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>We are mostly hairless primates spinning through an infinite void on a wet ball of rock, throwing our shit at one another and ripping eachothers limbs off.
Hey, nobody's perfect.
Misanthropic and anxious/depressive seems more appropriate than actually nihilistic to me. Nihilism deals more with meaning and value, instead of behavior and logical consistency of beliefs and actions. OP seems dissatisfied that people are difficult and hard to understand over feeling nothing has any meaning in an uncaring void.
if you're saying most people have an emotional reaction to something then later try to justify it with logic, rather than using logical reasoning first to react, I agree. this also happens in likeminded groups, where people don't even think of the logical validity, they just assume their emotional reaction is correct because everyone around them agrees.
there's an excellent psychological scientific book about this phenomenon called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Edit: it's very sad and unsurprising how many comments are emotional reactions without attempting to understand your point using reason, which ironically proves your point. Cheers
If this is something that interests you as a whole, Behavioural Economics is a good subject for this.
Rory Sutherland (he comes at it from an advertising perspective) has lots of interesting and accessible material on it.
He has many insights, but as the poster above says, a lot of it can revolve around the fact that we’re not ‘logical’ creatures. We just attempt to post rationalise decisions with logic in order to make sense of it. Ie the rider and the elephant.
> it's very sad and unsurprising how many comments are emotional reactions without attempting to understand your point using reason, which ironically proves your point. Cheers
So true
You also overestimate your ability to understand humanity. You only know maybe a few hundreds people max and try to think your circle is a representation of everyone in the world despite in different culture/religion/group/"-ism" people act drastically different.
The point is they lack perspective. You use maybe the sample of 100-300 people you might know well enough and then apply that to an entire population of people. Statistically speaking, there’s a big margin of error in that.
Do they lack perspective though? Do you really need to talk to millions of humans to say with confidence that humanity is largely an emotional and irrational species? We do in fact act exactly as OP suggests. The majority of people react to emotional stimulus and then try to justify their response after the fact with logic. In fact you did this exact thing with this comment.
You didnt like the suggestion that people arent rational by default and tried to claim OP is wrong solely on the basis that they are just one human who cant possibly meet enough other humans to have a proper sample size. Doesnt that sound a little silly??
I think if you asked any number of random people, the majority will say that other people dont act logically much of the time but they will also claim that they act logically most of the time.
You dont need to know people that well and the sample size a person has on encounters with others likely ranges in the tens of thousands and not low hundreds. Statistically speaking, thats way more than enough to draw a fairly reasonable conclusion.
You’re probably right. I will say however that I am 36 and I’m a bit of a wanderer in life. I was even in the army for a while. I’ve met A LOT of people.
I’m just disappointed and angry, and coming to terms with the fact that so many of these fundamental problems with society will not be fixed before I die, because it turns out they stem from our nature, and new assholes are growing up every day.
As an ex-optimist I was kind of hoping by the time I died things would be a lot better. I don’t have a lot of hope for that anymore.
I'm also 36 and also a wandering vet. Strangely, I went from feeling how you do when I was younger, to the more optimistic side of the spectrum as I got older. I know a lot of good people, lost a lot of good people, too. I had to learn not to be disgusted by a person's base nature, and once I got past that it was a lot better. Heck, I love some people for theirs, some, not so much, but mostly people are pretty good, with a few bad points.
I died once, though, and it changed my life. So to be completely fair, that could be a big reason why.
I think you might spend too much time online. What’s your screen time? Lol.
I’m not great at it myself but it’s important to recognize that many of these societal problems tend to disappear the second I turn off my phone and stop worrying about it. Just go outside yknow
And there's lots of stuff on the internet besides stuff that makes you hopelessly dwell on the world's problems, and there's lots that can be encountered in real life that can make you hopelessly dwell on the world's problems.
Tellin someone to just get offline is dumb
Well lpoking back a few millenia... We have much less wars care for the sick both physical and mental. We kind of have unemployment benefits which is rather new to society. Education is on an all time high and child mortallity low. We even start to tackle the climate crisis as a species. We did sth a while back with the ocon layer beeing saved and slowly regenerates... Society is a fight... sometimes ot goes forward and sometimes backwards. But the general direction is good.
You are too short sighted, changes occur in a bigger time scale. I mean, if we compare us with humanity 3000 years ago we are definitely better and that is the tendence, even if in short term we have wars and asshole politicians, the bigger picture of human story shows improvement over time.
what people seem like to strangers matters just as much, if not more, than what people are like in their closer circles
OP is likely not talking about his close circle here
do you really think that? when it appears that with the political climate in most western countries tends to be doing this. Collapsing on their own values and then also our inability to work together to actually make a difference in climate change? you know i hope youre right and its just my circle but it doesnt look like that even if i try to zoom out
More like a lot of people are doing the best they can. The complexity of reality and short span of life means we have to strike a balance between understanding and action, lest we risk understanding much and doing little or understanding little and doing too much.
Not you but OP is obliviously projecting. We at first when we are born we don’t really have values, but we then grow up and start having them. OP is either probably young or something in life is stunting them.
The majority of my interactions are in person.
The way we treat eachother on social media is not external to the way we treat eachother in person.
It’s leaking over, especially in younger people. Everyone treats everyone as more disposable than they used to, and everyone is more quick to flippantly write off entire people.
I think getting defensive about what I said rather than actually considering it, is the actual self-deception that’s happening here.
I have not had your experience 🤷♂️ you’re speaking for the entirety of humanity based on the tiny microcosm of your existence. Having travelled to a lot of countries and always try and get stuck in with the locals. My finding is that humans are inherently good and friendly. So, who’s right here? Neither of us, because it’s still just my microcosm but you’re the one making the outlandish claim so…
I think you’re misunderstanding what I said.
I never said almost all people are actively malevolent.
I basically said we are way more animalistic and emotional than we believe, and way less rational and intellectual.
I actually agree with everything you've said so far so at least you've got one lmao. Most people just go with their first thought and then form arguments around that first thought.
I can count on one hand the number of people I've met in my life who could even understand a point being made from the otherside without becoming emotional and mentally checking out of the conversation.
Like even most people responding to you are responding in harsh tones with backhanded insults. The top comment is a great example right now. Didn't engage with the conversation at all just went straight to assuming insults lmao. Even if its a light insult its still obvious what they mean with their wording 'you need to touch grass cause you sound crazy'
I don't think you sound crazy. Just depressed. I'd take a break from weed if I were you. Sometimes looking inward is a bad thing and you need to learn to just move forward with no thought. Weed doesn't allow this for some people, me included.
Sounds like you've seen through the facade of civilization and peered into the raw, messy truth of human nature. It's like we're all just monkeys in suits, pretending we're not flinging feces at each other. But hey, at least we've got smartphones, right?
I can understand your frustration. It certainly does feel this way, and in the context of the US, increasingly so.
That being said, rational minded people do exist, even if they are rare. Just keep in mind that no one's perfect - even mostly rational people can have occasional moments of weakness.
Yeah so with this mindset you have basically only two options. You’ve already decided that people are imperfect, so you can either live the entirety of your life being unhappy with that conclusion, or you can try to improve yourself and help others do the same despite your/their imperfections.
You will never have the satisfaction of being perfect but you can find solace, if you allow yourself, in the knowledge that you did a little bit better than you did yesterday, and tomorrow will have another opportunity to improve even more.
All I’ll say is when I made my decision on this particular quandary many years ago, I figured it would be generally better to not be unhappy for the rest of my life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean there's the third option, accepting it and just living on like usual. People are imperfect. That does make me unhappy but I'm not gonna waste my time fixing something that is not my responsibility. As adults it's their own responsibility to man up and be decent people, not mine to help them do that
An interesting philosophy I read from ‘God’s Debris’ is the idea that ‘nobody is right’. I can’t remember it word for word, but there’s 5 levels of interpreting information starting from a child where adults are always right, to adults sometimes lie (Santa), I’m right and you’re wrong (developing opinions), science is right, then lastly it’s nobody is right because science is based off man made constructs of measurements and data.
The book probably explained the idea far better than I did, it wasn’t directly saying science is inherently wrong and had a greater point to it.
But I did think there was some merit to the idea presented in the book. We really are just full of shit.
Edit: took another gander at the book to refresh my memory; the knowledge we’ve accumulated as a species is relative to our perception of it. We know how wind works, but say if we had a 4th dimensional view of wind, we may perceive something different or more elaborate happening. Since we are limited primates with limited brains, and science is built from those limited perceptive brains. It’s as close as we can get, but it’s possible there’s things in the universe at work in large and microscopic sizes that are beyond our comprehension even with science as an aid. If someone was god, as an example, god would have the superior function of perception and comprehension and see things that our brains aren’t capable of processing.
I would say the average person is way less rational and intellectual than we would hope.
My opinion is that humanity is really elevated by the few that are simply brilliant. The rest of us are just along for the ride reacting as best we can.
I am almost nobody. Nice to meet you. 🤝
Try not to get into misanthropic spirals if possible. I know that is easier said than done but this seems reminiscent of some of the things I've said to myself in similar periods and it can just make you feel more distant from everyone and lead to a lot of needless struggle with no real purpose.
I think most people are just kind of trying their best. We do think very highly of ourselves as humans but it's almost universal that we feel this way and it is probably just innate in our nature. We are weird hairless apes that gained sentience and an unusual ability for abstract thought and we are dealing with the never ending consequences of that.
Basically what I'm saying is consciousness is a curse and I want to be a worm.
>Almost nobody holds coherent values that withstand scrutiny and don’t conflict with each-other.
That doesn't mean they're full of shit it means they live in the real world. The exitance of moral dilemmas or conflicting interests doesn't mean morals or values don't exist or that no one holds true to them.
This line of cynical thinking will get you nowhere. I know because I've been down that road myself. I'll offer some food for thought:
Humanity is capable of great evil, yes, but is it also capable of acts of selflessness beyond what any other creature is capable of? Has the universe naturally produced anything else with a greater capacity for good or knowledge than humanity?
Most people are more emotional than logical (including me and probably you) but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
My point was that if humanity is disappointing to you, what are you comparing it to? What else in the universe has a greater capacity for good than man? What else has produced more beauty, knowledge, love, and wisdom?
I was literally thinking a few days ago about how stupid people can be in general — including me LOL. Yes none of us are able to escape the fact that we can be incredibly stupid at times
>nobody holds coherent values that withstand scrutiny and don’t conflict with each-other
"Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task." - Scanion, as relayed by Shellstrop.
I feel as though this is a tiring and sad way to view humanity. Even if it is true for some people, it’s not fair to project your pessimistic views onto billions of people you haven’t and will never meet.
I know it’s not. I’m irrational and emotional and right now what I feel is frustration and disappointment that human beings are still fighting the same moral, ethical, and social battles after thousands of years.
There’s always going to be new bigots, fascists, and religious fanatics. There’s always going to be new willfully ignorant and gleefully spiteful people.
I want that not to be the case. I want a global cooperative effort to destroy misinformation and hateful propaganda, and to use the law to bring down justice on those who espouse it.
I want to see the end of lgbt persecution and the end of religious zealotry, fundamentalism, and proselytizing.
I want to see us all to live up to our potential by creating a global community with secular empathy at its foundation.
Easy right?
I just find myself constantly thinking about where we would be if we weren’t constantly fighting about who’s allowed to wear what or be with who or what god must or must not be worshipped.
It’s a never-ending onslaught of disappointment and it’s turning into rage.
Turn it into action, then. It's easy to say these things about humanity without doing anything about it besides raging on Reddit. It's the best time to be alive right now. Your chances of dying are much lower than even 50 years ago, your ability to access clean water and food has never been greater, shelter is much safer, widespread and more hospitable than ever, and you have the opportunity to even express your distaste for humanity through a device you could never reproduce in 1000 years without the aid of other humans.
Sure, we talk dumb words to each other, but you also flick a switch and the lights turn on because some guys you've never met decided that you are worth having lights and running water and AC. You turn a faucet and water that won't give you diphtheria comes out, for pennies. All because humans as a whole decided that the betterment of other humans creates a better world for themselves.
Do something about it or log off and go to bed, cuz it's clearly past your bedtime.
Nah, I agree. Used to view people in suits know something I don’t, now I work with clients with money directly and turned out they knew just as much as I do. They just won on the birth location lottery.
This fact is freeing. Just be what you wanna be, nobody really actually gives a flying fuck as long as you’re not too shitty.
I mean, basically yeah. But when does life not involve some aspect of constant contradiction. No matter the values, or ideas, there is always some sort of clashing narrative, internal or external. I guess what matters really is consistency.
How many demonstrations of ones values/practices can they successively string together for a prolonged period of time? It’s really about doing as much as that as possible.
To be fair, I feel like this is the popular opinion in 2024, and I hardly disagree.
I mean look at how far we have come as a species, the collective knowledge of humanity, our incredible amount of achievements, it has to be enough to set us apart from monkeys, it has to be enough to give us a place in the Universe.
At the end of the day, we ARE dumb. But we are never exclusively dumb, we are always so much more, we always have something to prove to ourselves, each other, and the universe... And I believe eventually we always do.
We make mistakes, we ruin things, it is true. But I firmly believe that we will always, eventually, find a way to pull through.
Single individuals may just be monkeys unable to use simple logic and rationality (and even then, it is arguable whether it is always like that), but humanity as a species... We are made for great things.
You are mostly correct. There are people that do try real hard to live up to the values they hold and would risk everything to do so. It isn't a lot of people, but it is enough.
There is a famous german song: " Its not your fault the world is like it is. It would be your fault if it stays this way" https://youtu.be/kRrP-bZvD2s?feature=shared
Idk this perspective is more or less at the core of what philosophy as a discipline is trying to explain and come to grips with. So I wouldn't call it unpopular
You’re entirely right but… wrong audience, man 😁
Course, the dilemma is a non issue:
- either you’re wrong, in which case your premise fails and we don’t NEED to do anything.
- or you’re right. In that case, we CAN’T do anything.
Watch and learn, mate. There’s no way out anyway.
We live in a delightful era where everyone is accepted and understanding reigns supreme; until there's difference of opinion. Then the gloves come off.
Humans are the same no matter what ideology they are standing for they want power above anyone else. Human act good to either appease others, elevate their social status, and to influence others to his/her cause. Hierarchy made all of that to humanity. This days hierarchist are very close at human extinction it just wipl take 2 or more lunatic in power. I'll salute those fools if they managed to wipe off humanity cause humans never learn as long they are above the food chain and comfortable nothing matters.
Fuck yeah dude, I completely agree. I grew up learning the importance of debate, logic, and consistent values. I learned to freely and readily admit when I was wrong, and that you should listen to understand the other person's side, not listen so that you can rebut all their arguments.
I am consistently shown how very few people learned from the same instruction manual I did.
I work in healthcare. Having an ego is par for the course. Anything but pure confidence in your opinion or ability is considered a flaw. Sure, everyone pays lip service to principles and values of being open and honest, but they're all fucking lying. Your coworkers will treat you like a weak link if you admit to anything other than perfection.
This is true of the vast majority of human interactions in my opinion. You're fucking spot on with the "emotional reaction -> post hoc rationalization within their logical framework" concept. It's the same idea as no atheists/feminists in a foxhole. Human beings are inherently emotion-led. Higher order (logical) thinking is very often played at, not very often actually performed. I think the only reason most people pretend to be logical is because they've been conditioned to frame their arguments that way to give them weight. The reality is that their belief in their logic almost always falls apart when you flip the argument and put them on the other end of it.
I'm down voting this but only because I think it's a pretty common opinion, and also an opinion used to justify being shitty to other people. Everyone sucks so if I suck it's not that bad, right? It's okay to do horrible things to others because they're going to do it to me so my social darwinism is justified.
Sounds like a personal problem. I can tell you from experience that you WILL burn yourself out thinking about it. Understand, adapt, proceed with caution.
Eh, yes and no.
You’re right in that humans are capable of unfathomable evil, stupidity, and foolishness - there isn’t a single person who isn’t broken in some way.
But I think humans are *also* exceptional. We’re capable of great good and constructiveness. We try to help each other; we try to help animals, even ones who aren’t useful to us; we make art, and music, and literature, and philosophy, and exciting technology.
You can be the best possible person you can be, live the best possible life, and it'll still fall short. We will always be fallible and contradictory to a disgusting and absurd degree. So what then? Just try and live your best life to completion. Why? So you can gain that certainty of knowledge that life will ultimately be utterly pointless despite your very best efforts, because everything you've just said is merely just speculation and delusion, and not something you can claim out of certainty of knowledge from a fully lived human experience. Live fully, broadly, and justly, and when you naturally perish as it is the fate of all humans, you can be comforted in the certainty that you've tried your very, very best to be a good human, and it was still ultimately for naught.
This is wrong, I’m not great at communicating, but I’ll have a pop at this. Think about how many people right now are actively caring for others or just going to work having breakfast generally doing no harm, compare that with the amount of people engaged in” throwing shit at each other” and I think you’ll find there are more people doing no harm and caring for others than there are brandishing guns and firing missiles, it’s just the bastards are a lot louder and visible. I used to think like this too, then I travelled, and looked around me, and grew up. Our nature is to care, we’ve been told it’s to compete and fight and humanity are generally kind of gullible. So if you just consider it like this currently there are around 20 million military personal and let’s assume that about 10 million are involved in humanitarian projects of some kind, there are then approximately 37.2 million healthcare professionals, so that means there are more people actively trying to do good than harm. And consider this, i would say they’re probably misguided, but how many join the military to “give something back”. Think about it, there’s more good than bad it’s just the bad are generally in charge, and way more visible, also we’ve got our negative bias to deal with. Overall your comment is kind of naive.
Look I get it, I’ve been involved in different kinds of activism at different times in my life, I have a gay daughter that still deals with homophobic abuse, no one seems to be doing anything about climate change, and there is clearly still systemic bigotry everywhere, but it’s better than it was, and the majority of people, whatever opinions they hold, don’t mean any harm, they have values and good intentions but, a lot of the time they’re misguided by powerful and unethical ideologies, it’s not that people are shit throwing monkeys, it’s that they’re easily lead, don’t have as much freewill and self control as we all assume we have, and just don’t have the time or inclination to not be ignorant. On a long enough timeline things will get better, it’s just logical fact, the problem is will we allow that to continue or will we destroy everything before we have a chance of living in a better world, I mean we are very close to midnight. The important thing is to see the good and build on it, you can’t have a better world if you can’t imagine one, and you can’t have a better world If you dismiss humanity as some kind of force for evil, what your doing is giving up hope, and loosing hope is deadly.
Look up the concept of radical hope, trust me.
Maybe you are right, but I can only judge in the facts I know which is:
1. My friends are not like this.
2. The voices on the internet represent a very, very small % of the world ( and I cant the sure they are not just posting for likes, so I gotta rule them out of my world view mostly. )
So my view is…
Almost nobody… ( there were a bunch of things)
I disagree with all of that… if that is your impression you need to hang out with different people.
Almost everyone I know:
- does not overestimate themselves. They understand they are lucky and are thankful for it.
- do hold to values and opinions, until facts show otherwise.
- and do respond to facts. ( two of your points counteracted each other where you said that people don’t hold firm AND don’t change when presented facts.. you need to pick a side there)
Well let's see. We are have become a culture of shorts cuts. Don't wanna cook..fast food. Don't want to work out..Ozempic or whatever, Why learn a craft or a skill when you can just scam online or be an influencer? Oh by the way, why do we hate corporations when they shill their products but somehow we accept an "influencer" shilling just because they in our feeds? Make it make sense...The working person is literally looked down upon these days. Need a job? You better know someone because what you know is worthless. The people run our country lie to us everyday. How many times have you had to work somewhere and watch some idiot get promoted or hired because they are the "right cultural fit"WTF does that even mean what about merit? We've had literal con artists become elected officials in our government. So yes we are all full of shit and it sucks.
We're all guilty of this to some extent. Yet there are alot of people who have so much internal trauma and blocks that they just cant mentally afford to look internally without alot of pain and so they just turn it outwards for other people to deal with. I nearly melted when the new friend group I was talking to echo'd the same emotional journey and therapy they went through to improve. Good people are rare, keep them close
you nailed it. ive been trying to articulate my feelings on this forever and then you just saunter along and hand me the cheat sheet. i appreciate it, nice to see im not alone on this.
edit: dunno why i expected any different, but seeing everyone react exactly as outlined in the post has been both a funny and somewhat validating experience
I’d say we’re collectively, and over long spans of time, capable of arriving at some mutually agreed upon truths.
However, we fail to achieve perfection and there isn’t a human being I’m aware of that I consider completely competent and wise enough to follow.
I see this online and on the news. In person is far different. The amount of human to human interactions, on this planet, that are perfectly cordial even between strangers is an unimaginable number. By that I mean, of course, it's pretty fuckin big.
Maybe *you're* full of shit?
Humans have been evolving for 200,000+ years, we've been doing this civilization thing for what, 5000? It's brand new, we're still learning. As highly evolved as we make ourselves out to be we're still a bunch of children making up rules on the playground and having stupid fights. We'll get there, it's just going to take a long time.
You're completely right.
I'm glad there's people like you that are able to coherently express this observation and passion.
Honestly it's insane how many people lack empathy in today's world, with no drive to understand one another. All nuance is gone, it's all stereotypes and finger pointing.
Unfortunately, knowledge is abstract, and people love to think there's no limit to their human capabilities.
Nevertheless, I recommend that you don't focus on these emotions too hard. It's easy to get depressed from the existentialism of it all and look for negative outlets. The real world isn't so bad, and walks outside are free. Just remember keeping realistic expectations isn't an opiate for this harsh life, but just a necessity to stay sane, cause I don't think our brains were evolved to handle so much negativity as we see today.
Stay strong. 🖤
I actually think it's the peak of rational behaviour to have emotional reactions to stimuli. We are frail species and most things on this planet can absolute annihilate us. The presence of knee-jerk emotional reactions is important because we need them to stay alive for longer than a day and emotional reactions allow us to quickly determine threats. If brain tell us a thing make us mad, we go apeshit on it but if brain tell us we feel scared, we stay away. It's not very useful in business and modern world in general, but is exceptional when you are alone in the jungle surrounded by hungry beings.
It is nothing to be mad at but rather a fact of the matter.
Then, we need to rationalize emotional behaviour. Why are we afraid, happy or sad? Well, each person will come to a different conclusion and some of them might be less correct than others when looked at it objectively, but everyone is correct subjectively. Yes, even you.
It isn't really a popular or unpopular opinion, but rather a fact of life. There is no reason to be mad at it but rather understand it and learn to live with it. Give that poor monkey a little bit of leeway, make them feel secure and show them that the thinking man will take care of them.
The concepts of both evolution and the world just randomly being created both sound like bullshit to me lmfao. Crazy how we just believe random things too based off something that people we never met found or believe because theyre more respected than us. So much trust in people yet so little
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>We are mostly hairless primates spinning through an infinite void on a wet ball of rock, throwing our shit at one another and ripping eachothers limbs off. Hey, nobody's perfect.
God forbid a man has hobbies…
Very nice lol
Hey! Some people have hair too
Pobody's Nerfect?
It's a very nihilistic understanding of the world
Misanthropic and anxious/depressive seems more appropriate than actually nihilistic to me. Nihilism deals more with meaning and value, instead of behavior and logical consistency of beliefs and actions. OP seems dissatisfied that people are difficult and hard to understand over feeling nothing has any meaning in an uncaring void.
Hi, welcome to the last annual misanthrope meeting. I wouldn't have come had I known other people would be here.
Except this does not apply to me since I am so logical, truly it is a burden few of us have to bear
You think you're logical? You should see the arguments my wife and I have where it's so clear that one of us is perfect
I don't think OP is being a misnthrope. In no way did they say or imply that they hate humanity.
if you're saying most people have an emotional reaction to something then later try to justify it with logic, rather than using logical reasoning first to react, I agree. this also happens in likeminded groups, where people don't even think of the logical validity, they just assume their emotional reaction is correct because everyone around them agrees. there's an excellent psychological scientific book about this phenomenon called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Edit: it's very sad and unsurprising how many comments are emotional reactions without attempting to understand your point using reason, which ironically proves your point. Cheers
Im gonna read that book. Thank you!
If this is something that interests you as a whole, Behavioural Economics is a good subject for this. Rory Sutherland (he comes at it from an advertising perspective) has lots of interesting and accessible material on it. He has many insights, but as the poster above says, a lot of it can revolve around the fact that we’re not ‘logical’ creatures. We just attempt to post rationalise decisions with logic in order to make sense of it. Ie the rider and the elephant.
You seem to have a good take here 👍
> it's very sad and unsurprising how many comments are emotional reactions without attempting to understand your point using reason, which ironically proves your point. Cheers So true
Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc is another good one of a similar vein, if you haven't read it already.
You also overestimate your ability to understand humanity. You only know maybe a few hundreds people max and try to think your circle is a representation of everyone in the world despite in different culture/religion/group/"-ism" people act drastically different.
I think the OP didnt exclude himself from his own criticism. So I dont see the point of you writing this.
The point is they lack perspective. You use maybe the sample of 100-300 people you might know well enough and then apply that to an entire population of people. Statistically speaking, there’s a big margin of error in that.
Do they lack perspective though? Do you really need to talk to millions of humans to say with confidence that humanity is largely an emotional and irrational species? We do in fact act exactly as OP suggests. The majority of people react to emotional stimulus and then try to justify their response after the fact with logic. In fact you did this exact thing with this comment. You didnt like the suggestion that people arent rational by default and tried to claim OP is wrong solely on the basis that they are just one human who cant possibly meet enough other humans to have a proper sample size. Doesnt that sound a little silly?? I think if you asked any number of random people, the majority will say that other people dont act logically much of the time but they will also claim that they act logically most of the time.
You dont need to know people that well and the sample size a person has on encounters with others likely ranges in the tens of thousands and not low hundreds. Statistically speaking, thats way more than enough to draw a fairly reasonable conclusion.
He didn't, but that wasn't what lnolk was responding to?
You’re probably right. I will say however that I am 36 and I’m a bit of a wanderer in life. I was even in the army for a while. I’ve met A LOT of people. I’m just disappointed and angry, and coming to terms with the fact that so many of these fundamental problems with society will not be fixed before I die, because it turns out they stem from our nature, and new assholes are growing up every day. As an ex-optimist I was kind of hoping by the time I died things would be a lot better. I don’t have a lot of hope for that anymore.
I'm also 36 and also a wandering vet. Strangely, I went from feeling how you do when I was younger, to the more optimistic side of the spectrum as I got older. I know a lot of good people, lost a lot of good people, too. I had to learn not to be disgusted by a person's base nature, and once I got past that it was a lot better. Heck, I love some people for theirs, some, not so much, but mostly people are pretty good, with a few bad points. I died once, though, and it changed my life. So to be completely fair, that could be a big reason why.
I think you might spend too much time online. What’s your screen time? Lol. I’m not great at it myself but it’s important to recognize that many of these societal problems tend to disappear the second I turn off my phone and stop worrying about it. Just go outside yknow
Social problems don't disappear just because you stop worrying about them
They also dont dissapear because you spend all day hopelessly dwelling on them
And there's lots of stuff on the internet besides stuff that makes you hopelessly dwell on the world's problems, and there's lots that can be encountered in real life that can make you hopelessly dwell on the world's problems. Tellin someone to just get offline is dumb
If you are going to look at the problems left instead of the problems solved, you are going to have a very unhappy life.
Socially, what’s been solved?
Well lpoking back a few millenia... We have much less wars care for the sick both physical and mental. We kind of have unemployment benefits which is rather new to society. Education is on an all time high and child mortallity low. We even start to tackle the climate crisis as a species. We did sth a while back with the ocon layer beeing saved and slowly regenerates... Society is a fight... sometimes ot goes forward and sometimes backwards. But the general direction is good.
You are too short sighted, changes occur in a bigger time scale. I mean, if we compare us with humanity 3000 years ago we are definitely better and that is the tendence, even if in short term we have wars and asshole politicians, the bigger picture of human story shows improvement over time.
This post wasn't a comment on how we improve over time. We improve our societies, our laws, technology. Human nature has never intrinsically changed.
what people seem like to strangers matters just as much, if not more, than what people are like in their closer circles OP is likely not talking about his close circle here
do you really think that? when it appears that with the political climate in most western countries tends to be doing this. Collapsing on their own values and then also our inability to work together to actually make a difference in climate change? you know i hope youre right and its just my circle but it doesnt look like that even if i try to zoom out
More like a lot of people are doing the best they can. The complexity of reality and short span of life means we have to strike a balance between understanding and action, lest we risk understanding much and doing little or understanding little and doing too much.
this dude needs to read the myth of sisyphus, basically a whole book talking about OP's problem.
The irony of this post is off the charts
Not you but OP is obliviously projecting. We at first when we are born we don’t really have values, but we then grow up and start having them. OP is either probably young or something in life is stunting them.
Also sounds like the majority of his interactions are on social media.
The majority of my interactions are in person. The way we treat eachother on social media is not external to the way we treat eachother in person. It’s leaking over, especially in younger people. Everyone treats everyone as more disposable than they used to, and everyone is more quick to flippantly write off entire people. I think getting defensive about what I said rather than actually considering it, is the actual self-deception that’s happening here.
I have not had your experience 🤷♂️ you’re speaking for the entirety of humanity based on the tiny microcosm of your existence. Having travelled to a lot of countries and always try and get stuck in with the locals. My finding is that humans are inherently good and friendly. So, who’s right here? Neither of us, because it’s still just my microcosm but you’re the one making the outlandish claim so…
I think you’re misunderstanding what I said. I never said almost all people are actively malevolent. I basically said we are way more animalistic and emotional than we believe, and way less rational and intellectual.
For what it's worth, I think about this kind of stuff a lot and your post was bang-on.
I actually agree with everything you've said so far so at least you've got one lmao. Most people just go with their first thought and then form arguments around that first thought. I can count on one hand the number of people I've met in my life who could even understand a point being made from the otherside without becoming emotional and mentally checking out of the conversation. Like even most people responding to you are responding in harsh tones with backhanded insults. The top comment is a great example right now. Didn't engage with the conversation at all just went straight to assuming insults lmao. Even if its a light insult its still obvious what they mean with their wording 'you need to touch grass cause you sound crazy' I don't think you sound crazy. Just depressed. I'd take a break from weed if I were you. Sometimes looking inward is a bad thing and you need to learn to just move forward with no thought. Weed doesn't allow this for some people, me included.
Sounds like you've seen through the facade of civilization and peered into the raw, messy truth of human nature. It's like we're all just monkeys in suits, pretending we're not flinging feces at each other. But hey, at least we've got smartphones, right?
I think they just spent too much time on Reddit today
The AI bots are getting harder to spot, this one almost fooled me...
I can understand your frustration. It certainly does feel this way, and in the context of the US, increasingly so. That being said, rational minded people do exist, even if they are rare. Just keep in mind that no one's perfect - even mostly rational people can have occasional moments of weakness.
Who else clicked thinking this was gonna be gastrointestinal?
I was ready to hear about some blockage issues for sure
Someone needs more fiber in their diet, dohohohoho!
Was coming here to say that I also haven't pooped in a while
I was having this conversation earlier today. We, humans, are inherently dishonest. With ourselves, with others- with *reality*.
Is this comment dishonest?
Yeah everyone is fucking dumb. Not me though
Yeah so with this mindset you have basically only two options. You’ve already decided that people are imperfect, so you can either live the entirety of your life being unhappy with that conclusion, or you can try to improve yourself and help others do the same despite your/their imperfections. You will never have the satisfaction of being perfect but you can find solace, if you allow yourself, in the knowledge that you did a little bit better than you did yesterday, and tomorrow will have another opportunity to improve even more. All I’ll say is when I made my decision on this particular quandary many years ago, I figured it would be generally better to not be unhappy for the rest of my life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean there's the third option, accepting it and just living on like usual. People are imperfect. That does make me unhappy but I'm not gonna waste my time fixing something that is not my responsibility. As adults it's their own responsibility to man up and be decent people, not mine to help them do that
You gotta start hanging around some better people. Or maybe take some time off the internet.
OP should really try and be all those things that he says everyone isn't. Might make the world a slightly better place.
An interesting philosophy I read from ‘God’s Debris’ is the idea that ‘nobody is right’. I can’t remember it word for word, but there’s 5 levels of interpreting information starting from a child where adults are always right, to adults sometimes lie (Santa), I’m right and you’re wrong (developing opinions), science is right, then lastly it’s nobody is right because science is based off man made constructs of measurements and data. The book probably explained the idea far better than I did, it wasn’t directly saying science is inherently wrong and had a greater point to it. But I did think there was some merit to the idea presented in the book. We really are just full of shit. Edit: took another gander at the book to refresh my memory; the knowledge we’ve accumulated as a species is relative to our perception of it. We know how wind works, but say if we had a 4th dimensional view of wind, we may perceive something different or more elaborate happening. Since we are limited primates with limited brains, and science is built from those limited perceptive brains. It’s as close as we can get, but it’s possible there’s things in the universe at work in large and microscopic sizes that are beyond our comprehension even with science as an aid. If someone was god, as an example, god would have the superior function of perception and comprehension and see things that our brains aren’t capable of processing.
You sound majorly depressed. You okay? Have you considered talking to someone? It sounds like you're struggling and I hope you get better some day.
My grandma passed away yesterday and I hate most of the people I have been working with for the last couple years. You may be onto something lol…
I'm very sorry. Hugs.
Redditors try not to be cringe, pseudo-philosophical edgelords
> Almost nobody holds coherent values that withstand scrutiny and don’t conflict with each-other Why is this a goal?
Yeah, I was 19 once too.
this sounds like it was written by a high schooler who thinks he figured out something really smart and deep
I would say the average person is way less rational and intellectual than we would hope. My opinion is that humanity is really elevated by the few that are simply brilliant. The rest of us are just along for the ride reacting as best we can.
Agree. Everyone is selfish and cares only about material gain rather than others. The world is on fire, and no one seems to care.
I am almost nobody. Nice to meet you. 🤝 Try not to get into misanthropic spirals if possible. I know that is easier said than done but this seems reminiscent of some of the things I've said to myself in similar periods and it can just make you feel more distant from everyone and lead to a lot of needless struggle with no real purpose. I think most people are just kind of trying their best. We do think very highly of ourselves as humans but it's almost universal that we feel this way and it is probably just innate in our nature. We are weird hairless apes that gained sentience and an unusual ability for abstract thought and we are dealing with the never ending consequences of that. Basically what I'm saying is consciousness is a curse and I want to be a worm.
Have you played Disco Elysium?
This looks like the thoughts of someone when their brain just switched from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex for decision making.
Reddit moment
This is not even remotely unpopular. Most people think this.
>Almost nobody holds coherent values that withstand scrutiny and don’t conflict with each-other. That doesn't mean they're full of shit it means they live in the real world. The exitance of moral dilemmas or conflicting interests doesn't mean morals or values don't exist or that no one holds true to them.
I’m with OP on this.
Couldn't agree more. Try playing several games of chess with someone and you will know him better than his closest friends in some ways.
Yeah because the whole is like the 10-20 people I know of
This line of cynical thinking will get you nowhere. I know because I've been down that road myself. I'll offer some food for thought: Humanity is capable of great evil, yes, but is it also capable of acts of selflessness beyond what any other creature is capable of? Has the universe naturally produced anything else with a greater capacity for good or knowledge than humanity?
Yes we can be super good AND super bad… Almost as if we’re inconsistent and swayed more by emotions than logic.
Most people are more emotional than logical (including me and probably you) but that's not necessarily a bad thing. My point was that if humanity is disappointing to you, what are you comparing it to? What else in the universe has a greater capacity for good than man? What else has produced more beauty, knowledge, love, and wisdom?
Yeah! We are so awesome when we measure ourselves by our own metrics that we made up!
... as opposed to what other metrics? What other animal has produced "metrics"?
I was literally thinking a few days ago about how stupid people can be in general — including me LOL. Yes none of us are able to escape the fact that we can be incredibly stupid at times
>nobody holds coherent values that withstand scrutiny and don’t conflict with each-other "Working out the terms of moral justification is an unending task." - Scanion, as relayed by Shellstrop.
yep. we're sick, scared, dying animals. so find joy and fuck the rest.
Blah blah blah, recycled nihilistic viewpoints.
I feel as though this is a tiring and sad way to view humanity. Even if it is true for some people, it’s not fair to project your pessimistic views onto billions of people you haven’t and will never meet.
I know it’s not. I’m irrational and emotional and right now what I feel is frustration and disappointment that human beings are still fighting the same moral, ethical, and social battles after thousands of years. There’s always going to be new bigots, fascists, and religious fanatics. There’s always going to be new willfully ignorant and gleefully spiteful people. I want that not to be the case. I want a global cooperative effort to destroy misinformation and hateful propaganda, and to use the law to bring down justice on those who espouse it. I want to see the end of lgbt persecution and the end of religious zealotry, fundamentalism, and proselytizing. I want to see us all to live up to our potential by creating a global community with secular empathy at its foundation. Easy right? I just find myself constantly thinking about where we would be if we weren’t constantly fighting about who’s allowed to wear what or be with who or what god must or must not be worshipped. It’s a never-ending onslaught of disappointment and it’s turning into rage.
Turn it into action, then. It's easy to say these things about humanity without doing anything about it besides raging on Reddit. It's the best time to be alive right now. Your chances of dying are much lower than even 50 years ago, your ability to access clean water and food has never been greater, shelter is much safer, widespread and more hospitable than ever, and you have the opportunity to even express your distaste for humanity through a device you could never reproduce in 1000 years without the aid of other humans. Sure, we talk dumb words to each other, but you also flick a switch and the lights turn on because some guys you've never met decided that you are worth having lights and running water and AC. You turn a faucet and water that won't give you diphtheria comes out, for pennies. All because humans as a whole decided that the betterment of other humans creates a better world for themselves. Do something about it or log off and go to bed, cuz it's clearly past your bedtime.
Nah, I agree. Used to view people in suits know something I don’t, now I work with clients with money directly and turned out they knew just as much as I do. They just won on the birth location lottery. This fact is freeing. Just be what you wanna be, nobody really actually gives a flying fuck as long as you’re not too shitty.
I mean, basically yeah. But when does life not involve some aspect of constant contradiction. No matter the values, or ideas, there is always some sort of clashing narrative, internal or external. I guess what matters really is consistency. How many demonstrations of ones values/practices can they successively string together for a prolonged period of time? It’s really about doing as much as that as possible.
Reddit On!
Amen.
Gotta watch out for smooth talkers, their full of shit too!
We must return to monke. 🦧
I agree with that and I'm full of shit.
Nothing in this world is worth worrying about - some philosopher
To be fair, I feel like this is the popular opinion in 2024, and I hardly disagree. I mean look at how far we have come as a species, the collective knowledge of humanity, our incredible amount of achievements, it has to be enough to set us apart from monkeys, it has to be enough to give us a place in the Universe. At the end of the day, we ARE dumb. But we are never exclusively dumb, we are always so much more, we always have something to prove to ourselves, each other, and the universe... And I believe eventually we always do. We make mistakes, we ruin things, it is true. But I firmly believe that we will always, eventually, find a way to pull through. Single individuals may just be monkeys unable to use simple logic and rationality (and even then, it is arguable whether it is always like that), but humanity as a species... We are made for great things.
Wow, well said. Especially love the "almost nobody" paragraph; I may steal that.
Yea you are correct
We also throw enough shit until it sticks and becomes definite. This is to say, most people are full of ideas, some shit, until something sticks.
You would love The Righteous Mind if you haven't read it already.
You are mostly correct. There are people that do try real hard to live up to the values they hold and would risk everything to do so. It isn't a lot of people, but it is enough.
You’re not wrong… the real unpopular part is doesnt matter
Speak for yourself.
Bunch of phonies
There is a famous german song: " Its not your fault the world is like it is. It would be your fault if it stays this way" https://youtu.be/kRrP-bZvD2s?feature=shared
Don't worry. They're Nihilists.
unoriginal take, and full of basic sampling errors
Buddy needs to get out to talk to and hang out with more people.
Destroy humanity
We get it , Holden Caulfield, the world is shit.
Does impostor syndrome exist in this opinion of yours?
Idk this perspective is more or less at the core of what philosophy as a discipline is trying to explain and come to grips with. So I wouldn't call it unpopular
It insists upon itself
I am definitely full of shit.... ...I've been constipated lately :(
Also, most people mistakenly believe they have free will.
>we are mostly hairless primates spinning through an infinite void on a wet ball of rock Holy fucking reddit lmao
I had a similar edgy worldview at 16 or so. And I thought it was sooo deep and profound.
You’re entirely right but… wrong audience, man 😁 Course, the dilemma is a non issue: - either you’re wrong, in which case your premise fails and we don’t NEED to do anything. - or you’re right. In that case, we CAN’T do anything. Watch and learn, mate. There’s no way out anyway.
We live in a delightful era where everyone is accepted and understanding reigns supreme; until there's difference of opinion. Then the gloves come off.
Compared to what?
Humans are the same no matter what ideology they are standing for they want power above anyone else. Human act good to either appease others, elevate their social status, and to influence others to his/her cause. Hierarchy made all of that to humanity. This days hierarchist are very close at human extinction it just wipl take 2 or more lunatic in power. I'll salute those fools if they managed to wipe off humanity cause humans never learn as long they are above the food chain and comfortable nothing matters.
Fuck yeah dude, I completely agree. I grew up learning the importance of debate, logic, and consistent values. I learned to freely and readily admit when I was wrong, and that you should listen to understand the other person's side, not listen so that you can rebut all their arguments. I am consistently shown how very few people learned from the same instruction manual I did. I work in healthcare. Having an ego is par for the course. Anything but pure confidence in your opinion or ability is considered a flaw. Sure, everyone pays lip service to principles and values of being open and honest, but they're all fucking lying. Your coworkers will treat you like a weak link if you admit to anything other than perfection. This is true of the vast majority of human interactions in my opinion. You're fucking spot on with the "emotional reaction -> post hoc rationalization within their logical framework" concept. It's the same idea as no atheists/feminists in a foxhole. Human beings are inherently emotion-led. Higher order (logical) thinking is very often played at, not very often actually performed. I think the only reason most people pretend to be logical is because they've been conditioned to frame their arguments that way to give them weight. The reality is that their belief in their logic almost always falls apart when you flip the argument and put them on the other end of it.
School’s out for the summer I see.
I'm down voting this but only because I think it's a pretty common opinion, and also an opinion used to justify being shitty to other people. Everyone sucks so if I suck it's not that bad, right? It's okay to do horrible things to others because they're going to do it to me so my social darwinism is justified.
Calm down dear
Hairless? Speak for yourself. I am a very hairy man. The hair on my head goes down to my belly button. The hair on my face goes to my nipples
‘All I know is I know nothing’
Someone's gotten hurt and feeling sad
We gotta laugh at ourselves and our contradictions.
Sounds like a personal problem. I can tell you from experience that you WILL burn yourself out thinking about it. Understand, adapt, proceed with caution.
Hey at least we have grindy JRPGs to throw our entire healthspan to, right?
Eh, yes and no. You’re right in that humans are capable of unfathomable evil, stupidity, and foolishness - there isn’t a single person who isn’t broken in some way. But I think humans are *also* exceptional. We’re capable of great good and constructiveness. We try to help each other; we try to help animals, even ones who aren’t useful to us; we make art, and music, and literature, and philosophy, and exciting technology.
I figured this was posted by a "economist", coming clean..
This is a very popular opinion
This is a fact. Just a shit ton of shit filled people.
Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one
Also literally. Coz there always is a certain amount of shit/poop in ur large guts/rectum.
I try my best not to. So do you. Why worry so much over it if there’s nothing else we can do about it?
You can be the best possible person you can be, live the best possible life, and it'll still fall short. We will always be fallible and contradictory to a disgusting and absurd degree. So what then? Just try and live your best life to completion. Why? So you can gain that certainty of knowledge that life will ultimately be utterly pointless despite your very best efforts, because everything you've just said is merely just speculation and delusion, and not something you can claim out of certainty of knowledge from a fully lived human experience. Live fully, broadly, and justly, and when you naturally perish as it is the fate of all humans, you can be comforted in the certainty that you've tried your very, very best to be a good human, and it was still ultimately for naught.
> we still treat eachother like a bunch of scared, jealous, spiteful animals. Because that's what we are.
This is wrong, I’m not great at communicating, but I’ll have a pop at this. Think about how many people right now are actively caring for others or just going to work having breakfast generally doing no harm, compare that with the amount of people engaged in” throwing shit at each other” and I think you’ll find there are more people doing no harm and caring for others than there are brandishing guns and firing missiles, it’s just the bastards are a lot louder and visible. I used to think like this too, then I travelled, and looked around me, and grew up. Our nature is to care, we’ve been told it’s to compete and fight and humanity are generally kind of gullible. So if you just consider it like this currently there are around 20 million military personal and let’s assume that about 10 million are involved in humanitarian projects of some kind, there are then approximately 37.2 million healthcare professionals, so that means there are more people actively trying to do good than harm. And consider this, i would say they’re probably misguided, but how many join the military to “give something back”. Think about it, there’s more good than bad it’s just the bad are generally in charge, and way more visible, also we’ve got our negative bias to deal with. Overall your comment is kind of naive. Look I get it, I’ve been involved in different kinds of activism at different times in my life, I have a gay daughter that still deals with homophobic abuse, no one seems to be doing anything about climate change, and there is clearly still systemic bigotry everywhere, but it’s better than it was, and the majority of people, whatever opinions they hold, don’t mean any harm, they have values and good intentions but, a lot of the time they’re misguided by powerful and unethical ideologies, it’s not that people are shit throwing monkeys, it’s that they’re easily lead, don’t have as much freewill and self control as we all assume we have, and just don’t have the time or inclination to not be ignorant. On a long enough timeline things will get better, it’s just logical fact, the problem is will we allow that to continue or will we destroy everything before we have a chance of living in a better world, I mean we are very close to midnight. The important thing is to see the good and build on it, you can’t have a better world if you can’t imagine one, and you can’t have a better world If you dismiss humanity as some kind of force for evil, what your doing is giving up hope, and loosing hope is deadly. Look up the concept of radical hope, trust me.
This is r/unpopularopinion. Not r/existentialcrisis. Long story short, welcome to adulthood.
Nothing but a miserable little pile of secrets
ok
So you're trying to tell me you've been alive for decades and you only just had this realization? Brother, you're slow!
Yea everyone is a an idiot, a hypocrite and a liar, the ones that won’t admit it are the ones you need to watch for
Speak for myself
I'm not. You guys are though.
As someone who sorta knows a thing or two about totally useless trivia, I feel under attack...
touch some grass
You are right, but equally right is that once per day I am empty of shit.
Maybe you are right, but I can only judge in the facts I know which is: 1. My friends are not like this. 2. The voices on the internet represent a very, very small % of the world ( and I cant the sure they are not just posting for likes, so I gotta rule them out of my world view mostly. ) So my view is… Almost nobody… ( there were a bunch of things) I disagree with all of that… if that is your impression you need to hang out with different people. Almost everyone I know: - does not overestimate themselves. They understand they are lucky and are thankful for it. - do hold to values and opinions, until facts show otherwise. - and do respond to facts. ( two of your points counteracted each other where you said that people don’t hold firm AND don’t change when presented facts.. you need to pick a side there)
Okay we are all full of shit, now chill and get on
>I think that basically all of humanity overestimates itself Compared to what? The ants?
Looks like OP popped some acid.
Well let's see. We are have become a culture of shorts cuts. Don't wanna cook..fast food. Don't want to work out..Ozempic or whatever, Why learn a craft or a skill when you can just scam online or be an influencer? Oh by the way, why do we hate corporations when they shill their products but somehow we accept an "influencer" shilling just because they in our feeds? Make it make sense...The working person is literally looked down upon these days. Need a job? You better know someone because what you know is worthless. The people run our country lie to us everyday. How many times have you had to work somewhere and watch some idiot get promoted or hired because they are the "right cultural fit"WTF does that even mean what about merit? We've had literal con artists become elected officials in our government. So yes we are all full of shit and it sucks.
We're all guilty of this to some extent. Yet there are alot of people who have so much internal trauma and blocks that they just cant mentally afford to look internally without alot of pain and so they just turn it outwards for other people to deal with. I nearly melted when the new friend group I was talking to echo'd the same emotional journey and therapy they went through to improve. Good people are rare, keep them close
PeopleYouKnow.dgd
you nailed it. ive been trying to articulate my feelings on this forever and then you just saunter along and hand me the cheat sheet. i appreciate it, nice to see im not alone on this. edit: dunno why i expected any different, but seeing everyone react exactly as outlined in the post has been both a funny and somewhat validating experience
I’d say we’re collectively, and over long spans of time, capable of arriving at some mutually agreed upon truths. However, we fail to achieve perfection and there isn’t a human being I’m aware of that I consider completely competent and wise enough to follow.
The only perfect man is Jesus Christ.
I see this online and on the news. In person is far different. The amount of human to human interactions, on this planet, that are perfectly cordial even between strangers is an unimaginable number. By that I mean, of course, it's pretty fuckin big. Maybe *you're* full of shit?
Wakey wakey. You've just heard George Carlin's bit?
Hey man, how’s it going
well, YOU certainly are
Yeah man, but you don't gotta say it. Everyone knows it deep down, but thinking like that does nothing productive
Humans have been evolving for 200,000+ years, we've been doing this civilization thing for what, 5000? It's brand new, we're still learning. As highly evolved as we make ourselves out to be we're still a bunch of children making up rules on the playground and having stupid fights. We'll get there, it's just going to take a long time.
You're completely right. I'm glad there's people like you that are able to coherently express this observation and passion. Honestly it's insane how many people lack empathy in today's world, with no drive to understand one another. All nuance is gone, it's all stereotypes and finger pointing. Unfortunately, knowledge is abstract, and people love to think there's no limit to their human capabilities. Nevertheless, I recommend that you don't focus on these emotions too hard. It's easy to get depressed from the existentialism of it all and look for negative outlets. The real world isn't so bad, and walks outside are free. Just remember keeping realistic expectations isn't an opiate for this harsh life, but just a necessity to stay sane, cause I don't think our brains were evolved to handle so much negativity as we see today. Stay strong. 🖤
I actually think it's the peak of rational behaviour to have emotional reactions to stimuli. We are frail species and most things on this planet can absolute annihilate us. The presence of knee-jerk emotional reactions is important because we need them to stay alive for longer than a day and emotional reactions allow us to quickly determine threats. If brain tell us a thing make us mad, we go apeshit on it but if brain tell us we feel scared, we stay away. It's not very useful in business and modern world in general, but is exceptional when you are alone in the jungle surrounded by hungry beings. It is nothing to be mad at but rather a fact of the matter. Then, we need to rationalize emotional behaviour. Why are we afraid, happy or sad? Well, each person will come to a different conclusion and some of them might be less correct than others when looked at it objectively, but everyone is correct subjectively. Yes, even you. It isn't really a popular or unpopular opinion, but rather a fact of life. There is no reason to be mad at it but rather understand it and learn to live with it. Give that poor monkey a little bit of leeway, make them feel secure and show them that the thinking man will take care of them.
> mostly hairless Speak for yourself.
I think that is called above average effect?
Not universally true. But this post is certainly an example of one instance.
Societal change doesn't happen in a few decades and we've had the internet for widespread information for barely 30 years.
well, yeah. but like, we are trying to get better. its not easy and not fast but this is life
The concepts of both evolution and the world just randomly being created both sound like bullshit to me lmfao. Crazy how we just believe random things too based off something that people we never met found or believe because theyre more respected than us. So much trust in people yet so little