I had a friend whose brother would go to work and come home and play video games every day. That was literally it. Work, pay rent, game, eat sleep. I watched him repeat this cycle when we were hanging out. He didn't even have much to say most days.
The hikomori in Japan are already adopting this terminal frugality en masse.
It can be extremely expensive in opportunity costs, unfortunately.
(Belief that you have opportunities, and motivation to take them, is very valuable. You can't just tell people this though, humans don't work like that)
My grandfather had a collague, who build a fast-breeder reactor in germany. Then the political climate changed and the reactor- brand new was deconstructed, and the whole thing reverted to a grass-farmland.
Noting but memorys to show for it.
Building that reactor isn't just a job. That kind of a job generally has a future/career. You would learn so many things on the way you will likely land a better job sooner or later.
One of things that I keep saying to my younger cousins that pretty much everything I built at the start of my career in programming doesn't exist now.
All that remains is me, and along the way I've gathered skills.
Video games don't give you this.
This is just like the Japanese Neets.
In fact http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-16/new-york-assemblyma...
They ( the oligarchs through their politicians ) change the rules every day, but they say to us that the system is fair. Obviously it is lapalissian that the system isn't fair at all but it is massively rigged.
In the past centuries people would have revolted, now they imprison themselves in the virtual world.
It's natural selection. People who need to feel short term rewards in their lives will be wiped out from the gene pool. People who can operate without any rewards (contentment/happiness) in their lives; basically, people who seek status over happiness will strive.
There's a definite undercurrent that politicians are barely keeping a lid on, the latest manifestations being Brexit and Trump.
Sure, Brexit and Trump have had an effect, but are people truly better off? For all Trump's talk (whether you see that as positive or negative), I think we're seeing that even he's struggling against the whole system. And Brexit isn't really doing what anybody wants at the moment.
[0] Adam Curtis seems to come up regularly here on HN, for good reason. I can't believe it hasn't yet in this thread, but I'm happy to be the first. I strongly recommend all of Adam Curtis' work: https://thoughtmaybe.com/by/adam-curtis/
And to be clear, I don't ascribe to communism or anything, I'm simply speculating that some sort of new ideology, with a focus on the common person, will arise in the next 50 years to direct and fuel the next revolt. You'll know it when you see it.
[1] https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/08/02/black-lives-matter-p...
Even some of my brighter & more successful friends lack the self-awareness to have a constructive dialogue with the other side without "feelz" getting in the way of "realz". It doesn't help that none of them are policy experts or economists, but there it is.
You don't have to have studied very specific disciplines to be suspicous about the fact that your parents went casually to work at offices without ever "disrupting markets" or "moving forward and breaking things" and yet they had 2 cars, villa at the sea, and 2 apartments. How? By showing up at work and working times less than you or me.
just don't invade the hamptons by car. there's only one real road in, and it is only one lane each way. traffic routinely piles up on it ^.^
and unless you are invading on memorial day, july 4th, a saturday in july/august, or labor day, the richest of the rich probably will be in NYC instead!!
Humans don't like to live in zoos and alternate realities are ultimately unfulfilling.
I agree about your causal analysis too: the top of the pyramid have become so good at locking down wealth and power that they're closing the world down for everyone else. If this continues it will end very badly. We have nuclear weapons, drones, AI, and total surveillance, all of which are waiting for a truly unhinged demagogue to come to power.
World War III. Now there's a way to get out from under your student loans.
The reality is more like dystopia and control/distraction of the average user, packaged as good deals/market solutions to help you get ahead.
That's the status quo, sure. But nothing says that will remain stable.
Unless, of course your planning counts on government sponsored health insurance or even Social Security since in today's political climate, there's no guarantee that either will be around for your retirement.
I'm watching this happen to my own and friends' parents. Pensions gutted in industries / jobs that are dying or dead and nest eggs drying up very quickly to pay for health insurance and living costs. Most of these people did everything "right" that was within their means when it came to planning ahead and they are fucked.
If they were in an even lower economic rung of society, I would imagine what they are experiencing would be much worse. As in homelessness, malnutrition and death from easily treatable illnesses.
This is not something anyone wants for their future.
I mean, even if you bought a house at 35 and just made minimum payments, at least that would be paid off. And I'm sure taxes could be paid by renting out one room..
Counters to your example would be modern day Detroit, modern day Greece, and the Weimar Republic.
Its not going to be the same for you and most people on HN today.
Don't let the mere fact of their existence stop you from enjoying yourself.
This is well put and I would only add that the wealth trapping is occurring in a viral way, which means there should be some type of inoculation for the more harmful effects of it.
https://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-ca...
It also relates to the brain-body ratio for species, because investing in intelligence works for them - it says something about that species' environment/niche, and not just the species itself.
If games now provide the best gradient of reward for effort...
Another solution is to change the problem: what if games did provide a survival or reproductive advantage? Quite possibly, social media already is, being better connected has long been an advantage ("it's who you know, not what you know").
The memes aren't smart either, but the 2-layer system is smarter than any 1-layer system.
> but I do think that the top 1% have gotten so skilled at trapping wealth and therefore opportunity that it's really screwing over everyone else.
I've got news people: the top 1% is not forcing you to watch Netflix, consume social media, or strap a VR headset on.
We live in a generation absolutely devoid of personal responsibility. And it's why ideas that would easily be dismissed as Marxist (which masquerade as "post-modern") 30+ years ago are on the rise today.
Oh, you're just oppressed.
Economic growth is over, we have to redistribute things now.
It's not you're fault that you're addicted. Here, take this medication every day.
Where's the hard work in today's generation? Where's the personal responsibility? Where's the discipline? Where's the can-do attitude?
And let's get straight-to-the-point on the article in question. Nobody cares about men whining. It's just reality. Call it politically incorrect, whatever. If you're a man and don't work to get what you think you deserve, you won't get it. Instead, there's just gonna be more single women and more jobs available for those that do choose to compete.
Your comment is perfect example of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
The reality is people are taking advantage of the generosity we have in our society and people who grow up comfortably will never know how to see someone below their standard of living as a leech but instead as oppressed. Redistributing wealth more and more creates less opportunity for the free market to lift people out of poverty.
What? No it doesnt? How do you even
Is this satire?
You are right though, butchering the middle and upper class with taxes then passing it around does help people out of poverty -- At the cost of making our future generations poorer, happens every time through out history. I am heavily against government welfare. For markets to survive it need competition, not cooperation through government bureaucracy!
That's why Trump imposes lifetime ban on some lobbying, five years for others. The TPP getting shot down was a big win as well, these are regulations we need to stop government corruption. The west is waking up!
My immediate family and I came from having next to nothing. We busted ass and have money now. We aren't rich, but we're enjoying life in ways we couldn't growing up.
If we, instead, believed the rhetoric that life is screwed unless you came out of a "lucky vagina," we would still be broke, in Brooklyn, trying to make ends meet, and I would be another socially-inept dude that spends way too much time on games and "computers."
It's not just us either. I graduated with a bunch of people who came from similar situations and are now doing great.
Life is what you make of it.
Just because it worked for you, doesn't mean there aren't a thousand people who tried and failed at exactly the same thing.
Your chances are definitely higher than zero if you try, but unfortunately it's no guarantee that you'll succeed.
There is literally nothing better to do with your life than try. So just try.
I hope I don't have to go through all the reasons this is fundamentally disconnected from the problem described in the article now.
"there is literally nothing better to do with your life than try. so just try."
As advice it also ignores the structural issues that make trying easier and harder for various people. One way of encouraging people to try is to break down the real barriers that exists and make it harder for them than others.
People ARE trying. Its not really a good strategy as it gets no where. Its only a better strategy than not trying, as not trying gets you to being a depressing statistic, like joblessness in erstwhile manufacturing hubs.
Knowing that you might fail and flame out is the definiton of risk; you do it because the upside is worth it
Otherwise they'd be out there, looking for work. Instead of dismissing the possibility that they act in their rational self interest, perhaps you can study how the actual risk/reward ratio evolved for these people over the course of the last few decades.
But that would be quite a bit harder than giving self-help advice on the internets.
"There is no point in trying, because you will fail" kind of attitude prevents you from trying at the first place.
There is one reason to be assured of failure, which is by doing nothing at all.
in other words, a restaurant owner isnt going to hire new employees unless hes got more customers, it doesnt matter how much 'investment' you give them, what creates job is demand.
The only thing I had to do to get free grants was to show my parents didn't have money.
Their poverty became an enormous benefit for me when applying to college and receiving financial aid. It's an incredible and amazing country we live in.
I busted my ass as a obedient worker bee for 15 years and now (at 37 years old) all I have are 4 debts and a bit of tech. No own apartment/house, no savings, no security of any kind. If I lose my job tomorrow, I am as good as homeless. Oh, and I have health problems for which I can't pay (having teeth with holes in them isn't fixed by home remedies, before you try that).
I am glad it worked for you. You have to understand what you say is a confirmation bias however.
Will I ever stop trying? No. I am changing approach drastically as I am typing this, changing the way I work and communicate with people, focusing more on what the business needs are instead of negotiating for meager salaries that barely cover my huge monthly expenses and food. I'll succeed eventually, simply because people who don't give up + change their way of doing things are inevitably bound to succeed. But again, don't try to push the message of "work hard and it will work out". No it won't, otherwise now my mother would have had respectable pension and wouldn't rely on me for shelter and food.
Sorry, 100 million dead bodies is more than enough to convince me that Marxism doesn't work.
Nope, not going to play that.
Edit:
At this stage, enough so-called "Marxist" governments have descended into slavery, starvation, and mass murder that the burden of proof should lie on those who advocate such governments, and that burden should be heavy indeed.
But nope, it's always "but that wasn't REAL Marxism".
After a century of trying, with dozens of attempts, it is quite clear that either those hellhole governments are "real Marxism" or, conversely, that "real Marxism" does not and cannot exist.
Otherwise someone would've gotten it right by now.
There has been real Marxism, though it's never been absolutely dominant in any society. Particularly, it has been a key driving force in replacing the system of Capitalism that 19th Century socialists identified and critiqued with the substantially different modern mixed economy as the dominant economic form of advanced societies, even though Marxists would claim that as far from a complete success, as the modern mixed economy is far from their desired end state.
Refusing to back up certain or all interpretations of an idea by no means amounts to NTS.
You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought. Modern Marxist philosophers are almost dedicated to finding flaws in 20th century Marxist implementations, and doing research on other models such as anarchism, post-left anarchism and technocracy.
Dismissing this research as "lol no true scotsman, not playing that" is incredibly ignorant and facile.
Nope. I recognize that "Marxist thought" doesn't specifically advocate such things.
Nonetheless, those things always happen.
So far the scorecard is about Murderous Hellhole: 100, Utopia:0.
Usually one only needs to be burned once or twice before deciding that touching a hot stove is a bad idea, even if that glowing burner does look really pretty.
You may be interested in anarchist writers, or Murray Bookchin.
Actually, defenders of capitalism, when confronted with problems attributed to it, frequently argue that the problems are "the State" or "crony capitalism", and that the problems would not exist with "real capitalism".
Of course, both the State and cronyism are features of the system for which the name "capitalism" was coined by its critics, but that doesn't stop the defenders of capitalism for saying that those are separate and opposed things to "real capitalism".
> And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.
That was common long before capitalism.
Where did Marx and Engels write about 100M dead bodies?
Sorry, not seeing your point here.
If Very Bad Things happen every time a particular idea is put into practice, it's a bad idea, regardless of whether the Very Bad Things were explicitly mentioned when the idea was put forth.
More to the point, where did Marx and Engels write about narrow vanguardism instead of broad class consciousness, bypassing capitalism rather than moving forward from it, or any of the other central points of Leninism, which (and not Marxism) is the common ideology shared by the people responsible for those 100 million dead bodies?
The only people trying to put Marxism, rather than Leninism, into effect have been in developed capitalist (and now, in part due to their efforts, post-capitalist mixed) economies.
> Capitalism (according to Marxist theory) can no longer sustain the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit by driving down wages, cutting social benefits and pursuing military aggression. The socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through workers' revolution.
Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month? Did Mao not try hard enough?
Newsflash, folks: we've had a few workers' revolutions. They're not all they're cracked up to be. Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.
The idea that by pointing to some successes, it justifies the whole system of appropriating labour for profit is utterly falacious and false. I hope you can see that it's not sound reasoning.
A system can have merits; Marx was very clear that Capitalism has various merits, especially over its predecessors. His idea was that there is a further reachable goal. You have made no effort to dismiss this other than by saying "what we have now is pretty ok".
>Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.
Why would their experience be relevant to reformulations in theory? To be clear, I'm not advocating for Soviet-style Communism.
No, they mean the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th through early-20th century (since replaced in the developed west by the modern mixed economy which is an unstable form with a danger of reverting back to capitalism because it retains central features of capitalism.)
What China has is a transitional form that is somewhere on the map between totalitarian centralization through a kind of neofeudalism (that relates to classical feudalism in the same what that Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist totalitarianism relates to monarchic absolutism) to something like capitalism. Which is certainly progress, just as Marx recognized that the transition from.feudalism to the kind of capitalism he and other contemporary socialist critiqued was progress.
But that it is progress from something worse earlier doesn't make it the ideal end state.
> Did Mao not try hard enough?
Mao tried quite hard at completely the wrong thing. Leninism and it's descendants abandoned key tenants of Marxism to create something that either (in the overly generous view) they thought could work in very different conditions than Marx addressed or (in the more cynical view) as served as convenient propaganda for authoritarian populism in the societies in which they operated.
Also, treating Marxism the way you suggest empowers the people who will use association with Marxism (which whether or not people who think Marxism had good ideas avoid the name, people who don't can still draw the connections) as an attack against an idea, leveraging the failure of Leninist societies to suggest that anything associated with Marxism is bad. So, no, I'll continue to point out that that involves not only the ad hominem fallacy, but also the fallacy of equivocation.
Giving in to people who are trying to cloud the meaning of words is the linguistic equivalent to negotiating with highjackers. You can do it, but you just make the job easier for the next highjacker.
I know it's a scary moment, where it feels like words have lost their meaning and insanity reigns, but that's just the zeitgeist. Words still mean things and that still had power.
Look out your window it's everywhere.
Any way you slice it this is not going to end well. Essentially we're in a Great Depression of an entirely new sort.