once you actually internalize that society is fake and we just made everything up and none of this is real other than the "realness" people have placed upon it, it's insane that anyone thought any of this would work in the first place
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this is something I’ve been thinking about recently. Like animals don’t have mortgages or prisons. We just did that cuz we’re evolved apes. It’s so stupid how we just oppress ourselves for no good reason.
It's made me infuriated. I figured it out a long time ago and to see civilisations being led by emotionally stunted grown children who can't see past their need for materials is sickening and depressing.
It's my hope that these people flocking to Bernie sanders&AOC rallies start looking further into socialism communism Labor&class struggle Actuality see they don't actually stand for anything just finance the continuation of bourgeoisie oligarchy do absolutely nothing for us
Have you read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankjnd by Yuval Harari? I’m on the chapter about the origins of money and he says this about money, about religion, gender ideology, all the things. It’s a really entertaining read for such weighty topics.
Good point! Anything other than groups of roughly a hundred people being hunter-gatherers is a construct. I like not having to catch my coffee in the morning though, so I kinda hope society stays robust.
My understanding of this is nowhere near complete, but I think as a species defaulted to large family groups. Farming and the need to stay in one place was the beginning of society. There's a book suggested in the other replies that looks pretty interesting, I don't know much about the topic.
I know it's always gonna be a nuclear patriarchal family that's the "really real default correct natural way" though because evopsych assholes love to trot out that bullshit!
I naively like the idea of being in a group of the same hunter-gatherers my whole life. It sounds nice. In real life, I needed medical intervention when I was born. In prehistoric times, I would never have even gotten started.
I sometimes feel this way driving a car through a city.
“What are we even doing? Why are all these people controlling death machines waiting their turns and staying in the little lines?”
while driving I am constantly thinking about the fact that we drivers have all made a silent agreement to stay in our little lanes because to turn the wheel into the other lane kills us both and that fear of mutual destruction keeps us alive.
I kinda feel like that's breaking down, though, in our brave new world of "rules are for suckers." A couple weeks ago I saw someone roll up behind another car at an intersection and start honking at them for not running the red light.
i rented a little Toyota hatchback last weekend and was wishing for a magnetic bumper sticker saying "YOUR RIDICULOUSLY GIGANTIC PICKUP TRUCK DOES NOT INTIMIDATE ME. BACK THE FUCK OFF"
In moments like that, I wish I had the power of Q from Star Trek to just snap my fingers and be sitting with them in their car, freezing time for just them and saying in John DeLancey's smarmy voice, "And what exactly did you think you were going to accomplish by that, hmmm?"
The poor areas of L.A. County, esp, have been like this for at least a couple of decades. People do things like go 65 down the bike line to pass on the right and be first through the intersection when the light goes green. Go 65 down the median to be the first to turn left. People do die, a lot.
The fundamental problem with the death machines is the perverse incentives they create driving tired driving drunk because how else are you going to get there because everything was designed for death machines but not designed to make them actually safe.
Our fundamental misapprehension is that we are something other than monkeys with bigger brains that mostly are used to justify our autonomic reactions to barely processed stimuli. It’s astonishing that anything works.
"You mean I pay $1500 a year in case my car gets in an accident to get it repaired only to a certain point, but when I notice something that needs to be fixed or replaced I have to pay out of pocket? And that money isn't even partially put aside for me? What?"
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN.
"Tooth fairies? Father Christmas"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Terry Pratchett
I worked tech support over the phone, and I would get yelled at if my call average went over 7 minutes, but I would also get yelled at for bad reviews from customers who felt rushed.
EXISTENTIAL SELF REALIZATION!!
The process of understanding and accepting one's own existence, freedom & responsibility, leading to a sense of authentic self-awareness & meaning in a world without inherent purpose.
Yes, it is all a social construct. Money is not real. Gender identity and race being tied to behavior/intelligence/capability isn’t real. Borders and nation states aren’t real. Religion isn’t real. The calendar isn’t even real. They are all manmade and choices. Constructs that can be deconstructed.
I think the fact that they are constructed by us shows us that there is a reality to them. It also shows us that much of our world is mental and we have the ability to participate in it through various modes. The fact that they are real doesn't mean that they are immutable
And the fact that they are mutable certainly isn't license to become nihilistic about or antagonistic to the construction of these modes in general. It actually places a responsibility on us to be creative and intentional about how we create our embodied reality.
if you tried to explain capitalism to a child they would be like "none of these numbers add up or make sense" but it's your job as an american to lie to them until they're so confused they stop questioning things and if they can't or won't do that then they are Bad
Our local economy heavily depended on the steel mill which was shutting down when I was a kid in the 80s (Bethlehem Steel). Teachers claimed that capitalism was the best- ignoring it was also was why our parents were unemployed, why families got evicted, why kids got teased for being on free lunch.
this literally was an epiphany i had at maybe age 10 or 11. "wait, if there's... limited stuff... and you want to take unlimited stuff from that bag of limited stuff... aren't you gonna run out of stuff?" it's just such a massive and basic flaw, like someone saying the moon is made of cheese
oddly enough i think that paradoxically that's why more people are fooled by it. tell someone a little lie and the can debunk it easily. tell someone a massive lie about the nature of the universe and it overwhelms them so hard they give up
For instance: Why do stocks have value? Unless you own them at equity firm scale, you have no influence in the company. You get none of the profits distributed to you as a partial owner, and dividends don't offset buying costs. We just made all this up
I remember my parents trying to explain stocks and the stock market to me and thinking “none of that sounds real or good but they’re grownups so I guess it’s ok”
The perfect example of this is city builder games. The games are like ‘plop hospital goes here and costs x so people can go to doctor’, because if you put the real US healthcare system in there the game would be unplayable and the players would become communists.
My hospital management games charge people to go to the hospital, so you can buy more things for the hospital, but sort of... handwave where that money actually comes from. The people who need care get it, and you get money for it, somehow.
You are curing people in disasters and no-one gets turned away for not being able to pay. There is not a medical debt simulator. Honestly they could probably replace the 'money' bit with 'reputation' and it'd work the same.
I actually remember this moment in my elementary class. It was math or something and I was having trouble understanding how everyone could profit and still afford things and SURPRISE, LITTLE ME, THEY DON'T
the numbers will keep going up forever. don't worry. also we based our entire economic system on that premise so. cheer for infinite growth in a finite world or you're unamerican
but these stupid social structures that are real in their consequences made it so you’re committing yourself to a decade of poverty just get the chance to enter a crap shoot lottery for job security only to have the president say “yea sorry sociology is illegal now”.
If you tell anyone that the strategy of endless growth is the same strategy as a cancer cell, they look at you like you're the one who's not right in the head.
You’d think we could get every finance brained CEO to just play a videogame that sucks them off by showing them numbers going up and a big slot machine and they’d leave us alone.
everyone who has ever worked a retail or sales job long enough is inevitably jolted out of capitalism brain the 100th time they get yelled at by their manager for not meeting some ludicrous metric based on 20% increase year over year forever when you know damn well that's not happening
when I think of retail, I think of when I worked at Waldenbooks and was directly told I wasn't being promoted or given a raise because my "book club signup numbers were low".
I then became the district leader in book club signups, by over 100 vs. #2.
my department has been directed to make the 2030 number FIVE TIMES BIGGER than the 2025 number, despite not actually being able to expand into a larger market. Just squeeze five times more blood out of the same stones.
I worked at a popular fast fashion eyewear store and was consistently the top seller at the store but I still got scolded frequently for not selling add ons
When I worked retail I remember we had a metric where we were supposed to do X service on Y% of customers. One of the district managers sent out an email praising another store for having like 300% on this metric, something which could only be done by cooking the books. Metrics, baybee
Currently in this stage at my retail job, because our old manager who didn't give a shit about metrics was basicly forced out, and they're doubling down on metrics...
Back when I was working for a big tech firm, they'd built a document management web site for use by lawyers during a bankruptcy. They then hired one of the VPs from the bankrupt company, who thought the system was amazing and should be sold. I got to beta test the release product...
It was terrible. A glorified file server with an http interface and UNIX read-write permissions bolted on. I got to sit in a meeting where said VP was confident it would be a $60 million dollar product in two years.
As the tester, I got to tell him that it would fail in the marketplace...
Was actually fired for not making my personal sales goal which was 30% over the previous year’s sales for the whole store. They “offered” to let me quit so they wouldn’t have to give me a bad reference. Told me I couldn’t get unemployment anyway if I were fired. They were wrong about everything.
I worked at a large chain bookseller and heard this incessantly during a summer with no major book releases. Sales needed to increase but the prior year we had a new Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code breaking records. Absurdity.
i worked at an outdoor shopping center and it would be absolutely pouring rain and we would still get scolded every hour for not selling enough products to an empty store
same thing but it was a remote control car kiosk in a dying mall that only had a sears and a picture frame store. i got yelled at for being there when the mall opened and had my boss call to tell me I was too stupid to understand what “door buster deals” means.
when i worked at sears, they expected *every associate* to sign up 100 people for credit cards per day. SEARS! in 2013! our store mgr encouraged us to pump up our numbers by targeting people who can’t speak english very well to essentially trick them into signing up. thank fuck no one complied.
i worked at a sam goody that was a mall entrance (so 90% of people in the store were not planning to shop there) and we got berated for not selling "profit" (batteries). you weren't supposed to try to sell cds/movies/games, those don't matter. just sell batteries to people trying to go to jc penney
I'm still haunted by the girl at Borders who broke down in tears when I declined to give her my email address. They had been told that they would be fired if they failed to collect enough addresses each day and she was below quota at the end of her shift. Cashier should not be a traumatic job.
I remember my years in retail and getting told off for not making enough sales in days no-one came in and wondering if I was supposed to kidnap them off the street
Your average retail/food service person is a combined punching bag and therapist on top of their actual job, which is physical and tiring, all for minimum wage. We keep proving our whole system doesn't work without them yet insisting they don't deserve respect or good pay.
Happened to me when I worked exclusively morning shifts at a video game store for months. Got told off for not making enough sales when I worked weekdays and saw maybe 10 customers a week lol
Omfg, working for Mid-range phone stores is the WORST. Literally barren store, never-mind the plaza bein' empty.
"You didn't sell anything today. What's up with that?"
Well.. If you checked the cameras, you would see that literally no one showed up. I can't just yank people into the store now..
the beginning of the end for me at sephora after 5+ years off and on was when they introduced the credit card (something they previously said they would never do, btw). i never signed up one person for a sephora credit card. absolutely evil concept entirely
When I worked at Home Depot they were obsessed with moving the credit cards, and I ran out of ways to explain that I don't give a shit what my customers pay with.
When I was a scheduling manager at Old Navy I would talk with other managers who built their schedule around taking hours away from people who didn't get enough credit cards. Strong arming teenagers to sign up struggling parents to a 26% apr credit card or they lose their job. Insanely dark world.
Yes to all of this ! At benefit we had to track people down in belk and lure them to the counter to sell them things and get a credit card. MAC was similar in the sense of sales. It broke my heart. I get it, I just felt bad treating people like sales goals I couldn’t do it anymore.
so much of the entire shopping experience now is shit that is no one wants to be doing or hearing. i was in line at TJ maxx and every interaction was the cashier uncomfortably trying to push a credit card when they clearly didn't want to and the customer uncomfortably declining. no one wants this
When I was a bank teller, I had consistently great customer service feedback, pretty good investment referrals, but terrible credit card sales numbers because I also hated them. But my aunt was the district VP and pestered me about improving them every month.
I categorically refused to ask about credit cards when I worked at Walmart. I will not help them facilitate others into debt for greed, they can eat my ass.
i remember somehow manifesting an increase in customers on a dead day to meet cafe sales quotas at my bookstore job and my boss still being unimpressed.
though to be fair here both her and the store manager were punished for abusing me by the dm after they fired me for having panic attacks/autism.
I worked at a bank inside a grocery store where we would all have get on a call to share our goals for the day and we’d be like “we’re going to get 3 home equity loan applications today” and have to harass people who just wanted to get some ice cream and leave and then get fussed at for not selling.
Besides the regular push for sales (with the implicit connection being that if sales are down, your hours are down), there’s the credit cards, loyalty cards, and at my last in-person job, tech and print services that you HAVE to sell. Ask me how fun being in an outdoor garden center in Vegas ISN’T.
when we were taught about the stock market and the teacher got to futures, I instantly understood. (my mother had been taking me to the horse track for years, her to gamble and I was deep in horse mode) I said "it's gambling" and argued with the teacher for quite a while over this.
A dude came along and said “I own all this land and also the mineral rights and if you don’t work for me I’ll let you and your family starve.” 400 years later, in the classroom: “Our American Way of Life is the best!” rasps the android Edubot v. 3.67 as the children cower. (Capitalism)
A fave epiphany moment was once imagining all humans and their culture suddenly disappeared. That imagined world is true reality at the end of the day. Un-indoctrinated.
And that whatever it is, it's part of a constant evolution of something that existed from the earliest human times. And maybe before if we start wondering how much of neanderthal society we integrated into our own.
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It's my hope that these people flocking to Bernie sanders&AOC rallies start looking further into socialism communism Labor&class struggle Actuality see they don't actually stand for anything just finance the continuation of bourgeoisie oligarchy do absolutely nothing for us
It all worked more or less as long as people played along to the bare minimum amount needed.
Which explains a lot.
“What are we even doing? Why are all these people controlling death machines waiting their turns and staying in the little lines?”
"You mean I pay $1500 a year in case my car gets in an accident to get it repaired only to a certain point, but when I notice something that needs to be fixed or replaced I have to pay out of pocket? And that money isn't even partially put aside for me? What?"
"Tooth fairies? Father Christmas"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
Terry Pratchett
Peace can only be achieved by people agreeing on it. Finding ways to create mutual benefit.
There is simply no alternative. But that's why peace is so fragile.
The process of understanding and accepting one's own existence, freedom & responsibility, leading to a sense of authentic self-awareness & meaning in a world without inherent purpose.
yeah
I then became the district leader in book club signups, by over 100 vs. #2.
I did not get a raise or promotion, ever.
lol. lmao.
Goal is 2 app downloads a day, 14 a week. And they call this a low goal.
Our customer base skews older. Hell, a decent number have filp phones and keep their cash in that little bank envelope.
They're delusional to think we can get 1 everyday, forget 2.
As the tester, I got to tell him that it would fail in the marketplace...
Within 18 months, it was off the market, with sales in single digits, not the thousands he anticipated.
"You didn't sell anything today. What's up with that?"
Well.. If you checked the cameras, you would see that literally no one showed up. I can't just yank people into the store now..
though to be fair here both her and the store manager were punished for abusing me by the dm after they fired me for having panic attacks/autism.
it is the most horrific system to build a society around that humanity has ever invented.
it has killed billions and crippled billions more.
this has to stop. 🙁
He laughed at me and called me an idiot, and didn’t answer the question.
"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings"
What I just said is a construct.
The words I used, the letters that make them up, the sounds they make, the thoughts they inspire: all constructs.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/sapiens-a-brief-history-of-humankind-yuval-noah-harari/15277101
Oh, not you, sweetie! 🥰
It's all about who l why individuals do what they do in groups and how we make and enforce "society."