Why can't we shake the gloom? It's more than inflation or higher prices.

tintory@lemm.ee to Politics@beehaw.org – 44 points –
Why can't we shake the gloom? It's more than inflation or higher prices.
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Thanks, interesting stats in this article.

Just a guess but climate change events (and corresponding headlines) have really ramped up in the last three years.

And as the saying goes, there are no pockets in a shroud.

Covid made me completely lose trust in society (they couldn't even follow basic measures), the government (completely unprepared, constantly lying to the people), the economy (suply line issues for years show that any safety or redundancy was optimized away), even family members (half of them anti-vaxxers now).

How are we going to manage the far larger crisis of a climate collapse? We won't.

A giant rift splitting the world into two might get the world to cooperate for about a month before people start complaining, followed by rich people and state rulers starting to focus more on how they could possibly enrich themselves from this.

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Hell when confronted with a big problem, almost half the US decided that fascism would be better than democracy.

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I know that not everyone is greedy and stupid, but the people that are get to make the decisions that pull us further and faster into catastrophic ends for their own personal gain and the average person is completely unable to stop it at this point. Everyone knows the next ten to twenty years, we're going to see cascading failures, if we even have to wait that long. Droughts, food shortages, desertification, algal blooms, melting ice caps - these things have all been snowballing for decades already and we're doing nothing to slow it down because to do anything would harm the economy rich people's bank accounts.

This is it. This is the great filter. The rich killing the planet and everyone getting firsthand experiences of the old cree proverb.

Name 1 thing that has improved for the average person

I understand this is tongue in cheek and I agree that everything is getting worst. I’ll still answer to your question even if not everyone can enjoy this: the normalization of remote work. Best thing that happened to me because of COVID. I’d even say it outweighs the permanent degradation of my sense of smell from the virus itself. It can’t be taken for granted though and many bosses are pushing back.

As someone who also went full-time remote during COVID, I tend to agree.

However, it's also felt like trading one cage for another. Except this cage has more yard time.

The article blames COVID for people’s pessimism about the economy and shows some very serious looking spiky graphs. I don’t like how it seems to argue obliquely that the economy is good now but the peasants are too whiny to notice.

I can’t be the only one to feel like the economy (whatever that is) mostly improves through the average person’s misery and mostly suffers whenever we get some kind of windfall. Moreover it’s driving us right into some kind of apocalypse. So if some pollster asks me how confident I am that the economy will get better soon I don’t know what I’ll say to be honest.

Yes, it is almost like this 'strong economy' is not benefiting most people, or something.

I don't think anyone is blaming just inflation for how people are feeling, but those high prices are still there, and so are a huge list of other things to worry about.

The right answer is in the last paragraph of the article. Supply chains are not back to normal yet, why should consumer confidence?

It’s called corporate greed. They are the 1% and they own everything. Not hard to figure that one out. Inflation and enshitification. Divide and conquer.