102 karma · joined November 25, 2016
Foreigners, on the contrary, often work remotely for other countries, so they don't steal job from Spanish citizens. It's hard to survive in Spain without Spanish, so it's strange that natives lose employment battle to people who don't know the language.
For me personally, South Korea is a great example, how entire nations of homo sapiens can be unconsciously cognitively trapped, and in how technological progress, science and ability to solve differential equations !== wellbeing.
You mean health insurance or pension plans? :-)
> and make 2+ times as much as tech workers in the EU do.
Phew, what is the purpose of this 2x salary, if you don't have time or energy to use it. To raise another generation of busy burnoutees? Or to buy benefits the European takes for granted?
From what I see, Europe actually has the opposite trend for switching to the 4-day workweek, instead of working hard @ buying big houses and cars.
> US and China
Notoriously famous for their awesome work culture.
No, thank you. Another useless tech doesn't worth my mental health. Especially with the ability of working remotely and not being tied to the local market.
The thing is, under commies people were brainwashed that they live in the best country in the world. It wasn't some kind of evil dystopia with everybody suffering. Yes, they were poor, but they didn't know life outside do compare to understand their poverty. The state gave everybody the bare minimum to live. The state gave the clear direction and meaning of life. Even now there are plenty of (older-ish) people who feel nostalgic about that times!
edit: I agree that in 00s the situation became better, but that's the point, that life in 2005 != 1994.
> one of the most hopeful/optimistic periods in human history
I first thought that you were American, but then I read more carefully
> and lived in Russia
Sorry, but how can you combine "90s" and "optimistic" if you witnessed it by yourself? For post-soviet people it was a nightmare, it was a total collapse of their world, with oligarchy, banditry, miserable salaries (or no salaries at all). I was a kid during that time, but I'm pretty sure nobody was giving a flying duck about US budged surpluses, and people wasn't able to admire the rise of internet, because they got it only in 00s.
Somebody should invite these lay-flatters to Southern Europe. They will definitely like Spain.
It's exactly is.
It's funny that people don't see the double standards of capitalist economy. When you're a business, you strive to achieve more goods or money by spending less resources, labor or money. Which makes total sense, no complaints about this. So if you're an individual, applying this pattern, you also should strive to find ways to get more utility from less things. By practicing asceticism/minimalism, one looks exactly for a business-ish optimisation of life! To flourish using only a few things is the same as to build spaceships using small python script. Just imagine. One doesn't working hard, creating huge enterprise with tens thousands of workers. Just a few lines, and the spaceship is ready. How lazy the author of the script should be!
Not lower but different living standards.
Also, please mind the context. Lying flatism is originated in China, that is famous for the absurd work-life balance. You know, work 6 days/week, 9am to 9pm or even stay later. Find a romantic partner, but spend time with them only Saturday evenings and on Sundays. Bring kids into this amazing lifestyle, see them also on Sundays (the rest of time, grandparents will take care of them).
It's kinda obvious that people started to understand that something is going wrong and now are testing the way to fix it.
it's strange to see this question in the gpt era.
well, how about a jinn that is able to construct a seed of a self-replicated spaceships with a warp drive while you're drinking your coffee? ;-)
But you can't look in somebody's head, to see the whole context of their behaviour. There is multiple official cognitive flaws related to this. Humans are very bad at reading others minds and good at hiding their intentions. Think about a typical suicidal person who appears happy and smiling but then... well, you hear the bad news.
Modern philosophy is impractical. The Greek/Roman philosophy is great, for example. It should be a huge shame for "humanity" to drop this approach in favor of highly sophisticated word-juggling in three tomes.
> Premise 1: suffering is bad
As someone already mentioned in the post, there is the difference between negative feeling we feel and the process of suffering it triggers. One of the biggest flaws of the common human culture is the failure to recognise it. You may feel the coldness of water, but not to be cold. You can feel pain but not suffer. Or, more generally, you can see a failure indicator on your control panel, but not to become the failure. Without taking this difference into an account, the rest of this hedonism makes no sense :-)
On the other side, philosophers usually focus on abstract things: think/behave like this and your life will be good. Forgetting that whatever smart philosopher you are, you probably will not be able to function normally under extreme hunger or chronic pain.
It's another example that "sapiens" are so lame, so even having AbUNdAnCe TeCHnOlGy and PrOgResS they manage to terribly screw their environment. A handful of ancient greeks living in "undeveloped" conditions with infant mortality, slavery and no mcdonalds managed to produce philosophies, which are heavily quoted today. Take stoicism, it manages my mental health like charm, and I'm only shallowly practicing it. "Developed" countries have thousands of universities full of "educated" people who have access to orders of magnitude knowledge than the guy who taught at Stoa. They should've cured not the teenage depression, but the mental health issues at the scale of humanity. If they are _really_ developed and educated, of course ;-)
It'd be great to research and promote alternative adult lifestyles, where you don't need rich parents or be super lucky, but that may require some hard work and dedication to build. For example, the prospect of becoming a digital nomad could be definitely more interesting for teens than turning into a typical hardworking suit.
> I’ll do my job, but I’m not going to work my ass off or do anything more than absolutely required” kind of apathy. What's wrong with this approach? People just don't want to stress out to buy their CEO a new sport car.
Why should one stay in the society, though? Was it ever intrinsically good? I mean slavery/serfdom, wars, racism, social inequality builtin in the culture multiplied by general narrow-mindedness. People love to ignore these inconveniences. The leader considered "the great" conquers the city and kills/rapes/enslaves everybody? Oh, that was normal. But now it's not, and it will never again repeat itself even on the smaller scale. Now society works perfectly. Yet fundamental physical constants and human biology remained the same. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Integrated documentation. I see "foo", I see it's type, I see what can I do with it (if it's OO-like).
- You can choose to work from the place you like, regardless of the local IT market.
- Commute. Nuff said.
- Having your own schedule is magic. Waking up early in morning and doing all important work till noon/lunch is my goal now.
- Boring things suddenly become awesome. Imagine, you work at a really boring enterprise with low load, but the pay you like. You still have to sit 9-5 and watch youtube. Let's move stuff remotely. Do your chores in a couple of hours and your day is done!
- Socializing: being remote encourages to go out to meetups and find your real friends. And you still can visit coworking spaces.
This sentence makes total sense for North Korean parents who work super-hard to afford smuggling their kids out of the country. But not for the richest region of the world superpower and the "citadel of democracy".
> "They put pressure on their kids to succeed so they can afford to live in this area when they grow up and repeat the cycle to become well-paid professionals and suburban parents"
I'd understand if they lived in a poor country, where being a "non well-paid professionals" meant constant suffering. But if a person "sacrifices" themselves so their kids can afford fancy car, hmm, something is suspicious here, isn't it? :-)
- You live competitive capitalist style, but get iphones, uber and google.
- Or you have relaxed four-hour four-day workweek, with button phones, no uber and website catalogs serving under 5kb/s dial-up.
I'd choose the second option without a second thought. The utility of having fancier screen doesn't fit the loss from switching from chill lifestyle to the competitive "capitalistic" one. Even with 5kb/s internet you're able to achieve a lot of things. You still have access to online libraries and forums. Bicycle commute and public transport aren't so terrible (In Europe). You still can hear your loved ones using a button phone. And the most important you'll have a lot of time and energy to enjoy all this stuff.