Being hit by a motor vehicle of some sort owned by a large company with deep pockets and suffering a horrific but ultimately temporary injury with absolutely no longer-term health effects that nonetheless results in a seven figure injury settlement
The New American Dream
Source. Attribution is cool.
Thank you! I saw it on bluesky
I hate to admit it but I’d love to go back to Covid times where I was forced to stay in my house and never leave. I don’t want people dying but I’m so fucking tired.
Many, many people, including myself, embraced the shit out of COVID.
That was a pretty clear sign that our society and way of life sucks.
Pictured: me longing for simpler times
Covid time was personally great for me. Vietnam locked things down. We had food delivered. We didn’t get sick. At home with the wife and kid. Watching movies and tv. Playing games. Making the second kid. I worked from home for something like 6 to 9 months because my office is in a neighboring province and VN didn’t allow travel between provinces until a later relaxing of restrictions after vaccines became available.
What’s struck me is how in America, the reality is the opposite of those fantasies. What’s that? The nation’s capital is being stormed by fascists attempting to kidnap lawmakers and overthrow the electoral process? And I’m still expected to just work like it’s just a normal day??
I was literally stuck in a fucking Zoom meeting watching the insurrection in another window. Fuck this timeline.
We’ve hit the point where people find the end of the world is more likely than the end of capitalism
Can confirm. This is me. Especially after the last two years. Everything just feels so hopeless, and I’m expected to spend most of my waking hours feeding a system that gleefully kicks us in the teeth every single day.
Watch for when Zombie/apocalypse movies start getting popular again.
It’s absolutely a sign of mass despair at “the system”.
Zombies make everyone equal again. The executive actually becomes dead weight compared to folks who have spent their lives doing physical or practical labour.
My therapist told me that, in fact, it’s not normal to wish to be hit by a bus on the way to work every morning just so you could escape from going to work.
Also because people come together during major crises.
And unfortunately, it does not look like we’ll be able to get rid of capitalism (and more importantly capitalists) without either a mass uprising or a devastating catastrophe (like total ecological collapse).
Currently we’re about to reach the latter, which I don’t think is preferable, but perhaps it’ll turn out well in the end. I sure hope so.
Also because people come together during major crises.
Since COVID I no longer believe this. Where I live, people immediately started hoarding essentials, threw low-paid retail workers under the bus, refused to follow even the most basic precautions to keep others safe (and had full-blow childish meltdowns and screamed in the faces of anyone who tried to ask them to comply), overwhelmed the healthcare system unnecessarily, burned down cell phone towers etc. Just a complete orgy of idiotic fuckery right from the start.
I agree. Since covid I lost my long held belief that humans are basically good.
Where I come from originally is kind of a remote place, that relies on tourism. We already have a huge problem with everyone buying their second holiday homes there and pricing the locals out of buying homes (which is a big part of why I moved.) Anyway, during COVID, because it’s remote and sparsely populated, it had one of the lowest COVID rates in the country. As soon as the travel restrictions lifted, everyone descended on the place. There were mayors of towns on TV begging people not to come. But they came anyway, wrecked the place and left garbage everywhere, caused a huge COVID spike (in an area that has one hospital and a lot of elderly people), and when people complained about it we were told we should be grateful that the tourists are there spending money.
Luckily my family that still lives there were okay (you get good at not being where the tourists are after a while) but still. It’s an area that’s perpetually underfunded and neglected, and when it was at it’s most vulnerable and just needed people to be just a tiny bit considerate for a moment, they trashed the place, used us as their disposable COVID bunker and then made fun of us for being unhappy about it, not to mention putting my family directly in harm’s way.
The world seems to have largely moved on from that whole time now, but I will not forget this.
Just getting silly here, but what if the people who are harmed by the system come together and abolish the system, because they are the majority?
That would require a level of solidarity that doesn’t exist and a solid plan for what comes after, which no one has.
They can’t; they’re too busy posting online daring someone else to do it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some 90 Days of Real Housewives of Whatever to binge.
Is that not a normal feeling? Because I felt that way long before things got this bad.
i have always attributed this feeling to the fact we live in a system where our contributions dont really matter, as in that we only work for a number to go up, and not because its actually needed (with few exceptions)
tldr: i think its capitalisms fault.
as alwaysi think our society is making us work in a similar way that a bodybuilder works out: it’s just about making [these muscles / that business] grow, even though they serve no purpose and could just as well just not exist, and things would be equally fine, but for whatever reason, we’ve made it a beauty ideal that these things are as big as possible, so we must max them! every! single! day!
I think one of the biggest issues is that nothing is real anymore. 90% of what 90% of us do is utterly meaningless. For the average person, life is entirely solved. Our problems are mostly by choice, be it ours or someone else’s. The only real things in our lives are tragedies that we’d never have been able to prevent or resolve anyway.
An apocalypse is enticing because then our actions would have direct consequences. Right now, the consequences of our actions are filtered and diffused through a trillion layers of bullshit where the positive and negative effects are basically invisible unless you make a ridiculous amount of money very quickly, or like, kill someone with your car.
I was told my entire life that “the apocalypse will set us free”
They meant rapture. I have leaned into the idea of it meaning the societal collapse of climate change will bring about liberation.
The question is free from what? Free from scrounging and fighting for survival? Absolutely not. Free from modern medicine? That’s a guarantee
i always figured those folk were jim jonesing it
You don’t need an apocalypse to do that
I mean, being killed in water war II after decades of suffering can be considered a liberation, but that’s not a great type of liberation
