And those are the lucky ones.
The rest get paid meagerly while inflation and rent gobbles up any earnings they have so they work numerous jobs to scrape by.
Most of the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
I love your idealism but I think most people would be happy to see everything collapse at this point.
Hmmmmmmm
> From my experience the best minds tend to work on important problems
My experience is that you're incorrect.
What I see is tons of people living the same template: pick secure, well paid job, no matter how meaningless. Even when they take a risk to spin some startup, very often goal is to sell off and retire, with little interest in what they actually do.
Then these people get depressed and complain how life is bleak, capitalism cruel and everything should collapse.
Personal experiences is anecdotal. There's hard stat's that say that a majority of this country does not live like you do.
Btw I'm not from USA and reading HN recently, I'm kinda happy about it, because it seems only options on your side are: starving, prisoner of job, sell-off with guilt trips/existential crisis, demoralized billionaire. Is there anyone left in the US, who simply enjoys life as it is?
I obviously dramatize here a bit, but literally a few comments earlier someone wrote to me, that, he/she didn't consent to be alive. Really dystopian thread.
I notice financially privileged people tend to advocate for a 'dont worry be happy' 'everythings going to be alright' mode of living life because theyre shielded from the brutality of the world by their money or their families money.
It's the same reason financially privileged people never admit that they had help from their family and always claim that they made their money themselves.
Because they're completely unaware of what it really takes to make it in life without any help from anyone and I suspect feel a little guilty how easy their life has been compared to others and want to connect with, and associate with people who actually made it on their own.
If you have ever been poor or financially struggling, you would realize 'don't worry be happy' is not a functional way of living life if you don't have family money....at least in America.
The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
May I have my happiness-pass now please? :-)
> The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
It is. My parents surely did and I'm also going to (btw calling this privilege and guilt tripping over fact, that somebody's parents are decent human beings is kinda weird).
This is how life works. No reason to obsess over some places being shitty. There's less of them than a few generations ago (fun fact - my city still has its old beheading stone. Thankfully not used for couple hundreds of years).
That's a rough start. Did they retire? What do they do now?
What's funny, they will tell you, that factory wasn't bad compared to work in the field they did with their own parents. It also got them place in block of flats - objectively kinda crappy, but everything was crappy back then.
What happened to them after the fall of socialism?
Nothing exciting, but they always provided for the family and helped us to start adult life however they could.
Unfortunately, it seems to be an extreme historical anomaly for elites to put the welfare of their people over the zero-sum needs of their own class. One recent such anomaly was in the middle of the 20th century--The U.S. and USSR both invested heavily in building large middle classes (it being historically rare for such to exist at all) because they wanted research supremacy, which you can't get if you squander 95% of the natural intellectual talent, during the Cold War. Also, the existence of other systems put both sides on better behavior: capitalism couldn't be as scummy as it is today, and state-run socialism had to improve material circumstances and scale back the authoritarian tendencies it had developed during WW2... because, otherwise, neither system would have survived. But now that the Cold War is over, we're stuck in this global authoritarian capitalism that retains the worst aspects of both systems.
The division we're seeing is, of course, artificial. The elites deliberately pit people against each other (and trot out old divisive garbage: zero-sum nationalism, weird-ass conspiracy theories to distract from the more boring and often technically legal conspiracies occurring in plain sight, and of course antisemitism) because otherwise, the natural lay of the land would have 95+ percent of the people guillotining their dusty asses. That being said, I can't think of an easy way to end it. We do, as humans, need to (using your words) engage and unite; the problem is that what we need to unite to do--that is, overthrow the current global corporate elite using any means and mechanisms that shall work--is extremely socially unacceptable because those in charge have made it so. Thus, we're just expected to accept a declining standard of living and a nearly complete halt on technical progress at a time when we need it the most.
I like to think about how much time/effort/energy has been put into designing and indoctrinating people into systems so that that the 95% or so will actually do the work to defend its existence and the elite class can operate effectively as managers rather than ever get their hands dirty. How easy and self-reinforcing it is for people to operate against their own interests is the product of millenia of heavy research into information control, psychology, and power, not an emergent property of social people
People complaint but I argued he was the best employee we had thus far. "If we can find just a few of these guys I too can stay home whenever I feel like it! We just need 3 or 4 of these guys to do what use to be a one man job. Then it will actually get done in stead of you guys wasting precious time talking about how bad he is, wanting him gone. Gone where? To sit at home and live of our tax money? Well, I for one love paying for it. He should sit at home until you guys wake up to the new reality!
Those unmotivated milenimals apparently are the answer. Waving a moldy dried out carrot in front of their nose has no effect.
Its not a real solution of course... at least I think not? Not sure really. But things will change regardless. It might not be pretty, it will at least be interesting times.
History shows revolution almost always ends in civil war and destroyed infrastructure. You can't just create a power vacuum with nothing to fill it.
Even if you do manage revolution on a unified front, it always seems to splinter within a generation unless something radically new from some outside source forces you to alter or die.
The best revolutions start with an abdication and reform, reform, reform.
The only way i see that happeniing in the US is if everyone started voting third party and stopped being a two party system. That would create some competiton among the ruling elite.
The problems actually originate from the way we engage in peaceful transactions and activities among each other. It is pretty much universally agreed by economists that something akin to a land value tax is suitable for the efficient allocation of land. This should be used as an opportunity to give everyone an equal share of land on the planet. By that I mean parts of the revenue of a land value tax would be paid out as a citizen's dividend, it is almost as if you were receiving a land certificate but was automatically renting it out for money. You can then use that money to rent your own land.
This would fix the "rent is too damn high" problem. The money problem mostly fixed itself in its own but anyone who would advocate for e.g. a demurrage currency could introduce it as an equivalent to food stamps, not necessarily for the entire population.
Just look around you, the interests of the savers override those who are still working for their own wealth. Housing and money are supposed to be appreciating investments instead of shelter for people and a medium of exchange for workers.
As people get wealthier, they want their wealth to be in forms that are harmful to the rest of society that isn't as wealthy.
Now more than ever, we as humans need to find a way engage and unite. But instead we are seeing more apathy, what feels like more division, and less interest in tackling truly difficult problems. Again, not trying to pin it on why (unchecked capitalism, etc), just trying to say that the state of affairs does not seem encouraging.