• qarbone@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    What an absolute dogshit take. You’re saying people would choose to continue struggling if given the option to be improved at zero to little personal cost? Why the hell do you think lottery tickets are popular? Because the people have internalized how unlikely they are to actually win life-changing amounts of money and are getting off on it?

    People don’t enjoy suffering; that’s so absurd I refuse to engage with it. People like routine. It’s a wading motion: easier than swimming but takes you nowhere. But if a current pulls them into bad waters, then the comfortable wading keeps them in bad waters.

    The currents have swept us to shark-infested waters.

    • MacN'Cheezus@lemmy.today
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      4 months ago

      Thanks, you just gave a perfect counterexample to what I’m talking about.

      First of all, I never said anything about it involving little to zero personal cost. Playing the lottery is the exact opposite because it’s 0.1% work and 99.9% hope. Personal responsibility is more like 90% work and 10% hope.

      Yes, I was being somewhat facetious about people enjoying their suffering, what I really meant is that they enjoy it more than the effort required for making a change. Your second example is a great illustration of that, because rather than looking ahead and watching out for signs of sharks (like a tailfin sticking out of the water), they’ll just keep going in their comfortable routine instead of changing course.

      Very often, looking ahead to check if you’re still on track to where you were originally going is all that’s required — if you notice the sharks (or the currents) before getting swept up in them, it’s still quite easy to change course. But people will rather commiserate over how difficult it is to wade through those currents instead of stopping for a moment to reassess their plans, and then complain some more when the sharks show up.