One word that explains why the world feels 'deeply off' for so many people
upworthy.com

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16 points

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unclebucknasty

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21 hours ago

23 comments

fullshark ・ 21 hours ago

I think this is just the nature of collective cultural shifts when priorities and what we believe about the world change. I've seen it on smaller scales in companies (when the business priorities have changed but the rank and file need to pretend otherwise) and apparently that happened in the USSR. I think the west is dealing with the cultural shift of the death of the post WW2 (western lead) globalist utopian vision for the world.

A lot of people are not on board, and it's now obvious it includes a lot of citizens of western countries who don't believe the deal is favorable to their interests.

lesuorac ・ 21 hours ago

The thing is though, a bridge with large cracks in it hasn't fallen down. You can always reinforce it and then it doesn't fall down.

Same is true for the US. If the elected officials and their hired civil servants actually went around reinforcing the US then we're fine. If they continue to neglect the decaying roads, neglect the growing trusts, and etc then the bridge will collapse.

  • swatcoder ・ 21 hours ago

    Yes, but the tension is that you can't always reinforce the bridge.

    There are a lot of contingencies that need to be satisfied to be able to do that, some about the bridge, some about the environment (people, resources, conviction, interest, etc) around the bridge.

    And among those environmental contingencies, because they're so numerous and imprecise, the failing bridge increasingly invites people advocating to just accelerate retirement of the bridge on their preferred terms, towards their preferred replacement.

    Ultimately, there is some point of no return, where you can no longer reasonably expect anybody to be able to gather enough resources to repair the bridge as it stands, even though it still hasn't spontaneously collapsed just yet.

    It's very hard to know where you are on this progression though, and for many people, they don't have much effective potency in doing anything about it anyway. Hence, they just kinda get by and hope that they still have some way to cross the river tomorrow, with the inkling sense that they very well may not.

  • maiar ・ 21 hours ago

    The capitalists have found a way to make 51+% of the justifiably furious people vote for further dismantling of the institutions that work (as well as anti-DEI witch hunts and other nonsense) and, therefore, more abandon and decay.

    • AnimalMuppet ・ 17 hours ago

      But the thing is that, if the institutions collapse, that isn't actually going to be good for the capitalists. They're making far more money from the working system than they would from a collapsed one.

      So either those capitalists are very stupidly short-sighted, or blaming all this on the capitalists is mistaken.

      I find the explanation of foreign agitprop to be more believable. At least with that explanation, you're dealing with an actor who actually benefits from the collapse.

      • lamontcg ・ 10 hours ago

        1. They don't believe the systems will collapse. Musk (to just use him as an example) has a meme-level understanding of the government and macroeconomics, so they may not be judging the risks very correctly.

        2. They don't care if the systems collapse, as long as they wind up with more than everyone else.

      • unclebucknasty ・ an hour ago

        There are select capitalists who want to replace the current order with something that further empowers them.

        I'm not sure it's accurate to continue calling them capitalists, though they certainly benefited from capitalism.

        If you consider, for example, the current AI push and its goal to essentially eliminate the need for human labor, you find that such a result would not be a form of capitalism that we recognize.

        In fact, those pushing this outcome have talked of the need for UBI, which would seem the ultimate socialist scenario. But, even socialism doesn't quite fit, because it wouldn't be society that owns the means of production and distributes resources, but those who own the technology.

        All of this to say, I'm not sure our current economic frame still applies to what may be happening, and this is one more example of the dramatic change the article talks about that we appear to be dealing with via normalization.

  • mcphage ・ 17 hours ago

    > If they continue to neglect the decaying roads, neglect the growing trusts, and etc then the bridge will collapse.

    Keeping with this metaphor, “they” have taken to knocking down the bridge supports, as many as they can.

disambiguation ・ 19 hours ago

A vague word for a vague feeling. It won't be long before we're ultra-orthogonal. Buy my book thanks.

  • mcphage ・ 17 hours ago

    Yeah, but to pull that off you should have published your book 20 years ago.

maiar ・ 21 hours ago

This is a fancy word for “being human in a hostile and duplicitous world.”

There is a real cognitive cost to knowing everything is invalid but being disallowed to say it is this because then one is contributing to “a morale problem.” The weight of all the emotional labor is why most people can’t climb the corporate ladder, as the intellectual demands of office work are basically zero. Normally it is only autistic people who struggle with this cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, but since 2020 it has been basically everyone. The fact that our world is run by terrible people who will probably not go away until removed violently is one of those things no one can talk about, but everyone knows.

  • wakawaka28 ・ 20 hours ago

    >The weight of all the emotional labor is why most people can’t climb the corporate ladder, as the intellectual demands of office work are basically zero.

    I'm getting strong Ignatius J. Reilly vibes here. Most people can't climb the corporate ladder because there is no room for everybody to be promoted like that. Getting promoted is an inherently hard problem.

    >The fact that our world is run by terrible people who will probably not go away until removed violently is one of those things no one can talk about, but everyone knows.

    Be careful what you wish for. The people doing any kind of violent removal probably won't be benevolent either, and are likely to be less competent than the people they're replacing.

    • maiar ・ 17 hours ago

      Two things can be true. Most people don’t climb the corporate ladder because there are a limited number of spots, that’s true, and it is also true for most people that the reason they won’t make it is that they’re not good enough at emotional labor.

      • wakawaka28 ・ 17 hours ago

        Sorry, I don't think "emotional labor" is what holds people back. It is the actual labor or quality thereof. "Emotional labor" is a made up thing to distract from the burden of true labor.

    • AnimalMuppet ・ 17 hours ago

      Well, they'll be more competent at violently removing people. At building a better society afterward... not so much.

tocs3 ・ 21 hours ago

I could put a spoiler here but I won't. It is a short article and might be more or less right.

  • jbm ・ 21 hours ago

    Yeah, thanks, but it's Hypernormalization.

    By chance (or the algo realizing I read HN) I watched an interesting edit of Adam Curtis explaining the term on Youtube too.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI

tlogan ・ 20 hours ago

The core issue is that many people are afraid to speak up or take action. We can see that things aren’t okay, yet we’re constantly told “everything is ok” and “this is normal”.

Depending on the topic, expressing concerns can result in being labeled as “racist,” “transphobic,” or “woke,” which discourages open and honest discussion.

  • Rzor ・ 20 hours ago

    I don’t feel that social media has proven to be the right venue for having those discussions either. The algorithms are always pouring gasoline on the fire to drive engagement.

  • unclebucknasty ・ 18 hours ago

    >* expressing concerns can result in being labeled as “racist,” “transphobic,” or “woke,” which discourages open and honest discussion.*

    The article is not really about people feeling constrained in their speech on specific topics. That implies that people know what's wrong.

    It's more about the idea that things feel "off" for a lot of people in ways they can't quite describe. And, it's saying that the reason is that there really are dramatic changes happening in the world, but the powers-that-be are acting as if everything's normal.

    "when everyone knew the system was failing, but since no one could imagine a possible alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society"

Rzor ・ 20 hours ago

In other words, the utter failure of progressives worldwide to shift from advocating for the needs and rights of the working class to carrying water for big corporations, while focusing on social issues that, though important, do not address the underlying problems driving wealth inequality and limited social mobility. In short, liberalism has failed to deliver.