• ameancow@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    You are absolutely right. Our world is imbalanced.

    We are a social creature, we are such a social creature shaped by millions of years of cooperative survival, that we literally fall apart and die without social identity. We have “loneliness epidemics” while being more connected to each other than we could have ever imagined.

    We desperately need social support, not just from friends and family but from communities. The whole “single family home” is a brand new concept in human society, we used to all live in villages where we knew each other, before that, huge tents and dugouts where we piled together and talked and cooked on fires together and shagged like animals day and night. We raised our kids as a community and nobody ever felt alone or adrift, and in fact being expelled from your community was one of the harshest punishments anyone could do to you.

    So why are we all retreating to discord chats and AI text predictors? Why do we want to avoid our neighbors so desperately that we want to remove ourselves even further from our societies?

    We are sad because we are alone, and we are alone because we are sad, and we have massive corporate machines pouring every placating, dopamine-numbing distraction down our gullets so we don’t actually start hanging out and socializing and forming communities again. If we did that, we might start sharing ideas and motivations and we might start changing systems… can’t have that! So best to keep reinforcing isolation. Show big, empty minimalist homes with huge TV screens as your “peak” goal in life, having isolated cabins in the woods with all the amenities as a measure of success. We run from people who think different instead of trying to convince them to be better and we argue with people ostensibly on our side and we get so stressed by it all that we do everything we can to turn off actual conscious, narrative thought.