Asklemmy

Greed.

It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.

Poverty. Not for lack of resources or ability, but for lack of will.

anything harder than wearing masks

Greed.

America is a great example of this.

Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up

I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.

Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.

Rent is due in 7 days.

Human beings. The issue is humans.

There's no problem in society that can't be fixed. But the problem is there's too much conclusion without proper understanding

I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.

I have wondered this about certain harmful cultural values. Culture seems to be the "great enabler" when it comes to things we would wish would change about people (think of Japan's habit of overworking people or Greece's penchant of old inequality). And the fuel of the flame there is going to take a gamechanger to douse.

Crime. There'll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there's an "acceptable level of crime", beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.

Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That's the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it'll find another avenue.