• schopenhauer1
    10.9k
    When you are born into a society, from the minute you are born, you are going to be judged as to how useful you will be to the society you are born into. In a modern context, you will be judged by how much valuable labor you can provide. Your only usefulness to broader society is your ability to both produce and consume. If we do not value these things (in the modern context at least), the system collapses.

    If you don't value work, you are considered lazy. Lazy people are of no use to society. You are free riding, according to the elders and other workers. If you are not lazy, you must be one-off genius. You have to produce something of value.

    "You better be lazing around re-thinking the next engineering marvel or physics theory! Otherwise, hopefully you get what you deserve by living in poverty or offing yourself" is the mentality.

    If everyone didn't work hard or think of intricate minutia of physics/engineering problems, we would live in poverty and ghettos. We would be living in ignorance and privation, no motivation to "produce" and simply be passive consumers..

    On the other hand, if we don't consume, the producers can't produce. Crime begets a whole business of keeping crime at bay. Pain keeps people needing to alleviate it. Our wants and needs need solutions.

    All of this.. being useful items for society, and its opposite.. being passive ignorant lazing types, is bad. None of it is good. It is using people for their labor and consumption. Yet not doing so collapses the system. Being that it is a conundrum that is pernicious, intractable and pervasive to human life (as we know it)- heap it on the pile of evidence for the pessimism of life.

    Here's a hint to know when you’re hitting on bedrock pessimistic points.. If it is intractable negative aspects that are so pervasive we say, "That's just the way it is. And there is no other way", you've hit upon something.
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