So really, the only major difference in living standards I could glean from discussions was basically the US has a huge amount more of cheap “treats.” Unfortunately, Americans just so happen to measure “how good” a country is by exactly that metric.
This tracks to me. People will talk like air conditioning and the iphone is the pinnacle of invention and human society, and I’m just sitting here like, what I would give for materially interdependent community. To have the knowing that I’m working toward something meaningful, that there is mutual benefit, that when one struggles we all struggle and when one succeeds, we all succeed. Even the very basics of that (unions under capitalism) gets vilified in the US.
So many people are depressed and lonely, some of them even turning to AI to help fill in the gaps (I’ve played around with doing that to some extent myself). The US has nothing resembling a positive or meaningful heritage. It’s systemic nihilism, community largely vilified and dismantled, but “it’s probably worse over in that other place that the western empire has been attacking and stealing from for decades.”
Some people would say stuff like “you don’t know how good you have it.” I say many US people don’t know just how bad they have it. Soothing a feeling of emptiness with products is no way for a human being to live. It is a kind of slowburn mental and emotional rollercoaster of fleeting highs and lows. And people have to adopt stuff like toxic positivity sometimes just to convince themselves “it’s ok, actually, and it’s just in my head.”
With that said, I feel it’s worth noting that of course working class movements are there, anti-imperialist movements are there, communists are there. It is not all doom and gloom, and some community exists. But on a nation-wide scale of the system and its operations, it is a hollowed out instrument of colonialism and imperialism. Why is it, I would ask such people, that so many people in the US have their attention glued to the future, to new versions of products, to new advancements in technology, etc.? That is not a sign of contentment.
This tracks to me. People will talk like air conditioning and the iphone is the pinnacle of invention and human society, and I’m just sitting here like, what I would give for materially interdependent community. To have the knowing that I’m working toward something meaningful, that there is mutual benefit, that when one struggles we all struggle and when one succeeds, we all succeed. Even the very basics of that (unions under capitalism) gets vilified in the US.
So many people are depressed and lonely, some of them even turning to AI to help fill in the gaps (I’ve played around with doing that to some extent myself). The US has nothing resembling a positive or meaningful heritage. It’s systemic nihilism, community largely vilified and dismantled, but “it’s probably worse over in that other place that the western empire has been attacking and stealing from for decades.”
Some people would say stuff like “you don’t know how good you have it.” I say many US people don’t know just how bad they have it. Soothing a feeling of emptiness with products is no way for a human being to live. It is a kind of slowburn mental and emotional rollercoaster of fleeting highs and lows. And people have to adopt stuff like toxic positivity sometimes just to convince themselves “it’s ok, actually, and it’s just in my head.”
With that said, I feel it’s worth noting that of course working class movements are there, anti-imperialist movements are there, communists are there. It is not all doom and gloom, and some community exists. But on a nation-wide scale of the system and its operations, it is a hollowed out instrument of colonialism and imperialism. Why is it, I would ask such people, that so many people in the US have their attention glued to the future, to new versions of products, to new advancements in technology, etc.? That is not a sign of contentment.