I don’t know what that means “not the sort of person to seek wealth”. I get you aren’t the type to go work for a Wall Street hedge fund or anything like that. But most people have to incorporate at least a little bit of “wealth seeking” into their overall life plan.
Agree. No matter how ethical, down-to-earth, “authentic” etc, one wants to be, you need cash to not just survive, but to last after finish earning an income. I “seek wealth” not so that I can buy a Porsche and a yacht, but so that I’ll have a roof over my head, and can buy food until I die. And the “until I die” part is not predictable; it’s just a giant guess.
I’m not really sure what you want me to say here, but I’ll try to provide a basic response? I suspect there might really just be a gap between how we see the world (which is fine, of course). Not trying to convince you of anything beyond maybe “people are different”. Hiding the response in a dropdown section because it’s a little off-topic. If you’d like to continue this part of the discussion for much longer, perhaps it’d be better in one of the other threads I started, or feel free to make a new linked one? Just trying to be respectful to the OP here.
Click to expand slight tangent about money
Maybe in the same way that the climate might not seem like an urgent, pressing matter to some, money has just never been an urgent, pressing matter to me? It doesn’t mean that the person who downplays climate can survive without edible crops or drinkable water, or that I can survive without money. Rather, I think it might just mean we have enough of either to get by, and beyond that, it doesn’t seem like an immediate, dire threat, and so it’s deprioritized relative to the myriad other hopes and worries we each already have?
To me, money comes and goes. It’s just another chore to deal with, like laundry or taxes, but the less time I can spend thinking about it, the better. I need enough to pay rent and buy food, but I try my best not to dwell on it any more than I have to. When I have enough, it’s one less worry, but it doesn’t really bring me any added hope or joy. When I don’t have enough, then of course it’s a concern, and I have to divert my energy and focus away from whatever I was doing in order to deal with it. Then once it’s ok again, I try not to think about it too much. That’s all.
Of course, this is the perspective of someone who’s always been lucky enough to have had enough money for at least the basics. Even at my poorest I was only ever lower-middle-class/upper-working-class, so I never had to worry about starvation or health collapse or anything like that. And even when I was very briefly homeless, I had a comfortable car to sleep in and friends who would shelter me. I was never truly “poor” poor by the standards of American poverty, much less by the standards of international poverty. It was fine, if not ideal.
I don’t remember those days as being particularly unhappy or stressful… Certainly it was less stressful than thinking about ecological collapse or the end of democracy or even just the end of abortion. For me, at least… certainly people are different and have different priorities. I don’t have (or want) a house or kids, for example… If I did, I’d expect my values to be quite different.
But to bring it back on-topic, in the context of this thread, all it really means is that that my personal financial situation has very little bearing on my feelings towards the future. That was shaped more by Star Trek than any bank statement 
As for my disappointment towards the present, that’s also not because of my finances, but simply because I grew up in a more collectivist country with relatively functional governance, and have visited and lived abroad elsewhere. American-style individualism seems unrealistic and quite unhealthy to me, as does our self-made societal problems that other developed countries simply do not have (like mass shootings or the lack of meaningful healthcare for large swaths of the population), to say nothing of our political system that disenfranchises most voters (regardless of their ideology) in favor of the ultra-wealthy. American society and especially American government just seems sick to me in a way that most other developed democracies do not. You can make me a millionaire overnight and I’d still think that. Probably because you could make a millionaire overnight; i.e., why do we optimize for individual lottery winners rather than overall societal well-being.
The collectivism thing is especially relevant here, I think. I don’t see my personal financial situation as any sort of meaningful indicator for the future… because at the end of the day, it only affects me (and maybe my partner and our cat). It has no real bearing on “the future” as a whole. Meanwhile something like climate or democracy or, yes, inflation and the economy, can reverberate across billions of lives and numerous generations. That’s why it bothers me. I see myself as just one insignificant part of a whole, and it is the whole that is worth protecting. My country is more important than myself. My planet is more important than my country. Life is important than my planet. (And by extension, AI may one day be a form of life, though of course that’s controversial in the present day).
Ideally all could be protected, but at this point I think it’s too late for the US. Maybe not for the planet, fingers crossed. But worst case, all I can do is hope that at least life in some form keeps going. That, and the small joys day-to-day, keep me going. Exercise and nature keep me happy. My personal finances don’t really factor into it as long as I can keep putting food on the table and such.
Does that clarify anything at all, or just make it all even more confusing? lol. Again, not really trying to convince you of anything. People are just different.
(Separate from the above post)
Hmm, I thought I made a new “linked topic”, but I must’ve screwed up. Posting that new topic manually in case anyone’s interested:
(mods, if there is a way to fix that link so it works as it’s supposed to, please let me know. sorry about that)
I guess I get it. I don’t agree so much with the “collectivist” part, but I do think that America is maybe becoming too focused on “individualism” in an unhealthy way.
It seems to me that all this technology is being used to turn people into isolated, independent “nodes” that can be swapped out or replaced at work, fed entertainment and advertising so they buy stuff, and otherwise “processed” for their various interactions. In many cases, there is a significant benefit in doing this in terms of cost and convenience.
Long term, I think there is a cost though in terms of isolation and lack of human interaction. Institutions like neighborhoods, the workplace, and romantic relationships used to provide a sense of stability and community. Over time, these things have become very transaction. I encounter a lot of articles online describing how loneliness is a major issue or people have trouble finding friends or romantic partners. And I think that highly individualistic, transactional mentality is a leading cause of that. Modern tech makes it too easy to just sit at your desk all day and have all your needs delivered to you.
As I alluded to early, I think this makes it too easy to present a world to people that isn’t “real” if their entire world is viewed through a HDTV screen. Or it turns people into a series of metrics that perhaps doesn’t tell the whole picture of what they are about.
I think this is phrased well.
I recently travelled to Kenya and posted about it here. Others correctly pointed out the inability to assess a country’s society based on a limited visit, but I remain impressed by what I did see that suggested values and attitudes different from the US. Namely, a lack of pursuit of unnecessary consumer goods, and an awareness of how one’s individual desires and actions might affect the community. My impressions are likely naive, inaccurate, and non-comprehensive, but my impression did highlight what impresses me as unhealthy and undesirable about so much that I perceive in the US.
I’ve long been confused as to what actually were US values, and why chants of “USA!” were anything other than jingoistic bullying. The recent election and Chimp’s 1st week have given me some clarity - but not in a favorable manner.
It is interesting to wonder how the world will function if the US were not so dominant. I do not think it necessarily would devolve into some dystopia. And many living outside the US might prefer such a system.
As you have implicitly noted with the recent election, U.S. values include a priority on: control of wealth, concentration of power (especially when it comes to life and death issues), fame, beauty and the ability to do anything one wants no matter how immoral, illegal or hurtful…and get away with it. Above all, having more of all of that.
I think these have always been “U.S. values,” but Trump has taken it to a new level. He is the inevitable byproduct of Capitalism where the overriding goal is the pursuit of profit. This naturally brings out the worst in humanity and government.
The only hope for the future in the next two years is that things won’t be as bad as many worst case scenarios would have it. The only ones who can stop Trump are congressional Republicans and they’ve shown they’re only willing to do that when he encroaches on their power. Otherwise, they are along for the ride and profit.
Yeah, because having wealth, power, and beauty is awesome and living out of your car sucks (no offense @Reply ). Personally I’d pass on fame and prefer to be anonymously rich and powerful behind the scenes where no one notices you, but I digress.
Except that doesn’t reconcile with my observations out in MAGA country where my inlaws live where people, by and large, are not wealthy, powerful, famous, or beautiful.
In response to @theportchicagowitnes the bot’s one and only SDMB post, I don’t really understand these people in spite of my vast intellect and education because there does not appear to be any consistent logic or reasoning there.
I’m trying to work out how my inlaws who can barely operate a modern smart TV, my middle-aged unmarried Facebook friend who loves trolling people with quotes that sound like they are taken out of Incel Quarterly Magazine, and tech megabillionaire Elon Musk (who is so rich, we have to talk about the wealth disparity between Elon and less fortunate billionaires) are ideologically aligned with Donald Trump.
Except they think they will be, and want the wealthy to be extra privileged so they can share in that “when” they get rich. It’s been like that as far as the Civil War, when many Southern soldiers supported slavery because they wanted to own their own slaves.
I don’t think my 80 year old inlaws or most rural MAGA folks think they will get rich. In fact I think it is disingenuous and a bit dangerous to believe that.
What these people want is to go about their simple lives, go to work at their regular jobs, raise their families in their regular homes in regular towns, and do whatever it is they do on weekends. What they see (and to a large extent framed in a right-wing context by FoxNews and similar media) is that there are all these rapid changes taking place in the world that they don’t really understand and often seem bizarre to their sensibilities. But they feel the impact in the form of lost jobs or cultural shifts (like why are there more than 2 sexes now?) or strangers moving into their town.
And I think they feel that the government is looking out for every interest except for theirs.
They are a different group from the privileged MAGA people who own businesses or work in finance who just want deregulation so they can make more money.
Because as far as they are concerned unless they can kill or enslave the entirety of the rest of the human race, they are “oppressed”. They are constantly pandered to, but it’s never enoguh for them.
People who are not exactly like them exist; and that is an offense they are unwilling to tolerate.
Yeah, it’s over.
I’ve still got fight in me, so no I haven’t given up.
Yeah - I get that. And I have some sympathy for/understanding of folk who are distraught that the world they knew seems to be changing so much. But at least the white, straight, christian folk generally do not appreciate the privileged status they benefitted from that was not enjoyed by all. Sucks that all of THEM aren’t happy to just quietly remain in their places. And - excuse me - these salt of the earth folk are fucking morons if they allow themselves to believe Fox and to support such a clearly horrible individual as Trump.
See my post of 1/25 above.
I’m not really structuring my perception of reality in ways that are meant to be useful for you. But I guess if you’re looking for news you can use:
- Don’t have children;
- If you do have children already, see if there are ways they can get other passports and get out of the US:
- Try to maintain your dignity, don’t turn a blind eye to the oppressed, don’t normalize fascism by maintaining friendly relationships with fascists, none of that “we just don’t talk politics” nonsense that got us to this point;
MIT is one of the world’s foremost experts in the STEM fields of Engineering, Math, and Science. I think what they would hope when they put the study together is that we would stop doing business as usual. We would better stewards of our resources, take better care of our environment, and not be so wasteful. As leaders in their fields they probably felt they had a duty to warn others once they reached these conclusions using hard math and science.
Unfortunately, it seems we have not really changed our trajectory, but it still did not change MIT’s duty to the public. I didn’t really like the results of the study either and especially our lack of action to it. It still might not be too late to avoid the absolute worst effects of a societal collapse and maybe the powers that be may ultimately act in a responsible manner.
But, for your own sake, don’t come here to Canada. Greenland’s probably another bad bet.
Back to the OP’s question, as a Canadian, I have no bloody idea about hope for the future these days.
I have no hope for the future that I thought was coming.
If continuing to live in whatever the US is devolving into is “the future”, I’m pretty apathetic. Virtually everything I’ve known and held dear is being systematically destroyed. Every new, despicable thing one of the cult vomits on the public sucks out just a little more of my will to live.
Yeah - hope is a curiously defined thing. No, no hope that in my lifetime (age 64) I’ll see the US continue an upward arc from where it was for much of the teens. About the best one could hope for these days is that the current apparent downward trend is arrested or not as bad as feared, and that the US can improve back to some time - I dunno - maybe 30-50 years ago?