People do things for social approval. That’s my point. Social approval requires meeting other people’s standards, not your own.

And when your standards are not in synch with the people around you, it’s miserable and leads to conflict.

Where I come from ‘bettering yourself’ got you socially shitcanned. And that’s true for a lot of parts of the world and family relationships.

The mantra of meritocractic achievement is only social and rewarding among the upper middle classes, in the USA at least. If you existing outside of that, you people often regard ‘self improvement’ with hostility.

according to whose standards?

i like to read books and learn and try new things. i also of a lot of athletics, like half marathon type stuff.

a lot of people think i’m a massive asshole for doing these things, as me merely talking about my interests and lifestyle ‘triggers’ them, as in makes them feel insecure about themselves. also they were not making me popular, famous, or rich, so what is the point of any of it?

according to my exes i would have been a better person if i gave up all my hobbies, got a soulless corporate job to make as much money as possible, and then spent most of that money on them…

a lot of people’s desires/goals require other people being subordinate to them, including you. and if you don’t comply, they will think you’re a shitty person.

picking up litter in your local park, or just volunteering to trim the weeds in it, does make a big impact.

the problem is once you start doing that don’t hang around in the park looking for litterers who are trying to ‘ruin’ your good deeds.

i have notice in volunteer work there is a fine line between doing good, and then imposing your rules on everyone else and become massive asshole. this is why HOAs and such go so wrong. they usually start off with good-intentions but get warped into perverse controlling nonsense.

and if you volunteer and find out the people around you are weirdo assholes, just quit and do something else. i joined a community garden awhile back and left after 6 months because so many members were losers who were just shitting on everyone else’s plot for not being as nice as theirs or getting jealous that a plot 10 ft over ‘got more sun’. it was insane how petty and pathetic a lot of the long time gardeners were because they felt they were ‘owned’ the garden.

Nobody has to do it. They choose to do it, and then justify it will some bullshit excuse like they have no other option. They do have other options, they just choose not to exercise them. Often because they feel like social media, or MLM, or other shitty choices will be a shortcut to fame and riches.

Yep. Nothing forces anyone to do anything, people do this crap willingly, and then blame everyone else for their poor behaviors.

It’s called be a shitty human being.

If my ‘struggling’ you mean ‘i want to be wealthy but i constantly overspend’

it creates perceived shareholder value of an emerging market. that is it’s purpose.

it’s utility is not for the end-user. it’s something for shareholders to invest in, and companies to push in an attempt to generate shareholder interest. It’s to raise the stock-price.

And like all speculative assets… nobody will care about the returns on it, until they do. And once those returns don’t materialize… poof goes the market.

Just like they did with all the speculative investment bubbles based on insane theories.

Have you met many people?

Most people’s entire lives are a form of autocomplete.

classes in philosophy, literature, politics, and digital media. typically.

you know, those evil humanities that are destroying society… because they don’t produce ‘value’.

It’s an ego thing when you think the world should care about your feelings and should modify itself to suit them.

People being stupid isn’t a problem or bad necessary.

The problem is when stupid being engage in collective delusion and damage/destroy the principles and needs that build society. For example, the belief that taxes are theft, rather than the cost of social infrastructure that makes their private businesses and lives even possible.

There are clear measurements of various abilities, but there is no measure of general intelligence in the sense of being able to process new information and draw novel conclusions about it, or think outside of existing socially dominant schemas.

Even the most ‘smart’ people I know, very few exercise this ability, even if they have it. To think well you often have to be trained to do so, and even then a lot of people will fail in that training willfully. Mostly because they are aware taht exhibiting thoughtful individuality will get them socially shitcanned and ruin their career, because so much of society is and career success is built on being a yes man.

A lot of people are smart enough to realize that being intelligent isn’t going to get they paid more or make them popular. Being an sycophant however, will often get them both.

and egotistical enough to think your feelings matter.

Those things are actively being done by the ‘smart’ people who want to horde all the benefits of those things for themselves. The concept of lifting up the unwashed mashes via education is considered niave now. What people are doing is isolating themselves into geographic bubbles of extreme wealth and making rules to keep everyone else out who doesn’t have a few million in the bank to afford the ticket.

anyone who has any money whatsoever is terrified of poor people. including other poor people.

Everyone now thinks they have exceptional intelligence. Thanks to social media they have all convinced themselves they are geniuses who think The Truth is a 5 second soundbite that they must endlessly repeat.

That’s the root of the problem. 90% of the content of lemmy is really dumb people thinking they are original geniuses who just discovered communism/anarchism/socialism, as if it hasn’t existed for 200 years previously, and if only everyone else believed what they believed everything would be magical and perfect.

or frozen ones that turned into mush once you cooked them. that was my mom’s specialty, serving flavorless nutritionless slop and telling me what an asshole i was for not wanting to eat it. i had no issue eating veggies during holidays… because we actually used fresh ones…

my nephews eat vegetables no problem. because they taste good and are fresh and actually have vitamins.

people’s perception of cost is highly relative.

people love to romanticize stuff without doing any true cost comparisons.

like how bad the environment was in the 1980s compared to today. or how expensive electronics were, and how unsafe cars were (and many were still using lead gas). and how bad nutrition and healthcare was. my dad had a massive heart attack in 2002 and lived another 10 years, in 1985 he’d have died on the spot because the surgery he needed didn’t exist yet. Let’s not even talk about the massive crime problem in the 1980s… and how anyone with any money refused to live in an urban area due to it.

life is generally way safer, cleaner, and healthier now and we have so much more access to improve our lives than we did in the 1980s. but nobody wants to talk about that. just be outraged at the cheapness of groceries and housing.

you realize the quality of the food back then was much worse, right? way more treated/process/packaged up the wazoo crap. Whole foods type stuff didn’t really exist yet in any broadly available way.

that’s also why it was so cheap. I grew up in the 80s/90s. The food was disgusting and we started getting massive increases in quality in the late 90s/early 2000s. if you ate a 1985 tomato you’d probably spit it out because it tasted like water and fiber and had zero flavor. it probably also had lead and other neurotoxins because of the lack of environmental regulations.

Then if you point out the implicist ableism in that… well you’re a woke nazi…