It seems very clear to me that the issue is not absolute working conditions and living standards, it is narrative and contrast. People have been much happier with much less, but these people are less happy with more. And I can’t help but think - have you tried being grateful?
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Nobody had to give you your job. Nobody owes you anything. You are incredibly fortunate to be living this far into an advanced civilization at all. This is a matter of perspective - and sure this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve your life, but the entitlement is bizarre.
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Maybe not bizarre. Just as I was grateful by paying a lot of attention to the state of past humans, I think a lot of the dissatisfaction with living conditions comes from paying attention to the more fortunate. We have some idea that inequality is *inherently* wrong.
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There’s a good chunk of people who would like to lower the wealth of the very rich even if this benefited nobody else, even if the wealth didn’t get redistributed at all!
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You can't expect everyone to be happy with less just because you're happy with it or it's relatively more than in the past
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No, but my point is the unhappiness is really more due to the narratives they're using than due to any sort of objective injustice.
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If you think that people who are worried about wealth inequality and poor living conditions is because of narratives and not objective material conditions. I don't know what to say
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That is exactly what I think, because I was in similar or worse conditions and I was grateful - and people were not in abject misery for most of human history, where living conditions were *much* worse than they are today.
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Got it. So we can't expect anything to get better just because it's relatively better.
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You have extremely low expectations for what living in a modem civilized society should look like and you expect everyone else to be fine with it
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