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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.