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.
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.
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?
Personally, I have a very hard time imagining a lasting peace or happiness as long as the world ignores Covid. Even in a micro sense, everyone just fucking does not care about a highly transmissible, permanently disabling disease that has not gone anywhere that will kill me and many others like me. I can of course find a fleeting happiness, some transient joy, in moments where I can live and exist safely among people who respect me and understand the existing conditions enough to acknowledge that, but the vast majority, even those who should know better, seem pleased to forget all of it, and they’re the same sort who will tell me and you to “make happiness where you can”. Whether the source of all that is benign, ignorant, or malicious my answer is the same: I try to be happy, and sometimes succeed, but it’s no thanks to any of them. I don’t know what that future looks like.
All of this is to say nothing of the ongoing macro threat of climate change, which both capital and myself truly have no answers for. If it’s all going to be fucked beyond anything I can do I might as well stick to the devil I know and try to survive as long as I can- if for no other reason than to see what happens- but there are actionable steps with immediate material benefits that we all can take for Covid that no one, not even comrades, will do, so I am significantly more upset and pessimistic about that, under capitalism or anything else.
I feel you... I don't have any diagnosed condition that would put me at greater risk of viral infections etc, but I guess I do have a weaker immune system than the average person, getting ill more often and more severely than those around me despite keeping a fairly healthy lifestyle.
And it pisses me off to see how people treat covid, colds, flus - heck, hygiene in general. I can't help but think we could actually eradicate these diseases for good, but it requires collective effort and drilling basic hygiene measures into people's heads since they're young.
Right now, all we can do is protect ourselves and maybe those immediately close to us. This of course helps reduce the spread of viruses etc for everyone else, but still, all it takes to ruin the effort of 10 hygiene-conscious people is just one indifferent person.
It's so much avoidable damage that we have accepted as an inevitable part of life - the only solution many see is to put up with it and hope you become more resilient by getting exposed to a lot viruses... Unfortunately that's not how it works, they mutate way too fast for you to build any meaningful resistance. And that's for healthy people; this is simply disregarding those for which getting ill is not an option. It's not too different from eugenics really. And so we submit to, at best, months of our lives wasted recovering and piling up tiny damages to our bodies, and, at worst, playing Russian roulette with our lives whenever going outside.
Sorry for the rant, it's a topic that bothers me and the lack of awareness really annoys me sometimes. I hope you will continue to have people in your life who understand you and are considerate. If anything, the successes of some countries in their covid responses is a glimpse into what's possible when it comes to fighting highly transmissible diseases on a societal level.
I'm sorry you've got that extra difficulty in dealing with covid. I live in the US and it bothers me greatly too the way people around me gave up on something as basic as wearing a mask so easily. I still do it, but I almost never see anyone else who does. Meanwhile, I write this while recovering from some kind of sickness, I suspect a variant of covid the way the symptoms and duration are different from a normal cold for me. Even with wearing a mask when I go out, I can't make other people in my household do it and a mask only works effectively if enough people are wearing them to reduce the transmission, since the mask itself won't keep it out.
It feels sometimes like I'm living in an upside down world. The people I'm closest to care about me and others, there's no doubt in my mind about that, yet they gave up on masking like so many others when the system of authority stopped telling them to and the peer pressure flipped. It is an act of basic harm reduction, a test of a sense of collective responsibility and cooperation, and so many completely fail it.
This thing of people valuing their own convenience over the mortal risk of others and sometimes even themselves is so confusing to me and so destructive. It doesn't even make consistent sense within the same person at times. One of the people I know, who was at least a longer holdout but eventually gave up on masking as well, is very much into prepping for disasters and just being prepared in general and anticipating the future. Yet they gave up on this, a current and ongoing threat that is only mitigated by vaccines and possible weakening of its strength through mutations, not even close to kept under control.
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re depressed because you’re terminally online
Hey what public physical space can I go attend safely as a person with an autoimmune deficiency in The Year of Our Lord 2024, asking for a friend
I am sorry to single you out specifically but the world sucks for a lot of people right now with no foreseeable end and it’s not just because everyone is too online
And where you're not easy prey for cisthumbs. I like exercise and trucks will just stop illegally in the middle of the street... with their driver's dead eyeing you. Once a truck just followed me and my gf, like driving right behind us for blocks until we lost him. And I've been attacked enough to know where that goes, so we bought treadmills. Yay
E: and we're both immunocompromised so gyms were out the second covid hit
I get that, I’m sorry. Still, it’s possible to be happy and being online too much doesn’t help, even if third spaces are dead etc. It’s not ideal, but one can exercise and meditate for free on your own, even if capitalism has greatly handicapped you. I’m trying not to victim blame, just hoping to do some people some good (pretty sure op doesn’t have an autoimmune disease).
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).
Movies, games, TV shows, anime, media in general, songs, internet at the time, irl experiences, whole vibe and just about everything.
Movies, games, TV shows, anime, media in general, songs
Distractions, the load of it, which is why none of it lasts. Meaningful experiences are few and far between. 10 years from now we'll look back at ourselves today and think the same thing, because nothing fundamentally has changed, we just enjoy our distractions differently with time.
Literally no lmao, I'm never going to miss this miserable time just as I don't miss 2017 and every year onward. These 3 years were fire from 1st January to 31st December, currently it's good if something good worth noting actually happens at all.
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.
