Do things need to get worse before they can get better?

[glowingfish]

 A lot going on, some of which I will talk about later...

 

But of course, for a lot of you, the war might be on your mind.

So here is one thing, for people inside and outside the US, and also for younger people: right now everything feels shitty. And it feels shitty in so many ways. Not just the current war, but in that everything is more difficult, and it seems the prospects for the future. Like everything feels dark. I am 46 years old, and I can't remember a time when things just felt so...grey and disappointing. Even our simple, guilty pleasures aren't as good anymore. Like, cheap microwaved dinners are...more expensive, and taste worse?

But here is the thing: things seem so bad, and people are pessimistic, that it might actually make social or political change harder. Because people aren't thinking "What do I want out of life?" or "How do we live in a better society?" or even "I want better pizza!", people are just accepting that the base level of the world is terrible. And that if world civilization and economy aren't actually, 100% destroyed, then that is tolerable.

And maybe one day we (collectively) will wake up and not think of the world in terms of shitty versus shittier.

Also, incidentally, this is part of the double standard of American politics. Any serious plan for a beneficial program will be criticized as unrealistic, and people advocating for it will be very careful about any backlash it could cause. If a politician went out and said "lets add 5 cents per gallon of gas to pay for major mass transit projects", they would be criticized for living in a fairy tale and harming small businesses...but when Trump has driven up costs by so much more, across the board, it is just something people have to live with. Apparently. 

Comments

[elyusion]

Good entry. I try to have hope, but every time I express it to anyone in real life they basically respond "how dare you expect good things to happen." But bad things get to happen all the time no matter how expensive they are... And we used to have good things happen even if they cost money! We still do, in fact. So if we just funded the bad things marginally less... But many have given up, and I wish I was more persuasive and charismatic a person so I could convince them they don't have to. My one hope for everyone else is that small pleasures becoming expensive makes them want to take change into their own hands, because I believe the #1 reason we've been so complacent this whole time is because we want our little treats. We remain complacent to a system that doesn't care about us because we at least get our little treats on demand. If the elite can't even keep up their unspoken promise of letting us have our little treats in exchange for our misery and labor, it's over.

[glowingfish]

Yeah, on the subject of "small pleasures", I bought some microwave macaroni and cheese the other day, and found that it was...not good, even by the standards of microwave macaroni and cheese? Like every thing feels darker and worse around me. Oh wait, I mentioned that in my original post.

Here is another example: consumer electronics have plateaued, and are getting more expensive with chip shortages. In past decades, even while things like healthcare and education got difficult, cameras kept getting smaller and cheaper! But that seems to have stopped. Like, yeah, would it have been that difficult to keep throwing us a few bones every once in a while?

[amberite]

I can't relate to the microwave dinner problem, & indeed find my access to cheap high-quality microwave food to be one of the silver lining blessings of the present, which suggests that it may be geographic (unless you're having post-covid taste impairment.) Is Trader Joe's a thing in your present landscape?

(Edit: I guess "cheap" is relative, I just remembered not everyone has food allergies so it's possible you're buying food in a tier that simply hasn't been accessible to me for a decade and a half. But I'm getting good quality stuff for say < $4 a meal via Trader Joe's or Saffron Road brand, and for those of us who can't have gluten it's also been the golden age of giant boxes/bags of oven-cookable frozen breaded chicken and fish, lately.)

[glowingfish]

Funny you should mention that! I am in Lincoln City, and the closest Trader Joe's is in Salem. Six weeks ago, while on a trip to Salem for other reasons, I went to Trader Joe's and got lots and lots of pouches of Indian food! But because I was literally going home on a 90 minute bus ride, and putting everything in my backpack, I did not get anything frozen, so sadly! :(

[rafqa]

It's a very bleak world right now. I'm a lot older than you and remember a time when middle class was working class. Seemed like pretty much everyone around me could afford the basics of a decent life-- like food, water, heat. A place to live. A visit to the doctor. Etc. At this point I don't think more toys can distract us any longer from the stranglehold of corporate greed and predation we're subject to literally every day.

I guess in the end I believe people have to remake their outlook from the ground up. Refuse to buy nonsense. Take care of each other. Etc. Pull society and the economy into shape where you are. But it's hard to fight a juggernaut.

Personally, I've noticed that Lipton Tea has become garbage. I've been drinking it for decades! it was always nice, flavorful delicious basic tea. Suddenly I buy a box of tea bags (since I can no longer get LOOSE TEA): there's hardly anything in them and what is in them doesn't even look like tea. And it pretty much just turns the water brown and calls it a day.

[glowingfish]

Part of what I remember about the 1990s and 2000s was Portland-specific.
I started community college in winter of 1996, 16 years old, and paid with bills for my tuition.
The biggest growth in expenses I saw was in education, housing, and health care. Also in the formality and difficulty of housing. But for my late teens and early twenties, I could still glide into those things. And other things were still cheap, if we were thrifty: this was the age of used book stores and record stores, and thrift stores, where you could still walk in with a handful of silver and get clothing and books. And through the 2000s, I was working/volunteering at Free Geek, where people would come in every day and dump literally tons of computers and home electronics every day. And if you knew the right places and people, you could get discounted things. So even though there was background anxiety about that, there was always fun things and things to do.

But yeah, right now, like you said, even our small comforts seem to be disappearing.