10 ms·

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically

The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around. What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling. I don't know if it's related to the generational trend, or maybe it's just selection bias over the people around me, but I think it's mostly the former rather than the second. Probably stems from the fact that we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance, while we live in a more priviliged regime (remember that I mentioned this applies mostly to financially successfully peoples) where money seems more immaterial. So I guess the author might be onto something about this whole financial nihilism thing.

themitigating 4y ago
Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".
hgomersall 4y ago
I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipulate constantly and fit in, and on the other end (the actual end of the race), you see a group constantly trying to justify and protect what scraps the race allowed them to keep. And in the middle you run as fast as you can, hoping you escaped the beginning of the race, hoping you make it to the end with some scraps you can call treasure. You run away from the beginning of race, disgusted at what you once were, and disgusted at what you need to become to survive until the end. It’s in that moment of realization you wish the universe imploded. All that running kills the soul.
  - badpun 4y ago
    It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - onos 4y ago
      I think this is a good challenge. But also nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.
      - jesuscript 4y ago
        It can’t be proven, but common sense would say GenZ are the most nihilistic because they have to work the hardest to even get to the middle, let alone the end. I’d say the people in the beginning and end have a tangible resentment, and not necessarily an existential crisis. In other words, GenZ would be resentful of having to start fresh against the barbarian Millenial/Boomer horde, and Boomers would be resentful of any attempt at reformation where their scraps from the race would be worth less. It’s only Millenials who would neither resent GenZ or Boomers because they were already GenZ once upon a time, and know they have to become Boomers to survive. That would be my best argument for why Millennials are in some deep psychological shit.
newsclues 4y ago
Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.
- mordae 4y ago
  As are the people who assume revolution means killing or taking. I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.
  - badpun 4y ago
    I can’t imagine that. It would require tremendous amounts of global voluntart coordination and discipline, all happening in a bottom-up fashion. Humanity is hopelessly bad at this, that’s why all significant revolutions were imposed via force and not peacefully.
  - WJW 4y ago
    The answer to that could be as simple as "no", after which those people would either need to re-start selling their time, starve, or resort to the killing and taking that is usually associated with revolutions.
- revolvingocelot 4y ago
  Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed aware of the consequences, but perhaps they look at a longer sequence of consequences. Unrelatedly, have you ever heard about the way pre-colonization Natives handled forest fires? [0] They, thanks to oral tradition, understood the necessity of allowing -- ensuring -- that smaller, controlled forest fires happened regularly. Not only to provide resources for their society, but also to ensure that the inevitability of a fire didn't bring outsize consequences. Our deployment of modern monetary theory, [1] I mean modern forestry management, isn't actually supported by the long view that the Natives took, but does make briefly-considered sense to the layperson. "Fire's bad, right? Everybody knows what a house looks like after it's been on fire, and that's bad, so we should stop all the fires." I don't think those people are idiots, but perhaps they should reconsider their position regarding fire's rejuvenation properties. [0] https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-traditional-knowledge https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-tr... [1] Huh, I don't know why I typed that at all. After all, we're talking about forestry
JansjoFromIkea 4y ago
"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anything it'd be a resentment over how easy their parents had it. It's possibly a direct reaction to the global response to the banking crisis in 2008. We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. The stock markets and bitcoin booming during the pandemic would've added fuel to the fire too. There'd be something somewhat comforting to see it all fall apart in a way that's undeniable and couldn't be patched over. Not a very rational response but it's understandable after the last 15 years (and the entirety of most their adult lives)
- glogla 4y ago
  Sure. Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn. The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your job and place to live. Now the inflation will deepen inequality and poverty. I think the next crisis of this type, at least for US (and UK which is kind of similar), is going to be when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything. That might be another nail in the coffin of the world possibly getting better for them. In the Easter Europe, where I am, meanwhile, people are more nihilistic than ever. They were rescued from the Soviet command economies that worked badly, and there was a huge jump in living standards - in the 90s and early 2000s. But by now, the non-freedom of Real Socialism was replaced by non-freedom of being precariat that will never own even the commieblock apartment that people made fun of in the 90s - while all the wonderful inventions of the West like healthcare on for the rich and student loans get imported here. No wonder people are genuinely thinking watching the world burn in nuclear fire might be cool. The climate change that was the cost of luxury of previous generations will destroy humanity anyway, why not go out with a bang?
mordae 4y ago
Hahaha, perhaps we are all waiting for the shit to actually get real for a change. After decades of being squeezed out from all relevant games. Come on, make zombies... Or something.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Zombies, as in stupid resilient slow moving half-dead aggressive humanoids operating in loosely coordinated herds? I think we created those... with social networks.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Most millennial parents are not even in old age yet and are statistically more affluent than they are. I don’t think your analysis is correct. Plus my own experience as someone born in 1989 doesn’t really mesh with yours. Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes. There is little nihilism but people are disillusioned with the system because they feel it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  > it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change nailed it. born '88, this summarizes my current world view so much, it's almost scary. I turned to solarpunk and try to decide every day decisions in a way that make this future more possible. I may not succeed, it may never happen, but after lots of reflection, this is the only future setting we can achieve and allows our (esp.: my) children to be better off than we are. Other ways simply lead to more pain/suffering/destruction/... no matter if they are philosophical more just or whatever. If you are leaning towards socialism, liberalism or are conservative, it all ultimately doesn't matter - green/sustainability is the only way to not destroy our planet too much in the next decades.
- pookha 4y ago
  Back in the 70's and 80's people were pretty frugal. The average person was experienced with Lay-away, balancing checkbooks and not a lot of people had credit (high interest rates). What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... But in no way shape or form are millennial's in a worse place than people were in the late 70's early 80's. I'd argue thins are considerably better thanks to the wide availability of tech jobs.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... That’s simply extremely untrue. You can delude yourself if it helps you sleep but this is factually false. People born in the 60s were the beneficiaries of policies which just don’t exist anymore. They grew in a context of full employment at any qualification level and with career paths towards higher pay which simply don’t exist anymore. Education costs and especially habitation costs both outpaced inflation widely. Tech jobs are such a niche it’s barely worth mentioning. The situation is even worse where I’m from in Europe with social systems having been utterly mismanaged for decades and a total refusal to equitably address the situation nowadays. And let’s not talk about the brain dead decisions taken by this generation when it comes to sustainability which millennials and gen z will now have to solve.
Quindecillion 4y ago
> What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling. I'm officially on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and feel the same thing, even with two young kids that will have to grow up and, as young adults, navigate the ashes of this imagined world. The charitable view I take of this (for myself) is the idea of creative destruction. Yes there will be great pain for very many people, perhaps including myself and those close to me, but there's little I can do to stop the runaway freight train, so I can only hope that out of all the pain and destruction something new and better can emerge from the void it leaves.
DontchaKnowit 4y ago
Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there done that, ur idea sucks moving on." So the result is this strange combination of extreme worldlyness and also naivete.
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  Maybe. But I don't think that being desensitized equals being nihilist, nor I believe genZ has had more exposure to "shocking" content than millenials. Things like 2girls1cup and rotten.com existed before genZ was even a commonly used word.
  - DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    Yeah I think the difference is that to gen z all that shock shit is like old hat.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar. Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards. Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that we're participating in--particularly injustices that give young people the short end of the stick. Poorer folk are too desperate to entertain the notion that the system is fundamentally unsound. They need status in that system badly enough that anything else is just a distraction. But if you're in the middle, you see the power that comes with a shared belief in the system and you want to live in that again, but you also see that it will never be legitimate until certain critical bugs in its design are fixed. Then you look around and see that the people in positions to fix those bugs are exploiting them instead. You want to build something meaningful on the ashes, to fix the critical bugs and have a just system that everyone can believe in, but it's not ashes. It's just kind of carrying on... on fire. And you realize that you might be quite old before fixing those bugs becomes a priority. That is, unless something happens to it first. So at least for me, nihilism is a compromise. I say that it's meaningless because that's easier than explaining that it's an enemy. Nobody who is counting the days until they retire wants to hear me explain why I want to show up at the grocery store with a dollar and have the kid tell me: > Sorry sir, we're not doing that anymore So I back off on the rooting-for-the apocalypse mindset and let people think that it's just nihilism.
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  Maybe it is a matter of being aware of "injustice" (for lack of a better word) too intensely, and then just becoming jaded to it to carry on. But it feels a bit too self-justifying to me, I'm wary of explanations that are too charitable to oneself. I hope we can find a way to channel that into self (and external) improvements instead.
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    I think we've always been aware of injustice. The new awareness is that injustice, left to fester, is a threat to the stability of systems that we rely on. I'd love to take a moral view of the situation, but people dismiss those. Everybody speaks threat. And having acknowledged a threat isn't exactly a high bar. We can worry about being too self congratulatory once we've done anything about it.
Tokkemon 4y ago
We also lived through 9/11 at a very formative time, which didn't help matters.
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  True, but not sure it's a leading cause: I think many of us were way too young for it to "matter" (as defined as <= 14yo), as we didn't quite understand yet how shattering of the established world order that was. Like, we knew it was a big deal because of our elders reactions, but I feel it might have happened a tad too soon to be a root cause.

themitigating 4y ago

Perhaps it's anxiety caused by people who want power. "Vote for us because things are getting worse"

TheFattestNinja 4y ago
Maybe, but is that new? I suppose the tone of political discourse has been going down over time. Not sure how that would cause this though: anxiety is kind of the opposite of "I want to see the world burn".

hgomersall 4y ago

I have a different take on why we want to see the world burn: we can see the world on fire, but seemingly lots of people don't (at least, not enough to do anything about it). We hope that if the burn increases a little bit now, people will notice before it starts burn uncontrollably in a few years, so start working to stop the fire.

jesuscript 4y ago
I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipulate constantly and fit in, and on the other end (the actual end of the race), you see a group constantly trying to justify and protect what scraps the race allowed them to keep. And in the middle you run as fast as you can, hoping you escaped the beginning of the race, hoping you make it to the end with some scraps you can call treasure. You run away from the beginning of race, disgusted at what you once were, and disgusted at what you need to become to survive until the end. It’s in that moment of realization you wish the universe imploded. All that running kills the soul.
- badpun 4y ago
  It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - onos 4y ago
    I think this is a good challenge. But also nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.
    - jesuscript 4y ago
      It can’t be proven, but common sense would say GenZ are the most nihilistic because they have to work the hardest to even get to the middle, let alone the end. I’d say the people in the beginning and end have a tangible resentment, and not necessarily an existential crisis. In other words, GenZ would be resentful of having to start fresh against the barbarian Millenial/Boomer horde, and Boomers would be resentful of any attempt at reformation where their scraps from the race would be worth less. It’s only Millenials who would neither resent GenZ or Boomers because they were already GenZ once upon a time, and know they have to become Boomers to survive. That would be my best argument for why Millennials are in some deep psychological shit.

newsclues 4y ago

Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.

mordae 4y ago
As are the people who assume revolution means killing or taking. I can easily imagine a revolution where people merely stop selling their time and instead start demanding to be included in the decision making processes and have an equal share of outcomes.
- badpun 4y ago
  I can’t imagine that. It would require tremendous amounts of global voluntart coordination and discipline, all happening in a bottom-up fashion. Humanity is hopelessly bad at this, that’s why all significant revolutions were imposed via force and not peacefully.
- WJW 4y ago
  The answer to that could be as simple as "no", after which those people would either need to re-start selling their time, starve, or resort to the killing and taking that is usually associated with revolutions.
revolvingocelot 4y ago
Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed aware of the consequences, but perhaps they look at a longer sequence of consequences. Unrelatedly, have you ever heard about the way pre-colonization Natives handled forest fires? [0] They, thanks to oral tradition, understood the necessity of allowing -- ensuring -- that smaller, controlled forest fires happened regularly. Not only to provide resources for their society, but also to ensure that the inevitability of a fire didn't bring outsize consequences. Our deployment of modern monetary theory, [1] I mean modern forestry management, isn't actually supported by the long view that the Natives took, but does make briefly-considered sense to the layperson. "Fire's bad, right? Everybody knows what a house looks like after it's been on fire, and that's bad, so we should stop all the fires." I don't think those people are idiots, but perhaps they should reconsider their position regarding fire's rejuvenation properties. [0] https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-traditional-knowledge https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-fire-management-and-tr... [1] Huh, I don't know why I typed that at all. After all, we're talking about forestry

JansjoFromIkea 4y ago

"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anything it'd be a resentment over how easy their parents had it. It's possibly a direct reaction to the global response to the banking crisis in 2008. We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. The stock markets and bitcoin booming during the pandemic would've added fuel to the fire too. There'd be something somewhat comforting to see it all fall apart in a way that's undeniable and couldn't be patched over. Not a very rational response but it's understandable after the last 15 years (and the entirety of most their adult lives)

glogla 4y ago
Sure. Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn. The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your job and place to live. Now the inflation will deepen inequality and poverty. I think the next crisis of this type, at least for US (and UK which is kind of similar), is going to be when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything. That might be another nail in the coffin of the world possibly getting better for them. In the Easter Europe, where I am, meanwhile, people are more nihilistic than ever. They were rescued from the Soviet command economies that worked badly, and there was a huge jump in living standards - in the 90s and early 2000s. But by now, the non-freedom of Real Socialism was replaced by non-freedom of being precariat that will never own even the commieblock apartment that people made fun of in the 90s - while all the wonderful inventions of the West like healthcare on for the rich and student loans get imported here. No wonder people are genuinely thinking watching the world burn in nuclear fire might be cool. The climate change that was the cost of luxury of previous generations will destroy humanity anyway, why not go out with a bang?

mordae 4y ago

Hahaha, perhaps we are all waiting for the shit to actually get real for a change. After decades of being squeezed out from all relevant games. Come on, make zombies... Or something.

speed_spread 4y ago
Zombies, as in stupid resilient slow moving half-dead aggressive humanoids operating in loosely coordinated herds? I think we created those... with social networks.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

Most millennial parents are not even in old age yet and are statistically more affluent than they are. I don’t think your analysis is correct. Plus my own experience as someone born in 1989 doesn’t really mesh with yours. Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes. There is little nihilism but people are disillusioned with the system because they feel it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change.

anonyfox 4y ago
> it’s setup to favour an older age bracket at their expense and failing to address the most pressing issues like climate change nailed it. born '88, this summarizes my current world view so much, it's almost scary. I turned to solarpunk and try to decide every day decisions in a way that make this future more possible. I may not succeed, it may never happen, but after lots of reflection, this is the only future setting we can achieve and allows our (esp.: my) children to be better off than we are. Other ways simply lead to more pain/suffering/destruction/... no matter if they are philosophical more just or whatever. If you are leaning towards socialism, liberalism or are conservative, it all ultimately doesn't matter - green/sustainability is the only way to not destroy our planet too much in the next decades.
pookha 4y ago
Back in the 70's and 80's people were pretty frugal. The average person was experienced with Lay-away, balancing checkbooks and not a lot of people had credit (high interest rates). What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... But in no way shape or form are millennial's in a worse place than people were in the late 70's early 80's. I'd argue thins are considerably better thanks to the wide availability of tech jobs.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > What you're witnessing now are just older people that have a lifetime of work accrued and are just trying to enjoy what they have while they can. You'll probably do the same... That’s simply extremely untrue. You can delude yourself if it helps you sleep but this is factually false. People born in the 60s were the beneficiaries of policies which just don’t exist anymore. They grew in a context of full employment at any qualification level and with career paths towards higher pay which simply don’t exist anymore. Education costs and especially habitation costs both outpaced inflation widely. Tech jobs are such a niche it’s barely worth mentioning. The situation is even worse where I’m from in Europe with social systems having been utterly mismanaged for decades and a total refusal to equitably address the situation nowadays. And let’s not talk about the brain dead decisions taken by this generation when it comes to sustainability which millennials and gen z will now have to solve.

Quindecillion 4y ago

> What I mean by that is that, while of course we don't really want to see the world burn, we are secretly hoping, in the dark, when no one is watching, for things to always go tits up a bit. Like there is a subconscious fascination to the aesthetics of Nero playing the lire while Rome burns. And upon deep self-reflection that's always a bit unsettling. I'm officially on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial and feel the same thing, even with two young kids that will have to grow up and, as young adults, navigate the ashes of this imagined world. The charitable view I take of this (for myself) is the idea of creative destruction. Yes there will be great pain for very many people, perhaps including myself and those close to me, but there's little I can do to stop the runaway freight train, so I can only hope that out of all the pain and destruction something new and better can emerge from the void it leaves.

DontchaKnowit 4y ago

Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there done that, ur idea sucks moving on." So the result is this strange combination of extreme worldlyness and also naivete.

TheFattestNinja 4y ago
Maybe. But I don't think that being desensitized equals being nihilist, nor I believe genZ has had more exposure to "shocking" content than millenials. Things like 2girls1cup and rotten.com existed before genZ was even a commonly used word.
- DontchaKnowit 4y ago
  Yeah I think the difference is that to gen z all that shock shit is like old hat.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar. Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards. Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that we're participating in--particularly injustices that give young people the short end of the stick. Poorer folk are too desperate to entertain the notion that the system is fundamentally unsound. They need status in that system badly enough that anything else is just a distraction. But if you're in the middle, you see the power that comes with a shared belief in the system and you want to live in that again, but you also see that it will never be legitimate until certain critical bugs in its design are fixed. Then you look around and see that the people in positions to fix those bugs are exploiting them instead. You want to build something meaningful on the ashes, to fix the critical bugs and have a just system that everyone can believe in, but it's not ashes. It's just kind of carrying on... on fire. And you realize that you might be quite old before fixing those bugs becomes a priority. That is, unless something happens to it first. So at least for me, nihilism is a compromise. I say that it's meaningless because that's easier than explaining that it's an enemy. Nobody who is counting the days until they retire wants to hear me explain why I want to show up at the grocery store with a dollar and have the kid tell me: > Sorry sir, we're not doing that anymore So I back off on the rooting-for-the apocalypse mindset and let people think that it's just nihilism.

TheFattestNinja 4y ago
Maybe it is a matter of being aware of "injustice" (for lack of a better word) too intensely, and then just becoming jaded to it to carry on. But it feels a bit too self-justifying to me, I'm wary of explanations that are too charitable to oneself. I hope we can find a way to channel that into self (and external) improvements instead.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  I think we've always been aware of injustice. The new awareness is that injustice, left to fester, is a threat to the stability of systems that we rely on. I'd love to take a moral view of the situation, but people dismiss those. Everybody speaks threat. And having acknowledged a threat isn't exactly a high bar. We can worry about being too self congratulatory once we've done anything about it.

Tokkemon 4y ago

We also lived through 9/11 at a very formative time, which didn't help matters.

TheFattestNinja 4y ago
True, but not sure it's a leading cause: I think many of us were way too young for it to "matter" (as defined as <= 14yo), as we didn't quite understand yet how shattering of the established world order that was. Like, we knew it was a big deal because of our elders reactions, but I feel it might have happened a tad too soon to be a root cause.