Corporations. Stop giving them money any way possible.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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I think it's short-termism combined with capitalism.
Capitalism tells people that success equals money. Short-termism tells people to focus on how much they can grab right now.
Look at the actions of C-suite level people. They do what they can to increase profits this year to get a massive bonus this year. If that means laying off half the company that's ok because they're incentivised to maximise profits now. So they do. The next year they're off to a different job at a different company and they will get that job because "When I was CEO of Mongoose & Felcher I increased YOY global profit by 270%". Their focus is never on the actual well-being of the company or its employees or on the social or environmental impact of the company because their bonus isn't dependent on those things.
Politicians are much the same. If they're not in power they want to get into power. If they are in power they have to act as quickly as possible to achieve their aims because they might only be in power for a single term.
One of my favourite 'business' ideas came from Gus Levy who was CEO of Goldman Sachs back in the 1970s. He came up with the term 'long-term greedy.' The idea was that you dealt fairly and honestly with your clients, never gouged them, kept your word, and did a good job. Sure, you might make slightly less profit from those clients this year but you would keep them as clients next year too.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
No-one seems to be long-term greedy anymore.
The CCP seems to factor this into at least some of their decisions. Their infrastructure projects (like any infrastructure projects) take years, sometimes decades, to pay off, but boy howdy do they pay off.
They also pay off in a lot of ways besides the pure "dollar in/dollar out" kind of way that I think people forget about a lot. Things like soft power, economic growth, and cultural alliance are all incredibly powerful things.
Its a shame the current administration is trying to gut the last 80 years of work the US has put into those things.
I don't consider myself to be any type of greedy, but that's how I ran my business. At least 97% of my clients were regulars, and almost all were recommended by a neighbor or coworker. I did very little advertising, but was busy 12-16 hours a day, every day.
Because we're monkeys that just came down from the trees. TBH that we've gotten this far relatively intact is remarkable.
On the offchance you don't mean in a current events way, but more cosmically: To all appearances the universe wasn't built for us, we just kind of showed up in a grimy corner of it. Living things have the brutal kind of existence that often goes along with being stowaways or pests.
Correct. I mean, lifespans are 125 years max. So we had to transfer knowledge down, and amazingly....we've conquered a whole planet. But sadly we can't unite and that will be the undoing of the human race. Until we can put petty deferences aside, and pool resources as a species? We will never be more than a chapter in Eath's history.
I feel like the transfer of knowledge gets overlooked way too much when people look at big history or technological history. Every time a new way of storing or transferring knowledge arrives technological advancement start going up by like an order of magnitude.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture took several millennia to fully complete, but in the ice age at least the northern hemisphere had a rapid climate disruption every 1500 or so. Any progress would have been disrupted and then quickly forgotten. Once the interglacial begins the transition completes for the first time in human history (although I do wonder why nobody started farming in Australia). That leads to sedentarism, higher population density and hierarchy, which leads to the development of cities. In cities, like-minded people can meet and share, and it was only a couple of millennia more before you start seeing pottery, metalworking, writing and wheels. With the development of writing knowledge of abstract systems begins accumulating, although you see variation in literacy and library sizes based on how cheap and convenient writing materials were.
They exploded with the arrival of paper. At some point in that period advances start happening within generations, so the effect is harder to track. With the arrival of specifically wood pulp paper in the Victorian era everyone had access to education, and now, with the internet, we can have nerdy conversations like this one every day.
But sadly we can’t unite and that will be the undoing of the human race.
What makes you say that? I feel like we're 95% of the way to united, relative to where we were 50,000 years ago. Consider that Kim Jung Un has sometimes worn a suit that would be just as normal seen on Mark Rutta - that's pretty significant cultural overlap, even with the stark ideology gap. We have some big challenges coming up, so it's not guaranteed, but I don't have any reason that we're doomed to failure either.
Doomed, maybe not, but it'll take a while to unite as a species and leave the planet. We could easily do it with the combined knowledge, tech and resources of a united earth. I think we will get there, but we can't destroy ourselves over petty little lines in the sand and cultural differences. You bring hope and that's what we'll need going forward.
😭😭😭😭
Ugh, sorry. In lieu of a hug, I'll point out that we haven't failed yet, and there's good and bad sides to being here by accident. The existentialists were straight up excited about it, actually - you get to define goals for yourself, amazing! I take a more neutral stance. It's like being rats in Notre Dam or on an early explorer's boat. It's tough but boy do we get to see some cool things. And, although there's no guarantee there's a happy ending, at the same time anything is possible; no god to look after us also means no god to smite us for our ambition.
Private equity buying companies and sucking them dry to make a profit is also big factor
We're in the late stage of capitalism.
Depends on how you look at things.
Compare your life to the life of people 1 century ago, 2 centuries ago, etc…
News, social networks focus on shit. Lot of things improve. But news only focus on what is going wrong.
Lot if things are shit, but lot other things aren’t.
This. How many of your childhood friends survived to adulthood? How many famines have you lived through? Have you ever received modern medicine? Do you know anyone who's shit themselves to death (a surprisingly common cause of death back when)? Are you literate?
I'll not try and tell anyone things are peachy, because they're clearly not. But a lot of things are so so so much better than they used to be. Most of us lead lives that would make Pharos of old green with envy.
oh society has lots of problems.
trying to fit it into one comment can be difficult but i can list some issues that i perceive:
- there's no long-term plan. none at all. nobody has an idea what humanity will look like in 100+ years. that leads to considerable uncertainty in the youth, which definitely makes their mental health difficulties more severe.
because you're old
Whats not old?
when do you remember things being good?
Probably when I was a kid, lol. But really, I would say any time before covid was a lot better. Even just like, 1.5 ago was still better. I feel like everything is just getting exponentially worse.
yea that's true
Unchecked capitalism.
Yes. The US used to work to prevent and break up monopolies. This allowed some of the optimistic promises of capitalism to work. There was competition that worked to bring prices down and quality up.
In the past few decades we've witnessed dozens of competing businesses merged to form conglomerates with little more than speed bumps from government to slow them down, presumably to line the pockets of the would be overseers.
We lost the competition that drove innovation. There's little need to do anything to gain market share when there's no real competition. Instead these mega corporations focus on efficiency to bring costs down, because they're answering to shareholders now instead of consumers.
The result is supply chains have become fragile. One supply chain disruption results in a total shut down, because redundancies have been eliminated. When you have competition, you must have redundancies to ensure you can remain competitive. No need for that when you have no competitors.
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People aren't being held to account for doing or making shitty things
Because too many people wouldn’t vote for anything less than a perfect candidate.
And too many people wouldn’t vote for anything more than a rapist conman.
Hey hey hey, that's autocratic megalomaniac rapist conman, can't leave out his best stuff.
We forgot we could regulate capitalism like we did 100 years go. Let's make taxes great again. Then take that money and pour it into education. If the states really want to control that, fine, that's a compromise that can probably still end up working out in the end.
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Not a troll post.
Fair enough. I'll take your question seriously.
Without any context, it sounds as if everything that you're perceiving right now is shit. Maybe your relationships are strained and you feel lonely or guilty. Maybe the news hits you harder every day. Maybe money is tight. Maybe you've suffered a great loss. Maybe nothing has happened at all and you're sitting there, contemplating whether life is worth it. I don't know your situation.
And whatever it is, it's valid. Heck, I sometimes feel like life is shit.
Now, I'm not here to say we should look at reality with rose-colored glasses or to look at reality with naive optimism. No. I'm here to say that we have a choice. We can choose what to focus on and how to respond to reality.
Is it really true that "everything is shit"? Is the fact that your body has managed, against all odds, to sustain your life shit? Is the fact that humans can grow and change shit? Is the fact that we can be better as people shit?
Still, shit happens. And we have to be ready to accept that. Regardless of how much shit there is, we can always choose how to respond to it.
For one, we play a massive role in our interpretation of shit. There's solid science behind this. You could look at theories of cognition such as the Theory of Constructed Emotion, Relational Frame Theory, or even the shallow but effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy frameworks. All of those theories think it's crucial to notice the lens that you and I are looking at the world through. Not only should we notice the lens, but sometimes we should clean it or direct it elsewhere. Otherwise we spend our whole lives stooped over a pile of crap, when we could stand, look around, and notice the world around us from a different perspective.
But that's not the only thing that matters. We don't just want to see the world differently. We also want to live valued lives. Once again, this is possible regardless of how much shit there is. How so? Well, what kind of person do you want to be? A kind person? A person that is reflexive and open minded? A person that notices and appreciates beauty when it appears? A person who is proactive about their future and that of others? A person who is compassionate towards others? A person that's curious about the world and how to improve it?
It's not easy, being kind, appreciative, and proactive when you're bogged down by shit. But you're not alone. There's brilliant and insightful people who have dedicated their lives to finding out how to do it. If you're interested, I'm happy to talk about empirical ways of doing it. For now, it's more important to ask what the alternative is. Is a life spent stooping over shit a good life?
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People are often rewarded with power or money for doing/saying shitty things.
If you are rewarded for something, you are likely to continue the pattern.
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We are losing the class war.
It apparently is human nature to select leaders who are susceptible to corruption and incentivized to propagate the corrupt systems. I believe we need a solution where we have full traceability and hold leaders accountable, I have never seen anything close to this in my lifetime. Perhaps it is because we have collectively left the wolves to guard the henhouse? Replace the wolves with dogs who are aligned with human best interests.
Because you are staring at the pain rectangle and being bombarded with every bad thing that is happening in the entire planet nonstop.
Your ape brain was not meant for this. Imagine if you lived in the 1300s -- Plague, famines, wars, pogroms. They had it all. But any one human being would only ever hear about whatever bad things were happening near to them.
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