Ask Lemmy

Curious why you expect it to have gotten better by the "year of 2026" when our genetics hasn't meaningfully changed for a million years. Our bodies are predisposed to form tribes, hoard resources, and perpetrate atrocities that only exist at a scale enabled by civilization.

It won't be solved until we wait a million years or use a CRISPR-like technology to fix our flaws.

As a species, we are not prepared for wide empathy. The farther some event is from us, the easier it becomes to dissociate from. What can compensate for this is nurture and culture but self reflection is a very dificult, even painful, exercise.

And to use your words against yourself, logic takes no part in this. Logic just denotes a sequence of events or concepts that, for the person experiencing or describing, hold value. Sometimes, we are able to correctly convey our logic to others and they gather a semblance of understanding on our thought process but that is all. Logic is not a sacred cow.

I personally find amusing hearing someone stating they act solely based on reasoning, as if that exempts them from their basal and underlying emotions.

We are not rational nor logic. We spend a lifetime mostly reacting to what surrounds us, droning through life. Existing, taking hold of your own conscience is a difficult task. Teaching others to do it, even more.

And you wonder why all you describe happens?

I dunno. Probably lots of lead poisoning, micro plastics crossing the blood-brain-barrier, other harmful stuff in our city-atmospheres and of course social media (for "old" folks facebook, for young people Instagram and tiktok). All of has fried our collective brains and tendencies for what you described increase because of it. But maybe that's just an excuse to ascribe what's wrong with people to something external.

I've read your post and some of your comments below the post.

I love you, bro. (No gender assumption.)

You are a good person. Be proud of yourself. ❤️

they were raised during the boomer/gen x era, mysogyny and racism, and most of all ELITISM is quite abundant and pervasive back then. and on other platforms, the parents seem to resent thier children for not finding a job as soon as they graduated, they still think wallking in person to hand in your resume is still possible. and cant imagine Online applications to be that difficult. especially with all those layoffs, there were so many posts like these.

I agree with your edited version. As for causes, being a good parent seems to be one of the hardest things to do. To be honest it's the main reason why I never wanted to have kids.

Your view of what adulthood should be is ironically child-like itself. There is no standard. You will lose a lot of energy focusing on how your way is obviously the right way and everyone else is wrong.

I've noticed that there are two distinct mindsets in people who have been hurt in one way or another.

The first is "I had it bad, so I don't want others to experience the same."

The second is "I had it bad, so why would anyone else have it better?"

I think they genuinely feel cheated when someone else gets something they never got. And they take it out on the people who did get that thing instead of holding the people accountable who denied them that thing. Even if they didn't deserve to get hurt, that is a shitty outlook to have on life and it's not going to do anyone any good.

I got into watching bodycam footage on YT recently and like half of these are 20 to 40 year olds crying for their mom, demanding the officers call their parents, etc. and unable to take responsibility for their actions, it's absolutely wild how immature some people are.

One of the great struggles of humanity is 'cognitive load.' Thinking, even if you have a very efficient brain, takes effort, and more advanced thought requires more effort. In hierarchies, part of the power dynamic consists of the displacement of cognitive load. The higher powered individuals don't think about what the lower powered individuals think, and, with enough power, not even the collective. The lower powered individuals, though, must consider the desires of those with higher power in order to make their way through the world. They have to expend effort, to carry the cognitive load.

Those adult children you are talking about are those who have not had to carry the load. People generally don't expend effort they are not forced to, so why would they go to the effort of considering the effects of their actions on others when their life has taught them that's the job of those lower than them? Or that they can do what they want without expending the effort and not only not be punished, but get ahead in life because their society runs on psychopathy?

what do you get when you spend decades eroding a social system that prunes itself and replace it with a social structure that allows inclusive shameless adults that receive little to no punishment?

I highly doubt you're a paragon of empathy or understanding, and your post here is very clear evidence.

You want to dunk on them to boost your ego. You're just like them, just younger and more arrogant and blind to your own prejudices, biases, and abuses of others.

I must say that your post itself does not come across as particularly empathetic. Calling people “negative IQ narcissistic garbage” is rather harsh and dehumanizing way to describe them, even when their behaviour is genuinely harmful or immature.

People do not simply choose to become the way they are. If you had inherited their genetic predispositions, been raised by the same parents, and grown up in the same environment, you would very likely think and act much as they do. Treating individuals as the ultimate, free authors of their character and behaviour is an error in my view. This is not an excuse for harmful actions, but it does call for more compassion and a clearer recognition that most of what separates us from them is luck rather than personal moral achievement.

The fact that some of us managed to develop greater empathy or self-awareness is largely a matter of circumstance. It is not a virtue we can fully claim credit for, any more than others can be fully blamed for failing to escape the patterns they inherited.

People are social creatures. They follow peer pressure. If you want to make the world better, one of the ways is to spend the effort to be better, to work on being kind with other people.

I had two different work friends, years ago. Both of them had low to mid grade homophobia. They'd say things. But after a couple years of me working on them, they stopped.

Was it worth it? Maybe. It was harder than just writing them off, but I like to think as a result of my spending the time with them, they hurt people less.

As you allude to in your first line, it's a mostly invisible disability. It's also one that is difficult to fix past a certain point, and that point of correction has been actively sabotaged for at least the past 23 years (in the USA).

I think it's because they gravitate to jobs and social circles where everyone else behaves similarly and expresses similar views.

There are a lot of people in the world, somr will be like that. Besides we are not logical beings, sure logic has helped us a lot but there is no logical thing to do if you are not following or chasing something usually defined by emotions. A goal, a feeling, moral compasses and a lot of other stuff.

Also sometimes people don't know they are even hurt or at least deny it which makes the healing process a lot harder if well, they don't want to heal.

I believe everyone learns something, every piece of information you process and stuff you deduce in your enviroment, people telling you stuff. Some stuff will be useless long term of course, other will be easier to forget. And if you just spend your life changing pleasure or something, without exploring different perspectives aside from your own, staying in the same circle and using bad coping mechanisms I see it unlikely you will learn much, specially if the circle discourages this stuff and critical thinking and you just distract yourself through life.

If the people around you don't grow and that's all you know, and have a possitive perspective around those people it's harder that you grow too.

Also those people are unlikely to be psycopaths. Psycopaths are usually calculative and would not let you know they don't feel empathy. Of course some psycopaths can be good people even without feeling empathy, some could not be so smart and yea yea. Sociopaths are usually more impulsive too from my understanding. I doubt those people are any of those, probably just more like "those people are different" and that's hoe they feel no empathy for them. When you see people as others, outsiders, enemies, different or maybe not even human it can be less likely for you to feel empathy for them.

or idk i don't know how humans work.

Religions tend to reinforce being a child, Christianity at least. It makes people more malleable to the social engineering.

The people in power are strongly encouraging it, and propaganda works. So yeah, it's pretty hard to fix people like this, or for them to fix themselves.

Is it really THAT hard to break free of the chains of your terrible childhood

Yes, it's hard and you should do some therapy about it, but we don't live in a society that encourages this. I know how you feel but most people are not capable of doing that on their own.

People tend to keep their views and the world was a lot different when they were young. It's hard for them to see that conditions have changed or that the victims of the change are not the issue because it worked fine for them in ideal conditions to start a family etc.

They've been programmed by American propaganda about rugged individualism to not seek help with internal strife and to be judgemental of those who lean on others, as well as a specifically targeted belief about therapy being unnecessary and wasted money through even most Hollywood depictions.

It's not a dead end starting point for someone to change for the better, but it's a big hill to get over for someone who accepts no advice, especially from those younger than them.

That all being said, my grandma is in her 80s and is far more progressive than almost every boomer I've ever met and even most gen x.

OP a lot of these responses are shitting on you, but I have asked myself that same question so many times.

It blows my mind how many cluelessly lost people I have met. People who have their shit together really are the exception.

Very old..

In their 60s

lol

A lot of this comes down to how wildly different the world was when different generations were raised.

People in their 60s and older were raised by parents who lived through extreme hardship and scarcity, where absolute self-reliance and emotional toughness were required just to survive. Empathy wasn't prioritized the same way because survival was the primary goal.

Meanwhile, younger generations were raised in a totally different era - shaped by rapid technological shifts, different parenting styles, and a heavier focus on emotional awareness and participation.

When two groups are forged in completely different environments with different core survival values, they are naturally going to view the world through vastly different lenses. Neither side easily understands the other because their starting points were miles apart.

Well, like everything, it's capitalisms fault. Oligarchs sway the government away from higher taxes (on them) and therefore less spent on social programs and community projects like school, higher education, community spaces, art, etc.

This leads to an increase in stupid sociopaths. Not necessarily their fault entirely. But their actions in life make the problems worse, so it's a feedback loop.