next time". It came about because I tend to see a lot of close friends and looser acquaintances on a day to day basis physically in the world, and there used to be more times than not where I wouldn't bother crossing the street or stopping for a minute to chat. Later I realized this costs me almost nothing, and even for less-close relationships, I'd prefer to have put in the tiny amount of effort to walk up and show them they're worth even that much before they overdosed or moved away or committed suicide. It's not always opportune, but what else is life for?

Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.

I think modern healthcare really put a focus back on people as individuals. Mortality rates were quite high even from what we see now as trivial illness or injury, and people would have a lot of offspring to account for this in the past.

By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.

Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well. When automation replaces our job or diminishes our economic worth many fold, not many friends and family remain unchanged. You parents, your siblings maybe and maybe 1-2 of your closest friends. Others will drift apart because we are in a different lifestyle now. Heck, even without any change, parent/siblings drift apart for many. It is tough then to not correlate our value with our economic value.

> Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well.

It's not about the quantity but about the quality of friendships and human connection. I couldn't care less about the number of my friends. I do care a lot though about the connection to them.

> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.

Maybe this was Diogenes's observation.

A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.

> [Within tribes, if] you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.

That's a nice sentiment, but do you have sources for the claim that tribes universally "loved" non-productive members just because they were kin?

There are many instances of braces and artificial limbs or that were found or fossilised bones that showed crippled people that grew into old-age, which provides evidence that people cared for 'non-productive' members.

Indeed. If one is crippled their 'value' for the tribe doesn't suddenly disappear. A person has their wit, their positive spirit, their wisdom and skills, their empathy, care and understanding for others that is important for the tribe's wellbeing. Etcetera.

Finding evidence that disable people existed does not provide evidence that they were not able to contribute in some way. It's incredibly ableist to assume they couldn't.

In the context of a pre-industrial society? I doubt it. In a hunter gatherer-society? I doubt it even more. people with certain skills (e.g. tool making, music, cooking maybe..) certainly, but not for a lot of people.

However, decent human beings do not value other human beings purely on the basis of their economic contribution. Someone might be a net cost, but a decent society still looks after them.

You're missing things like making clothing (tanning, sinew, etc) , gathering wood, etc. You can be missing an arm or leg and still contribute to those.

Assuming that disabled people are worthless when they are not able to contribute to the group is even worse.

I never said that. I'm merely countering the claim that disabled people couldn't contribute.

I say this with all due respect and as someone who is struggling to envision their own ability to meaningfully contribute in the likely future:

Nature is ableist. Humanity rises above it to the extent that we can, but ...

I think we have a skewed perception of ability, now that we’re connected via the internet to the whole rest of humanity.

Nature is ableist in a lot of ways… if you had diabetes in some ancient tribe you’d basically be screwed. But if you had an amputated leg, I dunno. You could still be the best flint knapper in the tribe.

I mean, think of your extended circle of friends and acquaintances, your 100 “closest” friends. In particular, think back on the community grew up in, if you’ve subsequently moved to a tech hub that accumulates rare talent. I bet picking through your hobbies there are a couple potentially useful things that you’d be a top-tier contributor in. Most people are really bad at almost everything they don’t do, after all.

I’m not going to engage in some prehistoric idealism. The past was pretty brutal. But we’d probably all die by getting little infected cuts, not because we were abandoned by our tribes.

The cynic in me wonders if it's because they were family members of the leader so got better health care.

It seems like most people in the first world either couldn't do physical tasks or would tell themselves they can't. Things like bow making and hunting (including processing) require specialized knowledge and a lot of physical work. Same goes for farming.

But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.

We still do that, though, within our own little tribes inside civilization. Most people still love their grandparents, even though they're old. That just doesn't necessarily extend to all of civilization.

>A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.

Indeed it seems that there really are two "modes" for human civilization; one where human beings are scarce and valuable, and one where they are abundant and cheap. The West has spent the last 400+ years in the former mode, as the plague decimated Europe and they spread into the vast new world, where humans were so scarce they had to be forcibly imported via mass enslavement, and wage earners could demand a premium. Now that globalism has brought us all onto the same stage as the Eastern masses, things are starting to feel pretty crowded.

This is incredibly naive. Hunter gatherer communities, especially those in regions without an abundance of food, are and were extremely selective about who were accepted and who weren't. This starts from infancy where non-desirable babies were simply killed. Estimates vary greatly but perhaps around a third to half of "modern" hunter gatherer tribes practice infanticide. The stated reasoning behind infanticides is often extremely vicious and comes down to "he/she is not a good fit for the tribe", or in other words "nobody likes him/her". This fact alone might be one of the major explanations of the high rate of prehistoric infant mortality.

But if you are even allowed to grow up and become an individual, things might be somewhat better once you are part of the in-group, but that does not factor in the fact that human empathy has an overall tendency to switch off if you're not. Even if you're loved because you're kin, your neighboring tribe might still kill you, or you and your kin might kill them, for entirely petty or cynical reasons. The prehistoric bone record supports this as well, seemingly human-weapon related reasons is the most common cause of death.

You can also examine your own emotions to get some idea of our evolutionary environment. Loneliness hurts, to the point where it has measurable negative health impacts equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Your brain is screaming at you not to be lonely, but why? Well, in our ancestral environment, being excluded from the social group meant death, so most individuals that did not have a profound and visceral fear of that happening got their genes consistently removed from the gene pool. For loneliness to be that big of deal, being excluded must have been an easily available option. If everyone loved and accepted everyone unconditionally, this emotional state would simply not have evolved.

Humans quickly become extremely brutal once the environment necessitates it, up to and including cannibalizing your own kin. Infanticide and murder of both ingroups and outgroups is historically commonplace because it was also commonplace prehistorically. Even modern tribes, that live in relative abundance, are still brutal in many ways to this very day.

But of course, when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy. But you might want to check the skeletons in the cave before you pick that as your conclusion.

Don't wake him up from his "Noble Savage" fever-dream.

Yes let's all revel in the sunlight of Enlightenment thinking. That's really going well.

>when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe, survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy

there is a lot of conjecture in your overall post, but I think this is a fair takeaway you put at the end.

Late reply, but in case you'll check I think most of what I said is sourced from sources of varying quality and salience, but at least it's sourced from somewhere. But I just typed it all out quickly without checking anything over, so a lot might be wrong. But it's not entirely pulled out of my ass at least.

Evolutionary history is of course always difficult. I think the loneliness part comes mostly from the kurzgesagt video on loneliness, as well as some other stuff here and there. Rate of infanticide is roughly correct with quick Google. Rest of tribal stuff is from a variety of books and high school social anthropology. I think I actually have the "reasoning for infanticide" part from sex at dawn, of all places.

I'm always scared to run a deep research service to find the counterpoints after I type this kind of stuff out, but feel free to do so for me and dress me down. At least survivorship bias is a classic that's pretty much always worth keeping in mind on any topic.

You're right, if you've diminished yourself to a generic "consumer", and haven't interleaved yourself into a fabric of value beyond economic. Relationships are worth a lot and can't really be bought. Do/Will you care for someone? Do/Will they care for you? This can make you far more valuable than your economic outputs, and also worth economic inputs if you ever lack.

The ability to care for someone in any material sense requires economic resources. Even having free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy.

"All" is a pretty high bar. I think a huge proportion of the developed world has a lot of choice and is repeatedly choosing stuff/experiences over people. Not sure how we'd find data to resolve that... People living paycheck to paycheck, or not having $400 to cover a bill is not really proof without understanding how they're spending money... As far as I can tell a lot of today's economic woes in the developed world is self inflicted through lifestyle inflation. We live in bigger houses (more sq ft per person), more alone, eat out a lot more, drive cars with far more horsepower, and have a supercomputer in their pocket.

Yes and we love urban areas. Urban areas like NYC, Boston, SF are extremely expensive, with one bedroom apartments renting for 5K and selling for 1M.

Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)

It's a disaster.

Yes, NIMBY-ism has done hard things to those specific areas. At least as far as we trust chatgpt, but people are still living in more median sq ft per person today than long ago (think 50-100 yrs ago). Of course rent per person will go up if we're renting 50-100% more space than in the past.

A lot of that is just technological advancement. The baseline has shifted up, you aren't going to save any money by driving a Ford Model T. Quite the opposite in fact, given the maintenance and obscure parts it requires.

Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.

If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.

IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.

It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.

The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.

Have you ever organized with your community before? No offense but you come across as a libertarian trying to monetize social relationships. It comes across as deeply human. It also declares that people have no agency, it's just a pathetic view point on humanity and our potential.

To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.

> To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.

They didn’t say that? Nor was it even implied? What the hell?

All they said was that EVEN free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy, and free time does often correlate to how well you can express your care for someone. And they are absolutely, without a single shadow of a doubt, correct.

Are you responding to the right post? I never said any of that.

All I said was if you have to work 3 jobs just to pay rent, you probably aren't going to be caring for many people no matter how much you might want to, simply due to limited hours in the day. Never mind people with actual disabilities.

> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.

It is other way round. The sort of person who sees themselves as their job only are good when they are well off.

That sort of person copes badly with when being poor. Having no self to draw from outside of work and feeling like constant failure in unsatisfying work leads to issues like alcoholism, violence, gambling.

This is only true if by "value" you mean monetary value. Your personality and humanity may not be valuable to the person paying you to do your job, it still has value for the people around you.

There is an intractable problem is economics which is how to assign value to a thing. It's probably more of a philosophical debate. One arm of the debate is something called marginal utility. That is, a think is worth a different amount to different people. I value a particular guitar more than my neighbour does. I think it's worth $100. He thinks it's worth $50. Who is right? Authoritarian nations use top-down economic methods to dictate the value. In this case, they would make the guitar worth $1 (so "everyone can afford a guitar now"). Under capitalism, we allow individual to negotiate, and the highest bidder determines the price.

Apologies for the long-winded context, but I think it's important to address your point. You're alluding to some kind of intrinsic, self-evident value, and I would like to challenge you on that. Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can. You might value a person in a certain way, but you can't ensure everyone else does. In fact you even accept this in your last sentence. A small group of people known to that individual would value them more than the other 8 billion people on the planet. Which is more or less what the person you replied to was explaining.

>Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can.

Why does any of this matter? Do you require a person proves their utility to you before you hold the door open for them? When a child falls and scrapes their knee, do you ask about their grades in school, or parents net worth, before lending them a hand?

My point: human society is deeply interwoven with sentimental behaviors that make zero sense in economic theory. You can try to apply all the models you want to model human compassion and it will get you nil.

But that doesn't mean we should optimize that out of societies. I think it's the most wonderful part of our societies, and if we were to remove it, we'd stop being humans.

> Why does any of this matter?

If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof. Holding a door open for someone and asking questions doesn't necessarily indicate value. It could indicate personal interest. Empathy. Projection. Self-interest. The concept of altruism doesn't necessitate the belief that other life holds value at all. Altruism by its definition is giving without the expectation of return.

I think you make a good point re culture and tradition. Humans like many "valueless" activities. Some of these are hardcoded into our psyche through evolution. Some are for sentimental reasons. Some are religious. Some are enforced. Some are situational. Etc. I am not suggesting we eliminate those. I am simply agreeing with the top comment which is that we cannot force people to place any value on them. Some people do not see value in those traditions (or in other people). There is no objective way to prove them wrong.

>If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof.

But this is assuming we share the same set of axioms?

It sounds like you don't accept humans having intrinsic value as a core axiom. However, I do, and it makes zero sense to me to try and "prove" such a notion.

But isn't it the other way around. The more wealthy you get the more valuable things become and the people around you become less valuable. Superficially it sounds counterintuitive and yet it is what we observe, even if it is a not very flattering observation about human nature.

I realized this first when I travelled Latin America as a young person. It was quite surprising to me never to get asked about my job but often about a family thousands of kilometers away and without any chance for the stranger speaking to me to ever meet any of them.

Only if you see yourself defined by the friends and family that surround you it suddenly makes sense.

> Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals.

Not valuable to what or whom?

> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Disposable and replaceable to what or whom?

The Planet doesn’t care whether we exist. But then again the planet would not need to replace us either. So what could this be about?

Only humans want or need automation of human labor. Are there then some special kind of humans that are entitled to (by might or other means) the output of the “disposable humans”?

Seems like people forget that work is not the goal, but economical freedom is. And its all about politics. Humanity reached a production capacity that human work is barely needed to sustain everyone. But there is greed and wars. Also, humans are social creatures, we still need one another for relationships. Hell, removing work will let us enjoy our relationships even more. Also, as long as there are wars, rest assured there are plenty of jobs. War is, sadly, a huge industry

> They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.

Something like 360-380 thousand births every day. We’re insignificant even just compared to the delta.

I mean, Jack London was pretty famously a professional hobo, wandering the country looking for a place to stay. He got good at storytelling so that he'd have something to give to the families who took him in and fed him.

Eventually Jack London writes Call of the Wild and becomes stupidly rich.

Was Jack London the famous author, living off of all the money (writing less popular stories, like White Fang) more valuable because of all the money he made? Was Jack London the hobo less valuable because he didn't write the bestseller Call to the Wild yet?

Or maybe, the entire concept of valuing people off a monetary lens is just bullshit.

Comments like this are what I hope to see whenever I visit. Spurring thought. Challenging the obvious.

I agree with every fact you said yet my conclusion is that humans are valuable. Why? Because your frame of reference is the world, mine is the known universe. Humans are so fucking unlikely. Matter that somehow can experience its own (and others) being is so crazy unlikely I feel anything other than valuing it is just wrong.

In German we have a word called "Zweckoptimismus" that would translate to purposeful optimism. It is the optimism of someone who knows the world isn't good, but accepting it as bad would make it even worse, so you operate under a defiant optimism without ignoring the reality of the world.

True. But tbh, you can find ppl making time for themselves or not, in most salary ranges. Extreme poverty is another issue ofc. That’s why we have social welfare, to avoid extreme poverty.

> I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.

Don't let capitalism do this to you. Not everything with value is paid in this system, only things which make the buyer more money.

Throughout this diatribe I think you had multiple opportunities to see the value of human life. That you didn't, makes me think you actually don't value your own life and while that's entirely your right. But, to project onto others that they're "in denial" for valuing their own, their families', or complete strangers' lives isn't the radical ultra-rational flex you think it is.

To pick one mere point where you might have chosen to value life otherwise:

> They're not a rare thing like say, gold.

You mean the gold that's a relatively common chemical in the universe? You're comparing the elementary particle formed by astronomical processes to somethings which (even if metaphorically) exists only within organisms so complex we have yet to find signs of similar complexity in the universe.

What you say is cold, but hardly truth.

I don't presume to be able to know the value of human life. There are too many unknowns and I'm not omniscient.

Perhaps we're immensely valuable - sparks of divinity. Perhaps we're not - mere bags of sentient meat.

I don't know which of those statements is more true. Either/neither/both?

> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

we are, but that doesn't mean we're not valuable. everything is disposable, everything is replacable.

the idea that an individual human life isn't very valuable and that it's only first-worlders that have trouble understanding that is projection. that is the modern, first world (read capitalist) view of human life. you think you're thinking but you're actually regurgitating the ideology you've received.

  > there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
  > like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
  > on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
  > as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

I appreciate the perspective you're offering here, and I don't entirely disagree, especially from an economic angle. But I do want to offer a counterpoint:

Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.

On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.

But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."

Just my 2¢

Huh? I value myself and my family at infinity. Meaning no-one else or no amount of money can replace them. So no we are in fact extremely non disposable and non replaceable to the people we love.

it's a very modern idea, too. historically people names were associated with their profession.

for the op, it might not define you but it does define you for others.

Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.

Probably a valid criticism. Of course coming up with a better alternative is always where the devil's at.

We know how to come up with better alternatives, but as Marx also pointed out, the capitalists won't sit back and idly watch their world crumble. So putting anything else into practice is effectively impossible.

About the only time all the pieces fell into place to even begin to see anything else was Revolutionary Catalonia. However, the USSR quickly waged war with it to ensure its demise, and within no more than a few years it was no more. The capitalists who seized all the capital in the USSR under the guise of pretending to move away capitalism didn't want the people to realize that the USSR was still under capitalism all the same. That would threaten the capitalists who controlled the capital.

Our society used to have religious beliefs that put special value on human lives / souls / whatever. Now for many people, capitalism and materialism is the only religion, and in this religion humans are reduced to their dollar value. But you should recognize that this is not a neutral choice: you have in fact chosen one of many possible value systems, and others may choose differently.

Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.

Zero to do with religion, I knew quite a lot of atheists / agnostics who were extremely wholesome and caring people.

While that could be true, it's important to remember that these people probably grew up in a culture that had religion influence for thousands of years. In order to become atheist, one needs to renounce god, therefore have the idea of god, therefore, have some background knowledge of or about religion. That is to say, that these processes a not as simple, as one might think: take soviet union as an example - official atheist state - yet so much on interpersonal level remained based on humane values formed by thousand years of east orthodox chiristianity. And even though measly 70 years are not enough to make a significant dent in human behaviour - it did produced a lot of cynicism and misanthropy before going out the window.

It might be the other way around: religions came to be _because_ humans have values that became the backbone of religions.

The evolution of "gods" is obvious in retrospect as well (a tale of some good deeds passed on through generations gets added to with every retelling and suddenly Joe who gave a child an apple and protected it from a rabid dog was walking around feeding everone and killing dragons that stole everyone's sheep).

I recommend reading literature, philosophical and historical works from more than 2000 years ago.

I don't buy it. People were decent and nice to each other long before any "holy" books were written. As my sibling commenter said, it's far more likely that some people one day finally caught up to that fact and figured they'll start writing stuff down.

Your message almost sounds like it has an agenda.

And exactly none of that is sourced from religion. Nobody is born religious, and when they aren't they behave the same. They might not do the same special genuflections and drink the same special holy tea or whatever, but they're similarly human.

Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.

So exactly was this? I am sure all of the slaveholders to the people who spit on a little black girl for dare trying to get educated in public integrated public school to the 80% of evangelical Christians who support a three times married man who admitted in his own autobiography of being a adulterer consider themselves religious.

As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.

Hey you’re welcome to your view. In my view that’s an insanely disgusting devaluation of human life that’s been put into peoples brains by propaganda. Capitalism and materialism sure is great huh.

Well here's a thing - I don't think it's capitalism which made me think this way, or even living in the first world. The first world in my experience is big on preaching the dogma that we're all special and valuable (whether it practices what it preaches aside).

Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.

We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.

And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).

But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.

On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.

But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.

And Christians founded a nation where Black people were counted as a 3/5th of a person and my still living parents grew up in the segregated south - that was upheld by a Supreme Court made up of people who were religious.

> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury.

Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job is the examined life. It what makes life worth living.

We should be incredibly skeptical of a social system whose default is to have individuals primary identify by the work they do. That necessarily sets people up for continuous identity foreclosure and psychic famine in a self re-enforcing feedback loop.

Frankly it's cringe to primarily identify by profession.

> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Gerasimov? Is it you?

You refuse to be in denial about your personal fears?

I'd respectfully challenge that your opinion reflects reality. Nihilism [1] is just one philosophy amongst many. It's no more 'the one truth' than any of the others. Many of the other philosophies have evolved in the light of folks living for centuries through harsher reality than most of us are experiencing today. You might consider other philosophies to be delusional (as others consider nihilism to be delusional), but even in that different delusion they provide a framework to relate your love of your own personality and humanity with the same feelings that a lot of other people also feel about themselves and also each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism

Philosophy is the theory and we are discussing the practice here. Be a non-nihilist; belong to any school of thought you like.

Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.

So your respectful challenge seems to be missing the point. Your beliefs are not challenged here. But you cannot change how other people value you.

>Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.

This is such a rigid world view that is demonstrably wrong. I won't even argue with you because others have already pointed out why this cannot be true elsewhere.

What I will say is that I hope you're doing alright.

I have no idea what's your goal with that message. I would love to live in your world but I am fairly sure that wherever I was geographically (5 countries), it does not exist there.

> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.

You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.

> That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.

Wait until you get to the part of philosophy that hinges on this being an invention of our own making. Human beings have decided that human beings are disposable. Just like we decided that gold was valuable (and to many, more valuable).

I mean, if you are willing to sell your personality, humanity and your soul, I am sure you will find a lot of bidders. Thats literally why slavery was a thing.

There is a definite economic value to it. What does not is your consioisness that you experience since nobody else can use it.

Grotesque.

BTW YouTubers get paid for... generally themselves alone. I mean come on, many are getting paid for reacting to other people's videos. Wild.

Many more don’t get paid at all.

I'd argue they get paid for their ability as performers and entertainers. It's a craft that often has be developed well beyond their innate personality, and often involves a lot of acting as well.

I agree, but many rich YouTubers are terrible. People get entertained by someone watching a video and comment here and there but stays silent for the most part. No acting here. The majority of the people who get entertained are kids, FWIW.

and then they said it's socialism that kills the individual identity of people...

Your view is disgusting and the fact that your comment is the top one here shows how broken society is.

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