'winning' implies that there has to be someone 'losing' and I don't feel like that represents my view of my life though I do feel very satisfied.

I am very glad that I was able to purchase a modest house that I can work on and modify. I'm happy with designing and implementing solutions to the technical problems my job entails. I'm happy that I have the opportunity to save so that I have a financial cushion should many unexpected events occur.

And I don't think this situation requires anyone else to lose.

Now I would admit that I might not be and likely am not representative of everyone in our society but isn't that more of an attitude towards expectations than some sort of static rule? I might have the expectation that I should have a Ferrari and an attractive and doting partner, or a happy perfect family, but there is no reason my expectations justify hurting others.

I think if we look closer at social dysfunction in general we would see that the people lashing out have either unrealistic expectations or have someone been marginalized even beyond what we all might agree about as a baseline of expectations: that we have the opportunity to take part in society without being treated shabbily for no reason, that we are appreciated at some level by someone, and that we can be vulnerable and rely on others without being neglected or ostracized.

There will always be people who are naturally dysfunctional due to mental health issues but I have to think most of the worst problems society faces could be greatly reduced if we cared about each other more.

By buying a house, you've put upward pressure on house prices in your area, thus making them more expensive for everyone else. Some people would be nudged over the edge from affording it to not affording it.

I think the loss, if it actually exists, is distributed thinly over a lot of people so it's hard to see.

> I don't think this situation requires anyone else to lose.

I don't know enough macroeconomics, nor enough about the veracity of macroeconomics, to determine whether this is true. I'm not calling you out, or asking you to defend your thesis to strangers. I'm just wondering whether you're able to reason end-to-end about this in your own mind, to reach this conclusion.

Also, whether or not your good fortune depends on losers, there are losers. An exchange at dinner the other night went like this: What slogan did Obama run on? Change. And what is it that people want to change? They want their lives to stop sucking so hard.

Whether their lives are "sucking" is a matter of perspective. There are billions of people around the world who would be only too grateful for a life that "sucks" as much as theirs do. You'll find people from all walks of life who have convinced themselves that their life sucks and that, if only they got that raise, or if the economy grew at x % or if the guy who talks like them became president, it would suck less. As long as the majority of people keep looking to external factors to determine their happiness and satisfaction with life, your society will always be vulnerable to populism.

At best, I think this could only be a solution for an individual. Perhaps I'm simply lacking imagination here, but the U.S. adopting some alternative to materialism is one of the last things in the world I can picture.

What did you anchor these modest goals upon? Chances are they were based on your perception of how people around you are doing. If you lived in the Paleolithic, perhaps winning would have been having a decent cave, and enough game to feed your family. In another world, perhaps you'd require only one or two modest robot butlers, not a fleet like many others have. Dumb analogies, I know. The point is that, most people's goals are derived from what seems achievable based on perceptions of how everybody else is doing at "the game" we call capitalism. As soon as you start doing that, there are winners and losers by definition.

The winners and losers in your description seems more a ranking, rather than causal. In most games, a winner causes there to be a loser. What about GP's stated goals and achievements would cause someone else to lose at the game of life?

I have friends who would consider me a "loser" by rankings (no house, no wife, no kids; I rent, have a fiancee, and, well, no kids). But their achievements have not caused me to be in this state. It's just facts of how life has played out, and differing priorities.

You can be winning at your own self defined game. And you probably should be.

Not all games are zero sum. I'm not saying that you need to win in order for others to lose. The cause and effect are almost the inverse of that. What I'm saying is, your definition of success and winning is defined by either achieving what others have, or avoiding situations you know are possible because other people are in them.

You know you're winning because your not in a third world country, homeless, starving, immediately dying, etc. You wouldn't know those were states to avoid unless others were in them.

This is what I was hinting of when I mentioned subcultures: https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society

The summary is that everyone needs to be a winner, and we can be as long as we all play a different game.

I think the article addresses that, too, with Mr. C: "...he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism."

> a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery

Wow. How little things change.

I love to read ancient documents that have survived to our days, all the way back to the first written forms of documentation.

The conclusion taken from almost 4 000 years of written information is that indeed things change very little regarding human politics.