blarghly, blarghly@lemmy.world

You Are Going To Die: Leveraging Your Existential Dread For Fun And Profit

Syllabus:
1) You are going to die.
2) No, seriously. Dead. Like, dead dead. Forever.
3) Jesus Christ, pay attention, you’re running out of time!!!
4) Practical: putting the fear of God in your heart with a near death experience.
5) Okay, I can see from your shell-shocked faces that you are listening now. Now sit quietly and think about your inevitable death.
6) If you knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do with your last day alive?
7) If you knew you would live to 100, what would you want to do in your life?
8) At the moment you die and everything goes black, you will be alone and must look death in the eye and shake its hand. How will you prepare yourself to face this moment with courage, instead of curling up in a ball and crying like a little bitch?
9) Practical: seeing death out of the corner of your eye - questing into the wilderness and doing an ass-ton of mushrooms.
10) Breaking down your goals into smaller goals: creating an outline for your life.
11) Breaking down your small goals into itty bitty goals that arent so scary.
12) Just fucking show up: the most important part of getting literally anything done.
13) Stick to the program: giving up your ego and just doing as you are told to see if it works.
14) Every day: turning small steps forward into sustainable habits.
15) Playing the numbers game: how to make your own luck.
16) Practical: Grind it out - one month of being a hyper-optimized perfectionist
17) Burnout - what to do when all you do is delay gratification
18) Impatience and frustration: your biggest assets in getting things done
19) Evaluating progress and re-evaluating goals
20) Not good enough - if it’s important, never settle for anything less
21) I want it NOW - realize that your “sensible” plan is actually a form of procrastination
22) Practical: Pull the trigger - challenge your limiting beliefs about what is possible and do something that scares the absolute shit out of you to make your dreams come true.
23) Passive progress - focusing on changing your life so pursuing your goals becomes effortless.
24) The big keys: mindset, health, friends, and environment.
25) Mindset
25.1) Go touch grass - when you feel hopeless, you probably just need to go outside and not think about anything for a while.
25.2) Go touch grass - if you are chronically online, you will be extremely anxious about everything because the internet keeps your attention by telling you the world is scary and most people are evil. Stop it.
25.3) Go touch grass - no, literally. Being in contact with nature will improve your mental health.
25.4) Anytime something bad happens to you, it is your responsibility to turn it into a learning experience that you can grow from. Yes, even trauma. Especially trauma.
25.5) Life is a mirror for your mindset - how your beliefs about the world reflect back to become outcomes.
25.6) Be a contender, not a champion - the real victory is the journey not the outcome.
26) Practical: go backpacking in the wilderness for a week. No electronics.
27) Health
27.1) Sleep
27.2) Diet
27.3) Exercise
28) Practical: do sleep, diet, and exercise right for once in your life.
29) Friends
29.1) Making new friends: just walk up and say “hi”.
29.2) Making new friends: go places where people who like the same things you do hang out.
29.3) Deepening relationships - offering and asking for help.
29.4) Deepening relationships - share feelings, not just facts.
29.5) Asking for support - people love to help you when they can see you are already doing the work.
29.6) Boundaries - establishing and maintaining them.
29.7) Cutting people out when they are detracting from your life.
29.7) Yeah, that goes for family, too.
30) Practical: pick a friend or make a new friend. Open up to them about a personal goal, and ask for their support.
31) Environment
31.1) Pro surfers don’t live in Nebraska - how your environment impacts your success.
31.2) Move to the right city - if the best in the world don’t live there, you are in the wrong place. 31.3) Move to the right part of the right city - if you can’t walk to where you work on your goals, you are in the wrong place.
31.4) Move to the right home in the right part of the right city - if you can’t relax at home, you are in the wrong place.
32) Practical: Make a plan to move somewhere better next semester.
33) Remember, you’re going to die - appreciating each moment that you are alive.
34) Final: get wasted at a secret forest rave. Students will be graded based on how shamelessly they embarass themselves on the dance floor. Bonus points for getting shot down trying to hook up with an attractive stranger.

I highly doubt most high school seniors would pay much attention to a class about math and personal responsibility.

Yeah, I have a friend. She emancipated herself from her family at 16 and got her GED. Worked nannying and waitresssing jobs when she needed money, but otherwise spent about 5 years traveling the world.

Literally just apply to teach English in Asia. Typically the wage is a solid middle class income, and you don’t need to know anything about teaching or English.

You can also look into WWOOFing if you want to explore that.

Moving the goalposts. We can assume from context that they are speaking to an audience from developed nations.

Because people wanna know how to look classy and fancy, and they know that “old money” is snootier than “new money”, and they wanna emulate the snootiest of snoots. So influencers give some generic “dress fancy” advice and then call it “old money” so that people will give a shit.

New Money cares that you have a LV bag.

Old Money only cares if you don’t have it.

Hence why I said “if you are reasonably self aware.” If you need actual, real help, obviously go to a therapist. But if your problem is “sometimes I feel sad” or “certain situations make me nervous” or “I had a shitty childhood and this is causing maladaptive behaviors”, then a chatbot can, like I said, be just as good as some journalling or a work book or whatever.

AI chatbots can be good for, like, therapy, if you are reasonably self aware. You can talk about your feelings, your life circumstances, and the chatbot can make some fairly generic suggestions or ask some fairly generic followup questions, and these can help you reflect and come up with your own solutions - kind of like playing with Tarot cards or something. Or they might help you roleplay some kind of event or situation, and that can be helpful.

But anyone saying that a chatbot is anything like an actual romantic partner is either lying for sensationalist hype or, quite frankly, insane. I don’t know about the specific chatbots in the article, but every chatbot I’ve talked to is very clearly a chatbot. If not immediately, then after a couple dozen messages. They forget things. They repeat themselves. Everything they “do” is a trope in the genre of fiction they inhabit. They can be fun to fuck around with - its a decent way to make personalized porn. But as an actual companion - no. This does not exist.

Door to door construction sales. There are lots of companies that do thinks like install new windows or solar panels. They pay people to go around, knock on doors, and see if people are interested in their product. Technically the job title is “lead generator”. And these companies are always hiring for these positions, since, to be honest, it is pretty shit work. You walk around all day in the hot sun, knocking on peoples doors and having those doors slammed in your face. Base pay isn’t great, and you make your real money in comissions, which are rare, since you are cold calling.

But it is regular hours, exercise and sunshine, practice keeping a positive attitude and meeting people. And as soon as you get hired, you can start applying for other, better jobs in sales.

Yeah. “Bring your own tools” is a pretty common policy in a lot of blue collar work. The company might technically provide the tools you need - but they will typically provide the cheapest, shittiest versions. So the workers will bring their own tools, which are higher quality. And since they are personally owned, they are less likely to get broken or “walk away”. And since everyone is bringing their own tools, the guy at the job site who is supposed to bring the tools gets lackadaisical about that part of his job.

So you show up as the new guy, first day on the job, and they say

“where’s your hammer?”

“I dunno, I thought you guys had hammers”

“Joe, we have any hammers?”

“We got some at the office”

And now you’re just gonna stand around all day not doing shit, feeling embarassed that you don’t have a hammer. And then you go to the hardware store and buy a hammer after work that day, so Joe is able to continue slacking off at his job of remembering to bring the hammers.

Cant tell if slut shaming or hornyposting….

I’m not. I can appeciate cool drone footy as much as the next guy, but they are fucking annoyin when flying around

joke is smol pp

I feel like sometimes you are capitalizing your words to make a point, and sometimes just because your fingers slipped, and it’s giving me a headache…

Anyway, consistently pushing pro-fossil-fuel legislation through goverments around the world clearly shows, imo, that corporations are not entirely driven by quarterly profits. They can plan to be evil on longer time horizons than that.

But the quarterly earnings cycle is what makes this a specifically capitalist phenomenon. Of course, corporations are greedy and will try to make a buck at everyone else’s expense. That’s sort of their thing. But other forms of power are hardly immune from poor descision-making. Count the monarchs and despots who have started wars or enacted sweeping agricultural reforms only to result in the deaths of millions, just because they felt like it or were born inbred and insane. Or count the number of times a politician has let debt balloon or delayed maintenance on critical infrastructure, because an election was coming up and they didn’t want to become unpopular.

Are you saying socialism would solve this problem? Because Venezuela was socialist for a while, and they continued being one of the top oil producers in the world. And then their economy collapsed.

Or perhaps Venezuela is too authoritarian for you??? Okay, then let’s consider autonomous Catalonia. This source notes that Catalonia generates 22% of its electricity via renewables. But compare that to Europe, where the economic zone average is 47%, or Spain as a whole, where renewables are nearly 60%. Shouldn’t we expect all these forward-thinking Catalonians to be voluntarily cooperating in order to move to renewable sources faster than the rest of Europe?

the modern world is littered with the failures to ‘long term plan’.

SO IS THE ANCIENT WORLD. That’s my point. People, in general, are bad at long term planning, and we should not have so much hubris as to believe we have improved on this state of affairs. The old yiddish proverb “Man plans, god laughs” is as poignant today as it was in the past.

The null hypothesis here should be “this happened because people are dumb and the world is chaotic”. The world today is significantly less dumb and chaotic than it was in the past, and that’s great! But it is rather entitled to think that we should expect the world to be orderly and prosperous as a rule. Shit happens. Assholes gain power and start wars. Sometimes things that were abundant become scarcer. This isn’t a capitalism thing - this shit has been going on since the dawn of civilization.

Because Netanyahu needs a perpetual escalating state of war in order to maintain power, and Trump is a petulant man-child who is easily manipulated.

I actually own the original GoLite reflective backpacking umbrella. I’m aware they exist. I just know they aren’t, like, a mirror.

The petro-states most impacted by the blockade are all monarchies. The idea that the problem is that this blockade wasn’t planned for by short sighted CEOs is fucking stupid.

The impact on most of the world is slightly increased oil prices. A sudden decrease in oil supply is exactly the sort of problem that markets are good at solving - the main result is that companies will search for cheaper ways to get their products to market and will shunt resources to less oil-dependent products, while individuals drive personal motor vehicles less and switch to walking, cycling, transit, carpooling, or staying close to home. Ie, we already have a backup plan in place. Every somewhat-competently-run nation will simply tighten its belt a little, maybe increase investment in renewables, and soldier on like they have through every other economic downturn. There will, of course, be impacts on people - but the country will not collapse, governments will not be overthrown, food and water and shelter will still be widely available and easily accessible to almost everyone.

Of course, in response to this you may say that the impacts will be severe, especially on working people in places like the United States where greedy corporate interests tore up the street car lines, forced everyone into auto-dependent suburbs, and lobbied the government for pro-oil-dependency legislation - which is all true. But which is also a project that took decades. Which is a weird thing if your thesis is that corporations only make actions with the next quarter’s profits in mind. I’m not saying corporations aren’t evil - I’m just saying, if they spent all that time and money influencing elections and building coalitions and passing laws, then they are clearly capable of long term planning - like telling the politicians they have in their pockets to ensure political stability in the Straight of Hormuz region.

Meanwhile, the blockade is having a direct, immediate impact on petro-state monarchs, who are not going to ditch their companies with a golden parachute the moment things get hard. If anyone would have an interest in looking ahead and planning for contingencies if the Straight would be blockaded, it would be these people - fabulously wealthy and powerful, with the export of oil directly flowing to them and their families. If the problem you have with capitalism is that it doesn’t look ahead enough, then monarchs who pass laws and whose genetic lineages directly benefit from those laws should be your prime example of governments that take the long view. And yet, they don’t seem to have a great plan either, other than “pay the toll and hope Israel genocides the Iranians next.”

So is this because the evil capitalists don’t think far enough ahead? No! Not everything is because capitalism is evil. Sometimes stupid bullshit just happens, because that’s life.

Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode.

This is just religious nut end-times doomerism.

Also, your explaination literally doesn’t apply in this situation, since the people most impacted by the blockade are the petro-states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. With the exception of Iraq, all of these countries are monarchies, with the royal families having significant control over oil production and benefitting from its profits. These are not publicly traded corporations with CEOs only concerned about next quarter’s bonus. They aren’t even socialist technocrats given a mandate to do what is best for the good of the people now and in the future. They are individuals who will be directly impacted by this blockade, who are looking not only to the benefit of oil weath in their own lives, but in the lives of their families far into the future. If anyone would have an incentive to take the long view, it would be petro-state monarchs who are, I must point out, not capitalists.

So, no, this is not an example of the failures of capitalism. The far more obvious rationale is that (1) the future is hard to predict and (2) people are bad at planning.