Is THIS the Problem ?

There is indeed not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for young people.

But that doesn't mean there is nothing. The wheel will turn. Young people will assume power as old people die off. And they will be assuming power during an extremely difficult era when we transition from the horror of an unsustainable excessive consumptive orgy. To a world in which we no longer take for granted an adequate food, water and shelter supply, because those resources have become harder to sustain. To a broken financial system which cracked when too much real property became no longer profitably insurable.

Their governing responsibility will be akin to medical triage. Having to make difficult resource allocation decisions because there may not be enough for everyone to survive. Decisions about who is going to get the resources and who isn't based upon their expected future value to the community. Which communities are worth salvaging and which must be abandoned due issues like rising sea levels, excessive drought or flooding risk or wildfire risk.

We are leaving behind a world which will contain responsibilities that our generation has no grasp of. We have lived in a bubble between major global schisms. The tipping points to the next major human upheaval have been crossed during our time at the helm. That is our legacy to the future.

So many of us misinterpret what Trump truly represents in the larger scheme of things. When the population herd gets the message that the population is destined to shrink, they seek out a leader who is willing to divide the population into surviving and non-surviving subgroups. The people who support him do so in the hope he'll spare his supporters while he lays waste to others less dear to themselves. It's important to understand that Trump is just an avatar for the energy of the people ...... someone with the hideous personality which fits hideous times.

I confess that I am wishing for a different type of avatar to arise. One who had a message more like FDR's which told us there is nothing to fear except fear itself. One whose alpha presence and popularity with the people dominated the narcissistic, polarizing social media oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg and company. Someone who brings us together and lifts people up instead of someone who reinforces malignant tribalism through trolling like Trump and which is promoted by those media barons. Someone who understands the wisdom of a world which didn't allow too many people to fail at once. Young people are choosing that kind of energy with Mamdani and AOC.

This is the world that I see and it's a perspective that I don't see articulated often because it seems to be banned. Not by law. But by social convention.

I fully grasp that other people see the world differently than I do. We all have a unique sensory apparatus. It's like color blindness ..... when two people look at the same thing, they see a different color. It doesn't mean that anyone is wrong. There is no absolute right and wrong ..... the world is what we sense it to be and that sense is unique in each of us.

So feel free to share the world as you sense it and let go of whatever impulse inside you guides to express your contempt for others who share their authentic views. I'm not competing with you. I'm actually interested to hear how others relate to any aspect in themselves which concerns itself with a legacy.

(1) You won’t be offered more by reality than you are willing to accept

(2) You are willing to accept a future of material scarcity and nihilism, with no promise on the other side

(3) I think this is pathetic, especially as a man.

That is what I have to share with you.

I'm willing to accept a future and present which is not scarce when it comes to the ferocity with which we cling to life.

I think people who look at the world in terms of material wealth instead of spiritual wealth are pathetic.

Everyone is different. You are entitled to your perspective.

Spiritual wealth in this world is associated with a kingdom and a wedding banquet of abundance.

Not civilizational collapse and deprivation.

I’m no Nietzsche fan, but when he spoke of slave morality, he was thinking of people like you.

Sounds like some sort of capitalist fairy tale.

I'm not a Christian, but I think Jesus had spiritual wealth. He was a healer and his life was rich in human connection. I think the Buddha had spiritual wealth. He was a teacher and he taught people how to free themselves from suffering. These people had something in common. They exuded something which drew others toward them.

I'm not acquainted with any theology of people achieving spiritual wealth through material possessions and consumption. Having too much seems to be the kind of thing that dulls the senses and makes us out of touch with the experience of those who have too little. That's the whole point of this thread.

I'm a big believer that people need and want to work towards achieving things than having it given to them, and are most happy when goal oriented. I'm not necessarily promoting some capitalistic idea, I think social media and its instant reward system leads to a lot of the mental illness of today -amongst other things.

What type of world do you think would be best suited for the kids, both economically and satisfying?

Nut Nut v. craig has immense potential.

Delayed gratification is actually impossible without a vision of the future that is more desirable to the self than the present reality.

Material scarcity and deprivation is not more desirable to the self. This is universal and isn’t a matter of opinion.

Deluded people like the Buddha will often consciously tell a different story than the one they acted out.

Because they don’t actually know themselves.

Because they are frauds.

Our primary opponents in life are ourselves.

I'm not too concerned with craig. He can worry about himself.

I'm curious about you though. Do you have any goals or ambition in life Rococo ?

I find you boring.

Keep rereading what I posted about delayed gratification and the self. Over and over. Until it clicks.

Of course. I imagine that most people do. But I expect my goals would strike you as prosaic because they mostly involve the people close to me and my relationship to them. I will do my best to control the things I can control, but I don't harbor any illusions that I am likely to change the world.

Being an overly wordy scold on the internet seems to be a pretty dubious life goal.

To be fair, I think being a verbose scold on the internet is subservient to the much loftier goal of imposing Draconian measures to save us from ourselves.

Is it an illusion for everyone that they are able to change the world ? Do people like Trump, Putin and Xi change the world or is that simply an illusion ?

As people here who congregate on a forum dedicated to Politics & Society, I'm curious about who you want running the world. Which policies do you want to be at the forefront ?

Some measures aren't all that draconian in my opinion.

How terrible would it be if we were required to go food shopping with durable and reusable bags instead of single use plastics supplied by the supermarket ?

Is that considered draconian ?

I acknowledge that you are correct ..... the ultimate goal is to save us from ourselves. Any draconian measures which might be necessary are included for that purpose.

The way you have written your assessment implies that the draconian measures are the goal .... they are not. Survival is the goal. Whatever that takes.

For obvious reasons, Trump, Putin, and Xi have much more capacity to change the world than I do. I do not want Trump, Putin, or Xi running the world. I'm not sure exactly how I would rank policies in terms of priorities, but I imagine that my long term goals are not too different from a lot of people here. I am not as single-minded as you are about the environment, although I certainly believe it is a critical issue. I seem to attach more value to giving people a say in how they are governed than you do. In most other respects, I suspect that our political objectives are relatively aligned.

The major difference between the two of us is that you believe you know exactly which policies should be implemented in order to achieve your goals. I am not nearly as confident in my own judgment.

Status, however, is highly desirable to the self.

Sure, humanity will be living in the hell of abject poverty in NN’s vision of the future, but at least he will get to be the expert truth teller.

No one who truly cares about humanity could hold such a grim vision of the future, but someone who cares about status above all could.

This isn’t personal to NN btw. All of you that have pessimistic views of the future can go to hell.

Pretty much every generation has had a pessimistic, fearful view of the future. The only difference now is that social media increases our cortisol levels in measurable ways making us just become more fearful and enraged.

They will all have a good laugh at us when they look back from 50 years from now, as they solve the problems we thought were impossible as we wasted our lives worrying - as we sit comfortably, spoiled in our rooms wasting our days from fear. And as a result of that irrational fear, NN wants to turn the entire world into prison, do so with some wild assumption that it will work, then promote it with the only elementary talking point available which is belaboring the part that us inmates will have all the food, healthcare and living arrangements that the US prison system can offer.

I prefer lefties who say there are too many people in jail.

The Christians who got on the Mayflower weren’t fearful pessimists. The Christians who settled along the American frontier weren’t either.

Since Christianity is the religion of promise, as we have lost our cultural Christianity in the West, the sickness of pessimism has taken hold.

Once you realize you have the sickness, the only cure is punishment. And the punishment is to drag your ass to church.

At some point, each of us arrives at a process of how to make sense of the world.

My process involves an attachment to the scientific method with heavy emphasis on math and data. I place a great deal of trust in scientific consensus and my policy preferences are derived from my understanding of that consensus.

The pace at which we humans are transforming planetary chemistry seems to be without precedent and the consequences of that rapid change seem to be en route to overwhelming much human infrastructure which we refer to collectively as "human civilization". I would like to retain as much of human civilization as we can while approaching the task through the perceptive of a triage physician. Some parts are more important than others which must be abandoned for the sake of the survival of the whole.

It takes confidence to be a triage physician or a surgeon. It's not a job for the faint of heart or a weak stomach because patients can die. Mistakes will be made and there is still a job to be done.

Lincoln had the job during the Civil War and he aged terribly during his presidency. I'm human and I would make mistakes.

When I think about how I wish for people to relate to each other ,,,,,, I take some guidance from the Preamble to the US Constitution.

The goal in the Constitution was a "more perfect union".

In a society, I define wealth not by GDP, but by the quality of the connection among its citizens.

When we come to idolize a society by a financial number (total wealth) without any regard to how the wealth is distributed, it should not be surprising that the people who are failing are going to idolize such a system.

There is no force in the universe more fundamental than for an organism to struggle to survive. And we created a world in which money is a metaphor for survival. The combination of these factors results in a gravitational force of money. One in which it concentrates into few and fewer hands until the number of people failing is too great and the system collapses under its own weight.

In our minds, we sort ourselves into categories. By wealth, nationality, gender. relationship status, age, health, religious beliefs. political parties, etc.

But there is something we all have in common ..... as assessment of threats to our survival and the people who matter to us.

I want to build a world where the priority of society is to minimize that threat. To build a world where people feel the maximum sense of security. It hurts my heart that many young people today are refraining from having children because they don't feel they can do that in good conscience.

How do people feel about a government whose guiding principle is the security of its people and has a healthy respect for how unbridled greed can destroy a society ?