slackers

>access to almost all human knowledge >interconnectedness >hyperogranization >still confined to Earth >all of human potential is still untapped >suffering is at an all time high why is humanity slacking?

better yet: is humanity slacking am I wrong?

>>14532 It's all about curiosity, people who don't have it, never reach for the knowledge, and never learn of the many truths and perspectives you can have in life, thus the influence of the media tightening its' grasp on them, and strengthening the money, fame, work, family, etc. life values/perspectives, and if the people fail to achieve those things, they are unhappy. Probably even unhappy despite actually achieving them.

We tried to have our cake and eat it. If things go like this only 1% of population will be able to do this. No clue what you mean about human potential still untapped though

There is hypothesis of humanity reaching their peak in sense of cultural, intellectual and political development. We can only stagnate or degrade now. Seeing how autists and psychopaths are fighting over their dominance in the world atm I think that is the next step in our imminent "evolution" (ie genetic degradation in hopes of creating new weird modes of operandi). We have saturated this planet with drivel of "nice weather we are having?" because our egos fear the unknown and rejection.

> suffering is at an all time high citation needed

Suffering averages out over time. Suffering is always "high" but constant.

>>14537 Yes, for some reason, people seem to assume that all previous generations were happier, but good statistics only exist for the last few years, speaking relatively...Even primary sources can only go back so far and tell us so much. >>14532 In terms of human "slacking," my personal belief is that some of it has to do with the popular narrative that we are just fancy monkeys who are somehow destined to keep acting like monkeys in all the worst ways, even though we're actually complex "biocomputers" with sophisticated capabilities in the manipulation of symbols, among other things. It doesn't matter if we're fancy monkeys, fancy wolves, fancy octopi, or fancy geological formations: once a biological thinking entity reaches a certain complexity, its origins become somewhat irrelevant. The reality of where we came from has only a partial hold on the possibilities of where we are going. Ok, that's actually not quite right, but I mean to say that we don't have to keep squabbling in the dirt (literally realistically, metaphorically realistically, literally experientially, or metaphorically experientially) just because our ancestors (already a somewhat mystical concept, in terms of connotation) did, and yet it seems that many have internalized the opposite idea. Even on lainchan, we see talk of "my/their/our genes demand...," as though humans somehow have direct experiential access to something called a gene that whispers to them. If they have a desire for children, for instance, it's not the combination of pleasurable sensations and a lifetime of memetic exposure that causes it; it's a direct command from the almighty genetic code (to them, I mean). This memeplex is, I think, holding people back from the true experience of being what we are and replacing that experience with a flat concept of "humanity." As Kunihiko Ikuhara put it in reference to his reasons for creating Revolutionary Girl Utena, a show that is all about humans as heavily symbolic creatures, people are suffering these days because they lack imagination, even though our brains are naturally powerhouses of imagination. Anyway, I just typed this out in a passionate fit. I don't think it's the whole story, and I don't even know how coherent my argument is, but that's how I currently see it.

>access to almost all human knowledge having is not knowing is not being >interconnectedness connection without organization >hyperogranization organization without meaning > all of human potential still untapped no potential is human > suffering is at an all time high. If we suffer, we shall also reign <Like the tunneling to the surface. We must shed our own circumferences

>suffering is at an all time high source????

>>14540 Statistics for human happiness aren't accurate at all, they usually just measure them off of how much money people have and MIGHT do some polling.

>>14584 Well, there you go, then. We really don't know how happy previous generations were and apparently don't even know how happy people are now.

Too many people on the planet. All that needs to be said

>Why is humanity slacking Because commodity production run primary while humans are objectified to tools for it's unending growth via money, ultimately accumulating in the hands of a minuscule multi-billionaire few while the rest are left to manage the transcontinental machine that's exploiting their labor, in the midst of preventable social misery, disease, murder for petty monetary gain while suffering the effects of impoverishment. MUSK & BEZOS WILL TAKE ME TO MARS =D

>>14532 Capitalism, lol.

What is >all of human potential? I think we are pretty fuarrrking advanced civilization. Well, we didn't build an utopia, but for same reason we don't breed dragons and faeries. Those are abstract, unreal things.

>>14898 Well at minimum I think we should do the things we have resources to do, like make sure everyone gets health care. Utopia is just another word for impossible standard.

we specced into one tree heavily and then destroyed every country with our op min max pvp build, now the super cool utopia build can never be. its a complicated problem that requires complicated solutions but unfortunately everyone wants to pretend they do. what even is progress exactly, is our idea of it good or bad, do we need to throw it all out or is there something we did right. What about civilization, whos civilization, what was the goal of it, why does it exist. Somebody in this thread will answer all of these with answers heard a million times before, when it cant be solved in a day, its ongoing. the human calculator needs more than one processor weighing in and it needs time to and time is passing. These are questions to be kept in mind and taken out into the world and you pay attention to whats happening around you, and every day something should happen that scratches one of your answers off the list, maybe your favorite one even. i would like to establish some kind of communist unified third world theocracy, but I know its not the answer. it solves some problems I have and fixes the issues I see as pressing but probably not the ones you do. Its important not to let personal tastes, wants, desired, etc. get in the way of whats best, and its also just as important not to forget about what you personally want. Because you risk confusing what you personally want and whats best and then theres too much attatchment involved because it becomes all about you again. Thats what I think anyways. I would love and could explain in depth about what exactly I think the problem is and id get nothing but hate, id convince no one, and if I did that may be even worse. I cant imagine a solution everyone agrees upon that isnt hated or falls apart just a bit later, but im also not saying popular or majority consensus is wrong. In fact everyone loses until everyone wins. There is people whos primary position is everything is like kicking dead whales down the beach, and the rationalization and reasons why come after. If they were born into their perfect world they would hate it just as much. Often changing the internal is the real key, so maybe psychology is the answer. But at that point is that brainwashing, and does it matter that it is? Is being anti society a stance worth respecting? And how far can we stretch society or civilization, what are the bare minimum requirements for one. How much can someone be opposed to before they are just anti society in general. but overall to answer your question I think one thing I can say is that we started out and have for a very long time been working and slaving away to make things safe, because that was the primary concern for most of our history. so its no wonder maybe people arent happy or we arent on the moon, you dont need to be happy to be safe and survive (or so we thought). I like to think longterm thats a recent focus or goal. It may or not be very difficult too, if our ideas of being safe conflict with not suffering. I think we might be fuarrrked personally, I think we probably killed whichever civilization had the answers to that long ago. We would have to go "backwards" to go forwards and that tends to not happen so we just are going to keep on this train, its going to be worse than hell or any kind of violence imaginable. I dont think its that late yet actually but I think its where its going. We either killed off or converted them into our definitions of what matters and what makes you human. We could have been here right now but had access to hundreds of other groups with totally different perspectives and ideas about everything, the most basic things we can hardly imagine a different definition of. But we have absolutely nothing to contrast against, so these things just become dogma. There may have been other forms of thinking that were not "logical" but equally beneficial. Imagine how horrifying that is, if logic itself leads to hell world, but now its so ingrained to question logic makes you literally insane. And it should, its so built into all of us I certainly cant think of another way to think. If only someone could, thats the problem I see. sometimes I think about how if you arent religious, dont like prophets, then some of the very foundations and creators of our civilization and laws and ideas, were schizophrenic. so being very linear, we are living in a schizophrenic world and it could be basically a giant delusion. alternatively, because we dont listen to such people anymore because they are illogical, we have removed the potential for new pathways of civilization and thought. we boxed ourselves in. that isnt to say a schizophrenic has the answers today or tommorow, but what might be allowed to develop from such a schizophrenics delusions over thousands of years might in fact.

>>14777 Different user here, and I definitely think that mass human happiness is an intangible quantity that would be difficult to impossible to form a meaningful metric for. But the suicide rate has to be some kind of indicator, right? If people have better GDP and more assets and such, but still are killing themselves at an escalating rate, something's not adding up with our measurements of human suffering.

>>14898 You're right, maybe we oughta give ourselves some credit for doing a couple things right here and there--but the latter part of your thought is some kind of thanatos death-drive soykaf. We would have thought a lot of our modern rights and privileges were abstract, unreal things before they became the world we live in nonetheless. We have to continue to aim higher. If we don't have an ideal to work towards, we're doomed to stagnate. Possibly the ideal will be ambitious to the point of being a bit unrealistic, but that's not really material to the purpose of having an ideal anyway. Right now we could certainly afford to take care of each other and our planet a lot better. We have wayyyy more than enough energy, assets, and manpower. All our advances of a civilization will be vanity, utter vanity if we end up sharting all over our biosphere and deadzoning our oceans in the next century. Taking care of that is 100% mandatory. It's the sine qua non of a species such as ours going forward. Seems like a worthy goal to me at least.

>>14928 To begin with, even suicide statistics only go back so far. While I might agree that they provide some sort of indicator, I would also contend that the relationship between suffering as an emotional complex and suicide as a behavior is not terribly close. Think about how religious attitudes toward suicide have changed. As the influence of old Christianity declines, people tend to expect less hellfire upon self-termination and more of an empty void. That should influence whether they go ahead with it. That's only one outside factor. Increasing portrayal of suicide as a response to suffering in media could contribute to a higher suicide rate without necessarily changing the underlying levels of suffering. Do you suppose that Goethe's publishing The Sorrows of Young Werther caused suffering to increase across Europe? I imagine it did not, and yet there were a number of copycat suicides. Saying that number of suicides is a good indicator of levels of suffering across history seems to me to be similar to saying that amount of ice applied to knees is a good indicator of the number of sore knees across history. In times in which ice packs weren't considered solutions to sore knees, there would have been sore knees without ice application. The problem and the "solution" are only loosely related.

It's not that humanity is slacking, it's that there's too much verticality in our power structures. We plebs cannot hope to change much without a united and exceptional pushback, but even then that a thousand times over would still be too little. The Earth's forests are turning to deserts. The oceans are acidifying, which will take 99% of its life with it. The ice is melting, lowering the Earth's albedo and inevitably leading to extreme warming. Commercialized farming is turning the soil poisonous and acidic. CO2 is rising, which will eventually kill all large animal species. Humanity's litter has contaminated everything with plastic and heavy metals. The promoted methods of change, such as voting or recycling, does fuarrrk all to change the fundamental problems of the system we live in. In our society our biggest information sources push division and hysteria over the opinions of our neighbors, while our most expansive information source leads us all to walled gardens and echochambers. Most of people of the world cannot hope push for change because it would severely endanger their way of life almost if not immediately, and it would be in vein because they would be protesting alone. Our governments are subservient to a power structure that promotes the accumulation of wealth exclusively. Hundreds of millions of people are starving, and/or migrating, and/or a victim of indentured servitude which guarantees no future. Scientists are pushed into a 'publish or perish' culture, funded by private entities, to fuel and conform to the machine. False prophets will donate their time or money to fix a symptom but not bat an eye to the underlying problem. And so on... I can go on, but I kind of lost my train of thought in the midst of my drunk. Anyways, enjoy things as they're are, and be proactive towards yourself and your community. Keep yourself healthy and learn to be self-sufficient in every way possible. Grow your own food and learn to hunt, build a rain catchment system, reduce your energy use as much as possible, learn to repair the things most essential to you, wean yourself off of dependence of goods and services in order to live well, and so on. When the collapse comes, support your community, and be careful of those that try to seize the ensuing power vacuum. Also, don't ever Mars. Things are pretty bad there, and it's like really far. Stay on Earth.

>>14536 There is no such hypothesis. You shouldn't skip your meds.

In this talk, Evgeny Morozov proposes an act of mass amnesia. What place, person, or idea could be erased from our collective memory, and what new ideas could emerge from fruitful forgetting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1yJ8eeI2js&feature=youtu.be&t=373

>>14962 That was an interesting talk. Thank you for sharing. However, my takeaway was different from the description. I'd say that it was a talk about how educating people on the history of the Internet could lead us to understand the weaknesses of the "free and open" Internet concept that we are currently familiar with and tend to support. Hopefully that's helpful for anyone who is considering clicking the link. I'd say the ideas contained within have greater significance within this thread because he advocates for the restructuring of networks with an eye toward things like the good of citizens, etc. I suppose you could say that the current structure is not necessarily the most conducive structure to the "development" or "improvement" of humanity.

>>14962 Keep the knowledge and forget all life experiences.

>>14962 It's always possible to establish a new culture by isolating a massive group, imagine how alternative internet phenomena would look like.