/lit/ - Literature

Pinker cope.

>>16437988
>material fulfillment = happiness

>>16437988
Moynihan Report, Bowling Alone, Burnout Society, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Starvation Artist, the Holy Bible.

Material riches at the expense of spiritual poverty is no way to find happiness or contentment.

>>16437997
>>16438008
>we should increase infant mortality so I could feel more spiritual

absolute retards

>>16437988
Those numbers are fudged.

>>16438011
You're an idiot and/or an idealogue if you think that's a binary choice.

>>16438021
you guys are the ones tying uplifting the global poor with a loss of spirtual connection

>>16438021
Oh, for what it's worth I remember that Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book on exactly this topic. Too lazy (and drunk) to look up the title but you should be able to find it easily enough.

>>16438011
>Increase infant mortality
We already HAVE massive infant mortality, it's called fucking abortion. Everyone is already okay with it, they just brush it off into their subconscious where it metastasizes into a fucking cancer of social alienation and the death of higher meaning.

Idea of decline in western history, by Herman

>>16438011
>>16438029
Hey, you asked. If you didn't want an answer, you should have kept quiet.

>>16437988
>Having the heart and soul of your entire society, that which gives you meaning, replaced by Marvel superheroes and Jewish lies, polyamory (adultery) and faggot anal sex
>BuT aT lEAST yoU have IPHONES.

Materialism is a sham and we deserve to suffer for choosing it over God.

>>16438034

>>16438011
Every infant you toss into the bonfire strengthens the world-spirit.

>>16437995
kek. this. pinkercope.

>we
If you are 35+ you live in the best times

Anyone under is living in times worse than 1950s

>>16438050
You have no idea how good you have it. Your ancestors would gladly trade places with you.

>>16437988
>cherry pick data in the extreme
>the end result is there's still more people in terms of raw numbers in poverty today than 100 years ago
Pinkerton babies are actual retards.

>>16438075
My advice to them is be careful what you wish for.

>>16437988
based opinion, anon. now is the best time

>>16437988
If things are so good then why are you so mad?

Imagine being this over socialized

>>16437988
"As for your colleague’s claim that the “overall material standard
of living seems to be increasing,” the way that works is that the technoindustrial
system simply defines the term “high standard of living” to
mean the kind of living that the system itself provides, and the system then
“discovers” that the standard of living is high and increasing. But to me
and to many, many other people a high material standard of living consists
not in cars, television sets, computers, or fancy houses, but in open spaces,
forests, wild plants and animals, and clear-flowing streams. As measured
by that criterion our material standard of living is falling rapidly."

--Kaczynski, Technological Slavery (2019), p. 164.

>>16437988
relativity

>>16438928
Came here to post this. Ted isn't the strongest theorist but this observation is spot-on.

>>16437988
Good times for third worlders. Bad time for westerners

>>16437988
>Look! Line go down! More people are more happier now!

>>16438011
Infant mortality has never been so high.
It's called abortion.

>>16438035
Good grief you just went full schizo

>>16438035
Who cares. It mostly black babies anyway.

>>16438035
Holy mother of based.

Yeah it’s pretty much unquestionable that life has improved for people drastically in modern times. All these anons arguing against it have become spoilt growing up in the material abundance of the modern world, and could not even conceive of the hardships that people in the past had to live through. I mean the very existence of economic migration in the modern day, where people will risk their lives and abandon their (often very religious) homelands and families to escape poverty and travel to a country where they can live better, is proof that living in conditions of poverty is hell. You can look at basically any statistic — the modern world is more peaceful, safer, more intelligent, less suicidal, healthier, and overall happier world than the pre-modern.
Sure, there are still issues which must be solved, and things are far from ideal, but this romanticisation of the past is largely the result of desensitisation to material hardships and a projection of life’s general suffering onto the structure of “the system”. In the Bible it says, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this”, from which we can see that this worship of the past is an impulse that goes back even to ancient human beings.

>>16437988
It is true that a lot of people don't need to worry about dying from hunger today. That doesn't mean that they don't have any worries, or that they now all have higher goals, or that people who were struggling earlier were only worrying about it exclusively.

>>16439418
I think that you might have romanticized something yourself. Economic migration is economic migration. When there is a difference in air pressure, it moves, and creates wind. When there is an economical difference, there is migration. No need to imagine some specific hardships.

People running from hunger or war are called refugees, and they have nothing to lose. On the other hand, if someone can live in Place A, work hard to have food on the family table, or move to Place B, work hard, spend some money on living expenses, send the rest to the family, and still get net benefit, than we have a migrant.

>>16437988
Don't read The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

>>16438928
based tedposter