So we’re all just working as normal while the world burns? Sure doesn’t feel right. (TikTok screencap)
The only apocalypse we got to look forward to is the Repuglican genocide
At my job, we have dependencies on teams that are in the warzones. I would say they have it worse. From our side we are like, how do we know if we need to escalate things to get them prioritized over other teams requests vs that person is hiding in a bunker right now, no amountnof escalation is going to help.
I remember when Trump threatened tariffs on Canada of 25%, I went to work that day and was freaking out. Most people didnt know, didnt care, and just went on like normal; as if 80% of our exports didnt flow to the US.
It makes sense. I live near the border, and I’ve worked at quite a few places that used Canadian imports to make finished American products. I’m glad I found a new job since them; God knows it my ex-boss found a new supplier of steel tubing. Every car part we manufactured was a product of Canada.
When was the last time the world wasn’t burning? Because I don’t remember.
Well it was always burning… But we did just add more fuel (you may have noticed)
Welp.
Lemmy open on one monitor. Jira open on the other.
So this tracks.
I pray for the apocalypse so I never have to look at a fucking ticket queue again. It’s a neverending list of other people’s problems I have to rapid fire solve.
The world is burning, I got worms in my brain
Gonna bleach my eyebrows and change my name,
The world is burning and I laugh at the blaze…
Status: in progress while everything is literally on fire 💀 corporate survival instincts are undefeated.
I had to look up “jira ticket”.
I’m glad I never worked for a company large enough to use such a system.
Come.
Let me show you the 9th level of hell called “Help Desk”.
That also means you have missed out on the joy of refusing to do a task simply because they haven’t created a ticket for it.
It’s still better than splitting up its functionality among three different and even more complicated systems because upper management likes the pretty graphs they produce for their PowerPoint slides.
They will still make us watch adds during the end of the world lol
The world burns and I’m burnt out. Slowly chugging along in the hopes that I recover my footing someday.
Well yeah. Like what else am i supposed to do? Why people online always have this delusion of grandeur that they have any power to change world wide politics? We are all completely meaningless cogs in the machine.
I still need food, clothes, shelter, warmth. To get those i need to either do it all myself like back in mediveal times, which is rather time, energy consuming/inefficient and unstable or exchange it with universal currency.
To get universal i need to exchange my time and skills for it aka work.I’m not someone special, i cant change the world, i cant even get the snowball effect starting. I, as a single individual am completely meaningless in world scale politics. Best i can do is just adapt to changing circumstances and surive, maybe even help a people close to me/within my sphere of influence.
So yeah, i keep working like normal.
you CAN effect change, major change. You choose not to, which is fine. But a single person can most definitely change the world.
A single person can, but not every single person who chooses to is able to. You have to be born in very specific conditions or get very lucky to be able to enact meaningful change on a world scale.
How. The world is in the state it’s in because rich and powerful people just do whatever the hell they want and ignore everyone else who protest.
You can definitely change the world, have you ever heard of history? It’s full of revolutions, the french revolution, the civil rights movement, the workers rights movement / unions. How do you think, we achieved this relatively good living standard in the last 50 years?
Shure, changing the world will be hard as fuck and it could be years until you see any positive change from your behaviour, maybe your actions will only bear fruit after you died.
But the only thing we can / we have to do is try.
And attitudes like yours are exactly what fascists are counting on.
If you don’t want to do anything and just stick your head into the sand, I can’t stop you, I guess, but stop pretending you didn’t have a choice.
The difference in attitudes from a decade ago is 180 degrees backwards. Young people and academics are where revolutions begin or end. Those people have been demoralized and pacified.
You can still be part of the change.
And also that is a gross overgeneralisation, it’s not like schools were full of revolutionaries a decade ago, and today I definitely feel like more people are ready to do something, especially since Trump took office.
Just look at the success of Mamdani or the no Kings protests.
This is the delusion im talking about. It’s completely baffling to me how people can take something that has a 99,99% failure rate and assume they’re the 0,01% and that’s not limited to politics. People constantly do it with every single aspect of life.
You’re using a survivorship bias and seeing only the ones that succeeded and ignoring all the ones that failed or didn’t even get off the ground to be heard of.
I’m fairly sure not a single one of those were started by a single individual either. These were all started by groups of like minded individuals and I’m not even in a country where there are enough people to get started with any movement.
I’m not sticking my head in the sand. I’m just not delusional to assume there’s a realistic possibility to affdct any change even if I’d were to dedicate rest of my life to it. I don’t assume I’m special.
We’re all just cogs in the machine. Yeah sure we can somewhat change in which part of the machine we are and have a cleaner conscious, but it will not stop the machine.
We can also somewhat break the undesired behaviour of the machine (be unreliable cogs). So yeah, a little freedom we have still
And how much of an effect beyond self satisfaction that has? It will more likely disproportionately effect people close to you/reliant on you than have any effect on the machine.
It’s the same argument for why it’s OK to sell drugs. Someone is going to do it anyway, me selling crack is not going to change anything meaningful, so I might as well do it.
Good point, but wrong conclusion. Yeah, me selling crack wouldn’t change anything on a world wide scale, but it would change things for the worse inside my sphere of influence. The only thing person can have a little and albeit a very limited effect on.
So person shouldn’t sell crack out of simple selfish desire to not feel bad(guilt/cleaner conscious), the crackhead will likely just go to another dealer, not in the vain hope of having any actual effect on the wider world
Have enough unreliable cogs in the machine and it won’t do what you want. Yes, this is again a plan for long after we die, but doing something good is still worth it
And i never said doing something good isn’t worth it. Even in first reply i said best one can do is to just help people close to them, inside their sphere of influence.
Just that it’s really really unlikely to have any meaningful effect on world wide scale, even after our deaths.
There’s no point to hope to change the world, not that theres no point to help others.My bad, I have misread you. Feels good to see I am not alone in this, let the time be kind to you
Shure, changing the world will be hard as fuck and it could be years until you see any positive change
No. For people without needed capability (read: 99.(9) of all people on the planet) changing the world means “you will most likely die trying, and it might amount to something, but may as well not”. And building said capability is again close to a full lifetime of work, if not more
I feel like, that’s exactly what I said.
And that changes nothing, because we either try to change the world or give up.
And the world as it currently is is not acceptable to me, so I try to change it.
Then I’ve misread you, as “you have a decent shot to do it if you try hard enough”. World won’t change much because of me, but I will make sure to be a drop of change for the better
Also, something I’d like to add (it may seem contrary to what I said before, but it stems from the same line of thinking).
Everyone changes the world, for better or worse.
It doesn’t have to be a revolution or anything, you can change the world in so many ways.
The most important thing is to be an upstanding, good person. You can change the world through community, you can help your friends out, when they are in trouble. You can help your friends through just having a good time with them. You can reflect on life with the people you love, try to offer them new perspectives. You can help random strangers. You can make inspiring art.
You can raise confident, smart children, that may change the world themselves one day, either as a parent or a caregiver or teacher.
Fundamentally, Facism is about hate and left wing ideas are about love. So we can win by just increasing empathy in the world.
For me, I believe that free software can liberate us, and also I just love to code and be a nerd. So I contribute to free software projects online, I helped my mom and a friend of mine install Linux. I helped my scouts move to Nextcloud and Jitsi.
Change is about exploring new ways to use any skills you have to make small impact, which will maybe eventually bear bigger fruit than you might have thought. And if not, then you just made your life, or maybe the life of people you love a bit better, and that’s also great.
Of course, it’s also great to go to demonstrations, join political orgs etc. I just found for me, that I don’t have that kind of energy in me, so I focus on other things. That might also change someday.
Changing the world is mostly about your attitude on life.
I mean same but I still have that feeling of existential dread like … maybe we will all die tomorrow what does it all matter anyway. But I enjoy my work albeit with the nagging voice in the back of my head always telling me “there isnt much time left!”
In the last job I had, I was a software developer. I worked for a company that contracted to utilities in order to improve their GIS systems for asset and workflow management - and yes, that is as boring as it sounds.
I didn’t like the job. I sat in a gray cubical, interacting with boring people, working on projects that didn’t mean anything to me. The morning standups were onerous, the proprietary software stacks we used were infuriating, and the coffee from the keurig machine was bad.
But I can’t, in any honest way, condemn the company. Pretty much everyone there, from the owner (it was a startup that never had any intention of going public) to the managers, to the data entry clerks, were good, decent people doing honest work. The projects we worked on helped our clients have a better idea of where all their equipment and people were at any time, which meant they saved time and money, which meant delaying price increases to their customers as inflation pushed prices up and quicker responses to outagest to ensure everyone had consistent access to water and electricity in their homes.
I think most peoples’ jobs are probably something like this. It can be difficult to see the forest for the trees sometimes, but most jobs, most of the time, are about seeing to the wants and needs of large numbers of other normal people. Sure, maybe you work at Killing Babies Inc in the Emmitting Maximal Carbon division. But most jobs are things like cooking food, caring for children or the elderly, building infrastructure or keeping it working, helping other people do all those other jobs better, or trying to make sense of the chaos by managing people and doing your best to make sure things get done on a reasonable timeframe.
Suppose the apocalypse happens. The nukes fly, climate change accelerates, governments collapse, most people on the planet die, etc. Give it 100, 200, 300 years. What does life look like? It probably looks like people living in improvized shelters, hunting some of the few remaining animals for protein, scavenging for the last bits of working technology, trying to pass on knowledge as best they can so it doesn’t get lost forever, while defending themselves from violent raiding parties and trying to survive plagues and famines.
Here’s the thing - this is a reasonable description of the vast majority of human existance. Premodern life was, for most people, nasty, brutish, and short. Yes, they had close relationships and lots of sunshine and at whole foods - great! You can do that today if you want! But they didn’t have modern medicine, electricity, transportation, food production, or material supply chains. If you broke your leg, there was a decent chance you would be handicapped for life. If you hated your family, it didn’t matter - you were stuck with them. In the same house. Possibly with no/few private bedrooms. Possibly for your whole life. Wanna have sex? Well guess what - your partner might not have washed their asshole for several months, depending on the time and place of your existance.
The fact is, people showing up every morning, bleary-eyed, sucking down coffee, and annoyed that their boss is taking too long with the morning meeting, are the only thing stopping the apocalypse from happening every day
Nit picking, but I don’t think we’d sit on our asses for 300 years. The difference would be that we wouldn’t need to reimagine what’s possible, we’d know. So, simply that would drive us to improve our lives. But more than that, the knowledge would still exist in books, and we’d still know how to read. So, the idea that it would take us hundreds of years to get back on our feet seems silly to me.
That’s a very fair argument. My example was something of a thought experiment about what life would be like without modern supply chains, and I wanted to push it forward in time so that the apocalypse-conflict would no longer be relevant.
“Zoo Station” by David Downing. It’s a novel set in Berlin in the run up to WW2.
The hero is an Englishman living in Germany so he can be near his ex-wife and their son.
One aspect of it is that, while the hero gets caught up in a Soviet spy ring, he’s also doing things like taking his kid to football games and trying to buy a car.
Your comment reminded me of that.
I agree with most of this. To me, the soul-crushing part isn’t doing menial tasks to keep society chugging along, it’s doing them in the cheapest shittiest possible way. It’s doing them that way not because we have to, or to serve the most amount of people, but to ensure we can deliver the biggest pile of gold to the shitstain at the top.
Well said.
I dont hate my job. I hate the fact that my job sucks because everything we do is first and foremost a monetary transaction that is being governed by the principle of minimum investment for maximum productivity, all so a handful of people at the pinnacle of the organization chart can make more money annually than their entire entry-level workforce combined. They could take a fraction of that money and hire enough people that it wouldn’t be a constant fuckin grind but they won’t because why own 4 houses when you could own 5, or 6?
The world’s billionaires, roughly 3500 people, hold $20 Trillion in combined assets. Split evenly among the world population, that would be enough to give every single person on the planet nearly $2500. Doesn’t sound like much until you consider that there are currently 8.3 billion people on the planet. Each one of those billionaires corresponds to roughly 2.4 million people. The population of Houston, TX per single billionaire.
The average lifetime earnings of someone in the US is 1.85 million dollars today. Someone with just 1 billion dollars has the equivalent of 540 lifetimes of earnings. Elon Musk is currently worth 823 billion dollars. 444,420 lifetimes worth of earnings. One person.
Its not the job that sucks. Its the fact that I have to be miserable doing it that sucks, and all so a small handful of people can amass more wealth than some entire countries GDP.
We can acknowledge the myriad of trying circumstances that pervade modern life without resorting to thought-terminating cliches like, “There are starving kids in Africa” or “If you lived hundreds of years ago you might have died of a terrible disease”
Yeah, things could be worse. Of course it could be worse. But it could be a lot better, too. And a lot of people are justifiably unhappy about it.
Change starts with those closest.
Change ourselves, build up the lives of our relatives, etc.
Humans naturally cannot bear feelings for strangers far away, but that doesn’t meant we are heartless. We just don’t have all the heart to give.
My only problem with your comment, and this is what has been eating at me for some time, is that you say this
Here’s the thing - this is a reasonable description of the vast majority of human existance.
Which is only from the human perspective. I honestly could zero fucks about what happens to the human race after all this is over. But the destruction of earth as a whole will be horrendous. You mentioned “remaining few animals” and that’s really where the problem is. We are destroying Earth, not humanity. And Earth doesn’t deserve that.
A fellow Misanthropic Anti-natalist? I view humans as monsters. We are a truly evil species, bad for the planet.
Most people are good, it’s a wealthy few who exploit the planet and people for profit who are destroying the planet. The “humans are inherently selfish/evil” line only serves to protect those responsible from accountability by distributing the blame.
“He hates me, yet he caught me. Man is good.”
Sorry, didn’t mean to send that yet. Nearly all people are fucking evil, self-serving monsters. They do good to feel good or to receive good. Very few people do good because they are good. It’s actually very depressing. But oh well.
I used to think this way when I was miserable and disillusioned with society in general. When you approach life with the assumption that people are evil by default you tend to only notice things which affirm that belief. I’ve since made a lot of changes in my life and gained a new perspective, and I’ve found that I more frequently notice people doing small acts of kindness when they think no one’s looking. Most people want to do good, it’s just that they don’t often succeed.
I used to think people were good at their core, and then the covid pandemic happened and everybody revealed themselves to be self serving dickheads.
Glad you have a PMA (positive mental attitude) about stuff. Im not as grumpy as i seem either, I don’t think, but i have little faith in the goodness of humanity.
Jacob Geller made a video about something that’s quite analogous, how we deal with the knowledge, that the world is going to end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9N7Awpk9lE
I highly recommend it, Jacob Geller is an excellent storyteller.
Awwwh man, they blew up the 7Eleven.
normal day at quito or medellin
