The whole concept of not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone. Remember that song you used to hate hearing and now 20 some years later, you’d wish we’d be back to music like it because music today is too artificial and AI-powered? Remember nearly a lot of things you criticized and now have a soft spot for because everything now has gone to shit?
Yeah, that hits hard. What sucks is that sometimes, you don’t know for certain if you’re experiencing the best of things. But once it passes you, give it 1 - 5 years, you’ll know it.
Life is inherently just suffering. Everything you do to prevent suffering simply prolongs it. Coupled with the fact that most forms of life need to consume other forms of life just to survive.
Even in the most beautiful ecosystem you could find it’s a constant war between species just for basic survival with no real meaning behind it
I’ve been grappling this for a while now, and how to think about it. It’s so sad that just about every being has to constantly work and suffer to prolong their existence (which only consists of work and suffering).
To what extent should we avoid the suffering? To what extent should we embrace it? Prolong it? Are there different types of suffering? Are some more preferable to others? Is suffering to produce art, or other creative work, better than the suffering of menial labour or going hungry?
How much should your children suffer? Should they suffer rigorous education and studying, or should you only occupy yourself with providing for them? Should you provide them a wealth of knowledge of life lessons and wisdom, or try to build up the largest pile of inheritance you can?
you can do everything “right” in life and still lose.
Physically painful chronic diseases
Life is fleeting, it’s short, and some people seem to only exist to make it as horrible for others as possible.
I’m struggling to think of an answer, but I guess the injustice of life in many forms. Some bad people have more success and luck than some good people. Alzheimers can make us forget the love of our lives after a long, happy life.
We die too quickly and not all of us experience all facets of life due to increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility.
I strongly believe life would be better for everyone due to these two factors alone
Lord of the flies was a thinly-veiled allegory for how the world actually works. There’s no growup keeping it in check, we’re on our own, and we’re not great at it.
The many ways people try to make it not that. Like just lying to themselves. Or scapegoating some subset of humanity they’re not in for it (which happens equally across the political spectrum).
Lack of agency
There is no karma, evil assholes get away with it and live to ripe old ages far more often than they should
Maybe there’s Heaven and Hell, though. Hopefully, right?
the very idea of some post-life reckoning is just a tool of social control meant to keep the workers from turning on their betters, because “it’ll all be made right in the end”.
what did the king say to the pope?
you keep em dumb, i’ll keep em poor
I don’t think that’s the origin, just the way belief/religion has been used by some immoral leaders. 🤷
Becoming old
For me it’s the nature of time. As you get older the amount of time you have had experienced grows, so new time feels quicker in comparison. So time speeds up just as you learn to enjoy it.
That eventually you have to say goodbye to parents, grandparents, animals, and loved ones - and there will always be a void you can’t fill that they filled.
Grief is the price of love. 🥲
that assumes they haven’t been a burden.
the best thing that ever happened to me was my dad dying. a huge cloud of anger, hate, and bitterness lifting out of my life.
same with the loss of some ex girlfriends, or an ailing parent who has been slowly decaying and sucking out your time, money, and emotions with nothing coming back to you. my mother has dementia it has no redeeming quality and has been nothing but a black hole on my life for years now. the sooner she dies the better. when she passes there won’t be a void, the void is her being alive.
A tad fucked that you only think of the current and not the length of their impact on your life. Yes, the current can be bad, but you have think about the impact they have - especially if someone has dementia.
you assume the impact on my life was positive instead of negative.
Not all people are loving and kind. Some people have very limited redeeming qualities. Like, wow my mom bought me some nice presents for Xmas… doesn’t really make up for the 20+ years of verbal abuse and resentment and her taking out of her lack of happiness in life on her child. The only redeeming qualities my parents had were examples of who not to be.
The first time I ever felt safe and happy in my life was college. The first time I came back from my first break I bawled my eyes out because I’d never ever before in my life felt safe and encouraged and positive before. It was mind-blowing that adults who were open minded and kind existed, because I grew up in a shithole rural town where such adults simple didn’t exist and most adults were miserable people who were full of hate and rage towards anything that wasn’t sitting on your ass and watching TV and complaining about life.
And yet despite all the horror they forced upon me, I was a decent enough person to care for them as they die. Not because I love them, because I refuse to be as shitty, selfish, and awful to them as they were to me.
You gotta get food. Like every day. Even when you can’t or don’t want to.
3 years I had a normal blood pressure.
5 years and 2 months ago I had a back.
10 years ago I had knees.
Oh, and I haven’t slept more than 5 or 6 hours a night in several years and most of the time I’m lucky to get 4.
I truly do not mind getting older. It has a lot of benefits, but damn… I’d like there be enough of my body left to enjoy it.
In 1994, I didn’t own a computer yet, smartphones weren’t a thing yet, I was 12 years old and learning to fix and rebuild lawnmowers and go-karts.
Age 13, I got my first computer, and promptly learned how to crash it that evening. Turned out it had a DriveSpace compressed hard drive, 125 whopping megabytes, and I didn’t understand any of that yet on that very evening. But I had the manuals and the disks, and gradually learned the basics over the next 2 weeks to reformat and reinstall everything my uncle gave me.
By age 15 they were starting to shut down the local parts shops for small engine parts. Now mind you, that was way before online ordering was the big thing, and I was still running Windows 3.11, which I later upgraded to Windows 95, via floppy disk of course, because who in 1995 got a donor hand-me-down computer with a CD-ROM drive?
So, I started learning more about computers, and gradually learning automotive repair, the whole time building custom bicycles, because I had way too many spare junkyard bicycle parts.
But today, I dunno what the fuck to do. People don’t really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.
I get by fixing older vehicles like from 2005 and before, wondering what the fuck done happened to society over all these years?
I’m sorry, I could go on and on, there’s soo many things I can maintain and rebuild even, if only you could get parts and tools for modern stuff.
Right To Repair!
People don’t really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.
God damn do I feel that.
I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.
I’m a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.
And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn’t really hard, just time-consuming)
I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there’s a good chance the others weren’t far behind)
For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.
And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.
So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics
So that’s what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn’t make financial sense to fix it.
This wasn’t a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it’s an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn’t a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that’s pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic “3 inch roller wheel” for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.
But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn’t find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.
They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I’d have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.
If they use standardized/universal parts and let you buy replacement parts for cheap, then how are they supposed to get you to buy a new dryer every ten years?
Think of the shareholders!
you could probably 3d print a replacement for fraction of the cost, just need to get the dimensions right
because repair doesn’t make economical sense when it is cheaper to replace.
for most people, repair is expensive, time consuming, and difficult. It is not enjoyable or rewarding in any way. Replacement is far more immediate outside of very expensive long lasting items, like cars, homes, etc.
I do a lot of DIY, but the vast majority of people do not have the skills, patience, or time to spend hours figuring things out and then sourcing replacement parts to save a few bucks. They just want something that works asap, and replacement is almost always the faster option.
And that’s half of how we ended up in the era of enshittification.
Let’s say one of the control knobs on your 15 year old dumb stove fails, shorted out, where as soon as you turn it to low heat the eye is blazing hot at full heat. Do you?..
- A. Just not use that eye anymore
- B. Buy a new control knob and get another 10 years out of it
- C. Buy a whole new stove, that may last 5 years, and wants you to connect to the internet so they can eventually brick the firmware
We went with option B, way cheaper than a new stove, plus none of the headaches of modern digital technology. Like, why do appliances need modern digital technology? A stove heats food, plain and simple, and that’s all it needs to do.
And look at these new refrigerators coming out, that fail within weeks to months, maybe at best a couple or few years. When your grandma’s old fridge was passed down from her mom and has been kicking strong for 50 years, save for that new door seal installed like 15 years ago…
Sigh, we live in a disposable dystopia anymore ☹️
You aren’t painting the full picture. The new stove is probably more efficient, cleaner, etc. Modern digital tech makes them better at these things. I have a 20 year old purely analog stove. It sucks balls. But I’m too cheap to justify buying an new one until it breaks. That’s entirely on me though.
You are also grossly exaggerating things. I have a 4 year old washer, it came with a 10 year warranty. it broke twice already but both times it was covered under warranty at no cost to me. It was electronic failures. It’s super efficient and I love it. Granted if I bought a cheapo one that was $300, it probably wouldn’t have such a good warranty.
There are lots of choices. Nobody is forcing you to buy fridges that break. And plenty of companies do consumer testing for you such that you can buy a reliable model.
What you have is nostalgia. I had computers in the 90s too… they broke all the fucking time. I barely got 1 year old of a HDD back then. So yeah you had to repair them. Modern SSDs last much longer because they have no moving mechanical parts, on time of being blazingly faster.
Shitty stuff was always shitty. Good stuff is will always be good. There were shitty computer brands and appliance brands 20 years ago, maybe you were lucky enough to never encounter them, but the notion that ‘things are bad because modern’ is complete boomer nonsense. Modern appliances are way more reliable, efficient and superior to decades old appliances. It’s just that have different points of failure that your 20 old appliance didn’t.
Same with cars. Old luxury cars had electronic gizmos that broke. Modern cheap cars are better than old luxury cars, so now they have the same extra points of failure. Like… if you want a car 80s/90s car that’s purely mechanical… cool, go buy a used one. There are plenty of them out there, but they tend to be collectors items at this point because people only really want them for the nostalgia factor. For everyday use a modern car is far superior in reliability and comfort to those cars, esp apple to apple comparison. a 2026 mid range Camry has more luxury than a 2000s Lexus.
Yeah, you’re right about shitty computer brands ~20 years ago. Turned out they were all shitty in the long run, as that was back during the Taiwanese counterfeit capacitor plague… ☹️
As far as vehicles go, I don’t much care for luxury features, that’s just more points of failure. And now they got all the sensors, modules, cameras and stuff on the CAN bus, which is good for the manufacturer because it reduces the copper wiring, but bad for the consumer, as one faulty shorted sensor can take down the entire data bus and basically brick your car.
Just give me a vehicle that cranks, runs, drives, and stops when I got places to go, and is easy to troubleshoot and repair as necessary. The most luxury I care for is heater and air conditioning. I’ll trade in the push button windows for hand crank rollup windows as long as the vehicle comes with a spare tire. I don’t want any vehicle that tracks everywhere you go, records everything you do, and can be bricked remotely by the police.
Our current vehicle is a 2005 Hyundai Tucson, roommate’s had it going on 4 years now I think, for $3000. At first it had some running issues, but after a new coil pack, crankshaft position sensor, and mass airflow sensor, it purrs like a kitten ever since. And those sensors are cross compatible between Hyundai Tucson and Kia Sportage from 1999 to 2010, meaning both used and new parts aren’t too difficult to find.
And it’s not on a payment plan, he outright owns it 👍
Having a pattern finding machine between your ears that desperately tries to find meaning/reason/purpose in a meaningless universe
