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.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Hey hey hey, that's autocratic megalomaniac rapist conman, can't leave out his best stuff.
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?
Well written, and exactly what I needed today, thank you sir.
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.
This, exactly.
Boomers grew up with a 91% top-tier tax rate.
Nobody ever paid that rate; anyone who was close to that line found some tax deductible way of spending their excess. That "tax deductible way of spending" was, ultimately, someone else's paycheck.
Without that punitively-high top tier, there is no need for them to actually spend their excess income. They invest it, creating a debt owed back to them.
We tolerate this horseshit out of fear that "they'll go away, and take the jobs with them". Which won't happen: When we restore our 91% top-tier tax rate, the rest of the world will follow.
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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You see what you want to see.
Things aren’t great but not “everything is shit.”
Come live in a poor country and start being positive when the grocery prices go up every week
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Money and greed.
But you can help. Grab a grocery bag, go out side and pick up some trash. Talk to your neighbors. Go put change in parking meters that are about to expire. Go through a parking lot and put shopping parts in the corral. Get a bag of frozen peas and feed some ducks (not bread). Get some cheap paper plates and a marker or two from a dollar store, make happy faces and staple them up on telephone poles.
The more we act hyper-locally, the better we can make it. Maybe it will inspire othdrs to do the same. But even if they don't, you're still making the world a better place.
Second this. Macro level things are.. not great. At home, our neighborhoods though, we can and do make a difference. Your friend group, your family, your close relations, those groups are the same as they were a year ago, and are worth being around. Yeah things are kind of shit right now. You can still go have a pint with your friends though. Or enjoy your favorite video game. Work on that hobby you've put off. We've been trained that buying is happiness - but you don't need to spend a lot of money to be content. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what you have and improving your own neighborhood.
People will tell us to hate, and to divide, and I just refuse to. I've been going out on walks, saying hello to the neighbors, going to the local coffee shop and bar. Communities are worth building.
Because of the collapse of the USSR. It was the only thing scaring capitalists into giving something to the people.
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You might have depression
More like suffering from capitalism and the global decline into authoritarianism.
No medicine can fix oppression.
Both can be true.
F'course, pills won't fix society, but medics can't really fix the social systems. Best they've got is pills that make you not want to die.
That's possible. Or you could be paying a lot of attention to world news.
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Because the economic conditions of the modern world allow for tyranny and the people haven’t figured out that we need to unite and overthrow the tyrants to build a better society.
The short answer is our legal system was not designed to withstand the stress the ultra rich can put on it as a result a lot of laws were over turned.
Im on mobile so it's hard to type and explain in more depth.
And that's only one facet.
But there are good things in the world too. And there are people fighting for what's right. It's easy to slip into despair but as mr rogers use to say
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping
Not everything is shit, we're just in a massive downturn, so all the things that suck are growing while all the things that rule are being downplayed.
There is still beauty in the world, and there is still hope. We just have to work together to make sure it isn't buried under all the shit we see day in and day out.
We forgot to perform maintenance on everything.
It's because everything is literally made of shit, or fecal matter if you prefer.
This dude explains(in a couple minutes) why boomers are how they are and why they are breaking down society
We had a huge population of genuinely evil people who were locked away in the rural south so they could only abuse black people around them.
Then social media gave these people a voice and politicians realized they could pander to the trash with funding from the billionaires and that's enough to keep them in power indefinitely.
It was always shit. Now we just have technology that lets us see all of it.
There was always a genocide going on somewhere in the world. Cops always brutalized and killed people. The wealthy always exploited the poor. New diseases are always popping up and spreading. Politicians were always corrupt.
The internet tells us about all of it. We no longer have the bliss of ignorance.
Not everything is shit. It's just not as good as it used to be
We used to be looking forward; those have always been the good times. Now, we either look backwards, or at the immediate. It's hard to be optimistic and drive in the right direction when you're constantly staring in the rear view mirror.
Also: corporations and governments learned a lot from Nazi Germany, and Goebbles in particular. Not in the usual Godwin's Law sense, but in how to manipulate the populous by controlling messaging. And they improved on it; rather than doing it through fiat, which breeds resistance, they've done it through good old Capitalism: the biggest media are owned by big concerns, and the messaging is controlled by editors.
There is free media, but that's a mixed bag. That gets you InfoWars and Rush Limbaugh, too.
The key is to live in the moment. Looking backwards or forwards is a rookie mistake.
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Late-stage capitalism and a mix of grossly undereducated people in at least one major country and apathy.
Unchecked capitalism
I see everything as a risk, since I'm living a double life. It is often that the road for me to leave as an apostate is narrow, and chances of me being free is close to none. But I don't stop there. I remind myself that I have friends who looked after me, and I mourn those who passed away from terminal illnesses. Grief seems to talk to me not in stages, but as a constant companion. I balance everything with the good and the meditative. It doesn't always work, but I like to try them everyday anyway. Good luck buddy.