6 ms·

I think there is definitely an existential crisis in the West. I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic, this focused on individual improvement

I think there is definitely an existential crisis in the West. I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic, this focused on individual improvement and this divided financially, and I was an adult in the 80’ies. I recently hired for a temporary junior position and the applicants blew me away. It’s the first time I’ve truest vitnessed the product of the competitive state, these 22-24 year olds were spending all of their time trying to prepare for the job market, not because they seemed to want to, but because they didn’t want to fall behind their peers, as one of them said bluntly when I asked why she never seemed to take time off. I can’t imagine how terrible that constant performance pressure must be. Especially if you’re not in the top 80%. Ironically I can’t really think of a time where things were really better than they are now. So I’m not entirely sure where this pessimism and performance anxiety comes from. Rising inequality is a problem though, if left unchecked it almost always leads to violent instability.

craftyguy 8y ago
> I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic How can you consider human history up to this point when such details are almost certainly lost to time? Did the fall of the (western) Roman empire, for example, really not spawn generations of pessimism? Or maybe it did but those folks unable to document it? I bet a large portion of Europe was pessimistic during WW2.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Well, the suicide rates were probably pretty high in the Roman Empire, and they were certainly high during WW2, especially among people who were denied entry to the army. Society as a whole wasn’t pessimistic during WW2, there was a very focused sense of doing what was required of you, which is why men committed suicide when they couldn’t fight for their country. We don’t have a very good view on how the mood was in the Roman Empire, as most information on commoners come from a few lines of text on their burial pottery, so it’s hard to say much about that. It probably wasn’t fun to be poor though. I can’t remeber either of those periods, and I was making a statement from my own world view, which is obviously anecdotal and may be flawed.
- pacifist 8y ago
  You can safely append "in my lifetime" to their musings.
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    But how are we going to farm for karma if we can't nitpick then ? /s
nurettin 8y ago
I think posts lumping up the many parts of Europe, UK, Canada, USA (edit: and maybe South America?) together as "the west" is not something worth reading online.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Because parts of the world that share similar cultural heritage and have strong economic ties to each other should under no circumstances be lumped together.
  - nurettin 8y ago
    Folks with entirely different lives and world views should not be lumped together. This is what the Islamic folks are doing wrong as well.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Right, so we should look at every person individually and never generalize over more than one person. Sounds very useful.
      - nurettin 8y ago
        The sarcastic tone is rapidly losing it's utility as you fall deeper and deeper into the same naive over-generalization pitfalls as any extremist criticizer of "the west". Your urban existential chrisis is simply alien to your average Italian farmer who lives in a neighborhood which hasn't changed much in the past two centuries.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Animats 8y ago
I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic, this focused on individual improvement and this divided financially. Not in recent history. In US history, you have to go back to about 1880 to see such wealth concentration. And that was a time of much greater general economic growth. What's discouraging today is that a lot of long-term trends that haven't declined in a century are headed down. Even population is dropping in much of the developed world. In the US and UK, the new generation is doing worse than its predecessors. That's very unusual without a war. We have more productive capacity than we know what to do with, and no clue how to organize a society to use it effectively.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  Indeed, the more I think about our current American political climate, the more I think of the American Gilded Age: huge wealth disparities, ineffective and corrupt politicians, larger-than-life industrial titans, and a largely global society.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Pretty much everyone lives far better now than they did in 1880. Objective, material conditions are way up. So this argument has to be based on relative ones. Do you really get existential anxiety from the knowledge that others' lives are improving faster than yours? Would it help if they did it in secret? Perhaps it is the activists yammering on about wealth inequality who are causing the actual problem here.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    Despite a lack of physical evidence, I'm starting to believe there may be more dimensions to the human experience than wealth and material condition.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Of course there is - which is why the diagnosis of “it must be wealth inequality” is so uncompelling.
losteric 8y ago
Probably a combination of standardized testing, perceived looming economic/environmental/social upheaval, and feedback loops between blind optimization of social media engagement metrics and unwitting narcissism. I found that social media let me to regularly compare myself with friends, and feel like I was also being evaluated... after explaining why I shut down my accounts, I learned many of my friends felt similarly. It doesn't help that everyone's social lives are a clixk-away. When someone's feeling down, they can passively scroll through "evidence" supporting those emotions - compared to talking to people, or even imagining their lives (actively thinking).
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Plus how every company seems to insist on only hiring the best or the rest, no middle ground; either you're a top genius working at hip startups and/or the engineering department at the big internet megacorporations, or you're doing the modern equivalent of a McJob, that is, Uber driver (if you're lucky enough to have a car), delivery guy, warehouse order picker that needs to pee in bottles on the go to get the targets the computer is telling you to reach.
- drukenemo 8y ago
  I've pulled of from social media (with friends) for that exact same reason. It's relieving. I still use it to follow and connect to people I don't know in fields I'm interested in.
closeparen 8y ago
>I can’t really think of a time where things were really worse than they are now How about literally all of history?
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Holy shit, I wrote the exact opposite of what I meant to write, I mean, it’s not ironic if things aren’t better. Heh.
rifung 8y ago
> Especially if you’re not in the top 80%. I think you mean top 20%? Top 80% means you're not in the lowest 20%.
Roritharr 8y ago
I wonder where you get these applicants. We're in Frankfurt/Germany, a reasonably famous startup with 65 people now and the best hiring strategy we've found is peer recommendations. The normal application funnel receives a flipside of what you describe, most students/young applicants are barely able to verbalise an interest in any field and use the majority of the interview to ask about benefits and home-office/remote possibilities instead of what the job entails. The cutest response that kind of summarized the attitude I feel I get we lately heard from a school intern on his last day, age 14 in our company-wide slack:"I loved being surrounded by so many nice people... ...if I ever have to work, I would like to work for a company like yours." He was an exception though and very diligent trying to help wherever he could, but It caused quite some chuckles.
- Bombthecat 8y ago
  Probably because Frankfurt is super expensive. I interviewed for two jobs there and then gave up on Frankfurt. Management still does not realize or don't want to acknowledge how expensive this city is. If I would keep going to interviews you can bet your ass my first question would be about money. Because after the answer I know if you are living in reality or living in a dream world and we can end it there.
slumberlust 8y ago
There's a whole book on this topic you might enjoy called Abundance. It talks specifically about what is changing for the better, despite what we see/hear every day.

craftyguy 8y ago

> I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic How can you consider human history up to this point when such details are almost certainly lost to time? Did the fall of the (western) Roman empire, for example, really not spawn generations of pessimism? Or maybe it did but those folks unable to document it? I bet a large portion of Europe was pessimistic during WW2.

eksemplar 8y ago
Well, the suicide rates were probably pretty high in the Roman Empire, and they were certainly high during WW2, especially among people who were denied entry to the army. Society as a whole wasn’t pessimistic during WW2, there was a very focused sense of doing what was required of you, which is why men committed suicide when they couldn’t fight for their country. We don’t have a very good view on how the mood was in the Roman Empire, as most information on commoners come from a few lines of text on their burial pottery, so it’s hard to say much about that. It probably wasn’t fun to be poor though. I can’t remeber either of those periods, and I was making a statement from my own world view, which is obviously anecdotal and may be flawed.
pacifist 8y ago
You can safely append "in my lifetime" to their musings.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  But how are we going to farm for karma if we can't nitpick then ? /s

nurettin 8y ago

I think posts lumping up the many parts of Europe, UK, Canada, USA (edit: and maybe South America?) together as "the west" is not something worth reading online.

adrianN 8y ago
Because parts of the world that share similar cultural heritage and have strong economic ties to each other should under no circumstances be lumped together.
- nurettin 8y ago
  Folks with entirely different lives and world views should not be lumped together. This is what the Islamic folks are doing wrong as well.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Right, so we should look at every person individually and never generalize over more than one person. Sounds very useful.
    - nurettin 8y ago
      The sarcastic tone is rapidly losing it's utility as you fall deeper and deeper into the same naive over-generalization pitfalls as any extremist criticizer of "the west". Your urban existential chrisis is simply alien to your average Italian farmer who lives in a neighborhood which hasn't changed much in the past two centuries.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Animats 8y ago

I can’t think of a time when society was this pessimistic, this focused on individual improvement and this divided financially. Not in recent history. In US history, you have to go back to about 1880 to see such wealth concentration. And that was a time of much greater general economic growth. What's discouraging today is that a lot of long-term trends that haven't declined in a century are headed down. Even population is dropping in much of the developed world. In the US and UK, the new generation is doing worse than its predecessors. That's very unusual without a war. We have more productive capacity than we know what to do with, and no clue how to organize a society to use it effectively.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
Indeed, the more I think about our current American political climate, the more I think of the American Gilded Age: huge wealth disparities, ineffective and corrupt politicians, larger-than-life industrial titans, and a largely global society.
closeparen 8y ago
Pretty much everyone lives far better now than they did in 1880. Objective, material conditions are way up. So this argument has to be based on relative ones. Do you really get existential anxiety from the knowledge that others' lives are improving faster than yours? Would it help if they did it in secret? Perhaps it is the activists yammering on about wealth inequality who are causing the actual problem here.
- mistermann 8y ago
  Despite a lack of physical evidence, I'm starting to believe there may be more dimensions to the human experience than wealth and material condition.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Of course there is - which is why the diagnosis of “it must be wealth inequality” is so uncompelling.

losteric 8y ago

Probably a combination of standardized testing, perceived looming economic/environmental/social upheaval, and feedback loops between blind optimization of social media engagement metrics and unwitting narcissism. I found that social media let me to regularly compare myself with friends, and feel like I was also being evaluated... after explaining why I shut down my accounts, I learned many of my friends felt similarly. It doesn't help that everyone's social lives are a clixk-away. When someone's feeling down, they can passively scroll through "evidence" supporting those emotions - compared to talking to people, or even imagining their lives (actively thinking).

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Plus how every company seems to insist on only hiring the best or the rest, no middle ground; either you're a top genius working at hip startups and/or the engineering department at the big internet megacorporations, or you're doing the modern equivalent of a McJob, that is, Uber driver (if you're lucky enough to have a car), delivery guy, warehouse order picker that needs to pee in bottles on the go to get the targets the computer is telling you to reach.
drukenemo 8y ago
I've pulled of from social media (with friends) for that exact same reason. It's relieving. I still use it to follow and connect to people I don't know in fields I'm interested in.

closeparen 8y ago

>I can’t really think of a time where things were really worse than they are now How about literally all of history?

eksemplar 8y ago
Holy shit, I wrote the exact opposite of what I meant to write, I mean, it’s not ironic if things aren’t better. Heh.

rifung 8y ago

> Especially if you’re not in the top 80%. I think you mean top 20%? Top 80% means you're not in the lowest 20%.

Roritharr 8y ago

I wonder where you get these applicants. We're in Frankfurt/Germany, a reasonably famous startup with 65 people now and the best hiring strategy we've found is peer recommendations. The normal application funnel receives a flipside of what you describe, most students/young applicants are barely able to verbalise an interest in any field and use the majority of the interview to ask about benefits and home-office/remote possibilities instead of what the job entails. The cutest response that kind of summarized the attitude I feel I get we lately heard from a school intern on his last day, age 14 in our company-wide slack:"I loved being surrounded by so many nice people... ...if I ever have to work, I would like to work for a company like yours." He was an exception though and very diligent trying to help wherever he could, but It caused quite some chuckles.

Bombthecat 8y ago
Probably because Frankfurt is super expensive. I interviewed for two jobs there and then gave up on Frankfurt. Management still does not realize or don't want to acknowledge how expensive this city is. If I would keep going to interviews you can bet your ass my first question would be about money. Because after the answer I know if you are living in reality or living in a dream world and we can end it there.

slumberlust 8y ago

There's a whole book on this topic you might enjoy called Abundance. It talks specifically about what is changing for the better, despite what we see/hear every day.