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Yes? Life is joyous enough that even the most imperiled, enslaved people have found happiness and love in their fleeting moments of peace and freedom. I mean, have you seen a rainbow? Shit's pretty
Of course lol. I ran a 10km race yesterday and I did far better than I expected. I was happy about it. Afterwards I ate pizza and watched Jurassic Park. I celebrated my birthday last weekend with friends and family and felt really happy.
There's so much to enjoy about life. It's the little moments like dancing in my room listening to music, or chilling with my cat. It's the big moments like graduating or finding someone to love or whatever. Life is more than just capitalism.
Serious response: It may not just be capitalism. Be very careful placing requirements for your happiness on external things as it will inevitably cause great unhappiness. Happiness needs to come from inside you to be sustainable (sometimes our brains need help because of genetic or environmental factors but, ultimately, getting a good balance of neurotransmitters is happening in your brain).
If you are miserable and hopeless all the time, regardless of things that should be joyous and beautiful, and experience things such as disinterest in activities that you enjoy and feel emotionally numb and/or all over the place, you may be experiencing a depressive disorder. If you have access, the assistance of a mental health professional may be able to help you through it so that you can keep fighting for a more equitable future.
Mental health is a serious matter and some disorders, like massive depressive disorder can be fatal. I know this from experience, having lost a parent to it and nearly losing both a spouse and sibling to it as well.
I don't care if I always agree with you or others on this instance on the "right" way to achieve a better world for everyone. You're a fellow traveler in life and deserve love and joy. Between this post and one of your recent ones, I'm honestly a bit worried about you. Please reach out if you need to talk or need help finding resources available to you. You're not alone. You've got friends, comrades, and internet strangers that give a shit.
ofc we can, throughout history there have been people who had happy moments even under horrible conditions, so who's to say we can't have a few happy moments under a rapidly deteriorating system in the imperial core?
Absoltuely, yes. People can find happy moments in almost anything: even in warzones, as slaves, as serfs under feudalism. Humans can always find individual happy moments, we are good at that as a species, but that is very different from our circumstances allowing us to be generally happy. I would never even begin to argue that slaves are generally happy as an example, but that doesn't mean that they didn't find brief moments of happiness with those around them.
I don't think capitalism even precludes some people from being generally happy in certain circumstances if I am being perfectly honest. However, there are socialist systems that allow many more people to be much happier, and that is something I think is worth striving for.
Obviously. It's just in spite of capitalism, not because of it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re depressed because you’re terminally online, but no I’m happy with reasonable frequency. Capitalism doesn’t mean everything’s bad all the time. Joy is an act of resistance.
Things were worse before capitalism. Life was nasty, brutish and short. Plenty of happy moments were had.
Things were worse before capitalism.
I'm confused reading this here of all places. That's a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
Life was nasty, brutish and short.
And this part sounds very much like the civil/savage colonial narrative that pretends societies were inherently more savage before and have now "evolved" (guess who takes on the label of having "evolved" most of all - colonizer systems).
Some conditions for some people were worse, sure. As a whole, saying it was overall worse is ahistorical nonsense. You could argue technological improvements that came with industrialization, advances in science, medicine, etc., lessened a lot of suffering for people who could actually access those improvements and benefit from them. But then we are talking about when they could benefit, not as a given. Which is very relevant to a discussion like this. Some people are suffering a lot more than others. I support you in saying in such a context that "plenty of happy moments" can be had within that regardless, but it is part of the reality we're dealing with.
That’s a mythos pushed by capitalism as part of the portrayal of history as a linear progression of improvement with capitalism being justified as part of that improvement.
This is the reality I'm afraid. Capitalism is most definitely a necessary stage, as Lenin would agree.
Capitalism has its uses, as the Chinese model clearly shows. Under a DOTP only, it must be controlled and dismantled piece by piece. Otherwise it will take over all democratic institutions, enslave people in perpetuity, at least until it destroys the environment. If I were living in Feudal times, I would advocate for Capitalism as a furthering of history. You cannot skip this phase as the USSR found out.
....were inherently more savage before and have now “evolved”
There was certainly a gap of justice and life was shorter due to lack of medical progress. It's just historical fact and not chauvinistic to point this out.
I was wondering if a misunderstanding of China was fueling this nonsense. China is a DOTP as you described. We are talking about a dictatorship of capital, not a DOTP. These are two different things. How can you talk to me of "realities" when you bastardize the distinctions between concepts, conflate the kind of system a country such as the US has vs. China, say "you can't skip this phase" based on a single socialist project the USSR (attempting to push a universalized dogma off of one example while ignoring all of the other factors that went into the USSR's history as compared to China's, completely antithetical to a scientific approach to socialism).
You do not know what you're talking about and no amount of votes on a web forum will change that fact.
Tehcnicall you can be very happy if you own all the means of production and have the working class completely brainwashed into enthusiasm about the system. You could shoot yourself into space in dick shaped rockets just for shits and giggles, for example. Whatever floats your boat (you could have a boat).
Yes but it's only brief. Crapitalism fucks you over immediately after.
In the dark times, should the stars also go out?
It feels to me like if you have to ask, your personal answer to the question is no.
My personal answer is yes.
The alienation can come and go comrade and leave you spinning out of control. We all get it, it'll pass and you'll get anchored on something again. Ride out that storm and take your winnings where you can get them. You're allowed to enjoy things. Take a break and be kind to yourself if necessary. You're no help to yourself or others being a miserable basket case.
I really only find myself miserable about it when I consume content about it. Otherwise, it’s just another day.
No system will ever be perfect and you’ll always find something to complain about. Better to find the happiness within yourself rather than search for happiness in whether or not the systems you barely control are in the exact shape you want them.
The Liberals depend on redefinition of words like capitalism, socialism, 'state', and dictatorship to gain political support. The redefinition creates the situation where you can say that Capitalism always have happy moments or that Capitalism lack happy moments because it depends on whether the Pax Americana authority dictate an economic system with a happy moment is Capitalist at that time. The original definition of Capitalism is government by the rich property owning elites which is the frequent criteria that Pax Americana used to dictate whether a country is Capitalist or Socialist even when they provide false description to the economic system in reality.
Anyway, you can have happy moments in Capitalism when you are a modest content person in the working class who seek the little pleasure in life, a person in the Capitalist class who do not complain about the lack of more free stuff, or a person who benefited from colonial free riding or Indian residential fake schools that are a series of slave camps, torture camps, human experimentation camps, churches of Biblically accurate Satan, and death camps in disguise. You could also get happy moments in Capitalism from factors that has no relevance to Capitalism like stolen fertile land, stolen inheritance from abducted Aboriginal children under the fake cultural assimilation project by the racist white governments, good climate of stolen land, good geographical location for trades on stolen land, rich natural resources on stolen land, Native American policy to share rich fertile land to everyone like the European immigrants, free humanitarian aid from a Caribean Native American tribe that saved Christipher Columbus in his first voyage to America, pacifist war of Native Americans in the great plain that resolve war with harassment and disarming instead of property destruction or murder, and democracy from the Six Civilized tribes among the Native Americans who are now in concentration camps until their forfeit their property owner rights.
this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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