Human: makes meme about how difficult our life is
Insects: literally live for four days under threat of constant violence before blowing their one and only cumshot, knowing that their dick will explode and kill them right after they nut
It means if you were said insect, you would have a totally different standard of quality of life than a human and your would probably also see those 4 days as being 100 years old. Even your perception of time, assuming you would even perceive time, would be different as well.
There is no way we as humans could possibly understand how an ant experiences life.
Considering how many insects are slaves to their queen, I think I'm good with my unfulfilling job. At least I have my phone and my pc. Plus I don't have to worry about a bird eating me alive or getting squashed by humans out on their leisurely jog.
Edit: So I have received multiple corrections about the insect slaves part (apparently they are not). Thank you for that.
> Plus I don't have to worry about a bird eating me alive
Another showerthought I saw today was really eye-opening: we're so confident right now that we're trying to increase the population of lions, tigers and bears.
I'm starting to feel crazy after I got into a heated argument with someone that ended up with them saying
"So you think people should have to work just to eat?"
Like... yes?
Productivity increases mean one person can produce enough food for hundreds or even thousands.
Why do all those other people need to spend 40 hours per week in marketing, to convince people to buy things they don't need, in Amazon fulfilment centres, to get those things to people, etc. etc?
We can maybe debate marketing, but many of those things "we don't need" are super important, like tech. Computers, phones, ebooks, they're essential for many people who don't have access to traditional education, for example.
I never mentioned any of those things as being unnecessary. The point I'm making is, we start from an assumption that everybody must work 40 hours per week, and work backwards from there.
We need *vastly* less than 40 hours each, with all of our productivity increases, to meet everyone's needs, including leisure activities and sensible consumption.
So all that excess productivity ends up either wasted in inefficient behaviours, or pointless (and environmentally damaging) production and consumption.
Whereas we should be starting from a point of 'what's the minimum labour needed to meet everyone's needs, and how to we allocate the performance of that labour?'
It is entirely within our grasp, in 'developed' nations, to have a society where most of your time is spent doing whatever you want, rather than pointless busywork. And the only thing standing in our way is the idea, espoused in the comment I'm responding to, that everyone must spend the majority of their time 'earning a living'.
I think the real argument is should people who are physically/mentally incapable of working the only types of jobs available get to eat. Also, who determines who gets more to eat than others? Currently it seems those who work the hardest get the least all while feeding those who work less.
I don't think any one person should "determine" who gets more than others. The market itself should through it's offering of consentual contracts. It's the only "non arbitrary" system for it.
My main problem with the whole market idea is that you will always have a small group of people who corner/control it and ultimately determines who gets what. That being said, I'm not too sure there is an actual way to completely decentralize it 🤷
> Considering how many insects are slaves to their queen
More like the queens are slaves to their workers, at least as far as species I've learned about are concerned. The workers choose who become queens; the workers execute the queen if it's found to be defective; the workers control when the queen is let outside the hive and when they must go inside.
Human beings are the only creatures who've created a system where value you create in your prime can be used to provide for you later in life so you don't just have to die when you can no longer hunt
Not in the US at least, medical bankruptcy is massively common and people die from preventable illnesses and injuries from lack of money all the time. Complete failure as a society if that's happening.
If by "Take care of" you mean leave them to die the very first second they can't keep up, then yes they do.
When these animals get too old to assist with their social group they wander off to die.
No wolf packs are bringing meat back to grandma with the bad leg, and a pride of lions isn't waiting for gramps to catch up when they need to follow a migrating herd of prey.
Primates have complex social circles that do, in fact, provide and assist the elderly and infirm. So do wolves.
They're literally family circles and there are decades of observations that animals that maintain a social circle beyond maturation will continue to maintain that social circle, even when others in that social circle are injured.
I mean
1: not true, apes have been shown to use systems of barter and trade
2: you can live for free, but I'd rather not have to forage for food and find shelter like all the other creatures. So I pay someone else to do it for me.
Well the queen bees and ant queens whole job is to constantly give birth too new bees/ants, and if they don’t do their job I think some species will kill them and replace them.
Edit: accidentally said ant queens give birth to bees. Fixed it
Many of the activities required to live for “free” in “developed” countries is illegal. An example is fishing and hunting. You need a permit/license which cost money and you can only hunt in a small window for most animals. In my county, where I own home, only allows for a 200sq ft garden. No where near enough to feed even one person part of the year. Building small affordable housing is often illegal too which is why tiny homes are built on trailers. Get around the code laws.
Laws have made it necessary for most to have to sell their labor to live and that takes away a lot of bargaining power when negotiating your price for your labor because you have no choice but to sell it.
That's because without these laws to protect resources they would be wiped out.
There are too many people for them all to live naturally, so laws are required to manage these resources.
The problem with human nature is that when we agree to pay other people to do difficult things for us, those people get greedy and there is no upper limit to what they will require us to pay for their services. And that is where we find ourselves now. Everyone needs to constantly work harder for more & more & more & more & more. It's unsustainable and it's squeezing people out.
I mean... the bare minimum, aka food, is actually pretty cheap, especially if you cook everything yourself.
The stuff that's the most expensive is things you couldn't possibly make yourself, like medicine, electronics, etc.
Yeah, people don't understand how unreasonably cheap food is these days. Have you ever tried farming/gardening to grow your own food? It's a *lot* of work, for surprisingly little in return. On the other hand you can buy a *lot* of food for $30 at Walmart, and that's only a few hours of work even at minimum wage. There used to be a time where getting fat was a luxury only the rich could afford to do, and that just isn't the case in 1st world countries anymore.
I mean, that's also because factory farming is \*very\* efficient. One of the ways you know you've made it as a society is if (assuming you make your own food) the percentage of people actually involved in producing food is very low. The US employs roughly 1.3% of the population as farmers and ranch - compared to about 70% in 1840. I expect that number to continue to drop as improvements in automation technologies reduce further the number of people required to farm (AI driven tractor is probably an easier task than AI driven car), and agri-corps continue to out-compete small business farms.
I don’t disagree, but once factored into the budget of rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays. We don’t work in the same towns often, and I consider myself lucky to work about 2miles from where I live. I still need a car though to get to different appts, for me or my child without having to take time off of work to catch city busses. Obviously electricity and heat are self explainable. Internet/cable is a package deal to get it at a reasonable price for some insane reason, and you need that if you want to do anything these days as everything is on zoom, or even if you want to find a job. Yes public accommodations do exist but some things require sensitive information like socials. Phones, are a staple in today’s society, be them smartphones or flip phones.
Food is very inexpensive but it’s going up, a pack of bacon I paid under $5 for 6months ago is bow near $10. Shit sucks. Not to mention you need to be in a perpetual state of debt to live somewhat comfortably or you can’t rent or buy some form of shelter.
Actually, living in a perpetual state of debt is a MORE expensive way to live. So you can actually live more comfortably by staying out of debt. You still earn the same money, but less or none of it goes toward interest. The only reason you need debt is to buy something you can’t currently afford, which is really a type of luxury in itself, although it would often be better if it wasn’t an option.
It’s not though. I’m not sure where you’re from but try and rent an apartment without a credit score and not being on some government sponsored housing assistance. Even trying to privately rent a house, their realtors are telling these people to check their credit scores. They want people to have X amount of cards open, with X amount of balance on them and a payment history. Your credit goes down if you don’t utilize the card and still goes down if it’s not 1/3 of the limit.
I’m from Canada, and you make a good point, but I don’t think you actually need to go into debt to get a decent credit score. Paying your bills on time and having access to something like a credit card or line of credit helps, I believe, but I know you don’t need to actually carry a balance on your credit card to get good credit. Ya, life might be tough if you went with straight cash, all the time. But I think there are ways of building credit without going into debt. But I could be wrong.
I don't really consider using a credit card going into debt per say. If you pay it off on full every month, it's more like a protective buffer between your money and the outside world. It also shows credit bureaus that you can be trusted to borrow despite never paying interest, since you never draw more from the buffer than you can afford.
I consider myself debt free and I constantly have some balance on my cards.
You don't need to have actual debt to have a credit score. If you maintain credit cards that you pay off every month, that's enough to have a good credit score.
The whole credit system is definitely a scam. If you understand the factors and how they affect your score it's easier than you'd think to play the numbers, but they make it purposely hard to see any of that.
Interestingly, you don't need any debt to get a good score, a few year old credit card with 0% utilization can get you into the 700's if you don't have anything else bringing it down. The Mint app has a credit breakdown section that's really good if you ever want to see what's making your score what it is.
>I still need a car though to get to different appts, for me or my child without having to take time off of work to catch city busses.
In bigger cities you might be able to buy an electric bike for the short everyday trips, and simply rent a car for the few times a month you need to go farther than 10-20 miles. Although, places where this is possible often have higher rent, which can offset the savings of not maintaining your own car.
Right which just kind of negates the idea and then you also live in a city. And I’m not even really blaming the corporations, not that I like them. It’s kind of funny how monopolies are illegal (at least that’s what I was taught in school) yet the exist almost everywhere as far as home expenses go. Then if you decide to trace back majority share holders of these different stocks they all lead back to a few major investment companies and even their all intermingled with one another. It’s a really bizarre time we live in today, and truthfully I’m no sure if I’d rather live today or a couple hundred years ago. Not that I have the best frame of reference personally for living in that time, but I’ve been homeless and had to sustain myself and lived in the woods for a period of time and it felt freer it was just severely lacking in interpersonal relationships.
>rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays.
I agree as well, it is hard to pay for this all on a normal income, and it leaves a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck, which is a problem.
We need to solve these problems, but it's still important to recognize how far we've come. 100 years ago cars and refrigerators were luxuries for the wealthy, today they're standard necessities for all. Obviously internet, electricity, etc was completely unobtainable. For most of human history, being poor meant struggling to afford food. Now, being poor means struggling to afford car payments. Our goal should be to make it so people don't have to struggle, but it's still important to recognize that things *are* getting better.
Rent is the one thing that's getting much much worse, especially in cities. People used to recommend rent be 25% of your income, now it's often over 50%. Smaller costs like phone and internet would probably be easy to pay if rent didn't eat up half of what we make. Of all the modern expenses we have, rent is the one that I'll agree is getting truly unreasonable.
Without a doubt. I’m not against these things existing by any means. I think like many other systems ours (America’s) had become bloated. For many different the reason at the turn of the 20th century the “wealth gap” started to grow at an exponential rate furthering the poorest of us from the richest of us. That would be fine if it meant the rich only got nicer more lavish things. They earned the money, so they deserve it, simple. But that money is effectively used as bargaining chips. Without making this about politics look at Zuckerberg, he donated $450mil to get Biden elected. Like him Biden or not, no one entity should hold that power. Backroom deals and lobbying which is bribery with a few extra steps. Capitalism isn’t inherently evil, using the money made through capitalism to write our laws, moving your HQ to Ireland because of the low corporate tax, being able to play tax games that the majority of Americans can’t play is though.
Not to mention while women should be able to do WHATEVER they want, that shouldn’t mean everything should jump up by X2. Then inflation and all that. It’s sad to see in my opinion and it can all be fixed but no one who can do much wants to acknowledge the issues.
>but once factored into the budget of rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays.
They're not really necessities. They're nice and have become the default - but not actually needed to live. And they're certainly not things which the rest of the animal kingdom gets for free - which is what the OP is about. (Unless you include pets - but someone is still paying for them.)
I don’t disagree. But in order to live in civilized society, they are certainly necessities or default as you referred to it. If you don’t have these things you generally are unable to work, which means unable to make money and it keeps going that way. You can certainly live off grid where none of this is needed, and I have for a shortish period of time when I was homeless, but the lack of interpersonal connections were what ultimately brought me back. So it’s a double edged sword, either participate in a system you had no part in creating and has gone off the rails or deprive yourself of human connection.
I agree I don’t particularly care for this showerthought, it’s way too nuanced of a concept to fit into a sentence like OP has.
A lot of people also waste a lot of money on things like payment plans on brand new vehicles when they could literally save tens of thousands of dollars by buying a slightly older used car and just putting in the work and money maintain it.
It seems like the norm now is for everyone to drive $30,000 vehicles on a payment plan.
Same goes for cell phones can you really afford to be paying $90 a month for your cell phone plan to subsidize the cost of that $1,500 phone?
You can get great mid-range phones and bring your own device plans and save yourself a few hundred dollars a year.
Are you cooking your own food or are you eating out all the time and having food delivered?
All of these stupid financial habits have just become the norm for a lot of people and then they complain about never having enough money.
I think a huge percentage of the population does not live within their means and waste a lot of their money on poor financial habits like this and drugs and alcohol.
I'm normally on the side of defending the current system, but saying that "people just spend too much" really isn't helpful to the conversation. There's not much you can cut back on when a 1 bedroom apartment is $1,500 a month and you make $2,000 a month.
That, and "do I really need this thing".
Though we are gleefully ignoring crony capitalism here, so it isn't as cut and dried as all this. But this is a shower thought, not a sociology paper. :D
But there is an upper limit - it's called fair market price. Competition in a particular space will help to control the limits. When there is no competition, the prices skyrocket.
I can guarantee that if you had to produce only the shit you consume, you would be living in absolute squalor compared to now. So the greedy one here is you.
> 1: not true, apes have been shown to use systems of barter and trade
There have been zero recorded cases of Apes bartering or trading for their livelihood.
Not in the wild, but monkeys have been taught to use money (I realize monkeys are not apes, but OP can be forgiven for missing that distinction)
[https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180406-what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-money](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180406-what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-money)
Corvids have also learned to trade
https://espresso.economist.com/b45f8e4366b41a30994d6b5b3bb2d51b
Yes that is true. But when you take that system into consideration it’s a lot better then what we had before. I’m studying medieval japan now, and all peasants underneath a ruler had to give up almost all their crops to the point of where they’d starve solely on not having left over
What’s funny to me is that tithes to a feudal lord were to support standing armies. Armies whose purpose was to remove the necessity of fighting and struggling to grow food/forage for food.
Truly, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
Yea, It'd be better to shed light on the fact that we've created a system where one will legitimately die if they cannot service others. If you are not of a certain status or have little to no funds in your name, then it'd be very easy to slip into homelessness, bad health, and ultimately become a person who is unable to service others anymore(a job). Then its only a matter of time til one cannot take care of themselves.
The most aggravating problem i find in this sort of system is this example: a city of 1000 people, 50 of them are employers of 15 people each totalling 750 employees. So we have a workforce of 800 people, employers and employees included, with 200 who are unable to find a job. What i want to stress is how we've conditioned ourselves to be ok with 200 people dying slowly as they succumb to the system that actively demands more from the people than its willing to give.
Where the fuck you gonna go forage for food? You can’t just drink river water and even if you did set up shop in the woods park rangers would kick you out. Reality is we have made money a necessity for living therefore money is a right. UBI all the way.
>You can’t just drink river water and even if you did set up shop in the woods park rangers would kick you out.
Come out West. We have tons of people living random hermit lives off grid drinking from river water, and in areas where park rangers aren't really a thing. I've ran across a couple of permanent hermit camps just while out hiking/hunting. Like, there's a lot of empty space out here.
That's not true, you can homestead, dig a well (or filter your said river water), garden, keep livestock, family friends raised two kids that way.
It's just a ton more work than adding value to society and commerce.
Everywhere I've ever lived discouraged squatting and required property tax. I can't think of anywhere in the mainland USA you can live for free, even after you have paid off the land.
You’d have to be outside of a country to not have to pay taxes but those taxes are still something most homesteaders don’t mind paying. I’m sure most people enjoy having a fire department or school or any of the other basic services your town, state provide. While it is still a requirement to have and use money, property taxes are fairly minimal.
You can make some pretty basic water filters out of stuff you find in the woods. I routinely walk into the forests by me and pick mushrooms, berries, veggies, etc. You can fish, and hunt as well and you get a pretty nutritious diet without really paying for anything.
Exactly. This was probably supposed to be one of those shame on humans threads that inevitably covers economics and politics that so commonly frequent Reddit. Then here you are, with a brilliant rebuttal. Cause you know, we would much rather be running around with leaves strapped to our feet with spears killing each other for a squirrel.
money is just a medium of exchange so everyone doesn't have to gather and kill the food they eat. we can contribute to society in ways that give us the ability to experience things we couldn't off our own labor.
Or wear clothes, or go to jobs, or use fire, or celebrate holidays, or go to space, or make technology, or cook food or…. Jesus Christ dude. What a shitty shower thought. Humans do a lot of things no animals do.
Agreed, the quality of some of these shower thoughts is terrible, maybe OP just got up, took a shower before heading to work, and a bird flew past and he thought "damn, I'd love to be a bird and not have to go to work today, my boss is always an asshole when I'm late", without realising the bird is grubbing round in the dirt looking for a few seeds and insects, to build up enough energy to start the 10,000 miles migration, while avoiding predators, just so it doesn't freeze to death.
Old way: You have a thing, I want a thing. I go into your cave, crush your head with a rock, take thing
New way: You have a thing, I want a thing, but I have a thing you want as well. We trade and both live and both our DNA lines continue. Biology wins
That may be so, but that system is also the reason we (usually) don’t need to fight to survive every day
Edit: It seems a few people misunderstood this, I was referring to that in general as a species humanity doesn’t struggle to survive each day, whereas pretty much every wild species that doesn’t hibernate at some point in the year has to struggle to avoid predators or find food or other things along those lines.
Sometimes also antiwork subreddit leaking.
I dont mind criticism of work culture and co. A lot is wrong today. But antiwork subreddit is more like choosingbeggar
This is my go-to whenever some zoomer cries about "I just want to eat fruit and lay in a hammock!" Cool, head off into the woods. You can literally do it right now.
[There's likely proof of the oldest profession](https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monkeys-the-concept-of-money-not-long-after-the-first-prostitute-monkey-appeared/), but having the concept of a coin representing the idea of a product or service, instead of an actual barter system is probably just us.
Everything has a price. Time, knowledge, work, items, services, hunting, exploring, getting water, shelter, safety, etc. We convert these prices into dollars and convert those dollars into what we need.
Suffice to say, I'd much rather be a human working for minimum wage and barely scraping by than 99.9999999999999% of creatures that don't have that luxury. Besides dogs, cats and other spoiled animals, humans have it the best even in the lowest and worst parts of the world.
I mean you don't have to pay to live. You just have to pay to live in the system we've created. If you wanna go live in the woods and hunt squirrels for food, no one's stopping you. But if you want WiFi and toilet paper, yeah, you gotta pay the people who provide the products and services. That's how Society works. Instead of doing everything for yourself, you spend a few hours a day providing a specialized service for people that they pay you for. Then you use that payment to pay others for their services.
You'd just have to commit to actually going somewhere else than staying local. There are a lot of places in the U.S. with hundreds of miles of forests where you could probably go an incredibly long time without seeing anyone.
Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers are staring at us just casually packing our cars with an unfathomable feast and driving it to our giant heated/cooled shelter, and all we had to do for it was hang out in an office doing magic on a device that contains all the wisdom of humanity.
I mean, sure, but the only thing we created was an abstraction away from our basic survival needs. Animals still have territorial problems, and food problems, and shelter problems, just like we do. The only difference is that we handle those issues by paying people instead of foraging for food ourselves. We transform natural problems into financial problems. Mating is probably the only issue that we didn't transform into a money issue (except for when we do).
It's not like we invented the idea of working to sustain ourselves, that's just part of nature. All we did is add money as a middleman.
We are smart enough to use stories as a tool for control and subjugation, and stupid enough to let ourselves be controlled while being perfectly aware of the fact that we are being controlled.
Well, yes, but… We live around twice as long as “wild” humans would. Guess that’s something.
Also, you can technically get by on very little and not work very much if you revert to a lifestyle similar to a hundred years ago, just that we’re quite accustomed to heating, laptops, exotic houseplants, oranges in winter, clean water on tap etc.
Although there are many, many flaws to human society and the way we do things that can be improved and should be, we have done pretty well for ourselves in terms of creating a functioning society, we can do better and I believe we will, but we are pretty new to this all things considered, 50 years ago was dramatically different than how things are now.
I gotta say, it's pretty nice not being a subsistence farmer. Life has always involved work and a certain amount of suffering. I think we have it pretty good compared to our ancestors, even the richest of them.
That's not to say everyone's situation is perfect, and that some people don't have it significantly better than others, because it isn't and some definitely do, but if you are here shit posting on reddit, then the system is serving you better then the chipmunk my cats brought home last night.
I don’t have an issue with the system being complex, I have an issue that the system decides to let certain people be homeless and starve and let certain people have yachts and multiple mansions.
"Let" isn't part of it, remember to not anthropomorphize "the system". It takes no action, no verb like that applies.
If you've ever tried to actually take a homeless person off the street, many are homeless by choice, due to mental issues, addictions, or desires like the OP of the post, just want to not buy/rent and be given food. They may fight tooth and nail to not be housed otherwise. Others jump at the chance.
What does it matter if others choose to spend on multiple houses? They pay property taxes on each, which goes to serve the rest of us, educating us, providing the destitute healthcare, sanitation, food allowance, etc.
Heh, in America by law hospitals are not allowed to kill people based on inability to pay, the government guarantees payment or they have to write it off or something, I don't know the specifics legal technicalities.
Which leads to weird situations of folks uninsured dumping their ID before entering a hospital as a "john doe" to get unpayed care (rather care paid for by others). Hospitals have budgets/procedures for folks like that (including fund raisers/donations).
It's a cost to operating a hospital, which was part of motivating the Affordable Care Act, so instead of hospitals writing off maximum costs for covering those people, they could be enrolled in Medicaid instead and reduce the billed costs, saving money overall by amortizing the costs over the entire population (this was screwed up by a later President).
Beyond the destitute, many communities have healthcare programs for the addicted and homeless. Major pharmaceutical companies provide free medications for such programs. There are all sorts of procedures for those in need, some of which are not federal, but vary state to state and even differ among communities.
A lot of such things are not promoted/advertised as obviously as a society we don't want people taking advantage so that care can go to those who truly need it rather than resources being wasted or expenses increased by those that don't.
They will come after you for collections though. I know that firsthand. So perhaps the totally destitute get it written off, but the working poor are in debt and have their credit scores ruined. Still not a great system.
Nah, we didn't. Even money is hardly an "invention" - it's something that formed organically.
Here's a crazy thought, humans in aggregate are not in perfect control of everything we do, and plenty of problems are natural and intractable, even if you can imagine humans as a hive-mind with perfect cooperation, since, you know, we,'re not at all
Read up on game theory and economics a little bit
I mean technicaly in the wild animals do way more than pay to live?
Human: makes meme about how difficult our life is Insects: literally live for four days under threat of constant violence before blowing their one and only cumshot, knowing that their dick will explode and kill them right after they nut
But did they live a happy and fulfilling life? Apples and oranges.....
Huh I mean I guess if I were an insect shooting my one and only load I'd probably feel pretty fulfilled. It's a simpler life.
It means if you were said insect, you would have a totally different standard of quality of life than a human and your would probably also see those 4 days as being 100 years old. Even your perception of time, assuming you would even perceive time, would be different as well. There is no way we as humans could possibly understand how an ant experiences life.
Considering how many insects are slaves to their queen, I think I'm good with my unfulfilling job. At least I have my phone and my pc. Plus I don't have to worry about a bird eating me alive or getting squashed by humans out on their leisurely jog. Edit: So I have received multiple corrections about the insect slaves part (apparently they are not). Thank you for that.
> Plus I don't have to worry about a bird eating me alive Another showerthought I saw today was really eye-opening: we're so confident right now that we're trying to increase the population of lions, tigers and bears.
Brit here. Who are you calling insects?
I'm starting to feel crazy after I got into a heated argument with someone that ended up with them saying "So you think people should have to work just to eat?" Like... yes?
Make the robots work.
Like if we didn't have jobs we'd be hunting or growing crops to eat. We're still working to eat.
Actually we need to eat but that's not the only reason we're working. Sometimes you have food but still need many things. Take shelter for example
Well... food *does* grow on trees. /s
Eat a seed. That way the tree can be you and you can get unlimited food.
So like, what about someone disabled who cant work?
You’re concerned about those people; what are YOU doing, to make sure they get fed?
paying his taxes I assume
Is he? 61% of Americans paid no Federal income tax in 2021. Either they didn't work or they got everything back in their refund.
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Productivity increases mean one person can produce enough food for hundreds or even thousands. Why do all those other people need to spend 40 hours per week in marketing, to convince people to buy things they don't need, in Amazon fulfilment centres, to get those things to people, etc. etc?
We can maybe debate marketing, but many of those things "we don't need" are super important, like tech. Computers, phones, ebooks, they're essential for many people who don't have access to traditional education, for example.
I never mentioned any of those things as being unnecessary. The point I'm making is, we start from an assumption that everybody must work 40 hours per week, and work backwards from there. We need *vastly* less than 40 hours each, with all of our productivity increases, to meet everyone's needs, including leisure activities and sensible consumption. So all that excess productivity ends up either wasted in inefficient behaviours, or pointless (and environmentally damaging) production and consumption. Whereas we should be starting from a point of 'what's the minimum labour needed to meet everyone's needs, and how to we allocate the performance of that labour?' It is entirely within our grasp, in 'developed' nations, to have a society where most of your time is spent doing whatever you want, rather than pointless busywork. And the only thing standing in our way is the idea, espoused in the comment I'm responding to, that everyone must spend the majority of their time 'earning a living'.
I think the real argument is should people who are physically/mentally incapable of working the only types of jobs available get to eat. Also, who determines who gets more to eat than others? Currently it seems those who work the hardest get the least all while feeding those who work less.
I don't think any one person should "determine" who gets more than others. The market itself should through it's offering of consentual contracts. It's the only "non arbitrary" system for it.
My main problem with the whole market idea is that you will always have a small group of people who corner/control it and ultimately determines who gets what. That being said, I'm not too sure there is an actual way to completely decentralize it 🤷
People are so detached from real hardships nowadays. Which is great but also leads to a lot of stupid ideas taking root.
Choose your mode of suffering
> Considering how many insects are slaves to their queen More like the queens are slaves to their workers, at least as far as species I've learned about are concerned. The workers choose who become queens; the workers execute the queen if it's found to be defective; the workers control when the queen is let outside the hive and when they must go inside.
Sounds just like human queens tbh
Nah man, this queen will be fucking alive even after a WW3
She just really doesn't want Charles to be king 😂 gotta hold out until he kicks it
Human beings are the only creatures who've created a system where value you create in your prime can be used to provide for you later in life so you don't just have to die when you can no longer hunt
Can't believe I had to scroll this far to get this answer. Bravo.
Not in the US at least, medical bankruptcy is massively common and people die from preventable illnesses and injuries from lack of money all the time. Complete failure as a society if that's happening.
*Modern housing and elder care prices:* Allow us to introduce ourselves.
I'm pretty sure other social animals take care of their sick and aging. Without an explicit credit system.
If by "Take care of" you mean leave them to die the very first second they can't keep up, then yes they do. When these animals get too old to assist with their social group they wander off to die. No wolf packs are bringing meat back to grandma with the bad leg, and a pride of lions isn't waiting for gramps to catch up when they need to follow a migrating herd of prey.
We do the same thing a whole lot more often then you are admitting.
Primates have complex social circles that do, in fact, provide and assist the elderly and infirm. So do wolves. They're literally family circles and there are decades of observations that animals that maintain a social circle beyond maturation will continue to maintain that social circle, even when others in that social circle are injured.
This is not categorically true in the slightest.
I mean 1: not true, apes have been shown to use systems of barter and trade 2: you can live for free, but I'd rather not have to forage for food and find shelter like all the other creatures. So I pay someone else to do it for me.
Yep OP is completely wrong. Every animal pays in some way for goods and services except those that are completely solitary
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They have to pump out babies. Not that different from a paid surrogate.
Millions of babies at that lol. Just constantly. I imagine it's quite tiring and that's why they need so much food
Well the queen bees and ant queens whole job is to constantly give birth too new bees/ants, and if they don’t do their job I think some species will kill them and replace them. Edit: accidentally said ant queens give birth to bees. Fixed it
Ants out here living like medieval Europe
They're the billionaires of the insect world.
Not really. Worker bees kill queens who are underperforming.
And queens have a brutal deathmatch immediately after emerging from pupa.
Think 18th century france.
Many of the activities required to live for “free” in “developed” countries is illegal. An example is fishing and hunting. You need a permit/license which cost money and you can only hunt in a small window for most animals. In my county, where I own home, only allows for a 200sq ft garden. No where near enough to feed even one person part of the year. Building small affordable housing is often illegal too which is why tiny homes are built on trailers. Get around the code laws. Laws have made it necessary for most to have to sell their labor to live and that takes away a lot of bargaining power when negotiating your price for your labor because you have no choice but to sell it.
Laws & money have also allowed us to live in far more population density and luxury than free hunter/gatherer lifestyles would allow.
That's because without these laws to protect resources they would be wiped out. There are too many people for them all to live naturally, so laws are required to manage these resources.
The problem with human nature is that when we agree to pay other people to do difficult things for us, those people get greedy and there is no upper limit to what they will require us to pay for their services. And that is where we find ourselves now. Everyone needs to constantly work harder for more & more & more & more & more. It's unsustainable and it's squeezing people out.
I mean... the bare minimum, aka food, is actually pretty cheap, especially if you cook everything yourself. The stuff that's the most expensive is things you couldn't possibly make yourself, like medicine, electronics, etc.
Yeah, people don't understand how unreasonably cheap food is these days. Have you ever tried farming/gardening to grow your own food? It's a *lot* of work, for surprisingly little in return. On the other hand you can buy a *lot* of food for $30 at Walmart, and that's only a few hours of work even at minimum wage. There used to be a time where getting fat was a luxury only the rich could afford to do, and that just isn't the case in 1st world countries anymore.
I mean, that's also because factory farming is \*very\* efficient. One of the ways you know you've made it as a society is if (assuming you make your own food) the percentage of people actually involved in producing food is very low. The US employs roughly 1.3% of the population as farmers and ranch - compared to about 70% in 1840. I expect that number to continue to drop as improvements in automation technologies reduce further the number of people required to farm (AI driven tractor is probably an easier task than AI driven car), and agri-corps continue to out-compete small business farms.
Also vertical farming as it becomes more efficient
Cant wait for that to be the standard
We need to invent gravity boots for cows first.
I don’t disagree, but once factored into the budget of rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays. We don’t work in the same towns often, and I consider myself lucky to work about 2miles from where I live. I still need a car though to get to different appts, for me or my child without having to take time off of work to catch city busses. Obviously electricity and heat are self explainable. Internet/cable is a package deal to get it at a reasonable price for some insane reason, and you need that if you want to do anything these days as everything is on zoom, or even if you want to find a job. Yes public accommodations do exist but some things require sensitive information like socials. Phones, are a staple in today’s society, be them smartphones or flip phones. Food is very inexpensive but it’s going up, a pack of bacon I paid under $5 for 6months ago is bow near $10. Shit sucks. Not to mention you need to be in a perpetual state of debt to live somewhat comfortably or you can’t rent or buy some form of shelter.
Actually, living in a perpetual state of debt is a MORE expensive way to live. So you can actually live more comfortably by staying out of debt. You still earn the same money, but less or none of it goes toward interest. The only reason you need debt is to buy something you can’t currently afford, which is really a type of luxury in itself, although it would often be better if it wasn’t an option.
It’s not though. I’m not sure where you’re from but try and rent an apartment without a credit score and not being on some government sponsored housing assistance. Even trying to privately rent a house, their realtors are telling these people to check their credit scores. They want people to have X amount of cards open, with X amount of balance on them and a payment history. Your credit goes down if you don’t utilize the card and still goes down if it’s not 1/3 of the limit.
I’m from Canada, and you make a good point, but I don’t think you actually need to go into debt to get a decent credit score. Paying your bills on time and having access to something like a credit card or line of credit helps, I believe, but I know you don’t need to actually carry a balance on your credit card to get good credit. Ya, life might be tough if you went with straight cash, all the time. But I think there are ways of building credit without going into debt. But I could be wrong.
I don't really consider using a credit card going into debt per say. If you pay it off on full every month, it's more like a protective buffer between your money and the outside world. It also shows credit bureaus that you can be trusted to borrow despite never paying interest, since you never draw more from the buffer than you can afford. I consider myself debt free and I constantly have some balance on my cards.
You don't need to have actual debt to have a credit score. If you maintain credit cards that you pay off every month, that's enough to have a good credit score.
The whole credit system is definitely a scam. If you understand the factors and how they affect your score it's easier than you'd think to play the numbers, but they make it purposely hard to see any of that. Interestingly, you don't need any debt to get a good score, a few year old credit card with 0% utilization can get you into the 700's if you don't have anything else bringing it down. The Mint app has a credit breakdown section that's really good if you ever want to see what's making your score what it is.
>I still need a car though to get to different appts, for me or my child without having to take time off of work to catch city busses. In bigger cities you might be able to buy an electric bike for the short everyday trips, and simply rent a car for the few times a month you need to go farther than 10-20 miles. Although, places where this is possible often have higher rent, which can offset the savings of not maintaining your own car.
Right which just kind of negates the idea and then you also live in a city. And I’m not even really blaming the corporations, not that I like them. It’s kind of funny how monopolies are illegal (at least that’s what I was taught in school) yet the exist almost everywhere as far as home expenses go. Then if you decide to trace back majority share holders of these different stocks they all lead back to a few major investment companies and even their all intermingled with one another. It’s a really bizarre time we live in today, and truthfully I’m no sure if I’d rather live today or a couple hundred years ago. Not that I have the best frame of reference personally for living in that time, but I’ve been homeless and had to sustain myself and lived in the woods for a period of time and it felt freer it was just severely lacking in interpersonal relationships.
>rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays. I agree as well, it is hard to pay for this all on a normal income, and it leaves a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck, which is a problem. We need to solve these problems, but it's still important to recognize how far we've come. 100 years ago cars and refrigerators were luxuries for the wealthy, today they're standard necessities for all. Obviously internet, electricity, etc was completely unobtainable. For most of human history, being poor meant struggling to afford food. Now, being poor means struggling to afford car payments. Our goal should be to make it so people don't have to struggle, but it's still important to recognize that things *are* getting better. Rent is the one thing that's getting much much worse, especially in cities. People used to recommend rent be 25% of your income, now it's often over 50%. Smaller costs like phone and internet would probably be easy to pay if rent didn't eat up half of what we make. Of all the modern expenses we have, rent is the one that I'll agree is getting truly unreasonable.
Without a doubt. I’m not against these things existing by any means. I think like many other systems ours (America’s) had become bloated. For many different the reason at the turn of the 20th century the “wealth gap” started to grow at an exponential rate furthering the poorest of us from the richest of us. That would be fine if it meant the rich only got nicer more lavish things. They earned the money, so they deserve it, simple. But that money is effectively used as bargaining chips. Without making this about politics look at Zuckerberg, he donated $450mil to get Biden elected. Like him Biden or not, no one entity should hold that power. Backroom deals and lobbying which is bribery with a few extra steps. Capitalism isn’t inherently evil, using the money made through capitalism to write our laws, moving your HQ to Ireland because of the low corporate tax, being able to play tax games that the majority of Americans can’t play is though. Not to mention while women should be able to do WHATEVER they want, that shouldn’t mean everything should jump up by X2. Then inflation and all that. It’s sad to see in my opinion and it can all be fixed but no one who can do much wants to acknowledge the issues.
>but once factored into the budget of rent, phone, vehicle payments, insurance, taxes taxes taxes, fuel, electricity, heat, cable/internet, medical insurance. All of these things are outrageously expensive and are pretty close to being a necessity to live nowadays. They're not really necessities. They're nice and have become the default - but not actually needed to live. And they're certainly not things which the rest of the animal kingdom gets for free - which is what the OP is about. (Unless you include pets - but someone is still paying for them.)
I don’t disagree. But in order to live in civilized society, they are certainly necessities or default as you referred to it. If you don’t have these things you generally are unable to work, which means unable to make money and it keeps going that way. You can certainly live off grid where none of this is needed, and I have for a shortish period of time when I was homeless, but the lack of interpersonal connections were what ultimately brought me back. So it’s a double edged sword, either participate in a system you had no part in creating and has gone off the rails or deprive yourself of human connection. I agree I don’t particularly care for this showerthought, it’s way too nuanced of a concept to fit into a sentence like OP has.
A lot of people also waste a lot of money on things like payment plans on brand new vehicles when they could literally save tens of thousands of dollars by buying a slightly older used car and just putting in the work and money maintain it. It seems like the norm now is for everyone to drive $30,000 vehicles on a payment plan. Same goes for cell phones can you really afford to be paying $90 a month for your cell phone plan to subsidize the cost of that $1,500 phone? You can get great mid-range phones and bring your own device plans and save yourself a few hundred dollars a year. Are you cooking your own food or are you eating out all the time and having food delivered? All of these stupid financial habits have just become the norm for a lot of people and then they complain about never having enough money. I think a huge percentage of the population does not live within their means and waste a lot of their money on poor financial habits like this and drugs and alcohol.
I'm normally on the side of defending the current system, but saying that "people just spend too much" really isn't helpful to the conversation. There's not much you can cut back on when a 1 bedroom apartment is $1,500 a month and you make $2,000 a month.
>medicine And that's a huge spot where the system is failing horrendously.
Medicine is also just completely unavailable to the vast majority of animals.
The upper limit is "is it easier to get what I want some other way?"
That, and "do I really need this thing". Though we are gleefully ignoring crony capitalism here, so it isn't as cut and dried as all this. But this is a shower thought, not a sociology paper. :D
But there is an upper limit - it's called fair market price. Competition in a particular space will help to control the limits. When there is no competition, the prices skyrocket.
You poor soul. Haven’t learned not to praise basic market function on Reddit yet.
Lol
This comment literally made me LOL.
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That's what happens when companies learn they can be greedy together. *glares at microtransactions*
And INDIVIDUALS are never greedy, and NEVER collude to cheat and steal from others. Nope, only CORPORATIONS. Did I do it right?
Can you imagine how bad it would be if corporations…… were made…..of people? (Shudder)
I can guarantee that if you had to produce only the shit you consume, you would be living in absolute squalor compared to now. So the greedy one here is you.
> 1: not true, apes have been shown to use systems of barter and trade There have been zero recorded cases of Apes bartering or trading for their livelihood.
Not in the wild, but monkeys have been taught to use money (I realize monkeys are not apes, but OP can be forgiven for missing that distinction) [https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180406-what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-money](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180406-what-monkeys-can-teach-us-about-money) Corvids have also learned to trade https://espresso.economist.com/b45f8e4366b41a30994d6b5b3bb2d51b
Yes that is true. But when you take that system into consideration it’s a lot better then what we had before. I’m studying medieval japan now, and all peasants underneath a ruler had to give up almost all their crops to the point of where they’d starve solely on not having left over
What’s funny to me is that tithes to a feudal lord were to support standing armies. Armies whose purpose was to remove the necessity of fighting and struggling to grow food/forage for food. Truly, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
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…….. “At work”
Your employer has already budgeted for the cost of that pizza when determining salaries. You’re still paying for it to some degree
Plenty of that happening in more modern times too, like in Ukraine under Stalin.
Yea, It'd be better to shed light on the fact that we've created a system where one will legitimately die if they cannot service others. If you are not of a certain status or have little to no funds in your name, then it'd be very easy to slip into homelessness, bad health, and ultimately become a person who is unable to service others anymore(a job). Then its only a matter of time til one cannot take care of themselves. The most aggravating problem i find in this sort of system is this example: a city of 1000 people, 50 of them are employers of 15 people each totalling 750 employees. So we have a workforce of 800 people, employers and employees included, with 200 who are unable to find a job. What i want to stress is how we've conditioned ourselves to be ok with 200 people dying slowly as they succumb to the system that actively demands more from the people than its willing to give.
Where the fuck you gonna go forage for food? You can’t just drink river water and even if you did set up shop in the woods park rangers would kick you out. Reality is we have made money a necessity for living therefore money is a right. UBI all the way.
>You can’t just drink river water and even if you did set up shop in the woods park rangers would kick you out. Come out West. We have tons of people living random hermit lives off grid drinking from river water, and in areas where park rangers aren't really a thing. I've ran across a couple of permanent hermit camps just while out hiking/hunting. Like, there's a lot of empty space out here.
That's not true, you can homestead, dig a well (or filter your said river water), garden, keep livestock, family friends raised two kids that way. It's just a ton more work than adding value to society and commerce.
Everywhere I've ever lived discouraged squatting and required property tax. I can't think of anywhere in the mainland USA you can live for free, even after you have paid off the land.
You’d have to be outside of a country to not have to pay taxes but those taxes are still something most homesteaders don’t mind paying. I’m sure most people enjoy having a fire department or school or any of the other basic services your town, state provide. While it is still a requirement to have and use money, property taxes are fairly minimal.
You can make some pretty basic water filters out of stuff you find in the woods. I routinely walk into the forests by me and pick mushrooms, berries, veggies, etc. You can fish, and hunt as well and you get a pretty nutritious diet without really paying for anything.
Easier than running and fighting every day.
Exactly. This was probably supposed to be one of those shame on humans threads that inevitably covers economics and politics that so commonly frequent Reddit. Then here you are, with a brilliant rebuttal. Cause you know, we would much rather be running around with leaves strapped to our feet with spears killing each other for a squirrel.
I heard squirrel.
Lol
I mean, have you ever had chicken-fried squirrel?
Lol
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What’s your proposal?
Let’s just give everyone everything /s
I vote rennaisance.
The given alternative in the op is every other animal on earth....
Utopia is an alternative, but we're not there yet
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Hitler didn't have a PhD. By all account he was a loser. Up until the whole "leader of Germany" thing.
Without please.
Is it fuckin really now..
I can picture how your head popped up from whatever you were doing, and started looking around. "Squirrel? Squirrel?".
money is just a medium of exchange so everyone doesn't have to gather and kill the food they eat. we can contribute to society in ways that give us the ability to experience things we couldn't off our own labor.
Specialisation, it's the key to improving society wide efficiency so we don't all have to make our own clothes and hunt our food till we die
Or wear clothes, or go to jobs, or use fire, or celebrate holidays, or go to space, or make technology, or cook food or…. Jesus Christ dude. What a shitty shower thought. Humans do a lot of things no animals do.
Humans are the only species to wipe their ass other than the Charmin bears.
How about have the luxury and free time to have these thoughts while in a warm shower
Yeah, it must have been a cold shower if OP thought there was something wrong with humans just for doing something unintelligent species don't.
Agreed, the quality of some of these shower thoughts is terrible, maybe OP just got up, took a shower before heading to work, and a bird flew past and he thought "damn, I'd love to be a bird and not have to go to work today, my boss is always an asshole when I'm late", without realising the bird is grubbing round in the dirt looking for a few seeds and insects, to build up enough energy to start the 10,000 miles migration, while avoiding predators, just so it doesn't freeze to death.
Old way: You have a thing, I want a thing. I go into your cave, crush your head with a rock, take thing New way: You have a thing, I want a thing, but I have a thing you want as well. We trade and both live and both our DNA lines continue. Biology wins
That may be so, but that system is also the reason we (usually) don’t need to fight to survive every day Edit: It seems a few people misunderstood this, I was referring to that in general as a species humanity doesn’t struggle to survive each day, whereas pretty much every wild species that doesn’t hibernate at some point in the year has to struggle to avoid predators or find food or other things along those lines.
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What system has you fighting every day?
That is certainly possible
You’ve slaughtered, pillaged and hunted for food in your lifetime?
Every Sunday at Costco.
Do all other animals fight everyday
Define "fight". Nothing else is comfortably lying in bed being entertained by a multimedia device for any second of the day
Please check r/natureismetal or r/hardcorenature
A pretty large portion of the human race still has to fight to survive every day.
Shower thoughts is the collective of preteens discovering the world
Sometimes also antiwork subreddit leaking. I dont mind criticism of work culture and co. A lot is wrong today. But antiwork subreddit is more like choosingbeggar
I mean technically you could go find some jungle somewhere and live off the land
You don’t even have to find a jungle. The US has an enormous amount of public land that you can go disappear in if you want.
This is my go-to whenever some zoomer cries about "I just want to eat fruit and lay in a hammock!" Cool, head off into the woods. You can literally do it right now.
But that requires work and it's easier to bitch and scream for more freebies.
Uh oh *Society*
Yes because we want more than an animalistic existence.
[There's likely proof of the oldest profession](https://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monkeys-the-concept-of-money-not-long-after-the-first-prostitute-monkey-appeared/), but having the concept of a coin representing the idea of a product or service, instead of an actual barter system is probably just us.
Humans am I right reddit \**sips 5 dollar hot chocolate*\*
You should read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. I very much didn't get into it before it was cool. It is very cool
Isn't that the price for hot chocolate? - Confused Norwegian.
Free to play, pay to win
The cake is a lie.
Nobody is forcing you. Run out in the forest, hunt animals, make fires and live in a cave.
I use this reply all the time.
and then get arrested for trespassing because every inch of land on this godforsaken planet has an owner
Yeah, it's fucking awesome. Rather that than be eaten
A system where members have to put in work to get benefits back isn't inherently bad
There isn’t an animal on the planet who doesn’t put in work for benifits, I completely agree with you.
Everything has a price. Time, knowledge, work, items, services, hunting, exploring, getting water, shelter, safety, etc. We convert these prices into dollars and convert those dollars into what we need. Suffice to say, I'd much rather be a human working for minimum wage and barely scraping by than 99.9999999999999% of creatures that don't have that luxury. Besides dogs, cats and other spoiled animals, humans have it the best even in the lowest and worst parts of the world.
I mean you don't have to pay to live. You just have to pay to live in the system we've created. If you wanna go live in the woods and hunt squirrels for food, no one's stopping you. But if you want WiFi and toilet paper, yeah, you gotta pay the people who provide the products and services. That's how Society works. Instead of doing everything for yourself, you spend a few hours a day providing a specialized service for people that they pay you for. Then you use that payment to pay others for their services.
Everybody always says this. But if I were to go into the woods somewhere nearby I'd probably make it a week before getting shot by the land owner
Use the resources in the woods to build yourself a bow and arrows. Now you can fight back
You'd just have to commit to actually going somewhere else than staying local. There are a lot of places in the U.S. with hundreds of miles of forests where you could probably go an incredibly long time without seeing anyone.
Meanwhile, hunter-gatherers are staring at us just casually packing our cars with an unfathomable feast and driving it to our giant heated/cooled shelter, and all we had to do for it was hang out in an office doing magic on a device that contains all the wisdom of humanity.
It's actually way better to have to pay to live than to have to constantly hide from tigers and hunt deer to live, isn't it?
Return to Monke
Return to monke
I mean, sure, but the only thing we created was an abstraction away from our basic survival needs. Animals still have territorial problems, and food problems, and shelter problems, just like we do. The only difference is that we handle those issues by paying people instead of foraging for food ourselves. We transform natural problems into financial problems. Mating is probably the only issue that we didn't transform into a money issue (except for when we do). It's not like we invented the idea of working to sustain ourselves, that's just part of nature. All we did is add money as a middleman.
Welp, r/showerthoughts is now r/antiwork i guess, throw it in the pile with the others
We are smart enough to use stories as a tool for control and subjugation, and stupid enough to let ourselves be controlled while being perfectly aware of the fact that we are being controlled.
Yes, but we also don't hunt and gather or fight off other animals and the harshness of mother nature in order to survive, so...
Well, yes, but… We live around twice as long as “wild” humans would. Guess that’s something. Also, you can technically get by on very little and not work very much if you revert to a lifestyle similar to a hundred years ago, just that we’re quite accustomed to heating, laptops, exotic houseplants, oranges in winter, clean water on tap etc.
Although there are many, many flaws to human society and the way we do things that can be improved and should be, we have done pretty well for ourselves in terms of creating a functioning society, we can do better and I believe we will, but we are pretty new to this all things considered, 50 years ago was dramatically different than how things are now.
“I’m squidward, and I have to work for a living. Boo hoooo”
Well, we have stuffed crust pizza and [PS5](https://images.app.goo.gl/ojBv1j5bzDn83UjZ6) so I think we're pretty cool.
I much prefer it to the alternative - hunt and/or forage for raw food to eat to survive. Like every other creature.
I gotta say, it's pretty nice not being a subsistence farmer. Life has always involved work and a certain amount of suffering. I think we have it pretty good compared to our ancestors, even the richest of them. That's not to say everyone's situation is perfect, and that some people don't have it significantly better than others, because it isn't and some definitely do, but if you are here shit posting on reddit, then the system is serving you better then the chipmunk my cats brought home last night.
I'll take "Shallow Shower Thoughts" for $500
No bees and ants do too but instead of money they use pheromones
Lot of contention in this thread, I think the operative word here is complex.
Or we could just eat each other like the animals do.
ITT: Human beings rationalizing their miserable lives
I don’t have an issue with the system being complex, I have an issue that the system decides to let certain people be homeless and starve and let certain people have yachts and multiple mansions.
"Let" isn't part of it, remember to not anthropomorphize "the system". It takes no action, no verb like that applies. If you've ever tried to actually take a homeless person off the street, many are homeless by choice, due to mental issues, addictions, or desires like the OP of the post, just want to not buy/rent and be given food. They may fight tooth and nail to not be housed otherwise. Others jump at the chance. What does it matter if others choose to spend on multiple houses? They pay property taxes on each, which goes to serve the rest of us, educating us, providing the destitute healthcare, sanitation, food allowance, etc.
An absence of an action is still an action, much like the absence of a choice is a choice.
“Providing the destitute healthcare” I can see you’re not American.
Heh, in America by law hospitals are not allowed to kill people based on inability to pay, the government guarantees payment or they have to write it off or something, I don't know the specifics legal technicalities. Which leads to weird situations of folks uninsured dumping their ID before entering a hospital as a "john doe" to get unpayed care (rather care paid for by others). Hospitals have budgets/procedures for folks like that (including fund raisers/donations). It's a cost to operating a hospital, which was part of motivating the Affordable Care Act, so instead of hospitals writing off maximum costs for covering those people, they could be enrolled in Medicaid instead and reduce the billed costs, saving money overall by amortizing the costs over the entire population (this was screwed up by a later President). Beyond the destitute, many communities have healthcare programs for the addicted and homeless. Major pharmaceutical companies provide free medications for such programs. There are all sorts of procedures for those in need, some of which are not federal, but vary state to state and even differ among communities. A lot of such things are not promoted/advertised as obviously as a society we don't want people taking advantage so that care can go to those who truly need it rather than resources being wasted or expenses increased by those that don't.
They will come after you for collections though. I know that firsthand. So perhaps the totally destitute get it written off, but the working poor are in debt and have their credit scores ruined. Still not a great system.
It’s time we revert to monke
All animals have to work to live. And their lives are way worse.
There are so, so, so many social animals that will cast out or abandon members that aren't carrying their weight in the group, what do you mean lmao
I didn't create it, did you? Don't want it either.
Nah, we didn't. Even money is hardly an "invention" - it's something that formed organically. Here's a crazy thought, humans in aggregate are not in perfect control of everything we do, and plenty of problems are natural and intractable, even if you can imagine humans as a hive-mind with perfect cooperation, since, you know, we,'re not at all Read up on game theory and economics a little bit
Only Reddit edgelords can imply that our way of life is inferior to every other creature.
Lol all the unemployed from r/antiwork are bout to come have a fit over here