Yes? Life is joyous enough that even the most imperiled, enslaved people have found happiness and love in their fleeting moments of peace and freedom. I mean, have you seen a rainbow? Shit’s pretty
Of course lol. I ran a 10km race yesterday and I did far better than I expected. I was happy about it. Afterwards I ate pizza and watched Jurassic Park. I celebrated my birthday last weekend with friends and family and felt really happy.
There’s so much to enjoy about life. It’s the little moments like dancing in my room listening to music, or chilling with my cat. It’s the big moments like graduating or finding someone to love or whatever. Life is more than just capitalism.
Serious response: It may not just be capitalism. Be very careful placing requirements for your happiness on external things as it will inevitably cause great unhappiness. Happiness needs to come from inside you to be sustainable (sometimes our brains need help because of genetic or environmental factors but, ultimately, getting a good balance of neurotransmitters is happening in your brain).
If you are miserable and hopeless all the time, regardless of things that should be joyous and beautiful, and experience things such as disinterest in activities that you enjoy and feel emotionally numb and/or all over the place, you may be experiencing a depressive disorder. If you have access, the assistance of a mental health professional may be able to help you through it so that you can keep fighting for a more equitable future.
Mental health is a serious matter and some disorders, like massive depressive disorder can be fatal. I know this from experience, having lost a parent to it and nearly losing both a spouse and sibling to it as well.
I don’t care if I always agree with you or others on this instance on the “right” way to achieve a better world for everyone. You’re a fellow traveler in life and deserve love and joy. Between this post and one of your recent ones, I’m honestly a bit worried about you. Please reach out if you need to talk or need help finding resources available to you. You’re not alone. You’ve got friends, comrades, and internet strangers that give a shit.
Absoltuely, yes. People can find happy moments in almost anything: even in warzones, as slaves, as serfs under feudalism. Humans can always find individual happy moments, we are good at that as a species, but that is very different from our circumstances allowing us to be generally happy. I would never even begin to argue that slaves are generally happy as an example, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t find brief moments of happiness with those around them.
I don’t think capitalism even precludes some people from being generally happy in certain circumstances if I am being perfectly honest. However, there are socialist systems that allow many more people to be much happier, and that is something I think is worth striving for.
Obviously. It’s just in spite of capitalism, not because of it.
ofc we can, throughout history there have been people who had happy moments even under horrible conditions, so who’s to say we can’t have a few happy moments under a rapidly deteriorating system in the imperial core?
Personally, I have a very hard time imagining a lasting peace or happiness as long as the world ignores Covid. Even in a micro sense, everyone just fucking does not care about a highly transmissible, permanently disabling disease that has not gone anywhere that will kill me and many others like me. I can of course find a fleeting happiness, some transient joy, in moments where I can live and exist safely among people who respect me and understand the existing conditions enough to acknowledge that, but the vast majority, even those who should know better, seem pleased to forget all of it, and they’re the same sort who will tell me and you to “make happiness where you can”. Whether the source of all that is benign, ignorant, or malicious my answer is the same: I try to be happy, and sometimes succeed, but it’s no thanks to any of them. I don’t know what that future looks like.
All of this is to say nothing of the ongoing macro threat of climate change, which both capital and myself truly have no answers for. If it’s all going to be fucked beyond anything I can do I might as well stick to the devil I know and try to survive as long as I can- if for no other reason than to see what happens- but there are actionable steps with immediate material benefits that we all can take for Covid that no one, not even comrades, will do, so I am significantly more upset and pessimistic about that, under capitalism or anything else.
I feel you… I don’t have any diagnosed condition that would put me at greater risk of viral infections etc, but I guess I do have a weaker immune system than the average person, getting ill more often and more severely than those around me despite keeping a fairly healthy lifestyle.
And it pisses me off to see how people treat covid, colds, flus - heck, hygiene in general. I can’t help but think we could actually eradicate these diseases for good, but it requires collective effort and drilling basic hygiene measures into people’s heads since they’re young.
Right now, all we can do is protect ourselves and maybe those immediately close to us. This of course helps reduce the spread of viruses etc for everyone else, but still, all it takes to ruin the effort of 10 hygiene-conscious people is just one indifferent person.
It’s so much avoidable damage that we have accepted as an inevitable part of life - the only solution many see is to put up with it and hope you become more resilient by getting exposed to a lot viruses… Unfortunately that’s not how it works, they mutate way too fast for you to build any meaningful resistance. And that’s for healthy people; this is simply disregarding those for which getting ill is not an option. It’s not too different from eugenics really. And so we submit to, at best, months of our lives wasted recovering and piling up tiny damages to our bodies, and, at worst, playing Russian roulette with our lives whenever going outside.
Sorry for the rant, it’s a topic that bothers me and the lack of awareness really annoys me sometimes. I hope you will continue to have people in your life who understand you and are considerate. If anything, the successes of some countries in their covid responses is a glimpse into what’s possible when it comes to fighting highly transmissible diseases on a societal level.
I’m sorry you’ve got that extra difficulty in dealing with covid. I live in the US and it bothers me greatly too the way people around me gave up on something as basic as wearing a mask so easily. I still do it, but I almost never see anyone else who does. Meanwhile, I write this while recovering from some kind of sickness, I suspect a variant of covid the way the symptoms and duration are different from a normal cold for me. Even with wearing a mask when I go out, I can’t make other people in my household do it and a mask only works effectively if enough people are wearing them to reduce the transmission, since the mask itself won’t keep it out.
It feels sometimes like I’m living in an upside down world. The people I’m closest to care about me and others, there’s no doubt in my mind about that, yet they gave up on masking like so many others when the system of authority stopped telling them to and the peer pressure flipped. It is an act of basic harm reduction, a test of a sense of collective responsibility and cooperation, and so many completely fail it.
This thing of people valuing their own convenience over the mortal risk of others and sometimes even themselves is so confusing to me and so destructive. It doesn’t even make consistent sense within the same person at times. One of the people I know, who was at least a longer holdout but eventually gave up on masking as well, is very much into prepping for disasters and just being prepared in general and anticipating the future. Yet they gave up on this, a current and ongoing threat that is only mitigated by vaccines and possible weakening of its strength through mutations, not even close to kept under control.
Things were worse before capitalism. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Plenty of happy moments were had.
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I didn’t intend to be overly praising of capitalism, as I think was inferred. I just meant to point out that happiness can be found anywhere. It doesn’t have an absolute starting point, like temperature or something. There’s a thing called the hedonic treadmill.
the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.
If you’re born in a pit of hell prison and suffer regular brutality, you’re still going to know happiness.
That’s all I was getting at. Thanks for the praise though!
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Things were worse before capitalism.
I’m confused reading this here of all places. That’s a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
Life was nasty, brutish and short.
And this part sounds very much like the civil/savage colonial narrative that pretends societies were inherently more savage before and have now “evolved” (guess who takes on the label of having “evolved” most of all - colonizer systems).
Some conditions for some people were worse, sure. As a whole, saying it was overall worse is ahistorical nonsense. You could argue technological improvements that came with industrialization, advances in science, medicine, etc., lessened a lot of suffering for people who could actually access those improvements and benefit from them. But then we are talking about when they could benefit, not as a given. Which is very relevant to a discussion like this. Some people are suffering a lot more than others. I support you in saying in such a context that “plenty of happy moments” can be had within that regardless, but it is part of the reality we’re dealing with.
I would much rather live under modern capitalism than feudalism. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still awful, but a different kind of awful. I like not being the property of the local landowner, even if I do have to spend most of my money each week on rent. Capitalism is a “better” system than those it replaced, our job as socialists is to replace capitalism with a better system, but we don’t do that by pretending capitalism is just all pain and suffering all the time.
I don’t even know where to begin with how ignorant of a take this is. You think the worst of capitalism is paying for rent? How about the homeless people whose tents get bulldozed? You think this is all about how you personally experience capitalism, is that it? We don’t need to give capitalism credit in order to replace it with something better, that’s an asinine position to have. If you are a colonized person trying to liberate from a settler occupier would you say, “Well it’s better under the settler than it was before, but our job is to replace it by ousting them”???
Did I say it was the worst? No. I’m not unaware of how fucked up a system it is, saying “two things are bad” doesn’t mean “so one is fine and we shouldn’t complain ever.”
We don’t defeat capitalism by pretending it is something it isn’t is my main point.
Did I say it was the worst?
You implied that’s the worst aspect of it you could come up with in comparing it to feudalism, claiming that it’s a better system.
We don’t defeat capitalism by pretending it is something it isn’t is my main point.
And who exactly is pretending it’s something it isn’t? Vaguely claiming it’s a better system than in the past is being misleading about what it is, if anything. What benefit is there in this insistence on giving it credit? That’s not identifying what its mechanisms are and how to approach working toward better in a dialectical way. That’s walking backward on the importance of pointing out why what we want is better than what is already there. Why would you cede ground to the capitalists and their rhetoric of a superior system? It makes no sense.
There’s no “ceding ground” being done here. There’s nothing “dialectical” about refusing to observe the reality of capitalism, it’s utility as well as its treacherous inevitable failure. If you don’t recognise what people see in it, in an honest way, you make it harder for yourself to critique it.
Capitalism is, in my opinion, an inevitable stage of history. Until we see how some other similar cultures’ socio-economics develop in the galaxy we can’t know this for sure.
That’s a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
This is the reality I’m afraid. Capitalism is most definitely a necessary stage, as Lenin would agree.
Capitalism has its uses, as the Chinese model clearly shows. Under a DOTP only, it must be controlled and dismantled piece by piece. Otherwise it will take over all democratic institutions, enslave people in perpetuity, at least until it destroys the environment. If I were living in Feudal times, I would advocate for Capitalism as a furthering of history. You cannot skip this phase as the USSR found out.
…were inherently more savage before and have now “evolved”
There was certainly a gap of justice and life was shorter due to lack of medical progress. It’s just historical fact and not chauvinistic to point this out.
I was wondering if a misunderstanding of China was fueling this nonsense. China is a DOTP as you described. We are talking about a dictatorship of capital, not a DOTP. These are two different things. How can you talk to me of “realities” when you bastardize the distinctions between concepts, conflate the kind of system a country such as the US has vs. China, say “you can’t skip this phase” based on a single socialist project the USSR (attempting to push a universalized dogma off of one example while ignoring all of the other factors that went into the USSR’s history as compared to China’s, completely antithetical to a scientific approach to socialism).
You do not know what you’re talking about and no amount of votes on a web forum will change that fact.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re depressed because you’re terminally online, but no I’m happy with reasonable frequency. Capitalism doesn’t mean everything’s bad all the time. Joy is an act of resistance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re depressed because you’re terminally online
Hey what public physical space can I go attend safely as a person with an autoimmune deficiency in The Year of Our Lord 2024, asking for a friend
I am sorry to single you out specifically but the world sucks for a lot of people right now with no foreseeable end and it’s not just because everyone is too online
And where you’re not easy prey for cisthumbs. I like exercise and trucks will just stop illegally in the middle of the street… with their driver’s dead eyeing you. Once a truck just followed me and my gf, like driving right behind us for blocks until we lost him. And I’ve been attacked enough to know where that goes, so we bought treadmills. Yay
E: and we’re both immunocompromised so gyms were out the second covid hit
I get that, I’m sorry. Still, it’s possible to be happy and being online too much doesn’t help, even if third spaces are dead etc. It’s not ideal, but one can exercise and meditate for free on your own, even if capitalism has greatly handicapped you. I’m trying not to victim blame, just hoping to do some people some good (pretty sure op doesn’t have an autoimmune disease).
Tehcnicall you can be very happy if you own all the means of production and have the working class completely brainwashed into enthusiasm about the system. You could shoot yourself into space in dick shaped rockets just for shits and giggles, for example. Whatever floats your boat (you could have a boat).
In the dark times, should the stars also go out?
2014, 2015 and 2016 existed, so yes.
What happen then?
They were best years
What made them the best?
Movies, games, TV shows, anime, media in general, songs, internet at the time, irl experiences, whole vibe and just about everything.
Now granted Gamergate sucked ass and Halo started to get shit but hey it’s at least better.
Movies, games, TV shows, anime, media in general, songs
Distractions, the load of it, which is why none of it lasts. Meaningful experiences are few and far between. 10 years from now we’ll look back at ourselves today and think the same thing, because nothing fundamentally has changed, we just enjoy our distractions differently with time.
Literally no lmao, I’m never going to miss this miserable time just as I don’t miss 2017 and every year onward. These 3 years were fire from 1st January to 31st December, currently it’s good if something good worth noting actually happens at all.
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Yes but it’s only brief. Crapitalism fucks you over immediately after.
The alienation can come and go comrade and leave you spinning out of control. We all get it, it’ll pass and you’ll get anchored on something again. Ride out that storm and take your winnings where you can get them. You’re allowed to enjoy things. Take a break and be kind to yourself if necessary. You’re no help to yourself or others being a miserable basket case.
It feels to me like if you have to ask, your personal answer to the question is no.
My personal answer is yes.
