http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xhdy9zBEws

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Pretty cool video.

We like repetition.  Sure we seek little variances for spice, but for the most part it's comfortable and secure to have the big parts of our lives be stable and repetitive, work included.

Because 99.9% of us don't have (1) the fortune of being independently wealthy or (2) the magic combination of ingenuity, wits, ambition, guile, and/or connections necessary to escape drudgery.  It could be said, actually, that a workaday existence is something to be grateful for.

Haha, you guys really misunderstood me. You saw nothing else in that video than the "going-to-work"-bit? What I meant was not "Why do we submit ourselves to work?" but rather something in line with "Why did we allow our world to become so enslaved to technology and the 'workaday existence', to a worldview that sees everything as statistics, variables, resources and commodities to be sold, bought, allocated, controlled, distributed, etc.? Why did we allow this world-spanning iron cage to descend upon us?" Kind of something like that. And by the way, it was meant as a rhetorical/philosophical question, I don't really expect an answer to it, as there might not even be one, still I think its something worth considering now and then, thus "remind me". In a way, isn't it true that, while the ever-increasing speed of the development of science, technology, and commerce opens up many possibilities to us, it also makes us more and more like invalids, more and more dependent on artificial prostheses for even the most basic day-to-day actions? We're like cyborgs, only our implants are external to us, in the shape of computers, credit cards, etc. Are we becoming more "free" or less so? Impossible for any one person to really answer, I think, just as impossible as having a really complete overview of what's really happening in the world, you can only see a tiny fraction of it, a minute glimpse (that's why people who think they've got the process pegged down and trapped in a little glass jar, like political commentators on for example FOX, CNN, etc are the biggest idiots around, content in their self-smug and near-complete ignorance). But, sometimes the individual can get an intuitive understanding of the whole, look up from the never-ending carousel of the "workaday existence" and grasp what's going on, and I think this video makes an attempt to show that. Its very possible that I'm misinterpreting the message (if there was one), but personally I found the Röyksopp video more chilling than any death metal video I've seen (some of Kraftwerk's music can have the same effect, I think).

The question is so openly worded that literally any number of interpretations is possible, so don't be so shocked at a misinterpretation. 

To answer, Animal hides and horns were commodities to be traded and given values as clothing/goods long before electricity existed, and even the notion of "owning land" is as old as cavemen.  (this is MY cave! Go find your own cave!).

We have always assigned values to things so they could be traded, thus technology doesn't really have anything to do with turning things into a commodity to be sold and allocated.

Which certainly removes a lot of variables about "how/when did this happen?".  It happened way back in the B.C. ages

Sorry Carl, but I can't agree with that. To explain why, I have to be a bit long-winded, because this ties so many things together and to explain what I was thinking about I have to rant a bit.

Sure, trading has always been around, but as any historian or anthropologist could tell you, the concept of "owning land" (or owning and assigning "value" to anything, really) is closely linked to the rise of civilization and cities. Its the notion of owning land coupled with the start of agriculture (<--- which is very much based on the control and ownership of land) that started the process of civilization we're now treading along. I think that, even if you had the ability to converse with a cave-man, you could never have explained the notion of "owning" land to him, it would just have been impossible for hunter-gatherer nomads to understand that there is certain land you are not "allowed" to tread, that there is somehow this abstract, metaphysical ownership-bond between that particular land and a person called "the owner" and that that person could forbid you to be there. Sure, if you stumbled into someone's cave and he got pissed, he might've killed you, but I think that has more to do with basic "fight-or-flight"-instincts and fear of strangers/the unknown, not concepts of ownership. Such concepts are abstract and most be formulated, agreed upon between civilized people, and codified into law. Its a sign of civilization, and the abstraction has just gotten more and more complex and further and further removed from our direct physical reality.

How would you explain to a cave-man (again assuming you could make yourself understood) that you for example just ordered some CDs from CDJapan, you paid for them using a 16-digit number representing a "credit card", which itself in turn represented digital figures stored on some "bank" somewhere that you can draw upon (or that could be emptied by someone else or lost in a financial meltdown if the shit really hits the fan)? How could you explain shipping rates, inflation, office hours, the sorting of mail and packages, a mail-man service, and all the other processes needed to get this package of shiny discs half the way across the planet to your doorstep (and just try to explain "planet")? Its impossible, since we've abstracted ourselves so far beyond what formed the everyday existence of prehistoric man that most of us work designated and predetermined hours on jobs that often don't have anything to do with our own immediate needs or wants, other than earning us money. Isn't it crazy that some people go to work designing missiles, producing commercials, building monuments, selling substances that hurt their fellow men (either legally or illegally), and generally just go through motions to do stuff that we couldn't care less about once we get home? We're so far into it and caught in the cage that we can't see that its completely whacked out. The cave-man knew what he wanted and worked maybe two or three hours a day to feed and clothe himself. How many hours do we work? And by "work", I don't mean just what we're employed and salaried to do, but all the things around it that need to get done in order to uphold a modern life, like commuting/driving to work and back, picking up the kids, worrying about your looks, weight, and appearance to neurotic lengths, filling in forms, obeying laws and social conduct codes, worrying about score tests, what road is the safest way home on a dark night, tax rates, getting enough exercise, catching that show on TV, pre-ordering the new next-gen console, sucking up to the boss, voting, and just being preoccupied with inanities like editing Wikipedia-pages and going through ad deleting junk-mail, etc. The list can be made endless, just look around you.

I'm definitely not one of those naive "back-to-nature"-types that wants to flee back to some idealized prehistoric age and dreams idiotic dreams about living without technology. Of course life was hard and harsh in prehistoric times, life is never ideal. But I wonder if the bottom line so far has been negative or positive? Did they have a better life back then than we do now or is it the other way around? We can never definitely answer the question, but we can speculate and we can harbour intuitions, and the more I'm exposed to the vomit whirlwind of modern civilization, the more I get the feeling we made a huge mistake with that whole Industrial Revolution deal. And I think you're wrong when you say "technology doesn't really have anything to do with turning things into a commodity to be sold and allocated", technology and the rational ideal that goes with it has everything to do with the abstracted way of thinking we've developed the last few centuries, the technical evolution shapes us as much as we shape it, and it has increasingly made us view the world in terms of numbers, resources, variables, etc. We know that this development has produced much good, but many people don't seem to realize that its the same development that has opened the door to stuff like concentration camps. To take an example, do you know what a huge operation the Nazi's genocide of the Jews and other "undesirables" was? Its not as easy as just getting a bunch of people together and offing them. You have to build buildings, develop the most efficient method of killing (balancing effectiveness with cost in time and money and usability), train camp guards in rules and procedures and hire psychiatrists to evaluate whether the guards have what it takes to get the "job" done, employ resident medical staff and scientists (for all the hilarious experiments on the inmates, you know), have defense perimeters and set up security around the facilities, write down registers about who to send to the camps, who to work to death and who to just kill right off the bat. Not to mention the logistics. That sort of thing is a logistical nightmare, you have to coordinate train time-tables, raids, etc. Do you for example know that some of the first IBM computers were developed because the Nazi regime needed an efficient way to set the time-tables and deportations to the concentration camps? It just makes sense, right? If you have 11 million people you want to kill while simultaneously waging a huge war, what do you do? Do you employ a staff of thousands of skilled (and thus expensive) workers, or do you increase effectiveness by using a few punch-card computers that don't need sleep, food, and that you don't have to pretend to respect? Those people could be used much better in the war effort, so what a smart dictator would do would be to allocate the resource of a thousand humans to the Army so they can increase your chances of conquering the continent, and put the computer resources on the "ship-Jews-off-to-die" business. Crazy? No, rational, at least by the standards of a modern industrial economy. Maximum profit for minimum expense, etc...

I'm not arguing that people couldn't commit evil "back then". But the only part of the above equation that was possible or even imaginable during prehistoric times was killing someone. Sure, a bad thing, but at least there was something natural about it, someone tried to steal your cave, and you waste them. It wouldn't even occur to a cave-man to organize a "Final Solution" and create an elaborate and efficient killing-machine industrial complex in that way, and there would be no need for him to do so. The impulse to do evil has always been around, but modern technology amplified it, made it possible in so many ways and with such great ease that the door was opened to some really horrible shit. And the monstrous example of the Holocaust is only taken from the extreme end of things, in our supposedly more humane society of today you get things like people being trampled to death in stores because everyone is in a mad rush to grab Blu-ray Spider-Man 3 or whatever for $6.95, lower-class people working two or three jobs just to get their families by and consequently not even being able to spend time together or even enjoy life in any meaningful way, we get food industries and pharmaceutical companies that work by the "maximum cost efficiency"-principle, pumping out poisonous crap that hurt people more than it helps them, making them addicted, dependent, obese, tired, detached, etc. You get organizations and government departments working by the undead logic of self-sustenance alone, just coming up with new obscure causes to keep the tax revenue rolling in, governments justifying themselves by external and internal threats, allocating and subsidizing this and controlling and modifying that.

Things are never black-or-white and it might be impossible to say one way is better than the other. But taking refuge in "its always been like this" is just weak, things have changed a lot, and maybe when the balance score is finally drawn, we'll find that all the while we were jerking off to our supposedly happy, fair, and "democratic" modern society, things were really just getting worse and worse. Although I'm not religious, I do understand the appeal of the Biblical story of Eden. There is a feeling deep down in our collective unconsciousness that we had a good thing and we blew it, although we're desperately trying to bullshit ourselves into believing the opposite. Isn't that what all this ever-increasing escapism is really about? All these video games, movies, books, drugs, etc. Prehistoric man just lived, he followed whatever instinct welled up inside. We have to suppress, control, channel, modify, censor, and disregard almost every feeling, thought, and impulse we get, and we call ourselves "free", looking back at the dark and wild ages with contempt.

That's f---ing hilarious, isn't it? World history is the grimmest divine comedy: we're fucked and don't even realize it. Its like a "so-bad-its-good" movie. Maybe this whole prison-train of a historical process we're on will finally lead to some sort of poetic justice, imagine if our technology and science gets so complex and advanced that the classic science fiction-scenario of computers taking over and exterminating us comes true. Man, the animal that rationalized himself out of existence. The reason I get pessimistic about it is that we're already half-way there, this cage we built for ourselves has already drained half of all that was natural, spontaneous, free, and fundamental in our essence. Why otherwise would for example a person spend hundreds of dollars on video game albums during his poor student years and get by certain months only on noodles or other shit and let his body take the hits? Why does anyone at all want to work 8 hours a day on jobs that are repulsive and degrading like cleaning toilets and wiping the pube-hairs off toilet chairs, or sit in a back-killing office chair doing mindnumbing computer work, etc.? You might be "free", but prepare to be assimilated if you don't want to starve or go to jail or be put in a mental institution...

We're fucked, and in moments of clarity we know it. If you excuse me, I think my moment is passing now, I'm heading over to mininova to download the new Lars von Trier movie. You gotta do something with your freedom and human rights, yeah? Besides, I heard there's this totally grossed-out torture scene and shit! I'm so like, there, dude!

(BTW Carl, this wasn't directed at you or meant as an "attack" or anything, I was just writing down some shit I was thinking about).

DK, I think I love you.

Thanks, its mutual.

Also, I forgot my most important point. All the things in our lives that are truly good and worthwhile has always been around, haven't they? Love, friendship, joy, freedom, and other people existed "back then" as well.

But, what have we added these last 10.000 years? What worthwhile new things have we come up with? Maybe the concentration camps, the strip-bars and brothels, the political ideologies, the fundamentalist religions, the approximately one billion people dead in wars from the dawn of civilization up til now, the polluting of the natural environment? How about the torture-chambers, dank dungeons, inquisitions, the drug trade, the sky-rocketing prison rates (and for that matter, incarceration in general), the weapons of mass destruction, the communal latrines, the overcrowded cities, the traffic jams, the indoctrination centers, the country clubs and golf courses, the injustices, hate, malice, boredom, discontent, monotony?

We've added a lot of crap, but gained very little of actual worth. Thus my original question "Why are we doing this to ourselves?" My guess: because we're dumb and because we really have very little choice in the matter.

Totally, dude. My spiritual perspective is starting to evolve into one that feels like everything around us is filler: the CDs we listen to, the books we read, the forum posts we write, the jobs we have, the clothes we wear, the bars we frequent, the gyms we work out at, the cars we drive, the houses we live in, the TV shows we watch, the money we make, the money we spend. Granted, many of those things are fun for us (or else why would we be doing them? Unless the reason is boredom, and for that I can only advise that one who is bored get up, get out and follow your real passions in life before your time is up!) and the can evoke expressions and feelings that make us feel truly alive, but I think that the real important parts of life are the things that have always been around, like you said. When all is said and done, it's not about the fleeting and trivial matters of life that are important - it's about friendship, kindness, happiness and, above all else, love.

1. Transistor - Without the transistor, you'd be putting your thoughts in a diary, unless you wanted a room full of vacuum tubes.
  2. Alternating current generator - This makes our lives easier, granting us access to heat removal, superior lighting, etc.
  3. Atomic weapons - Would we still be in WWII right now? The advantage of those things is they scare people - quickly.
  4. Telescope - This was arguably more dangerous than atomic weapons, since it provided evidence that contradicted religious doctrine.
  5. Satellites - As an example, Google Earth.
  6. Particle Accelerators - They can be thought of as 'ancient simulators'. By ancient, I mean before the first stars existed. We can get some idea of what the universe was like at much higher energy (temperature) levels.
  7. Zero, Algebra, Calculus
  8. Relativity, QED, QCD
 
  I think what people are really looking for is something that will free them from having to go to work, and provide them with all the stuff that going to work provides. People don't want to work. They want things given to them. As I have stated previously, we spend a great deal of time trying to keep up with the Joneses. This is the impetus for working. In the far past, the impetus was one of maintaining one's existence.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up … he_Joneses

VIDEO GAMES DUDE!!!111eleven

Oh yeah, forgot that. I must be going crazy or something.

That technology enables our actions to happen on a much larger Scale is what you're getting at.

You already had summed it up in 1 line rather than needing 5 paragraphs:

"The impulse to do evil has always been around, but modern technology amplified it, made it possible in so many ways and with such great ease that the door was opened to some really horrible shit."

Where only a handful of people used by be affected by individual actions, now a few million people can be affected by any action.  The human motivations behind the actions are still the same, technology has merely scaled those actions up to a massive global level rather than a small local level. 

Technology just makes our human weaknesses that much bigger, making our errors more obvious and easier to see.

That's true in some way. Certainly when it comes to the devastation at the end of WW2. And yet, as abhorrent as that is to me, I can't help feeling it's an improvement over WW1. And, right now, wars are being waged with far, far fewer casualties than they may have had in years gone by. For several reasons, some of which are due to improvements in technology. One of the key recent improvements being information and communications developments. Quite simply, people have a harder time these days getting away with the crap they once did because someone, somewhere, will have caught it on video or be reporting on what happens.

Of course, I'd rather there were no wars and no killing going on.

But there has been war and killing all through history. These days, there are large sections of the planet with very little of that. You only have to go back a short time in history for that not to be true. Where I would have to walk to work in London passing a parade of human heads, or worry about me and my family being burned as heretics and so on.

Yes, that shit still goes on in some places but it used to go on everywhere, in places celebrated for being the height of civilisation. Many of us live in a far less violent age. And if you think we didn't have that violence 10,000 years ago, well I'd say you're likely just deluding yourself. History is bloody and wouldn't back that view up.

We still do a hell of a lot of shit we shouldn't and there are some people who have got better at hiding it or dressing it up for the masses but I can't help thinking whatever way you look at it, we're on the right path. It's a slow journey and it comes with setbacks, and every day I find myself disgusted by the hell that goes on in this world, but I think I can't help but look at history and look at where we're at now and think it's at least vaguely going in the right direction. Or at least, it could be going in far worse directions.

By the way, this is a reply to the posts in the thread, not the video. You gave me no idea what the video was and I've learned my lesson a long time ago about clicking a video link blind.

Watch the video, Jay. It'll be OK.

What?  It's still the case for the overwhelming majority of people that labor is performed just to be able to afford life's necessaries.  It is a small class of people who work longer/harder than they need to so as to be able to afford the finer things in life.

are you shitting me

I was trying to explain why we tolerate leading boring lives in order to remain alive. We don't need to work 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Much of the money we make is spent on things not related to actual survival. I'll bet if we only spent money on necessary things, we could work half the year, or less. But we couldn't do that even if our incomes allowed it. The system is rigged to force us to work all year, maddeningly, crazily, without cease.

  I've spent time thinking of a way to make the work force more efficient. A great deal of human productive energy is wasted with regular work schedules. Work schedules would be more efficient if they were irregular. No job should ever have any 'down-time'. A regular schedule creates great quantities of wasted time. Think of it this way. Imagine if someone tried to make a regular sleep schedule, in which they slept from 1 am to 9 am. That looks really good, but would be inefficient in practice. This is because not all of that time would be spent sleeping. To purposefully set aside chunks of time makes little sense, since we don't know the future.

You seem to have a very narrow definition of necessary expenses, not including things like, say, paying for a roof over one's head or adequate provision for the upbringing and education of children.  Most people need to work full-time just to be able to afford their rent or mortgage payments.  If your idea of necessary income is limited to earning enough to live in a cardboard box and subsist on bread and water without regard for your ability to survive once you are too advanced in years to work, then I guess you're right that you don't need to work five days a week with two weeks of vacation per year.

Sorry Carl, but I don't think you quite understood what I was trying to say. Of course increasingly advanced technology enables and amplifies our ability to do evil, but its not "the same". To think that we ourselves are completely uninfluenced by the technology we create is very naive. As I said, it shapes us as much as we shape it. Technology is a very suggestive means by which to manipulate the natural world, and everytime something new is created it changes our view of what is possible to do, the options that are on the table. You're trying to say that the "desire" to do evil has always been around, but that is just true in the broadest sense. "Doing evil" is an abstract concept: as soon as you actually try to commit something, you have to be more specific about what you should do, you have to decide how to go about doing it. What would prehistoric man come up with? Clubbing or choking you to death, throwing a stone or a spear? In comparison, just take a look at a cross-section of present-day horror movies and video games (and indeed, the actual news) to see all the thousands of ingenious ways we've come up with to hurt and off one another. This is not "business as usual" in the annals of human wretchedness, this is technological and scientific development opening the gates to previously unthinkable hells. Have you given thought to the harrowing possibilities that arise once we've completely mastered neuroscience or nano-technology, for example (and I really hope we never get there)? Stuff like that can make some seriously sick shit possible that most people today wouldn't even be able to contemplate, and the technological development fuels the sadistic impulses just as much as the sadistic impulses fuel the technological development. Like I said, much of the sick shit going on daily all over the world would be completely unthinkable to prehistoric humans. I'm in no way saying there weren't psychos or killers back then, I'm just saying that their state of technology and knowledge left much less leeway for these impulses to fully bloom out and be systematized and regularized. Tell me, what's more barbaric and "primitive", clubbing someone to death because you feel he's a threat, or setting up a system of concentration camps and killing fields just to be faithful to an abstract ideology? The latter isn't just an "amplification" of the former: its a new way of thinking that owes a great deal to modern technology and the modes of thought (or should that be "thought", since more and more things are being automated all the time?) that technology fosters and encourages.

Really? Could you then explain to me how 60 million people killed (WW2) is an improvement on 11 million people killed (WW1)? Sounds a bit off to me. Seriously, I'm not trying to be sarcastic, I'm honestly curious about what you meant.

If I can speculate, I'd say that WW2 could in a longer historical perspective be seen as "better" than WW1 because it's end signaled a new, more stable and peaceful world order than the chaos that marked the two decades after WW1 (and eventually lead straight to WW2). But that (if that is what you're saying) seems like a strange way to argue to me. What happened in the aftermath of WW1 was truly a tragedy that set the world up for the horrors of WW2, but that doesn't mean that it had to be that way. If the Allies hadn't treated Germany like shit after WW1, there was a real possibility that the discontent and hatred Hitler used to seize power and launch WW2 and the Holocaust would never have materialized (or in any event that it wouldn't have been so strong), that things went the way they went is more a result of a collective f----up on part of the world leaders of that time. And also, the end of WW2 might have marked the beginning of stability, peace, and a relatively merciful, tolerant society in the West, but there are other parts of the world that weren't quite as lucky. The end of WW2 meant the consolidation and expansion of Stalin's empire, and the establishment of Mao Zedong's rule in China (with the tens of millions of victims that brought), and those are just the tip of the iceberg. You might argue that the world's been more "humane" since 1945, but isn't this to retreat to a narrow Western perspective? For significant parts of the world, 1945 didn't mean an end to tyranny, war, or genocide, no matter how cozy things have been in the societies we grew up in. Truly, most people out there still live in a "eat-or-be-eaten"-world, and the question is: will our way of life extend to every corner of the globe eventually? Or will the same eternal laws that are still in effect in places like the Congo, North Korea, Iraq, China, etc. once again overwhelm us if something decisive happens here and knocks our pretty house of cards down?

After the end of WW2 in 1945, there have been on average 20 wars or armed conflicts going on simultaneously in the world at any given time. In the last 50 or so years, there have been more wars across the world than any comparable period during for example Alexander the Great's reign or during the early Middle Ages (500 - 1000 a.d.). Just because you never happen to hear about many of them on TV doesn't mean that they haven't happened. As for the comparison with the two World Wars, the only reason (most) wars today are waged with far less casualties is that the world system is more stable than has been the case throughout most of history. We're living in a breathing-pause period, especially us Westerners. We think the basis of our civilization is so secure, but isn't this really just a way of bullshitting ourselves into complacency? After all, as Western society is structured right now, the only thing that has to happen is for the oil to dry up (which many scientists say will happen in a few decades, I have no idea if their estimations are reliable, but its a very real possibility, that shit is hardly an endless or recyclable resource, once its gone, its gone). Just about everything in modern society is dependent on oil, and once that disappears, many of the everyday things we take completely for granted (manufacturing industries, social services, transportation, electricity, etc.) will become rare and contested commodities, or disappear altogether. If we get to that state, how strong do you think our humanistic values to "wage wars with few casualties" will be? My guess: as strong as they are in real places this very day that lack all or most of the above mentioned things. You know, places like the Congo (5.5 million people killed between 1998 and 2008, why didn't Dubya liberate this place?), or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (where modern society collapsed but left behind wonderful non-electrical modern technology like the machine gun, enabling a relatively small but ruthlessly disciplined band of fanatics to kill one third of the population in the short period of four years, for the slow intellects out there that's every third person in the country at that time).

The only reason war "hurts less" today is because we bought ourselves a breather from history (often on other people's expense), and because it mostly happens to other people we don't know or care that much about. There are so many possible ways for that chaos to creep back over the border and strike us, and when you think about it, hasn't the foundation of Western civilization become increasingly wobbly and unstable since the 1950s (especially in the last two decades)? Which direction are we heading? Only the future will tell, but (to return to the original theme of the thread), considering all of the shit we've come up with, if the shit truly hits the fan, we'll be more fucked than anything that has come before. We've set ourselves up for a major fall by being so dependent on our toys and moving further and further away from our "barbaric" roots that if it really happens, I think the living will truly envy the dead. If we've not come up with a viable, realistic alternative once the oil crash hits, I think Jay, that you'll have enough time to catch up on that "worry about my family being burned as heretics"-business (as well as a plethora of other interesting things we today consider confined to the safe realm of the cinema screen), and we'll all get more than enough of our fill of walking past parades of human heads, whether we're in London or not. The reason all of that stuff sounds so far off to us is that none of us really (please note that I'm including myself here as well as anyone else) has the ability to grasp the enormity of something that cataclysmal. Really, where do you begin to meet something like that? Write a letter to your congressman or member of parliament? Do an online petition? Since its such a huge thing and we all have busy lives to lead, none of that crap is really viable, even for the relatively few people that would give a damn. And that is getting close to the core of what I've been trying to say: this whole civilization deal has gotten so huge and all-encompassing, so far-reaching in it's multitude of consequences and dependencies that it will really take a Herculean effort to start steering this planet-sized ship into another course if the shit really starts going down big-time. My point is: maybe we've just set ourselves up the bomb, maybe our technological dependence and way of life has not made us as strong and secure as we've thought, but rather these 10.000 years of civilization might just prove to be the prelude to our destruction. If all the truly good things in life have always been around for living creatures, and these ten milliennia have only added a lot of death, destruction, torture, and hypocrisy, as well a multitude of funny, elaborate, and amusing toys for us to kill time with and pretend that our lives aren't empty and hide that we're moving further and further away from our roots all the time, is all this shit really worth it?

The answer, I think, is beyond reach for anyone. We can only speculate and philosophize from our vague intuitions. We have our lives to take care of, we have to make the best of it for as long as we can. But there might be a worth in considering all of this now and then, and I personally find that I can't shut it out of my mind all the time, it returns to haunt me now and then. Maybe these stupid monkeys (that is, us humans) should have just stayed in the African treetops and not started f---ing around?

(Also, for the record, I do share your belief that we're slowly moving in the right direction despite all the shit that's going on. I just like to play Devil's Advocate, and I can easily imagine the development described above actually happening, even if I don't hope for it).

C'mon Jay, don't you trust me? Seriously, its a great video, just click that shitz.

Seriously, only two weeks of vacation? What do you have time to do with two weeks of vacation? Between that, the non-universal healthcare, and the generally retarded level of the public political debate, I really wish I lived in the Land of the Free...... not.

Go suck a dick and stay away from this shit, OK?

Just out of curiosity, DK, what is it you do for a living anyway?

How rude! What, you're implying I'm unemployed or something because I write very long rants now and then?

I don't want to get specific about it, its something I want confined to it's own sphere and not mixed in with my spare time. Let's just say I'm in a line of work where you have to know a lot of stuff many people don't know about, and where you have to have at least a reasonable skill in expressing yourself in speech and writing.

So, how about you? How do you make ends meet?

Haha. The first and foremost reason was an honest and sincere interest (honest!)
The second reason is the one you stated

All right, I won't press any further if you don't want to mix business with pleasure, so to speak

As for me, I'm officially a research student at Osaka University, started studying for my PhD this april, but already found out I'm not cut out for it.
I'm doing some parttime work at a software company in Kyoto right now for the summer holidays, native checking Dutch vocabulary.
Your question comes at an opportune time, since I had a job interview yesterday for a small company specializing in localizing video games, where they're looking for a Project Manager, ie someone to handle incoming assignments, as well as doing the occasional translation myself (not that much, since Dutch isn't a very major language in the world of video games).
And I just found out I got hired! Yay!

I'll start my trial period in October, working only half days, but if everything works out, I'll start as a regular employee in November.
And despite all this negativity towards a 40-hour workweek, I'm kinda psyched!

Nice.  Always loved this track.  Was hoping this is what you were talking about when I saw the topic.

Hey, congrats on the new job Amazingu.

Yeah when you're looking at numbers, there's no doubt about WW2 comes out on top. But I wasn't thinking in numbers. I was thinking more in terms of the direction we're headed. Or were headed back then. As you say, the end of WW1 wasn't really an end. It was the setup for WW2 and I think it'sin how the wars finished where there was a big change.

Some could argue that it wasn't for the better. Some would say that Stalin should have then been the next target. I say some but, for a large part, I mean me. After all, what was going on in Russia was hideous. I don't know Stalin's numbers off-hand but I'm pretty sure, if you're thinking numbers, that he racked up a body count far higher than Hitler was even approaching. During the war, he illegally occupied countries and, in spite of what the Atlantic Treaty set out, they were not liberated.

There's a hell of a lot wrong with that.

And yet that war didn't happen. And I can't help feeling that there was a sense of finality that came with the methods used and the rise in weapons technology. It just all got too dangerous. It had to stop.

Oddly, in spite of the huge difference in numbers, when reading about WW1, I never got that feeling. It just seemed to be a case of throwing men into bullets over and over and over again. Even with all the shit that went on in WW2, the concentration camps, the bombs, Unit 731 and those things, there's something about the main methods of war in WW1 that haunts me more. Is that weird? I don't know. It seemed so utterly futile and, more than that, something that could go on forever. It didn't. But it could have and the aftermath was an absolute mess. As you say, some would argue that Hitler never could have risen to power if it weren't for how Germany was treated after WW1.

But I didn't live through either war so I could be talking out my arse because I'm thinking more of a perception, which is next to impossible to document.

But I do think there's more than just numbers to a war, even if those numbers are huge. Actually maybe especially when those numbers are huge. It's like the larger the numbers get, the less the numbers matter because you're long past a 'this should never have happened' threshold.

And, yes, from a narrow Western perspective, I think the Western world has been more humane since 1945 and, personally, I think that's an improvement. In history, even the most stable, the most dominant and most advanced civilisations were doing all the shit you say we'll do when things collapse. But those civilisations were doing those things without the collapse. And that's where I see an improvement.

Oh, and I finally watched the video, which has so little to do with what I was saying that I really should have watched it to begin with. Still, I love the progress. I love escalators. I love houses. I definitely love indoor plumbing. I, for one, am glad we don't live in the muck and I don't believe that we had any more peace and love back then than we do now. I can't help feeling that, at its most basic, is a 'grass is always greener' thing because history is awash with hideous stories of the shit we do to each other. I see no reason to believe those things didn't happen earlier simply because we couldn't write them down.

I believe the world is a shithole because of things we do and we're not even close to where we should be. But it's not always a shithole. We sometimes do nice things for each other. We're capable of so much more and I think, though it may take a ridiculous amounts of lifetimes to happen, I think we'll probably get there eventually.

But...

I do agree with you on the size of the job that would be changing or improving our current civilisation.

Sometimes, to make something better, you just have to tear it down and start again.

Wow, that's a coincidence. I was in a similar spot about a year ago, started working on a PhD but just quickly lost interest in it. Often times, the academic world is just seething with pathetic, beyond-petty grudges and intrigues, and after thinking long and hard about committing my life to an academic career, I decided to parachute out while there was still time. All the existential signs since have told me I made the right decision, as I'm feeling better than I've done in many years.

By the way, what subject was your thesis going to be in? Mine was in History. Also, congrats on the job!

Yeah, you're definitely right, Jay. Stalin did kill a lot more people than Hitler. And its true as you say that maybe the mindboggling heights reached and possibilities created by atomic weapons had a sobering effect on the world, even the warmongers and tyrants. But, I still feel its a fragile system. And these weapons are after all incredibly dangerous and potent, if someone lets them loose intentionally or by mistake, its going to be like nothing we've seen before. Its tempting to hide under the argument "we've had nuclear weapons for 65 years and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they've never been used", but just because something hasn't happen yet/before doesn't mean that it won't happen in the future... Also, you have to consider the unintentional effects, sure, atomic weapons have not been used very often in warfare, but sometimes the idea of them is used to create war, like when Dubya or other dickheads use them as scarecrows to justify invading other countries.

I see your point on WW1 vs. WW2 as well. While its easy to argue for a "moral" dimension to WW2 in terms of "good vs. evil", WW1 was just senseless waste and slaughter for nothing. In that sense it might truly be the most terrible war, although I'd still maintain the title should go to WW2, because (1) numbers actually do count, behind every statistic there was a human being with hopes, dreams, friends, etc., and (2) WW2 isn't as clear-cut as simplified war movies want to make it out to be. There was very much senseless waste here as well (the Holocaust is enough in itself, but there were smaller massacres going on everywhere throughout the war), both the "bad guys" and the Allies committed their share of needless atrocities that had very little to do with actual military objectives. Above all, what makes me put WW2 above WW1 is that WW1, while an incredible outrage, was still a "soldier's war". WW2 killed far many more civilians than soldiers, it brought war to people's homes in a way that hasn't happened before or since. And in that way, maybe it did teach a valuable lesson, we almost have to hope it did thanks to the huge scale of it all.

Also, another thing: maybe the reason WW1 haunts you more is because you live in Western Europe, and it's horrors are deep entrenched in folk memory in this region? If you were an East European, for example, I very much doubt that WW1 would chill you more than WW2, considering what that war did to that region... Believe it or not, there are places on Earth where the World Wars aren't even considered big deals, because for them it all happened far away. Examples are South America and India (in India its still common today to find people who admire Hitler because he never did them any harm, plus he fought and weakened the British Empire, thereby inadvertently helping the Indians in their independence struggle against the British). I guess these people see the WWs kind of like we see the Second Congo War or something.... hideous, sure, but still far away, and ultimately of little consequence or concern to us.

Yeah, no one's denying that technology can be sweet... The Internet is one great example, right? No Internet, no STC = no possibility of a debate like this between people living in different parts of the world who've never met. Or like when I'm visiting my friend who lives in an apartment on the 12th floor, I'm really glad there are elevators there.... Although, without technology we'd never build buildings that high to begin with, so... ummm.

About the "living in the muck"-thing: don't you think muck is disagreeable to us now because we're not living like that anymore? I'm guessing that prehistoric man didn't mind the muck that much simply because he knew of nothing other than the muck. I honestly believe he was happier on average than we are since he didn't have this whole world to lose and worry about, he lead a simple existence. His mode of life was timeless in the sense that it couldn't be destroyed as easy as ours. After all, we might one day be brought to a state of having to worry about getting used to muck again whether we want it or not, that kind of problem would never beset him...

As for which of the two simplified extremes ("prehistoric man" vs. "us") brings about the happiest and most fulfilling life on average.... Here we can only guess according to our intuitions, and it might just be a case of either seeing the glass half-full or half-empty. My personal intuition when I see all the stressed-out, fearful, aggressive, subjugated, depressed, harried, and controlled people shuffling around in our shopping malls, subways, on our streets, stuck in traffic jams, factories, offices, burger-joints etc., and then consider that these people are the ones living in the supposedly good, free, and democratic part of the world.... Let's just say that my thoughts often are that for all the bravado and complexity of our civilization, we're really worse off now than when we started out. But that's just me.

I definitely agree about the "grass is always greener on the other side"-part. Undoubtedly, there was much of that romanticism in my argumentation, but I decided to hell with that and just went for trying to portray one extreme. I still think there's much valid to consider in that viewpoint, although it is of course never as easy as that.

Someone's been watching Fightclub too much. That, and The Matrix. Add American Psycho to the list.

...

I sometimes question whether I'd still be playing video-games if life was all that much more enjoyable for me, if I actually found some people who were cool to talk to, and that I could trust? I think I would still play video-games, but it'd probably be limited to helping myself relax after a stressful day, rather than gorging on them as I do now, although, I do try to save REALLY good games for when I know I'll enjoy them.

But, if we found something that truly made our lives meaningful, that would be a lot of people who'd be going out of business. I understand why intellectuals distrust businessmen as they do: Some of them make a living off of people's vices.

...

Generalizing greatly,

Humanity owes a lot of its problems to the fact that its population has grown far too great to be sustainable by the planet, or manageable by any other group or entity.

And when you have too many people, and packed too closely together, it becomes a recipe for summoning the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse: Disease, Famine, Strife, and War, because competition arises for scarce resources, as well as situations in which a person has to fight for their life.

For that matter, I daresay we become less attached to other people, the more of us there are; the greater our numbers, the more we consider each other expendable. If one dies out of 100,000, not many are going to notice. But if 1 dies out of 100, SOMEONE is going to notice, and especially if 1 out of 10.

But if there's only a few of us around, and there's a lot of work we need to do to keep ourselves alive, suddenly, we see each other as having value.

I agree with most of your points, Bernhardt. I'm not dissing games by saying this, but its an unavoidable fact that, 9 times out of 10, if you have a person who's playing video games a lot every day, he/she probably has something deeper missing in his/her life, and probably has sadness and a sense of loss buried below the surface. Not that games are unique in this regard, though, they're just one of many ways to escape the boredom and monotony of a "workaday existence" (I'd say games are among the more potent ones, their interactive elements make them very engrossing, they're not far behind recreational drugs in this regard).

I guess like everything else in life, its about maintaining a healthy balance. I think someone who plays a lot of games all the time and has few friends will find that once he/she does get more friends to spend time with, the amount of time used for gaming will definitely decrease.... But for most gamers it will probably never quite go away, since games aren't just "escapism" or means by which to fill empty time, they are also great fun and an art-form of their own, and therefore deserve some time even in a busy life.

Confession time: I haven't seen any of the Matrix-movies. I must be like one of the four people in our generation across the world who haven't seen them (have seen Fightclub and American Psycho, though, both great films).

I saw the first one a long time ago, back in 2000 when I was away at school, but I don't remember anything except for someone telling Neo to bend the spoon and then seeing Keanu Reeves starting at the thing all like... O___o ...  o___O.

the 4 hoarsemen should just go out and buy some throat lozenges... 
(and no, i did not read the rest of the thread)

I heard Pastillance especially likes them.

seems to me the world already has all the fellatio it needs in this topic

Eh, you're just jealous.

I have to admit, that's true - I really miss the days when I could write dozens of paragraphs of insight into the human condition, totally blind to the fact that I was writing absolute bullshit.