It has always been this way for humans for the past 10,000 years since we invented society. In small groups you can actually care about people, in large hierarchical groups you can't possibly care about anyone other than your small tribe. The solution to this is to break countries into much smaller units of representation while at the same time reducing the population significantly, we don't need more than a few hundred million people on this planet, ever. Essentially making a war on hierarchy and massive conglomeration of people.
Without these two moves, things will continue to get worse or perhaps better depending on perspective. It's evident to anyone with a mind that civilization as it exists now is completely and utterly a mad experiment which has at least as much chance in total failure as it does in success... and success might not be something which is positive, i.e. everyone hooked into the Matrix or something akin to that. Robots doing everything and reducing people to something akin to wild animals with no economic purpose.
When you say that "we" (you?) don't need most of the people living today, or their offspring, ever, isn't it the perfect example of inability to care about people?
That does not necessarily mean that no one should have any kids. It means that people should be forced to have at most one child, by probably compulsory sterilization after the first child's birth. Puerto Rico is an example of a place where this policy worked just fine. And it should apply to everyone, not certain groups and classes of people which is where such a policy errors. So no it has nothing to do with caring for people. In fact the geometric population reduction would have the exact impact of reducing the population and therefore creating more appreciation for people.
Not trolling, most of those articles are just whining about how inhumane it is... really more appeals to emotion than any sort of logic. Capitalists simply coerce people not to have children by making their economic lives miserable. So that they are so tied up in work and the economy, with limited pay, that they can not logically think of having children. That only increases misery. All while the Capitalists import people from the third world to increase competition and misery. All of this humaneness at the end does not reduce misery or create happiness, it does the exact opposite while breeders argue about freedom and other things, they deprive their children of any sort of freedom or happiness. Most people simply produce slaves for the economy. People whose lives center around being exploited by other people. To me slavery exists on a spectrum, the more competition and worse the working conditions in terms of the so-called work life balance, the more akin a job becomes to slavery.
So the logical extension where I can't see the link is that cavemen way way back must have either have been slaves, or had better lives than everyone on today's slavery spectrum. Is that right?
When I am out hunting something or in nature, I feel generally much better than while in society. Much like slaves, stress for modern humans is constant and never ending. Stress for primitive human hunter gatherers was acute and they were adapted to it after millions of years of evolution. Humans love coming with with rhetoric to justify how much better off they are, while at the same time knowing they are all miserable and dislike their specialist jobs, but there isn't much to do about that other than create more rhetoric about how much better everything is and how much better it will be in the future. While the constant amount of stress, the feelings of helplessness, lack of balance, etc, simply persist if not increase.
> Much like slaves, stress for modern humans is constant and never ending.
> While the constant amount of stress, the feelings of helplessness, lack of balance, etc, simply persist if not increase.
I think you are projecting. If you have internet access and the depth of knowledge of most people that read HN, then you have the tools to be self-sustaining and carefree. All you've said is you personally have hobbies you find relaxing but are unhappy with niches you've found for spending the rest of your time.
The problem is that the "worse off" parts tend to depend heavily on perception and the "better off" parts are acutely measurable. It's quite difficult to even frame a comparison of living now and living 50 years ago. It's impossible to even explain how food alone has improved in 50 years.
Part of what Anthony Bourdain does is "food archaeology" with traditional dishes that are now coming back into cuisine. So maybe 250 years ago , food was better if you had it.
A thousand tiny torts over status-based "microagressions"* don't add up easily to equal severe food uncertainty.
*lousy word choice if there ever was one... I depend on you as a reader to pick your own replacement.
Part of me thinks people are bloody-minded animals and most of this lives only in their head. But it's based in "is this all there is" and that's quite real.
Without these two moves, things will continue to get worse or perhaps better depending on perspective. It's evident to anyone with a mind that civilization as it exists now is completely and utterly a mad experiment which has at least as much chance in total failure as it does in success... and success might not be something which is positive, i.e. everyone hooked into the Matrix or something akin to that. Robots doing everything and reducing people to something akin to wild animals with no economic purpose.