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Does anyone else feel that things like "camping" are performative non-enjoyable and actually sad "hobbies"? This video came up on youtube main page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1ae67XeLgY And I am thinking to myself, "why?". What is the enjoyment? Where is the fun of the hobby? Most of the time the kid is mentally "checking out" by not being in the moment of the situation by watching cartoons, the dad is performing these "ohh look its soo freezing out there" checkups for his viewers, he already had everything planned out yet he barely sleeps through the night because "he is afraid for his son". And it made me wonder, are their lives so boring and without any real hardships that the biggest hardship they can think off of is acting to themselves that they're stranded out in the wilderness and that they have to survive? Abstracted out to the most absurd level this makes me think, has the humanity lost its core purpose and drive in life? Is the current nihilism, narcissism, hedonism and existentialism just a byproduct of humanities lack of goal? The cycles of civilizations rising and falling just an aimless self serving natural cycle? I remember reading that "hobby" is actually a product of capitalism and how it steals pleasure off someone to provide profit at his job. But I wonder is this just another workaround of the same issue at hand, the existentialism and nihilism?

Depends how you do it and how authentic you want your experience to be.

The video you linked feels performative but there are other ways to camp to make it feel comfy, people simply get tired of being at home all day and go camping. Also bringing a smartphone to entertain yourself or take pictures isn't bad. I'd even say trying to live in the moment just because you're camping can be performative. It's not a black and white thing. It's similar to spending all evening on the rooftop sitting on a chair. smoking cigarettes and looking at your phone. >>38280 fpbp

>>38279 The guy in video is being performative because he's recording it for YouTube. People act a lot differently when they're not turning their hobby into content. Taking a 4 year old out in those temperatures seems really fuarrrking stupid and it wouldn't surprise me if the guy did that just to ragebait people into sharing the video.

I sincerely like camping. Its quite enjoyable in the right location, and in the wrong location it is at least fun. It, like any hobby, can be performative, and maybe its silly to force it onto people who aren't interested (I give a special exemption to parents forcing things on their kids. Should force more things! provided they are good, and camping is imho), but to those who enjoy it it is quite good. Sometimes people do it in somewhat silly ways, like any hobby though one can choose how seriously to take it.

>>38280 That is the issue. The authenticity of any activity is based on how much I hit my leg with a 2 by 4. It's all performative. Even Teds escapade and adventure. No transformative change happened from Ted, therefore its performative. He is wearing clothes manufactured by industrial society, lumber fabricated in big mills makes his home, he is even painting it with some of the paint of the processes that is harming. You might call me absolutist, I just want to see the meaning behind it all >>38281 But why go camping at all >>38283 What would you say you like about camping? How different would you say it to being just traveling around world? >>38282 Even then, checking up temperatures every few hours for others to see how cold it is and making food 5 times just so you have some kind of "survival" feature is pretty performative, even if no camera was filming so my question is WHEN does a hobby stop being performative?

>>38285 >so my question is WHEN does a hobby stop being performative? I'm genuinely curious, what is the point of your question? Why does it matter? Are you trying to create some purity test to ruin things for others? It won't work on anyone who genuinely enjoy doing any given hobby.

>>38285 >What would you say you like about camping? How different would you say it to being just traveling around world? Travelling around the world is incredibly non specific. You can visit a huge number of countries and not once camp, and you can go camping a lot and never travel 50 miles from your point of birth, most likely. Why do I like it ? Its a little hard to explain why one likes anything, but if I had to make a general explanation, it would be that by arbitrarily cutting yourself off from many comforts and conveniences,and yet trying to live comfortably, you get an excuse and an opportunity to act creatively and have your hacky solution be the best possible solution. I've heard similar arguments made for why computers are fun, because they give otherwise nonpowerful persons a safe environment over which they can be King. While camping, you likewise get to be in charge, if there are ants, you get to figure out what to do about them, or not do, and being smart and crafty can give you immediate good results that are very honestly better than the next best thing. You generally have to experience the bad thing a bit, so when you solve it its more enjoyable to have it fixed. On top of this I like being outside, like hiking, like weather, like the sun, like the dark and the quiet. Sometimes camping spots can be loud, but they generally have much less of the pervasive city droning, and far less of the city light problem.

I really enjoy camping and hiking, even though it is often physically taxing or unpleasant. I don't use my body very much at my day job, so I have a lot of extra energy that needs to be dissipated somewhere. There is also the aspect of being away from the humdrum of the city and out innawoods, looking at flowers and insects and plants and whatnot. Feels good. >I remember reading that "hobby" is actually a product of capitalism and how it steals pleasure off someone to provide profit at his job. hobbies are just a word for anything you do that isn't your job. It's a byproduct of capitalism (or more generally, industrial society) in the sense that without a world that's hyperfocused on profit (either individually or collectively), there would be no special word for something you do that takes significant amounts of work but does not generate profit.

>>38285 >so my question is WHEN does a hobby stop being performative? I don't think there's a clear line. I think it's a spectrum. On one end, there's total perfomativity where someone superficially engages with the hobby (or perhaps only pretends to engage with it) to garner some social or financial benefit (attention, higher social standing, money, prestige). On the other end, there's total sincerity, where someone truly loves the hobby and does it without any regard for social or financial benefit. Maybe they even do it knowing that it will be a social or financial negative. But there's plenty of in-between.

>>38279 Camping was the main vacation my family did when I was a kid. It wasn't like that. My parents met as a through hiker and cabin caretaker. So I think a big part of it was just that being out in nature is an important thing to them they wanted to share with their children. Also we were poor and it is probably the most affordable type of vacation if you don't buy a ton of expensive gear. Finding sticks and bugs is fun. Building fires is fun. Getting food poisoning and vomiting at the top of a mountain is memorable. I don't think the word "hobby" does it justice, it is the closest most people can realistically get to the experience of existing in our natural environment as humans. That said my father was the only one with any interest in winter camping and to his credit did not push the issue when the rest of us vetoed it.

>>38285 >Ted Kaczinski's whole police chase and literary work was merely performative because he used paint and wore clothes lmao, tell that to the people who got his mail. But of course our personal metrics for what qualifies as what may differ. Either way I'm the last person to keep you from logging off your computer right now and wander fully naked into the wilderness. However mind you, even prehistoric humans had more belongings to their name while they supposedly lived in utter harmony with nature. But then methods like fire stick hunting come to mind. But while we're already deconstructing this subject, you may as well go ahead and plug your teeth and nails out and remove your skin and so on since these were tools given to you by an unfair, arbitrary, ruthless, cruel and deeply hierarchical system where your only means of survival is to achieve some dominance (thus by extent oppression) in some niche that chance and natural selection has offered to you. That said if you've actually paid good money to be told that hobbies are a capitalist invention then you might have been ripped off.

actions are performative when they are done as a performance, and would not be done at all, or would be done significantly differently, without an audience. Hobbies can be taken arbitrarily seriously. I know a lot of people who enjoy home repair or carpentry or such things. None of them operate a lumber mill. Setting the scope of a hobby and attempting to do work within that scope makes it much more practical to get good at a thing. Lots of people around here like computers, computer programming, that sort of thing. Almost no one goes as hard as Terry Davis, and Terry Davis was mostly working on a vm; could have gone a lot harder. You can take anything to an obsurd degree, which will generally eventually turn all hobbies from computer programming to hobby airplane construction into the same survivalist routine where you'll be lucky to get into some early metal working or electronics by the time you die or go to prison.

>>38279 People who pretend to have a particular hobbit because of social pressure really exist? I enjoy occasional camping because it allow me to walk deep in the mountain, see wonderful scenery and sleep by a lake/in a forest/ wherever I like. The fact that it's free help. Some people enjoy the survivalist feel of sleeping without a tent or under the snow, whatever. I don't think anyone do it without liking it. If you don't want to be out there, don't come. We don't like when there is too many people.

>>38285 >Ted wore clothes >That makes him a hypocrite! >Born in a maze >Get tired of it >"Man fuarrrk this maze whoever put this here is an asshole." >lol you're IN the maze hypocrite! If you don't like it why are you here? Imagine not being cognizant, a legitimately cognitively impaired retard. This is what it looks like.

>Does anyone else feel that things like "camping" are performative non-enjoyable and actually sad "hobbies"? i can't tell what this actually means try using lowercasechad typing next time instead of overpuncuating your soykaf.

>>38290 >what is the point of your question? Why does it matter? I want to find the hobby that doesn't feel played out and doesn't feel performative or self-mastrubatory >Are you trying to create some purity test to ruin things for others? Totally honest? I don't care about you or the guy I posted in OP link, or any camper. Do what you like I don't care. I won't be angry because you're happy. >>38291 >Travelling around the world is incredibly non specific I would argue the opposite, furthermore the camping is "non specific" while traveling can be specific and granular. But interesting perspective, the self-dependance and self-reliance with dash of hackyness is quite a desirable aspect I like about computers, thank you for explaining it to me. >>38296 >It's a byproduct of capitalism Could capitalism and hobbies be a byproduct of something else entirely, like existentialism and nihilism? >>38300 My term of "performative" I guess is what made people missunderstand. I take the person "self" that is doing the hobby as being part of the audience, so performative activity in of itself is sort of any hobby they do to entertain themselves without any purpose or goal. How come hobby isn't "being better at your job" or "accumulating money"? Sure there are people like that, but they're weirdos and fringe minority. I guess my question is more on nature of nihilism in hobbies. >>38301 Anything can be fun if you put your mind to it. >>38302 >>Ted Kaczinski's whole police chase and literary work was merely performative because he used paint and wore clothes You can't call it a "police chase" or "literary work". Police didn't chase him, detectives did try to investigate his bombings which they failed due to poor techniques at the time, his brother ratting him out. Not much of a chase. His "literary work" is a manifesto, a small one at that, that to most sounds like ramblings without any pure goal. >you may as well go ahead and plug your teeth and nails out and remove your skin Non sequitor. Regardless, my gripe is with performative nature of his endevours, he wanted attention and fame, not actual transformation of the world. I don't have gripe with him achieving or not achieving his goal, his goal is twisted as much as was his mind. I am more of a utilitarianist in sense of our use of technology. Hammer can be used to create a house alongside few nails and wood, but also can be used to bash someones skull in. Its on how we use it. >That said if you've actually paid good money to be told that hobbies are a capitalist invention then you might have been ripped off. you missunderstood my post entirely, stop pretending world is out to get you or that I was against you, or anyone else. Go re-read it >>38323 Aren't you part of the audience? Aren't you performing for yourself? Sounds like dissociative personality disorder on my part but I think you hit the nail right on the head, everything can be a hobby, it's kind of mastrubatory and meaningless activity then, no? >>38325 It's a big club, and we ain't part of it? But also this club isn't formally a club because it isn't a hobby, you just like doing it? lmao, what a mental gymnast you are >>38348 It's hypocritical because it's empty, shallow, vapid and non-transformative. He was an attention seeker, through and through. His bombs barely worked, he prolonged his activity instead of doing a singular hard "hit" at the core of the system, which barely are some lone researchers. >>38349 ok

>>38354 >It's performative because it's not transformative That's semantically accurate, but to the same extent every philosopher is exactly the same. They thought a lot and wrote some soykaf down, "prolonging their activity without ever hitting at the core." Kinda diminishes their value, don't you think? The books written by Gulag prisoners were in vain, after all. They never DID anything! So what about propaganda? It's a transformative performance, no? Why are those concepts mutually exclusive?

worth remembering that uncle ted only got caught because his brother ratted on him. He was playing the small timey and careful murder game while also living his best life in a cozy cottage in the woods, a clear win/win. If not for the betrayal he quite possibly would have gotten away with it, and he made a much larger impact on the world in either case than most or all of the wankers on this board who henpeck at him.

>>38354 >His bombs barely worked, he prolonged his activity >instead of doing a singular hard "hit" at the core of the >system, which barely are some lone researchers. >bombs barely worked This is sort of fair, although I wonder how hard it is to make untraceable bombs from scrap >no hit at the """core of the system""" there is no literal """core of the system""" that's kind of the point of his writing you can't just kill one person and poof modernity fixed he argues that modernity is a set of ideas that are bad, and the way to only way we can dream of fixing it is by fixing those ideas IIRC the bombing was 30% a vague attempt to slow things down, and 60% a way to spread his ideas (to counter the ideas of modernity) and 10% ted being mad because his trees were getting cut down you don't have to agree with him, but you have to concede that he was very successful at spreading his ideas, which, from his perspective, was the single most important thing he could do to try and """fix""" modernity

>>38354 Hate to break it to you but anything you do for your own pleasure is inherently masturbatory by definition. It ceases to be "masturbatory" if you do it for the benefit of someone else in exchange for money... but then you're a "whore" by the same reasoning. I guess you could also find another person to engage in the activity with you without pay like soccer or an MMO, in which case it becomes "fornicatory" because you're both chasing dopamine together. Maybe don't think about your recreational activities in sexual terms if you're a prude? Caring about whether or not a hobby is "played out" makes absolutely zero sense no matter how I slice it. A fuarrrkton of people throughout history enjoying something is a reason TO do something. You shouldn't care what other people think of how you spend your free time anyway. If you're doing something unhealthy, it's not like you won't be aware. Who gives a fuarrrk if someone else thinks it's "played out"? A hobby only becomes "performative" if you're solely doing it for social validation. You're allowed to enjoy popular things like camping without feeling guilty if you genuinely enjoy it. Sounds like you've been in college too long and are afraid to be called a normal person imo.

>>38354 >Could capitalism and hobbies be a byproduct of something else entirely, like existentialism and nihilism? If we look at it from a materialist standpoint, hobbies evolved as mankind was able to secure a stable existence. Anything you can think of that one could theoretically extract any kind of personal satisfaction and mastery over, was once the domain of the elite. As we moved from a feudal society to an industrialized one, as the concentration of capital slowly began to realize social dividends, as the working class slowly afforded leisure time, did the access to such activities begin to appear universally attractive. Considering we live in a hellworld corporate dystopia, such things began a process of quantification and qualification.

>>38357 So I just have to write 125 pages no one reads and kill 4 people no one cares about to earn your respect? The truth is any given NEET on this board has had a more positive impact on the world than any given terrorist or politician. Your mindset is exactly what's wrong with modern society.

>>38422 >Terrorists are necessarily wrong The oira was unarguably right on everything. So was the forest brotherhood in the Baltics. Tarrent ended the wave of Muslim terror attack and therefore, can not been seen as a negative impact. Resistance against the government is always called terrorism, unless that government fell or is invaded by other countries, then it become heroism and is given as example to the kids.

>>38510 Teddy Bomber wasn't oppressed in any way nor was he fighting for freedom. He voluntarily was a subject in MKULTRA which unfortunately triggered a psychotic break and ruined his life. Not to mention how dead wrong he was to begin with. Like Karl Marx, he made a lot of accurate predictions but his prescriptions were terrible. You don't change society for the better by blowing soykaf up. You don't make it better by voting either. The only reason why the life of the average person is way better now than the life of the average person 100 years ago is not political ideology or religion or a lack of brown people. It's technology. If you're smart you should try to create a technological solution to the problems you see in the world. More tech is always more better. And life is better now. Do people misuse technology today? Of course. No different than bandits using knives to steal. Maybe there were no trans people 100 years ago, maybe fewer people were fat. But the truth is most people (including the rich btw) suffered from injuries, famine, disease, miscarriages, and general horror regularly. The only reason there were fewer suicides is there were fewer people. Why is that not a dystopia? The "burn everything down, do a great reset, and live off the land" meme is not the key to happiness so many think it is. Moreover, you're only delaying the inevitable because new generations will discover the benefits of technology and eventually build back society to our modern level of development.

>>38354 >I take the person "self" that is doing the hobby as being part of the audience, so performative activity in of itself is sort of any hobby they do to entertain themselves without any purpose or goal. Well that's just not what performative means. >How come hobby isn't "being better at your job" or "accumulating money"? Because the word hobby means that it isn't done as a job. That's just what it means. This is like asking "how come cheap doesn't mean expensive?"

>>38511 You missed one of his major points which was that "you cannot have the good without the bad." People cannot only have the good aspects of technology and none of the negative things it produces in the world. That will probably be true for as long as any organism or system requires energy in order to function, and produces waste as a result of conducting whatever functions it conducts with said energy. >You don't change society for the better by blowing soykaf up The majority of change that lead the world to where it is now was born out of bloodshed and secured through bloodshed. Also, you seem to keep focusing on how life was 100 years ago. Life was soykafty 100 years ago, I personally don't see many people saying that life was so much better a century ago. What I have seen on occasion is people stating that in terms of a given period of time offering more fulfillment of base human desires, like sex, creating a family, building a life for one's self overall, those times were better, and they'd be right. Male and female virginity is on the rise now while society is openly more sexually degenerate than ever, prices of rent continue to rise and with it homelessness, financial independence among youth is practically nonexistent. But that's not to say that life was great 100 years ago, particularly in America. The economy tanked, there was no work, plenty of people were starving, some people were virtually slave laborers for corporations having practically zero workers rights, and could be gunned down by thugs working for corporations if they protested. Organized crime was booming. That was the beginning of the technological society that we live in. I don't believe technology can be controlled so as to to only produce goodness or produce more goodness than negativity in the world. It can so very easily be used to subjugate people to unjust rule. Technology is the main force that is facilitating the current _technological_ enslavement of humanity. Of course technology in itself is neutral, people use it for their own purposes. People as a whole are evil, and some evil people will always be able to use technology to make their desired reality manifest. I really think that evil will always be the dominant force on earth, it is always more beneficial to one's self to be "evil", and to do "evil" things. One example would be making a lot of money very quick. The only way you can earn a lot of money extremely fast is by doing immoral things, stealing (both physically and digitally), scamming, selling drugs are some examples. There is no way to earn a lot of money in an altruistic or even mundane fashion, particularly nowadays. Aside people living on farms, hardworking honest people can wind up destitute, their labor doesn't pay off. The only people who work hard and become wealthy are extremely lucky outliers. You can find that some of those lucky few start to wage slave products to their former compatriots, talking down to the poor, hard working people, and telling them that if they just work harder and keep focused and buy whatever product they're selling to them they'll succeed as well. To live a half decent life nowadays you need to out-compete >90% of the population of your country, people are being engineered to become more competitive, they'll become more selfish and callous and will care less for the welfare of others, competing in this ratrace just so they can collect whatever scraps are thrown down to them by the elites in power whom control the flow of currency. And for altruism, it is inherently monetarily unprofitable, it could never be profitable monetarily, the world is not designed to permit such a thing. It could be profitable among animals, say a bird picks a leech off the back of a hippo, that's beneficial to both parties aside the leech. Just with the way people are at heart, many in power aren't necessarily seeking to do evil, they aren't consciously aware of the immorality of things they do, they don't try to "be evil". They try to earn money, they try to gain power for themselves or their corporation or government so they or their organization can do whatever they want for it to do, stop terrorism, protect "freedom" and deliver it to those who don't have it, stop racism and bigotry. Technology is just going to allow these kinds of people immense power, they won't know how to handle that power, they'll become corrupted, or they'll take actions with this newfound power and not completely understand the ramifications it will produce until it's too late, there's all sorts of misdoings to be made be they intentional or not. Obviously I'm just glazing over some issues. Ted Kaczynski's solution would never be an ultimate solution to last for all of time. I don't believe it can ever be realized, but if it could, it would only be for a duration of time. Everything on this planet is constantly evolving and advancing. Humans for the most part advance at a constant rate, be it rapid or slow. If all "technology", or all sophisticated technologies that facilitate the current global society were destroyed and humanity plunged back into the stone age it would eventually return to its previous state, albeit things would be slightly different. People wouldn't be using Windows computers or Macs and soykaf, but humanity would find itself in a similar conundrum. Computers would be the driving force in that dilemma. There is a logical configuration for all existing "technologies", or things, inventions, in the world. You can observe it when people point out the similarities between the components of cells to the motors found in automobiles. Their blueprints reside within the aether waiting to be uncovered. I say that only because some may think that computers could never be rediscovered.

>>38521 >You can observe it when people point out the similarities between the components of cells to the motors found in automobiles. Those comparisons are very surface-level. The actual mechanisms of action are quite, quite different. I think the main reason why convergent evolution of technology would occur is because for a lot of things there is an easiest/simplest way to do it, and that's always going to be the one that is discovered first and refined to be most useful, even if it's not the best way to do it. The same happens in evolution of organisms, usually "best" is never even approached because all optimization is local.

>>38285 Meaning is our word for expected pleasure, or things linked to expected pleasure. No one lives so they can be bored, or go to hell, it's always heaven-meeting a desire. These hobbies seem meaningless because you have a desire in the background you are not meeting, and on comes the 'quiet desperation.' If you were satisfied in every way but wanting to see a new location and move around, hiking would be wonderful. The videographer probably wants to feel more power over his environment than he ever will have, so he's acting out. Unfortunately, we are hurt chronically by many desires we cannot meet, such as the drive to be creative and powerful in an industrial system which cannot tolerate significant deviance. This is why most hobbies seem fake and meaningless-in our hearts, we know there's something else we 'must do.' But the drives we evolved to have did not evolve to be met/make us happy, nor to support industrial society. They only exist because they increased fitness, and so may not be able to be met. Sometimes, the desperate and miserable are better workers and more fit reproducers. Harry Harlow, pic related was a psychologist who had monkeys who, like in the picture, were always driven by meeting desires. When they had options to conquer their world and meet their desires, they were happy, and had meaning in their lives. When Harlow was pissy about his wife dying and trapped them in a funnel to a plain container, from which their escape, and therefore ability to satisfy desires was thwarted, they became permanently damaged if left in there long enough, not caring about life. Harlow said of his torture "this is what depression feels like," which I would change to "this is what meaninglessness is." You will find the meaning when you find ways to live a life of consistently meeting your desires. One place to start is feeling loved, I think most of us come to appreciate anonymity because we expect abuse. I'm trying to set up minstral AI as a 'friend/lover' on my PC which isn't going well, and I've been messaging with family more, personally. I'm also trying to create a device to mimic the feeling of loving touch, if it can be done. If you want to work together, email me at contral/gesic@pos/teo.n/et/

>>38521 >more fulfillment of base human desires, like sex So you're a degenerate. >Male and female virginity is on the rise now while society is openly more sexually degenerate than ever Pick a lane. You can't whine about not getting laid while simultaneously whining about how everyone is too sexually degenerate. >creating a family This isn't a problem for anyone who has their soykaf together. >financial independence among youth is practically nonexistent People had way less financial freedom in the past. These days it's almost viable to not even need a job in the first place, let alone a factory job where there is at least a maiming or death each week. Before that, you were either a born an aristocrat or a craftsman's son. If not, your options were be a criminal, a monk, a soldier, or a subsistence farmer. Of course if you were born a woman you wouldn't have any financial independence to speak of until the 1970s but something tells me you don't really consider women people anyway. Now no matter to whom you were born you're free to research, invest, start a software company with practically no initial capital, etc. Even if you're retarded you can create youtube channel that makes you a million dollars a year. If you're not taking advantage of the unprecedented financial freedom you now, that means your personal lack of financial independence is your fault. Btw, you can still be a subsistence farmer if you want with WWOOF or joining an intentional community or becoming Amish or buying 10 acres of land in the boonies. That never stopped being an option. But you won't do that because you don't actually want to because it's not better than your current life. >To live a half decent life nowadays you need to out-compete >90% of the population False. Especially compared to people at any time in the past, yes even the 1990s. You're just comparing yourself to the top 10% of people you see online and thinking you're owed the same life without putting in the work. Your life is just not that bad. >Tech allows evil people to have power Like I said, knives are technology. So long as weapons exist, evil will be done. At least now they're just getting you addicted to the internet instead of raping your family in front of you before capturing you as a slave. >Ted's solution Regardless of what he ranted about in his manifesto, all he actually did was bomb locations. I'm glad you admit that his ultimate goal of returning human civilization back to the stone age is impossible. Maybe when you're a bit more mature you'll realize it's also not a desirable goal to begin with.

Because it is fun. Trees and rocks are cool, is is nice to not be in the cocreate soy hellscape, to build fire, to see stars. To build something and have the fruits of you real labor. Also there is no such thing as "capitalism inventing "'; capitalism is not an implement system it is a result of people doing whatever they want. Some people want to make paintings, or build soykaf so there are people making supplies for such endeavors.

>>38524 Not that guy >False. Especially compared to people at any time in the past, yes even the 1990s. You're just comparing yourself to the top 10% of people you see online and thinking you're owed the same life without putting in the work. Your life is just not that bad Double false. No, it’s way worse than ever in that regard, you absolutely need to out compete 90% of the population in your country if you want a good life. By good life I do not just mean “be able to jerk off and have food”, because that is not a good life. To have a family, a means of supporting them, a future, food that isn’t poisoned, to be able to live in an area where you aren’t packed in like sardines, to not have to work for most of your waking hours, you absofuckinlutely need to be out competing most people. Denying this is just plain delusion and there is no way you are convincing me that people are getting this stuff without outcompeting 90% of the population. If anything less than what I said is considered a “good life”, by you, we will never see eye to eye and there is zero point in saying anything else here.

>>38526 I just think all your claims are absurdly defeatist due to my own personal experience: >To have a family, a means of supporting them, I'm a construction worker so I work with a lot of Mexicans and Blacks. While I don't have a family nearly each one of them does. Well, the Blacks usually aren't technically married but they own their homes, while the Mexicans are married and rent. I think most of their wives work too though we rarely talk about that. >a future, That's more or less up to how well their kids do in school. Given that they're minorities it's highly likely their kids will get scholarships if they try. There are obviously no guarantees. Their kids certainly have a better shot at moving up in socioeconomic class than they would have had at any time in the past. >food that isn’t poisoned, Maybe there was less pesticide but there were definitely more parasites. Again, stop romanticizing the past. It goes without saying that malnutrition was rampant among the poor and most people were poor throughout history. You can't deny that in modern times even our poor are fat. And you're acting like healthy food isn't an option these days. Why? Because it's too expensive? Not a lot of poison in black beans and brown rice. Perhaps you didn't know that food used to cost way more up until the Green Revolution in the 1960s. If you are willing to pay the same amount as your grandparents did or start a small garden yourself, you can eat as little poison as they did. Oh yeah, and they consumed WAY more lead than you due to it being in their gasoline and water pipes. >to be able to live in an area where you aren’t packed in like sardines, I live in a rural area outside of a mid-size city. I bought a 3-bedroom fixer-upper in 2019 for $80K that is now worth $120K, though I'll concede I really lucked out. If all goes according to plan my mortgage will be paid off in 5 years. >to not have to work for most of your waking hours Our shifts are 8 hours, but trust me, none of us work that hard in construction. Some of the family men even have the energy to get certified for a higher paying trade job. Others get drunk and high on the job (including me). >By good life I do not just mean “be able to jerk off and have food”, because that is not a good life. I agree, that alone is not a good life. But it's definitely better than not having access to those things and our ancestors often did not. Don't forget about all the other stuff we now have like bidets, air-conditioning, washing machines, etc. Sounds like you can't get hired for a cushy six-figure white-collar job, you don't want to get your hands dirty, and you don't want to take any entrepreneurial risks. So you just whine about how unfair everything is and demand communism.

>>38527 It is true that pretty much everything is better by any conceivable metric now than it was 100 years ago (with the exception of anything to do with non-human-inhabited areas -- they've been shrinking and going to soykaf lately) but to be honest it's all still pretty bad and I think communism would be a strict upgrade.

>>38529 Well, countries keep trying communism and it doesn't seem to ever work on a large scale. Maybe if there was a communist state that also allowed citizens to directly vote on legislation it'd work, but so far they've all been representative communism. Can you give your personal definition of communism?

>>38524 >So you're a degenerate. >Pick a lane. You can't whine about not getting laid while simultaneously whining about how everyone is too sexually degenerate. You contradicted yourself with these two statements. Also pointing out a problem is not the same as complaining of one's own problems which you should know unless you just have some kind of kneejerk reaction where if somebody says something you've been programmed to dislike, you'll jabber at them. >This isn't a problem for anyone who has their soykaf together. It is a problem. You're just shrugging off valid criticisms without any reasoning of your own. Infertility is somewhat common now, people struggle to have children. Would-be parents cannot afford to support children, they can hardly afford their own rent and utilities, let alone the costs that would come of having a child. These days often times both partners in a relationship have to work leaving little time for them to even look after a child. One can say that parents can "find a way" to make it work, but that just isn't going to happen in the majority of cases with parents. When raising a child effectively you essentially have to have somebody at home looking after the kid, a nanny isn't going to work if you can't afford one, and if you don't already have kids you can't have them look after a younger child. You can't just leave your kid home for 8+ hours a day, not everyone can have it where one parent works a morning shift and one a night shift, the real world just doesn't always allow for an idyllic situation. People didn't have way less financial independence. People could still go off, make their own way, and start their own life. Not only that but there were government subsidized programs which encouraged young people to follow career paths and provided them support, the G.I bill would be a perfect example. That bill quite literally set some people up for life. Now, if you're young what are your options? Try to find work, send out countless resumés to various businesses and get to response, if you're lucky, get an interview and maybe get accepted so you can work a soul crushing minimum wage job and live with your parents because you can't earn enough money to support yourself and live on your own. Either that or go to college for 4 years minimum and put yourself in debt for tens of thousands of dollars, only to get out and have just as much difficulty finding work as people who didn't even go to university. It was not like that before. >False. Especially compared to people at any time in the past, yes even the 1990s. You're just comparing yourself to the top 10% of people you see online and thinking you're owed the same life without putting in the work. Your life is just not that bad. At this point you're just projecting your own inadequacies onto me, as if I scroll through social media looking at things and feeling that I deserve them. Where the hell did that come from? You assume I use social media, you assume I feel that I deserve things, you assume my life is "not bad". What I said is true, normal people can barely get by each month. People can hardly afford their bills and their rent, I mean there's a ton of people that just break even each month and have a couple of dollars leftover. I'd have times, alongside my family as well, where we'd break even if lucky, but usually we'd just be losing money because it's becoming practically impossible to survive anymore. What I consider a decent life to be is this: Not worrying about being homeless in the winter because you can't afford the rent. Not wondering whether or not you'll be able to eat food 2 days from the present day. Not being stressed about paying for bills. Essentially, not being so stressed you can hardly enjoy what life you barely have left. >>Tech allows evil people to have power Oversummarization of what I said. I'm not even talking about random scumbags who go around raping and killing people, they are harmful, but manageable. What is not manageable is the people in power who've quite literally brought the average man to his knees with all of the stressors introduced into modern life. >Regardless of what he ranted about in his manifesto, all he actually did was bomb locations. Did you even read his manifesto? This makes it sound like you didn't. Anyway your post is a perfect example of the callous disregard that people are being socially engineered to have toward their fellow humans. But it's what works right? It's just the way to be now. You say you're a construction worker so you couldn't be the privileged user you sound like. Either way when confronted by proof that the current system we are all living in provides next to nothing for the labor of its people, you just immediately blame the people. They just don't try hard enough, they just don't have their soykaf together, they just complain too much about nothing. I'd have to assume your post is not even serious, I doubt it is.

>>38530 >Well, countries keep trying communism and it doesn't seem to ever work on a large scale. I believe communism is better purely in a theoretical sense; it is an ideal to strive for, a thing we can only recognize as good due to the thinking, enlightened part of our selves, as an alternative to accepting the present state of things as reasonable or good. While realizations do not always leave us better off, trying always results in net positives in the end (e.g. fear of communist revolution motivating labor reforms in the early 20th century as a compromise with the working class)

To me, camping is not at all about filming youtube videos. So no, camping is not sad, but I think it's sad if you have to watch cartoons and film youtube videos while camping. That defeats the point of camping to me.

>>38532 Not the guy you're responding to, but his criticisms are not contradictory. The very first thing you mentioned in your earlier comment as being a problem was lacking "a fulfillment of basic human desires, like sex" which both implies you think sex is extremely important and that you think sex is difficult to come by. If you weren't a "degenerate" you'd have said contributing to society was extremely important and lacking in the modern world. But then in the very next breath YOU criticize modern society for being too sexually degenerate i.e. being driven by their base human desires. Not needs by the way. Plenty of extremely successful and productive people throughout history were celibate monks. You shouldn't even be thinking about sex until you're married. Even then, sex isn't something you should even do more than a couple times a year, max. Birth control, condoms, abortion, and sodomy (which includes all non-procreative sex) are sins. God tells us sex is for procreation, not pleasure, and it's irresponsible to have more kids than you can raise properly because then they become everyone else's problem. Instead of posting online about how sex is imperative to life fulfillment and most men are unable to get it (except you of course), maybe consider going to church tomorrow.

>>38538 It is contradictory if he's going to imply I'm a degenerate and then a second later say that I'm not a degenerate. It's not my fault you can't perceive contrast. What do you want me to say, people are "more openly sexually promiscuous than ever." In spite of that more people are having sex less often. As for the "promiscuity", I will say that it's degenerate, when you have kids acting out on social media doing sexual stuff it absolutely is.

>>38541 You must be in denial because I'm not sure what you're missing here. You were trying to explain how modern life is worse than the past. The first thing that came to mind for you was how difficult it is for modern men to have sex (except you of course). You claimed sex is a fundamental requirement for life fulfillment. You couldn't have made your priorities any clearer. Maybe it's hard for you to understand because your mind has been so darkened by porn. I'll spell it out for you one more time: people who are not degenerates don't crave sex with the same hunger they crave food, career accomplishment, or friendship. If you seriously think sex is a requirement for life fulfillment then you are necessarily a degenerate. Yet at the same time, you decry the sexual degeneracy of modern society. That's why I couldn't help but comment on this hypocrisy. Did you never consider how we got to this point? The idea that everyone needs sex to be not just happy, but fulfilled, is a modern liberal belief that only began with the sexual revolution. Both young men and women "having less sex than ever" is a great thing for society. Us non-degenerates don't need to worry about what the degenerates are doing. If you actually want to work hard and start a family there is no shortage of single women at churches. Don't expect them to do the things you see in your pornos though. It's not too late for you to try living for something other than sex.

>>38542 not him but ehh, a lot of people get a lot of fulfillment from their families, having a family I think is probably a better marker of success than having a job. Sex is kinda a big part of having a family. If fewer people are starting families, having families, you kinda have to wonder why. Maybe the average person is less successful nowadays. Maybe they 'dont want to' or something, but if you don't want to get a job and so just hang out in your mothers basement you're generally considered unsuccessful, whether or not thats 'what you wanted'. Also what the fug I dont even want to read the whole backlog here to figure out how the 'why do people go camping' thread became yet another thread on sexual degeneracy and incels.

>>38547 Oh come on, the reason people aren't having families is not because they're mindless animals who never heard of condoms. It's not like people want to start families but just can't figure out where to put their genitals. Starting a family requires marriage, planning, and having your lives together. So much more than just sex. The word "sex" was used for a reason. You're trying to deflect by stretching the meaning of words. If you're this uncomfortable admitting you're a sex addicted degenerate, that may be God's way of telling you to go to church tomorrow. People aren't starting families because the state got involved with marriage. Also people would rather succumb to the temptations of porn, homosexuality, drugs, movies, anime, etc than get their lives together. You don't even need sex to have a family and the huge number of Christians who adopt proves that. Whenever people have unplanned babies it usually ends badly or even in the child's murder. I reiterate, plenty of single women at the church ready to start a family with a provider. But you will be disappointed if all you're really after is a bangmaid. Sex is not a right.

>>38550 OK maybe I was overextending a bit by taking that guys talk about sex to mean 'family', but these are closely associated things. A good argument for why they're not directly connected is birth control and maternal infanticide. You hint at this a little bit, but I think we can easily imagine solutions like forced marriage in the case of unplanned pregnancies between unwed persons. Creating a family doesn't require very much planning, doesn't require formal marriage in advance, doesn't require any of these things at all. One of the very few things which it does require is sex. I shall pretend to not have read your silly comment on adoption. If you can pretend not to have written it then the world shall be a merrier place, thank you. While I care about why TFR is down and marriage rates are down and all these things, from what I gather this tangent in particular developed out of the question of whether things are better today than they were 100 years ago. By this metric which I think is fairly important, it seems likely the case that they're not. Can you agree with that ? Why this happened is yet another tangential conversation that I'm sure we can get into later, maybe in the thread about bushcrafting books, or perhaps the webring thread, up to you. >sex is not a right on this we are in agreement. But that doesn't mean its not as essential to human life as eating, food being, of course, also not a right. Getting the right people to have sex (and families) is a matter of societal importance.

>>38553 >But that doesn't mean its not as essential to human life as eating If you don't eat you die. If you don't have sex you're maybe sad. They're not the same.

>>38555 on any significant timescale they're both essential you myopic glitterboy.

>>38557 "Essential" on. a societal level. A person can survive and even have a fulfilling life without ever having sex, and not everyone needs to have sex for society to survive or thrive. Same cannot be said for food.

>>38553 Wrong. Food is a human right. Even prisoners in Gitmo get food.

>>38560 >"human right" I always had a gripe with this term. "It is your right to have [X]", really? Who will provide this "right" to you? A government of some sort, so why is it "human right"? We have seen time and time again that governments can and WILL allow total disregard for said "human rights" to get their way. And in case of UN they will push and enforce some human rights on other countries in some goal of geopolitics. So instead of having that clear orwellian propagandist terminology why won't we call them what they trully are, "human priviledges". The fact of the matter is, no government can give you rights and no government can relinquish those elusive "human rights", if they were to exist it would be a misnomer then. So, this is on the same level as those "international world day of acknowladging forests" or "mothers day". Shit nobody cares about but total zogbots that eat that sh1t up because their lives are so vapid they have nothing better to do than to care about "human right violations in Zimbabwe" or Timbuktu. You were duped into believing those words exist. They don't.