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>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. Peopl

>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.

Dylan16807 6y ago
But LiveLeak doesn't help anyone understand the constant crushing stress of being unable to afford necessities. OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.
- moralestapia 6y ago
  Actually, a significant portion of the videos portrayed the life of the homeless, the sick, people under the influence of drugs/alcohol, and other things that you don't usually find on the usual platforms.
Aeolun 6y ago
> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.
- laoganmaplz 6y ago
  Is this to mean "People aren't killing themselves, ergo everything must be pretty good for them generally"? Because, if that's what's meant here, I have to pretty vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Yes, the premise of what you read is correct, but the conclusion you make seems different. People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out. The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy. I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
    - tnzm 6y ago
      The self-preservation instinct and general human will to live is strong enough to keep you going even in the absence of "enough good things". But good things aren't the only thing that balances out bad things, as anyone who has seen authoritarianism first hand could tell you. Bad things squared can work just as well. For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
    - thrwaeasddsaf 6y ago
      Yeah I don't think people or animals have a built-in "suicide if life sux" instinct built into them. Most will just suffer and suffer until it ends.
      - timeslip1523 6y ago
        Weird that people do commit suicide, then.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lm28469 6y ago
  "If you don't kill yourself it must not be so hard, stop complaining" That's a weird lens to see the world through
acituan 6y ago
> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.
- moralestapia 6y ago
  >Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong. Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
  - lazide 6y ago
    Hardly - rather that we normalize to whatever is going on in our environment, perceiving risk, danger, ok or not ok, etc. in a relative sense not an absolute one (minus adaptation time). There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
  - acituan 6y ago
    In the case of depression and anxiety, at least in the view of CBT, there is always some sort of cognitive distortion at play. In other words, if the mental anguish originates from having taken a distorted view of the world, it wouldn't tell us anything if the world was an OK place or not to begin with.
    - tnzm 6y ago
      The question that bothers me is whether the existence of such distorted views of the world tells us something about the world. After all, they did not arise in isolation - what distorted that person's perception and what's preventing it from correcting itself?
      - 6y ago
NL807 6y ago
Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.
- wwn_se 6y ago
  1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things. The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that. Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate. If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
    - kaba0 6y ago
      I absolutely agree with your points, but at the same time we can only worry about a fixed amount of things, and stress is very unhealthy — so from a purely mental well-being point of view, constantly thinking of all the bad things around the globe is not a good thing to do. Especially when we have a hard time actually effecting the given thing. I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
  - NL807 6y ago
    Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.
austhrow743 6y ago
What are you comparing the world to to say a regular existence in it is not ok? That you think being a regular joe is not ok and worse than neutral tells me more about you than the other commenter imo.
coulix 6y ago
You are right and things can revert backward very fast.
papito 6y ago
I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.
haswell 6y ago
The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this. Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been. You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on. This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that. Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged. - [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814 https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...
- MattSayar 6y ago
  The start of that book starts with a great quiz you can take online[0] to see how accurate your perceptions of the world are. [0] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/

Dylan16807 6y ago

But LiveLeak doesn't help anyone understand the constant crushing stress of being unable to afford necessities. OP said 'scary and violent', and on that scale things really aren't that bad.

moralestapia 6y ago
Actually, a significant portion of the videos portrayed the life of the homeless, the sick, people under the influence of drugs/alcohol, and other things that you don't usually find on the usual platforms.

Aeolun 6y ago

> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. Considering they all go on living anyway, you’d say the good parts must outweigh the bad parts though.

laoganmaplz 6y ago
Is this to mean "People aren't killing themselves, ergo everything must be pretty good for them generally"? Because, if that's what's meant here, I have to pretty vehemently disagree with that sentiment.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Yes, the premise of what you read is correct, but the conclusion you make seems different. People aren’t killing themselves, so even if their life sucks in many ways they must have found enough good things in the world to balance them out. The original premise somewhere further up was that poor people are never happy. I guess I should have used a less extreme point.
  - tnzm 6y ago
    The self-preservation instinct and general human will to live is strong enough to keep you going even in the absence of "enough good things". But good things aren't the only thing that balances out bad things, as anyone who has seen authoritarianism first hand could tell you. Bad things squared can work just as well. For example, most religions have a taboo on suicide. "Your life sucks? Well tough shit bucko, you choose the easy way out and you end up in hell where it's infinitely worse forever." Absurd as it may sound, people can live against their will, too.
  - thrwaeasddsaf 6y ago
    Yeah I don't think people or animals have a built-in "suicide if life sux" instinct built into them. Most will just suffer and suffer until it ends.
    - timeslip1523 6y ago
      Weird that people do commit suicide, then.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lm28469 6y ago
"If you don't kill yourself it must not be so hard, stop complaining" That's a weird lens to see the world through

acituan 6y ago

> People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you. You wouldn't know if you were talking to such a person right now without making a circular argument such that "a person without privilege cannot think the world is an OK place and since they think that they must be a person of privilege". Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong.

moralestapia 6y ago
>Existence of depression and anxiety across all socioeconomic strata proves that logic wrong. Further supporting the argument that the world is not "mostly an OK place".
- lazide 6y ago
  Hardly - rather that we normalize to whatever is going on in our environment, perceiving risk, danger, ok or not ok, etc. in a relative sense not an absolute one (minus adaptation time). There is decently solid evidence too that where someone lands on the distribution for a given environment is mostly set at an early age, often with a strong genetic component.
- acituan 6y ago
  In the case of depression and anxiety, at least in the view of CBT, there is always some sort of cognitive distortion at play. In other words, if the mental anguish originates from having taken a distorted view of the world, it wouldn't tell us anything if the world was an OK place or not to begin with.
  - tnzm 6y ago
    The question that bothers me is whether the existence of such distorted views of the world tells us something about the world. After all, they did not arise in isolation - what distorted that person's perception and what's preventing it from correcting itself?
    - 6y ago

NL807 6y ago

Individuals suffer in many ways, so the "OK" part is all relative. Living in environment where you can get a paycheck is still OK compared to the extreme violence and destruction depicted on Liveleak. In other words, looking through the lens of a platform that curates extreme content is hardly representative of what goes on in most people's day-to-day lives around the world.

wwn_se 6y ago
1000s of children die everyday due to diarrhoea caused by unclean water. About a 1 000 000 die every year from malaria mostly children. Just to name a few things. The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > The world is a hard unforgiving place for millions, we should never forget that. Agreed. But I'll go even further and say: we should keep the cruelty of the world in mind in order to a) fix it, or support those who try to fix it, and b) treasure the practices, institutions and technologies that shield us from suffering that fate. If people in the Western world were more acutely aware of how life without clean water looks like, then maybe maintaining infrastructure wouldn't be that big of a problem it now is.
  - kaba0 6y ago
    I absolutely agree with your points, but at the same time we can only worry about a fixed amount of things, and stress is very unhealthy — so from a purely mental well-being point of view, constantly thinking of all the bad things around the globe is not a good thing to do. Especially when we have a hard time actually effecting the given thing. I don’t know what should be the solution, perhaps it would be the task of elected politicians to try to fix the problems in place of the population, even in other countries? Which do happen, but it should be much more prevalent.
- NL807 6y ago
  Keep in mind, this is out of a population of 7.6 billion. Yes, lot of people die from terrible things. But the chance of someone suffering in the worst possible way (as depicted in those videos) is unlikely for most humans. That said, we could certainly do better.

austhrow743 6y ago

What are you comparing the world to to say a regular existence in it is not ok? That you think being a regular joe is not ok and worse than neutral tells me more about you than the other commenter imo.

coulix 6y ago

You are right and things can revert backward very fast.

papito 6y ago

I heard an interview once with a guy I don't remember, but he was a profuse traveller, and he said, no, the world is less dangerous than people think, and it all comes down to common sense. Whether New York City or Bogota - stay out of poorly lit places.

haswell 6y ago

The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this. Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases, even good) things have ever been. You are correct that the divide between privileged/lucky and not is still wide. But arguably this is more about the uneven distribution of progress, and ignores the fact that poverty has significantly gone down, deaths from disease are significantly lower now than even 10-20 years ago, and so on. This does not minimize or invalidate the fact that many do live in dangerous or "not OK" environments, but it's worth looking at the broader historical context to help contextualize that. Yes, more change must happen. There is much progress to be made. But much progress has been made, and that should be acknowledged. - [0] https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814 https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...

MattSayar 6y ago
The start of that book starts with a great quiz you can take online[0] to see how accurate your perceptions of the world are. [0] https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/ https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/