4 ms·

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 adul

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.

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.