I don't know what you're calling collapse, but the story above is the story of someone living through it right now. It's not 4-5 years away, it's right now.
If you go by something like "loss of basic amenities and rights to a majority of people" then the world as a whole has basically been in collapse for as long as any of us have been alive, taking third world countries into account. If you go by "collapse has to be marked by one single big event starting it, something like 9/11" then we're essentially waiting for the Bell Riots.
Clearly suffering exists, but then I would argue that 'society' still does too (even if it's getting less social by the day). People are still living lives, even if unsustainable; we're not seeing large, widespread riots and global shortages of basic amenities in modern Western countries (yet).
The process of collapse has been underway for years. The point of collapse, where it is generally acknowledged that a system can no longer deliver its promised goods and services and requires replacement (not just tinkering), has not been reached because elites remain in denial.
Exactly! Also the climate refugees have been happening for 5 years or more. And the resource conflicts that have been happening for a couple of decades now. I mean, so, so much.
If this is what you call a story of collapse, I urge you to research true collapse of the past in other countries. People aren't having to eat their children, the majority people aren't even starving. Collapse hasn't truly even begun. It's weird the comments rooted in fact on here that get downvoted but somehow this was awarded and highly upvoted? There is a remarkable amount of misinformed people on this sub lately.
Couple of things here. First is that the original post is now behind a wall and I didn't screencap it, so I can't refer back to it.
Second thing is that with systemic problems, such as global warming, it's almost impossible to point to any one thing and say "that's the start" because it's always a slow process. We can only see what happened in retrospect and say "it seemed to start around here somewhere." An example would be the collapse of the Roman empire. When did the collapse start and when was it done? We haven't even agreed to that, but we can say "it was here and now it's not."
Finally, yeah I agree that we ought to define terms. "Collapse" is still pretty vaguely defined even on this sub.
To say we are currently in collapse and to even compare the issues we face to those of other cultures is generous at best. Soviet era collapse for example is well documented. Sure, you could argue "when did it start/end?" But even the beginning phases of a true collapse is sheer terror in comparison to our situation. Governments haven't turned on their people yet, we literally have free access to an open internet in most of the world. Again, people largely aren't starving. These things are the first things to be controlled in a true collapse and we are quite far off of that, and this is coming from someone who believes our way of life has about 10-15 years left tops
See, this is why it's important to define terms. Just because a "large portion" of the global population isn't "starving" doesn't mean the conditions don't exist to make that an eventuality. And you won't see the start of the collapse because it'll happen in small pockets at first and spread.
But back to my first comment. Luckily someone did screencap the antiwork post that started this. /img/c3wodsoul3e81.png
What the poster is describing is the economic/political/social pressures that are building up for that kind of collapse. The poster is reporting how those factors are building up and are impossible to fix. They are describing the collapse.
Cannibalism doesn't start when you miss a meal or two or three. It starts when someone realizes that they will die if they don't. That's what the original poster is describing.
It's beginning. It's going to be a process of a few years, but yeah It is beginning in the US. Logical when a state assumes huge social differences and does little to combat them.
I'm no deplorable, but we were lied to about the scope of what was going to happen in the last 24 months.
What, you mean the almost one million extra deaths from covid in the US, and many millions more worldwide? Granted, we could have sought a more practical balance between caution and keeping society running...which might have happened if we had two rational main political parties.
The 2 weeks thing absolutely would have worked- if people had actually followed the prescribed actions. Heck, we could have done a lot of flattening if everyone had worn a mask in the beginning; but noooope. People gotta be stupid and politicize the science behind fucking facemasks, until a sizeable minority don't even wear one.
No. Sorry, people should do what is best for their society. It's no different than driving drunk. If you aren't vaccinated (or you are drunk) you shouldn't have the "freedom" to put people at risk. Just do what is right. How is that so difficult for these morons who are unvaxxed or unmasked. I'm sick of coddling these idiots who put politics over the science.
Also, no one is "locked inside their homes". At least not in most countries, especially the US. That's a ridiculous red herring.
It's not "just old and unhealthy people" getting affected by covid, but even if it was we would want to try to mitigate that. The problem now is having one group of people who are possibly over cautious and another group that is wantonly reckless, instead of working together to figure out a practical compromise.
The people who have refused vaccination should agree to wear masks everywhere they go, and sign a waiver that they won't ask for modern medical help if they catch covid. Those would be mature compromises. Instead the rest of us are stuck with the consequences of having so many people unwilling to take any action to help minimize the effects of a dangerous virus.
We all have blind spots, but willfully rejecting modern knowledge is going to end up contributing to the decline of our society. And that trend is not happening equally for all.
So, despite 50,000+ years of human civilization making it through dark times and consistently ushering in a better world, awms11 here has "thought about it" and "has a sense", so... close the books, now is the time (oh wait you don't give a date, you just get to be ambiguous so that if anything bad ever happens you can feel like you were right).
Yeah humans have always failed at solving problems while some rando on the internet figured out everything because they've "thought" about it and decided - and cannot be questioned - that we're objectively all fucked. How will humanity recover from your shit posting.
Do you think civilization has been a steady upward line since Cro-Magnon? Or maybe, throughout history, civilizations have built up and then collapsed as a challenge that could not be overcome presented itself to that given society.
Right now we are on the doorstep of at least 4 or 5 civilization-ending challenges. Climate change, mineral scarcity, energy scarcity, population overshoot, and a staggering wealth gap all come off the top of my head. Do you have the solutions to all of those problems? Can those solutions be implemented before we are overwhelmed? I doubt it.
Meanwhile, wealthy mansions have all of these beautiful water features in Arizona, Henderson NV, southern California, etc. How many large swimming pools does one need? Walkways surrounded by water, fountains.
One of my interests is architecture and design, the excessive water use by these wealthy houses is appalling and repugnant.
Yes, this too, there needs to be a lot more focus on turning lawns into environments for plants native to the area, period. Make the environment kinder to the animals that live there instead of putting down engineered grass and pumping it full of pesticides and fertilizers to make this abomination thrive while using far more water than is logical and necessary.
Yes, this too, we are poisoning ourselves to death even before we finish the job of altering the atmosphere with climate change to the point we won't be able to breathe it anymore. . .
Extinction of the species in 3. . . 2 . . . 1 . . . .
Totally. This is a natural cycle that has happened countless times throughout human and evolutionary history. It's the order of things on this planet. It's the fundamental meaning of "revolution"
so where a lot of things. paradigms change. think about when there was no lignin to decompose trees. or a asteroid 7 miles wide hitting earth. theres only been 6 mass extinctions so far in billions of years of life. the things that caused them were aberrations. aberrations, arguably speaking, are natural. just very, very rare.
Sure, and we can wane philosophical about that all day long. If anything humans are like the emergence of oxygen producing organisms 2 billion years ago.
But that doesn’t really matter for us. Humanity and the world we evolved in emerged from the ruins of the meteor 66 million years ago. We grew up in a fairly cool and stable environment that has lasted millions of years, and cycled over hundreds of thousands of years.
Within 270 years we have completely usurped anything we can call natural climate processes and stripped the planet of easily accessible hydrocarbons and mineral resources.
Anyone talking of natural cycles needs to understand we, humanity, are the aberration. We simply are an aberration with the ability to fix, or mitigate, our impact.
You disagree with a redditor, therefore the repeated, consistent consensus of the global scientific community that climate change is real and extremely hazardous to civilization, the now-regular and rapidly accelerating cycle of economic crises, and another rise of multi-state fascism are not signs of the collapse of the current state of civilization?
Burden of proof is on you for this one, oh professor emeritus.
Read your hivemind buddies comments, "You'll be dead, dying, or wishing for death by 2035. Save the date!", "no one is going to make it out", for many of your doomers who come here to hivemind it absolutely is "all life is going to cease to exist".
not these kind, no matter what it will always be faux outrage for them. They will always need some reason to cry, "the sky is falling", to help them deal with the fact that yes, you're all gonna die, whether the world is a utopia or not, you will still die people, and hiveminding about it and redirecting that existential dread towards this "collapse" is not gonna change that.
50000 years of behavioral modernity 12000 years of settlement and systematic agriculture only about 5 or 6000 years of complex civilization. regardless no one is saying collapse means total extinction or near total extinction with a return to a nomadic lifestyle for survivors. that the wealthy will hoard resources insulate themselves from massive conflict and disasters and human civilization will survive in some form is little comfort to those who are watching the tsunami approach with no means of escape
yeah, you haven't been reading this hivemind sub for long then... because if you just check around if in replies to this comment, you'll see, "no one is making it out", "everyone is going to starve", "only the rich are going to live"
You fund social security through your paycheck, when you say social security funding is running out what you mean is they will have finished stealing the money you and I contributed to our social security income.
He's not wrong, and a young person recognizing and discovering how fucked we all are is a good thing. The only one shitting here is you pal. No one is "making it through dark times" this go-round.
I certainly don't believe every human will die, but collapse of superpowers is common if not inevitable. Mayans, Ancient Egyptians, Ancient Greeks, Roman Empire, Persian Empire, British Empire, USSR etc etc.
So I do think we can see a thorough unwinding of Western dominance and way of life.
Half the problem we're seeing with stagflation and decreased quality of life is simply due to the end of a two-century industrial boom in the West, and we're finding ourselves on the wrong end of an increasing trade deficit and competing with rising nations like China and tens of millions of more middle class consumers, all wanting a piece of the world's limited land and resources.
World average salary is about $10k per year. Average in developing countries like India is something like $2,000 per year. So it's a long way for us to fall just to reach parity with the rest of the world.
So if the West even moves halfway towards the global average, we'll be seeing widespread poverty and collapse. It's just a rebalancing, the rest of the world wouldn't even blink, human civilisation would continue. Half a billion Chinese people move into the middle class, half a billion Westerners leave it...
Buddy you're like 99% of the way, let me see if I can tip you over the edge:
World average salary is misleading because money goes a lot further in the "third world". A $12k salary in Vietnam or India might be comenserate to a $40k salary in an average COL area in the US in terms of purchasing power.
Absolutely! This means a few things - it means the fall of the West won't mean the fall of the human race. It won't be felt that severely by developing countries.
It also means our current standard of living is built upon our strong currencies, upon outsourcing manufacturing to low COL countires and upon middle class consumption. Collapse in the West will mean the COL inflates while our salaries stay the same in nominal terms.
An iPhone or a nuclear power plant or a gallon of gasoline will still be about the same price in real terms because they're based on global markets. But we won't be able to afford them if stagflation continues as it does.
You basically explained most of it yourself:
Americans see the average wages in these places and falsely think they must be absolutely destitute because they're trying to imagine living in LA on $10k or whatever and not Da Nang
The problem is Americans will be trying to live in LA for $10k. The numbers will be different because of inflation, but it'll be the same in real terms.
As stagflation continues, inflation rises and salaries stay the same whilst the emerging middle class in the Far East compete for resources, we'll see everything continue to cost more, but it's really just because our currency is inflating away. We'll get to the point where inflation means you're living in a high COL American city on a global average wage.
So you'll be earning $40k but rent will be $3k. And the last few years have brought that a lot closer...
There's a lot of complexity that works out in the US's favour when it comes to arbitrage of labour and raw materials around the world. You called it "asymmetric exchange" which is a good phrase.
So anything that reduces this asymmetry is gonna be tough on the US. If US income drops (or stagflates), US COL rises, foreign income rises or foreign COL rises, any of those would narrow that assymetry. And we're seeing all four happen right now.
I see your point when you say:
I lived on probably about $1k a month in Vietnam for years and by all means had a better quality of life there than I ever did in the US.
I guess I was clumsy in my wording. I should have probably said we need to look at the ratio of income versus COL.
People living in Vietnam on a Vietnam income are ok. People living in the US on a US income are ok. People from the US visiting Vietnam are doing great because of that assymetry. But the really bad outcome would be a Vietnam income living in the US.
And that's what I'm worried will happen. We have a divergance of income and COL. Stagflation and international competition are dragging the US incomes back towards the global average. Yet globalisation means the COL is largely based on international markets. So I worry we really will end up on a Vietnam income but still paying San Francisco rents...
Hi, Immelmaneuver. Thanks for contributing. However, your comment was removed from /r/collapse for:
Rule 1: In addition to enforcing Reddit's content policy, we will also remove comments and content that is abusive in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.
nothing in particular, just yet another example of it. I mean this sub is a step on the ladder towards suicide cult, so there's that, but not nearly as bad as /r/antinatalism (don't go there, it's just depressed people who think the world is ending), which they might as well just admit they are in fact a suicide cult already.
Yeah I'm not subbed there. I don't judge others or tell them how to live their lives. If I can control it I won't have kids. So I'm not a fan of the sub. I also am not big on r/antiwork as although the current system sucks, everyone has to work. History has always had workers.
With this sub though, the anthropocene is upon us and all people should do is accept it. Regardless of ideology.
I just wish people reasserted their freedoms more in times like this and didn't hate others for their immutable characteristics, or their values. So the groupthink can be a bit much here. The MSM machine is fueled by fear and I don't think enough people here are skeptical enough of the MSM.
What does accepting the anthropocene really accomplish? I mean that's not going to change anything. Okay, I accept that I'm going to die, guess what, I'm going to go on with my day as normal despite that existential or any other existential crisis. Put it this way, sublime said it best...
I suppose the impulse in the sub is to imagine a failed state scenario for western countries. That's known to be distressing to some people. I've come to understand there's plenty of people who acknowledge the collapse but don't wanna think about it
why do you want people to think about it? I mean I can guess (so tell me if I'm wrong)...
You think that if people spent more time thinking about it, then we could keep "it" (whatever "it" is) from happening?
...if every person on this planet spent all day everyday thinking about "it", they would still do nothing about it, because the conclusion of all that thinking would be the same. "I - as an individual - cannot do anything about it."
You're asking for a dream to come true. You're asking for millions upon millions of people to work in concert with each other for a common abstract intangible goal. Good luck with that.
I can only do my little part, and to me that is, "vote blue no matter who".
I'm not depressed and I don't think the world is ending. I do believe that some major changes are imminent, but that will not be the end, just a beginning to the next story. Your story can turn out to be happy or sad, that is completely up to you.
There are considerable differences between now and before. Even in the middle ages, in feudal times, land owners had duties to serfs and free-men on their land. Serfs could be bought and sold but were tied to the land and had rights to it that held even if ownership of the land changed. The current owners of the vast majority of recources have no reciprocal duties to those whose labour they skim for their profits so we are in very different times to what has gone before. It isn't sustainable.
You'd be correct, except that one doesn't get to live in the tide of history. The OP is alive right now. Whether or not the world was better or worse in the past isn't their concern, though I bet the people in the past also had to live in the time they were given. The concerns of the OP are in fact, quite valid, because they're alive right now, at a unique moment in time. THIS time is different, because it's ours. If the OP got to live in history, like you seem to, then I'm sure they'd be fine.
After all, being an obtuse twat on the internet might be unique to our time. But being an obtuse twat has plenty of historical basis.
Civilizations have always collapsed. Look at the Maya, many of their great city states collapsed before the Spanish arrived due to famine and possibly warfare between the city states. And then there was more collapse after the Spanish arrived. Did civilization around the world keep going? Yes. But for the society going through the motions of collapse in real time it’s not a pretty picture.
How Americans can look around at all the homelessness, pollution of our land, air, water, lack of job opportunities, failing small businesses, rising food costs, dropping markets, sending national guard in to hospitals and schools, and lack of affordable housing — on top of all the health concerns caused by the Covid plague — and think everything is just fine is mind boggling.
Insert the burning in hell “life is fine “ meme here ——>
You bring a really valuable opinion. It’s valuable because it’s the way I tend to think. So here’s an upvote. I’m sorry this sub dogpiled on you. We humans forget we are human. Maybe that makes it easier for us in this world. That alone should tell us something about the state of things. And so I’d like to respond:
At current rates of consumption we will exhaust finite resources (oil, minerals, fissile sources), slowly replenishing ones (water, topsoil), and biological ones (overfishing alone will exhaust fish stocks). Most of these will be exhausted in the next 50 years. This is overshoot. None of this even mentions climate change that will drastically reduce carrying capacity, maybe even to zero.
If you’re running out of oxygen (overshoot) in a room you’re barricaded in and whose walls are slowly closing in on you (declining carrying capacity), there’s not much you can do save an unprecedented miracle that has never happened in the billions of years life has been on this planet. This kind of situation always results in significant reduction or extinction of the species.
We might be able to steal away carrying capacity from outer space, but eventually we might exhaust the resources in our solar system or galaxy. We might even happen upon certain miraculous technologies that are actually renewable to provide all energy and matter for industrial civilization. But even then we cannot have continual exponential growth as the energy emitted as heat would eventually boil the oceans.
Industrial Civilization scavenges the Earth for sustenance it cannot replenish. It is a farmer eating all the planting seeds straight from the sack. It is a baby sucking Mother Earth dry. It is unbelievably primitive.
It can only survive if it learns to cultivate its sustenance in a sustainable, replenishable way. Perhaps the agricultural revolution was a solution to desertification and exhaustion of big game in river valleys after the last Ice Age. Maybe it was the first collapse? Humans may have solved overshoot and declining carrying capacity then. But standard of living was pretty terrible for thousands of years and early states were incredibly warlike and oppressive.
Maybe if we can survive climate change and declining net energy we will learn industrial permaculture (I’m not sure what it’s called) where we do achieve utopia. Or maybe we abandon the new and go to a retrotopia as John Michael Greer discusses, or even some sort of primitivism after we have no choice.
I’m pretty newly collapse-aware, but this is what I’ve learned so far. In my paragraphs above I’ve of course also brought in my own analogies and histories from other things I’ve learned about. Collapse is logically and mathematically forecasted. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
I’m not betting on humanity any time soon. Maybe in a thousand years we’ll reach stability. Maybe people will be pretty happy in a retropia/utopia.
whoa, you're one of the few here who aren't looking for a hivemind safe place. I can respect that. But to respond to your opinion, I think it can best be summed up with, "necessity is the mother of invention".
For every person out there, doing nothing but running around screaming "the sky is falling", there's another person who is working on a solution.
Don't you know fusion is just 10 years away. (I say that in jest, cause it's always been 10 years away, they say, but there really has been great strides made in the last year or two towards a fusion energy source, and that would be a complete game changer).
So when someone says, we're going to exhaust all resources (and you even went so far as to say "in the galaxy"), I just say that is a person who can't think big.
Do you really think that all our industry, agriculture, and logistics will miraculously refit itself to be sustainable in the not even few decades we have left? They all use FINITE resources. Most aren’t even aware of peak oil or declining net energy https://energy-reality.org/net-energy/. Net energy is approaching single digits. This is collapse. Negative net energy is catabolic. We eat each other.
If we need to colonize the galaxy just to get our trinkets, what’s the fucking point?
Like, what happens in 50 years when there’s no copper to make batteries, no oil to power cars, no concrete to build dams and industrial plants, no fish to eat? This is all mathematically forecasted. The only way out is through permaculture and plankton. Getting this from space is very very difficult and may not achieve positive net energy. And like I said, how will that improve standards of living?
you aren't thinking of a solution because you don't have to (yet). necessity is the mother of invention, and will lead to solutions you can't and won't think of
Imagine the most brilliant minds of the 20th century working as hard as possible with society mobilized around them to solve a pressing issue “they have to solve” as you so claim. Not solving results in total destruction. The so-called twilight of the gods.
This was the state of the Wunderwaffen programs of Nazi Germany. I don’t like this example but it’s very recent and relevant. They came up with incredible technological fixes. But it wasn’t enough. And the fixes could only be scavenged by the shell-shocked remaining participants who took years to recover from the mass death and suffering. The system that birthed them was gone.
We’ve been needing solutions to steady the global industrial system for 50 years. Net energy has been declining for decades. Standards of living are declining. We have to get these fixes. We’ve known for a long time we will only make things worse the longer we delay the fixes. People are thinking of the fixes. And yet we haven’t invented the fixes. Maybe we will after much suffering has already occurred. But that typically doesn’t end well. And it usually takes a long time for the fixes to reach a useful scale and implementation.
Technological society was only allowed to develop in England after the majority of the European population declined in the decades following the Black Death from the disease and subsequent famines. This is what permitted the privatization of land to more efficiently exploit more scarce peasant labor. And these developments in England culminated a half millennium later in the invention of the steam engine. The solutions to the problems of High Medieval society and its catastrophic ruination took centuries of suffering to reach any kind of stability.
That’s what you mean by when we “have to” think of a solution, and that point at which we “have to” is what this sub calls collapse. I hate this uneasy example, but it’s like Nazi Germany seeing the writing on the wall after Kursk 1943 and rushing to churn out miracle tech fixes.
A system does not want to change its trajectory unless it gets seriously impacted. Barring massive popular investment and energy into solutions to the problems of industrial society right now, billions will die unnecessary deaths until enough pressure builds to even seriously try to work on fixes. Maybe we’ll get those fixes after all that suffering. But it’s not like that’s guaranteed. Some civilizations never recover.
We’re not saying that collapse destroys the metaphysic of progress. Honestly I don’t think you’re thinking “big enough” as you so claim other people are not. On a large enough timescale there is still “progress”. And this notion of boom and bust, rise and fall, is in accordance with nature even if it does not agree with the linear pace desired by an unsustainable society. Trees sway. There is still evolution. There is still entropy. And there will be more lessons for the future humans to build from. Needless suffering is endemic to human society. It’s a pattern that must gradually be corrected. And hopefully we will get better at attuning ourselves to the rhythms of cosmic and historical flux.
"A system does not want to change its trajectory unless it gets seriously impacted."
- we're saying the same thing.
billions will die unnecessary deaths
- that's a bit of excessive hyperbole, and really just your exaggerated guess (or maybe wishful thinking, if you're anything like the other folks on this sub)
I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish with that wall of text. Are you trying to convince me that the world is going to "collapse"? Cause for the most part I'd probably agree things are not on a good trajectory. I'd also say that it is mostly due to american republicans, who in my opinion are the worst group of people ever to grace the planet. I think they will be responsible for more death than the holocaust before they are extinguished.
I think this sub is filled with people who have an existential fear of death and are projecting that existential fear of death outside of themselves because they haven't learned to deal with that fear inside themselves.
All that said, I could probably sum up any disagreement we have this way, I think the world will be a better place in 100 years and you don't. I think fusion energy will power the world, I think clean energy vehicles will be the rule rather than exception, I think plant based food will become a mainstay, and I think there will be numerous other inventions that I haven't thought of that will improve the quality of life.
Ya know, this was the constant for most of mankind until the early 20th century? We’ve never had it so good. Regardless, that simply means that what has gone up, can also come down. A lot of privileged kids are going to be sorely disappointed that their lives wont match the instagram version they’ve all been expecting. Perhaps children should start bucking up on how to subsist instead of watching makeup tutorials.
Even with certifications, the opportunities still have to be there.
Up until just recently I was a security guard. Now if I hadn't just decided on a whim to do the course when I did, I would have missed out on working at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. There was no hard and fast track dictated by the universe that declared, Do This And You Will Get To Guard Athletes, it was just a mere happenstance that I was able to nominate for that course, at that time, and go on to work at the games later.
And then there is other happenstance. Like the fact that I, like many people, have a low self-opinion. There may be many courses we could do but our pass or fail is based purely on anxiety issues because we think we're not worthy, or we could get medication but maybe the doctor didn't get laid last night and is feeling pissy ...
There's a million and one reasons why anecdotes like, "I worked hard and got 20 degrees which now pays me millions", don't fucking help at all, and why people with even less degrees and simply more luck will do better in life than you.
In some forty-odd years of looking at this shit - my Dad was keen on lectures about what life was like when he was a kid - I would have to say that the major rule for job seeking has always been and will always be,
Heard that. I agree with you on these points. I would also say this is not a place where people are looking to improve their circumstance -- there are other subreddits for that.
My counterpoint: Whether you think you Can, or you think you Can't, you're Right.
And if you think my comments are useful, or useless, in both cases, you are right... Something about a horse and water...
The OP stated that life seemed hopeless and everyone he knows is poor. There are things that an individual can do to improve their lives. But, that's not a r/collapse mentality. Still I feel obligated to mention it periodically.
To your point, there are also ways to boost the whos you know. But again. Not what anyone here is interested in talking about.
Regardless of the mentality, you're preaching to a bunch of guys who would get better results from taking the cash they'd spend on education and pissing it up a wall.
There is a lot of luck involved in simply being the right guy, at the right place, at the right time, and congrats for being that guy, but most people are not so fortunate.
You want proof? Simply look at the ratio of millionaire Indians and Chinese to poor. You can't tell me there aren't millions of people in those billions who'd prefer to be the wealthiest motherfucker on the block.
We don't have the opportunities. We also don't have the exploitation, or the resources. Maybe on a planet the size of Jupiter, but then it would have to be solid instead of hyperdensity gas and we'd all be 10 feet wide and 2 feet tall, so I don't know if there's an advantage there.
Heard that. You're not wrong. If it's all luck then you are right, no action will help you or anyone. Give up.
If you ever want to talk, I do have openings (opportunities?) available in the Solid Waste industry on the East Coast and might be able to provide some pointers in getting out from under-employment.
But I also understand that depending on how you look at it, success is impossible except as a function of Fate. In which case, it is all in gods hands.
That's great. Realization that a solution doesn't work for everyone helps understand the real problem. I don't think we've ever had an era with so many degree-holding people who are working below their skill level and pay. I don't think another accreditation is going to help.
That's a weird marketing-sounding way to avoid the subject. I was talking overall through many people's testimonies both online and in person I've seen or heard. I guess I'll state the problem simply - in general companies don't pay people what they're worth. Not all companies, there are some out there that understand you get value when you put in value. But at the lower levels, that's a rarity.
That's just a tautology, eh? Some people get paid, some don't? Life is bad for some people? Do you in particular want to improve your circumstance or are you doing OK? I agree things suck for a lot of people. My chief point to OP was that it is possible for individuals to escape poverty.
What you said is right there for anyone to read. Sure it's possible to get out of poverty. That doesn't mean every attempt works, nor does it mean those who are stuck in poverty aren't trying. What got you the replies you got was the insinuation that they might just need a few certifications or something and everything would be fine. Might as well say the bootstrap lifting thing, as it's dismissing the problems people run into as something they can fix. Then you come back with "well, it worked for me". Clearly then it must be a universal solution, right?
Most importantly you missed the main point said, that the system itself is unsustainable and is breaking. A few MS certs won't fix that.
I can understand that people would presume I'm insinuating a universal. But I wouldn't be so foolish as to extrapolate to universality. I asked OP, have you considered getting certs?
Nobody wants to talk 1 to 1 about making their own life better, they want to say life sux, it's God's plan... Are bootstraps never, ever the answer? And if they worked for me, how do I go about dismissing the idea that I used them? Am I the last man in history to help myself? Was it a fluke?
Your last point is completely right. I didn't address OP's main concern. And that I don't contest. But I did want to jab him a little bit and see if he was interested in getting beyond where he himself seemed stuck.
A lot of people here seem dreadfully mired in their circumstances and see absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel for getting out,even within their lifespan, for themselves. But I digress. Maybe I was having a bit of fun.
OP says everyone he knows is poor. Everyone went to college. "I have thought about it back to front. There is no way out." You can't buy a house without 2 high paid incomes, yet Over 60% of Americans own real estate.
Ah, Rhaedas, I hear you, I hear you. I suggested hope in the hopeless subreddit. It's just how it is. Back to r/careerguidance and r/sustainability for me, lol.
Even well-paid and well-qualified workers are significantly underpaid in the current labor market. "Just get a certification, forehead" is not a solution to a systemic problem that affects all of us.
And if eveybody dose that who is going to clean the, who is going to flip burgers, who is going to pick up the garbage. The low paying jobs are necessary for the world to function and therefore the workers working those jobs should be able to at least afford an appartment, be able to have kids, own a car and have vacation days while working a 40 hour week.
Society can't finction without the unskilled workers and therefore they should not be exploited and opressed.
why would someone with kids be flipping burgers? Burger-flipping should not need to even be a job, robots can do it. Robots can also pick up garbage. People should not have to do those kinds of jobs. Basic income c'mon. With so much automation it's the obvious choice, if governments actually care about or want their countries to prosper.
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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '22
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