Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”

Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:

“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”

Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.

New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!

Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.

Religions.

The American Healthcare system

Trump

Work to live.

Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don’t want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn’t making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It’s not a great world we’ve made for ourselves.

Ads being everywhere.

Tipping.

Hahaha i read the 102 current comments and basically 90% of those that name the absurdity is just “capitalism” or its consequences.

Destroying our only habitable planet.

How taxes are dealt with in North America. Just send me how much I owe. Don’t have me go through a service to figure it out

Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.

For instance, it’s really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can’t even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can’t do anything about it.

Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they’re literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.

Capitalism.