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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!”
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
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!”