The internet is a mirror, it reflects back what you put into it.
Of course, some people want to inject politics into every single thing that we do, and some people want to inject bad lessons into everything we do, but you can use it to learn math, science, crafts, skilled trades, you can learn about literature, history, philosophy.
On the other hand, you should eventually step away from the screen, and go do some of those things that you learn about online. My beloved Soviet canuckistan is presently an Arctic hellscape, but when we end up getting our 37 minutes of summer, I intend to go out and play with a new kiln I bought for firing pottery and melting different metals.
Earlier today I made a post about the concept that the state owns you as opposed to you owning yourself. If you own yourself, and I think that most people should want to, it ends up becoming contingent upon yourself to come up with plans. The world is an adventure, there is so much out there, and so many things you can do without a penny, but just as you said, you need to get out of the house in order to actually participate, and you need to put in the effort to find those exciting things because no one else is going to do it for you.
In Plato's allegory of the cave, is the understanding of the forms which releases you from your bonds and sends you into the wilderness, but I think in postmodern society it is actually embracing your personal autonomy. For many people, if they see you doing something that they don't like, if they hear you saying something that they don't like, if they think that you think something that they don't like, and they get all of their opinions and actions from someone else so they don't need to and don't get to choose their opinions or their actions on their own, and they see someone else thinking for themselves and acting for themselves, and of course it enrages them because they know what they've lost even if they don't understand it.
All materialists are wrong -- if improved material conditions was all it took to be happy, then we should live in the happiest era in the history of the world because we have more stuff and nicer stuff than ever before in our lives. What it takes to be happy is something metaphysical, perhaps the satisfaction of creating something worthwhile, of sacrificing and seeing that sacrifice come to positive fruition, becoming better than you were yesterday and being able to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you are a better person today than you were yesterday, or participating in a real life community that provides social stability to everyone within it and your role being important to many other people's lives and you know it. The people who are happy seem to be the ones who are chasing those metaphysical things rather than more material possessions.
Another thing along the same lines though is that there is a group of people who think that the key to fulfillment is trying to change the entire world, and many of those people are among the most miserable people on earth so I think that that tells you something as well -- that what really matters is making changes that actually affect your life or the people around you or the people that you actually care about, and if you try to take on the entire world and you aren't the sort of generational power that can go out and actually do something like that, you're just going to be even more miserable.
Of course, some people want to inject politics into every single thing that we do, and some people want to inject bad lessons into everything we do, but you can use it to learn math, science, crafts, skilled trades, you can learn about literature, history, philosophy.
On the other hand, you should eventually step away from the screen, and go do some of those things that you learn about online. My beloved Soviet canuckistan is presently an Arctic hellscape, but when we end up getting our 37 minutes of summer, I intend to go out and play with a new kiln I bought for firing pottery and melting different metals.
Earlier today I made a post about the concept that the state owns you as opposed to you owning yourself. If you own yourself, and I think that most people should want to, it ends up becoming contingent upon yourself to come up with plans. The world is an adventure, there is so much out there, and so many things you can do without a penny, but just as you said, you need to get out of the house in order to actually participate, and you need to put in the effort to find those exciting things because no one else is going to do it for you.
In Plato's allegory of the cave, is the understanding of the forms which releases you from your bonds and sends you into the wilderness, but I think in postmodern society it is actually embracing your personal autonomy. For many people, if they see you doing something that they don't like, if they hear you saying something that they don't like, if they think that you think something that they don't like, and they get all of their opinions and actions from someone else so they don't need to and don't get to choose their opinions or their actions on their own, and they see someone else thinking for themselves and acting for themselves, and of course it enrages them because they know what they've lost even if they don't understand it.
All materialists are wrong -- if improved material conditions was all it took to be happy, then we should live in the happiest era in the history of the world because we have more stuff and nicer stuff than ever before in our lives. What it takes to be happy is something metaphysical, perhaps the satisfaction of creating something worthwhile, of sacrificing and seeing that sacrifice come to positive fruition, becoming better than you were yesterday and being able to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you are a better person today than you were yesterday, or participating in a real life community that provides social stability to everyone within it and your role being important to many other people's lives and you know it. The people who are happy seem to be the ones who are chasing those metaphysical things rather than more material possessions.
Another thing along the same lines though is that there is a group of people who think that the key to fulfillment is trying to change the entire world, and many of those people are among the most miserable people on earth so I think that that tells you something as well -- that what really matters is making changes that actually affect your life or the people around you or the people that you actually care about, and if you try to take on the entire world and you aren't the sort of generational power that can go out and actually do something like that, you're just going to be even more miserable.
@sj_zero How do you know people weren't just as unhappy before the modern era though?
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In previous posts, I've defined my understanding of the modern era as starting around the year 1500 with the enlightenment, and the postmodern era beginning shortly after world war II. The world wars were effectively the end of the modern period because after half a century of Western Civilization being vibrant, and going out and doing things, and feeling like they were justified in doing those things, the postmodern period represented the societal rejection of grand narratives, and even truth as something that can be objectively known. It's a fundamentally different era, and while the modern period did see an effective rejection of some ideas, it was a postmodern. That finally with the final nail in their coffins. When Nietzsche criticized Europe for killing god, it was a controversial statement because people still believed in God. However, a century later it was fairly uncontroversial and even celebrated.
Although world war II was the death rattle of the modernist period, the beginning of the end was world war i, since it was proof that the new liberal enlightened world order could still see the horrific situations as the battlefields of world war I. I guess it makes sense that a long and influential period which had reshaped the entire planet would take a little bit of time to fully die out. Art movements such as the dadaists are inherently postmodern and caused by a rejection of modernist values because they had led to such tragedy in Europe.
I guess it could be said that whereas world war II was the point that marked the departure between the modern era and the postmodern era for liberalism, in many parts of the world the publishing of the gulag archipelago was the point that marked the departure for marxists. Realizing that their ideology was not producing results that were morally Superior to liberals, it's similarly destroyed the grand narrative that was holding global Marxism together.
An important thing to have also be to define happiness. You could simply call happiness the raw emotional pleasure, but I think that that would be the wrong way to define it. The Nichomachean ethic introduced the idea of eudimonia as a counterpoint to raw hedonistic pleasure, has the pleasure from a life will lived and from actions well taken. From this point of view, if we are looking at the eudimonia definition of happiness it is self-evident that people are less happy because they are doing fewer things that lead to it.
I don't think you need to go into the pre-modern era to know people are happier in a non-postmodern context.
First of all, there are still modern civilizations on the planet. They are the civilizations which still rely heavily on modern or premodern values, such as religion, family, the nation and so on. A lot of Latin American countries are considerably more religious, but considerably more focus on family, and despite having markedly worse political and materialistic conditions compared to most postmodern civilizations, the people there are measurably happier.
Another example would be Southeast Asia, or even parts of Africa, both of which I've heard anecdotally are significantly happier than postmodern civilizations.
One fantastic example would be the same civilizations during the modern period compared to the post modern period. People in the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars we're willing to die on the battlefield for their values, and the civilizations were so vital that wars were happening relatively frequently has a release valve to get all of that vigor out somewhere. People are worried about world war 3, but my grandfather lied about his age in order to sign up for world war 2, today young people can't be hassled to even do the basic things of their own lives, they aren't having kids, they aren't participating in their communities, more able-bodied men are unemployed than most times through history, overall we're seeing entire civilizations commit suicide. The West is having its problems, but in China has similar issues despite being a quite different civilization. Xi jinping's call for a return to Maoism is a hope for a return to modernism, but it can't work -- you can stand in the same place in a stream, but the water has moved on and will never return.
Honestly, I think that we're already starting to see the postmodern worldview collapse because it doesn't really bring anything to the table other than nothing. The baby boomers grew up with the ghosts of modernist values, and so they had the benefit of both modernist values in their parents and the destruction of those values in postmodernist, but I would say that gen z and certainly gen alpha are living in a world whose values from the modern era have been thoroughly dismantled, and I think people are already starting to look for something to give lives meaning. Something else is going to come around that provides meaning and seems to make some kind of sense, and it's going to completely dismantle the post modern order. Human beings are not machines, and we're not computer programs, we live in meaning. A society that rejects meaning will inevitably self-destruct, and we are seeing Western Civilization self-destruct. That is always been my criticism of true nihilism, that if the world lacks value, meaning, or sense, people stop doing anything, and they have. The call for universal basic income and the desire to sit around playing video games all day is a final result of nihilism, because all you really want to do is avoid the stuff that hurts until you die of old age. The problem is that that's not a meaningful life, and so people are unhappy and they decide that it is the most logical thing to die -- which is exactly what we're seeing.
I certainly have no pretensions that my book is going to end up as anything other than a Dusty old tome in the national library, I speak of my own postmodernist brush with nihilism and existential crisis that came about thereby, and in the end I realized that I needed to accept a more intuitive worldview. As a human being, I'm impressed by things, I'm disgusted by other things, and any ideology that tells me that I don't feel these things when I do is obviously wrong. Therefore it makes a lot more sense to use that intuitive a sense to find meaning in the universe -- it is possible to live a good life, a great life today. It does entail a rejection of rejecting values, as I actually propose in the first chapter after the preface named "question everything and everyone -- especially me" where at the very end I suggest that we need to question questioning things, because eventually if you find an answer that's good enough for you, it doesn't make sense to keep picking it apart until there's nothing left.
One thing that I think is notable is that in philosophical circles where postmodernism first came from, the field is moved on. For one thing, there's a sort of metamodernism or post-postmodernism which it's sort of a reconciliation of the two, but also the field has moved on to be looking at other facets of philosophy such ae existentialism and the like. In this sense, our society is already significantly behind and it is just going to have to catch up.
Although world war II was the death rattle of the modernist period, the beginning of the end was world war i, since it was proof that the new liberal enlightened world order could still see the horrific situations as the battlefields of world war I. I guess it makes sense that a long and influential period which had reshaped the entire planet would take a little bit of time to fully die out. Art movements such as the dadaists are inherently postmodern and caused by a rejection of modernist values because they had led to such tragedy in Europe.
I guess it could be said that whereas world war II was the point that marked the departure between the modern era and the postmodern era for liberalism, in many parts of the world the publishing of the gulag archipelago was the point that marked the departure for marxists. Realizing that their ideology was not producing results that were morally Superior to liberals, it's similarly destroyed the grand narrative that was holding global Marxism together.
An important thing to have also be to define happiness. You could simply call happiness the raw emotional pleasure, but I think that that would be the wrong way to define it. The Nichomachean ethic introduced the idea of eudimonia as a counterpoint to raw hedonistic pleasure, has the pleasure from a life will lived and from actions well taken. From this point of view, if we are looking at the eudimonia definition of happiness it is self-evident that people are less happy because they are doing fewer things that lead to it.
I don't think you need to go into the pre-modern era to know people are happier in a non-postmodern context.
First of all, there are still modern civilizations on the planet. They are the civilizations which still rely heavily on modern or premodern values, such as religion, family, the nation and so on. A lot of Latin American countries are considerably more religious, but considerably more focus on family, and despite having markedly worse political and materialistic conditions compared to most postmodern civilizations, the people there are measurably happier.
Another example would be Southeast Asia, or even parts of Africa, both of which I've heard anecdotally are significantly happier than postmodern civilizations.
One fantastic example would be the same civilizations during the modern period compared to the post modern period. People in the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars we're willing to die on the battlefield for their values, and the civilizations were so vital that wars were happening relatively frequently has a release valve to get all of that vigor out somewhere. People are worried about world war 3, but my grandfather lied about his age in order to sign up for world war 2, today young people can't be hassled to even do the basic things of their own lives, they aren't having kids, they aren't participating in their communities, more able-bodied men are unemployed than most times through history, overall we're seeing entire civilizations commit suicide. The West is having its problems, but in China has similar issues despite being a quite different civilization. Xi jinping's call for a return to Maoism is a hope for a return to modernism, but it can't work -- you can stand in the same place in a stream, but the water has moved on and will never return.
Honestly, I think that we're already starting to see the postmodern worldview collapse because it doesn't really bring anything to the table other than nothing. The baby boomers grew up with the ghosts of modernist values, and so they had the benefit of both modernist values in their parents and the destruction of those values in postmodernist, but I would say that gen z and certainly gen alpha are living in a world whose values from the modern era have been thoroughly dismantled, and I think people are already starting to look for something to give lives meaning. Something else is going to come around that provides meaning and seems to make some kind of sense, and it's going to completely dismantle the post modern order. Human beings are not machines, and we're not computer programs, we live in meaning. A society that rejects meaning will inevitably self-destruct, and we are seeing Western Civilization self-destruct. That is always been my criticism of true nihilism, that if the world lacks value, meaning, or sense, people stop doing anything, and they have. The call for universal basic income and the desire to sit around playing video games all day is a final result of nihilism, because all you really want to do is avoid the stuff that hurts until you die of old age. The problem is that that's not a meaningful life, and so people are unhappy and they decide that it is the most logical thing to die -- which is exactly what we're seeing.
I certainly have no pretensions that my book is going to end up as anything other than a Dusty old tome in the national library, I speak of my own postmodernist brush with nihilism and existential crisis that came about thereby, and in the end I realized that I needed to accept a more intuitive worldview. As a human being, I'm impressed by things, I'm disgusted by other things, and any ideology that tells me that I don't feel these things when I do is obviously wrong. Therefore it makes a lot more sense to use that intuitive a sense to find meaning in the universe -- it is possible to live a good life, a great life today. It does entail a rejection of rejecting values, as I actually propose in the first chapter after the preface named "question everything and everyone -- especially me" where at the very end I suggest that we need to question questioning things, because eventually if you find an answer that's good enough for you, it doesn't make sense to keep picking it apart until there's nothing left.
One thing that I think is notable is that in philosophical circles where postmodernism first came from, the field is moved on. For one thing, there's a sort of metamodernism or post-postmodernism which it's sort of a reconciliation of the two, but also the field has moved on to be looking at other facets of philosophy such ae existentialism and the like. In this sense, our society is already significantly behind and it is just going to have to catch up.