Social media becoming advertising platforms, I think.

The American Healthcare system

Landlords & men behaving like sex pests

Throwing away food to maintain profits while people starve, but since I’m not the first to think this I’ll let my man Steinbeck explain it:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Religion

Copyright

Not saying Hello or goodbye in an elevator, to people from the same building, especially in big cities

Ads being everywhere.

Suburban car culture. People can go on and on about the how they like driving, and like the freedom to drive everywhere, even if it makes them fat and lonely. But what about their kids? It’s insane that kids are essentially trapped at home unless a parent happens to have the ability to drive that somewhere. Your convenient lifestyle comes at the cost of raising neurotic introverts who won’t go outside.

Nearly everything in society boils down to victim blaming, and since we won’t listen to victims (largely due to Just World biases), we keep making the same mistakes and missing the same pivotal feedback on why our solutions don’t work. So our “progress” usually ends up self-defeating.

Society itself. Have you seen this shit? What the fuck are we thinking?!

I have another one: Countries.

Some oppressors (indirectly, but essentially) started drawing lines one day and agreed that they would each get to farm the humans in their own territory. Modern governments run under the same framework, with pretty much the same expectations. Much of the oppression has been internalized and normalized, and the cattle now tell themselves they don’t want to be free because their rancher told them about fictional wolves that conveniently exist everywhere past the imaginary line that serves as a fence.

The end effect is that governments today almost always extract more their populations than they give back. Government is the system that establishes a stable funnel to redirect wealth and comfort from the bottom to the top. And it’s doubly abusive because the government monopolizes power, then leaves a power vacuum whenever it fails which screws over the masses a second time.

We all basically live under mafias running racketeering operations, and we are also expected to give our lives and passions to protect those those operations. If you try to break up the racket, some pawns will come and throw you in jail or shoot you.

Alternate systems of societal organization exist, but we have no interest in pursuing them. We’re happy just dealing with the problems that we choose to make for ourselves.

Rampant alcoholism.

That repairing stuff yourself is worse than the company repairing it for you

It’s kinda true since the company will probably try to withhold schematics, withhold spare parts or worse, maliciously design it to be unrepairable

Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of “Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?”

Took a while to digest because there’s a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:

“We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn’t have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves.”

Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can’t justify letting people live unless they’re necessary to society in some way - which might’ve made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn’t really necessary at all.

New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn’t actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you’re out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making “life” easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn’t how things should be at all!

Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we’d have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.