Yes. There's always a point. The world will always be unjust. That doesn't mean we should give up and take it. Fight for what you can, enjoy what you can.
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
163 points (81.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
638 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Went through this whole there is no future debockle a few years ago, I stopped caring about it to save myself mentally
It’s up to you to give your life meaning. Just because things suck, doesn’t mean it’s time to throw in the towel. Imagine the Bronze Age humans, who were getting killed over idols and and some random warlord’s whims. They persisted in the face of adversity so we exist today. Imagine the lives of the enslaved, raped, and oppressed native Americans and Africans in the face of Spanish rule in South America. They persisted with no clear future freedom in sight.
I could go on about humans facing horrible situations but my point is this: throughout history we have always faced a dark situation as a result of other human actions but we always found a reason to persist… or even fight back.
Exactly. In my current state persistence is key. The question “When do you want to give up the fight?” is a good one. Im hoping that everyone can get a world where they feel mostly happy. Things might go bad quickly but it’s important to remember the small things and create happiness for yourself, even if temporary (it always is).
Shit sucks; deal with it. Also you know be cool to people and they’ll be cool back.
Climate is fucked, but regarding everything else the world wasn't a utopia back then either. Poverty, war, corrupted overlords, etc have always existed.
Life has been pointless in the grand scheme of things and unfair, and been up to each individual to try and find
I suppose that's what I come back to.
My parents lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation, my grandparents fought in ww2. My gg parents lived through ww1. Most of everyone before them lived in relative poverty.
I'm not sure id take any of them over the current situation. Certainly there are massive problems looming that will cause lots of suffering, but humans do find joy and purpose at all times
There was never any point. Find your own meaning and don’t give up.
We live, we serve cunt, we die
Jkjk. I think why I stick around is bc I can help others even in the smallest ways, and that brings me joy. Also, the art that people create and the knowledge to learn are big factors as well.
There was never any point. Find your own meaning and don’t give up.
There are real problems, but be wary of news/social media that use doom & gloom for engagement. Algorithms will drown you in the most extreme takes, even when on the "right side" of real issues.
Just try to do the right thing, and don't let the internet scare you into not living your life.
Gonna die anyway, might as well see how it plays out 🤷♂️
I've had this exact same thought for so much of my life and it's always made me feel a little better. We all get there eventually, no need to rush it, may as well just find out what comes next.
Same reason people have gone on for a million years. Noe of that matters or is really as bad as it sound at an individual level. Individually you have it better now than at any point in history, asking why ‘you’ should go on because of the unknown future effects of the climate crisis (which is real enough, and shouldn’t be understated) sounds more like depression than a valid outlook that people should have considering actual world events.
Even the worst off people on earth, on average, are better off now than they were 1000s or even 100s of years ago. There have always been poverty, starvation, wars, rich taking advantage of the poor, and fewer safeguards or oversight on top of that.
Seriously I can't help it to see it in any other way. At the least I'm trying my best to not to be the part of it.
But it is really tough to live with a conscious.
Try to find meaning in whatever works for you. A lot of people find this in things like relationships, family, hobbies, interests and activism. Essentially, don't let the bastards grind you down. Existential philosophy may not be everyone's cup of tea but it can be helpful in navigating these kinds of issues.
(insert astronaut meme) never has been
Jokes aside... This is my personal philosophy & probably won't align with everyone's. As someone who started science quite young, I realized quite early that beyond societal issues, literally nothing is "meaningful"... If Earth itself will be gone in a few billion years, might as well practice some optimistic nihilism and do some stuff with whatever life I have. There's still stuff to do even if society doesn't prioritize ppl like me
Our lives, too, have meaning beyond these issues. The relationships we form, the joy we find in our passions, the simple pleasures we get from a beautiful day or a good meal - these things matter. They give us strength to face the larger problems of our world.
And in the face of these problems, we can find a purpose. Many people find fulfillment in dedicating themselves to fighting for a better future. Whether that’s in climate change activism, social justice, or just in being a kinder, more understanding person, we can all make a difference.
Less "world" and more private life, and everything begins to have sense.
I mean... I just found Lemmy. So there's that. 🤷
Your question makes me think of this video: The Goddess of Everything Else
load more comments
(2 replies)
You're at a moment in history where the only two real options are utopia or extinction. There are some worse things than extinction that people also worry about, but lets call it all "extinction" for now. Super-intelligence is coming. It literally can't be stopped at this point. The only question is whether it's 2, 5, or 10 years.
If we don't solve alignment, you die. It is the default. AI alignment is the hardest problem humans have ever tried to solve. Global warming will cause suffering on that timescale, but not extinction. A well-aligned super-intelligence has actual potential to reverse global warming. A misaligned one will mean it doesn't matter.
So, if you care, you should be working in AI alignment. If you don't have the skillset, find something else: https://80000hours.org/
Every single dismissal of AI "doom" is based on wishful thinking and hand-waving.
utopia or dystopia, innit?
No. Maybe as a short stop on the way to extinction, but absolute and complete extinction aint a dystopia. And the worse than extinction possibilities are more like eternal suffering in a simulator for resisting the AI. Not quite captured by a "dystopia".
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=3K25VPdbAjU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What do you mean by alignment?
AI alignment is a field that attempts to solve the problem of "how do you stop something with the ability to deceive, plan ahead, seek and maintain power, and parallelize itself from just doing that to everything".
AI alignment is "the problem of building machines which faithfully try to do what we want them to do". An AI is aligned if its actual goals (what it's "trying to do") are close enough to the goals intended by its programmers, its users, or humanity in general. Otherwise, it’s misaligned. The concept of alignment is important because many goals are easy to state in human language terms but difficult to specify in computer language terms. As a current example, a self-driving car might have the human-language goal of "travel from point A to point B without crashing". "Crashing" makes sense to a human, but requires significant detail for a computer. "Touching an object" won't work, because the ground and any potential passengers are objects. "Damaging the vehicle" won't work, because there is a small amount of wear and tear caused by driving. All of these things must be carefully defined for the AI, and the closer those definitions come to the human understanding of "crash", the better the AI is "aligned" to the goal that is “don't crash”. And even if you successfully do all of that, the resulting AI may still be misaligned because no part of the human-language goal mentions roads or traffic laws. Pushing this analogy to the extreme case of an artificial general intelligence (AGI), asking a powerful unaligned AGI to e.g. “eradicate cancer” could result in the solution “kill all humans”. In the case of a self-driving car, if the first iteration of the car makes mistakes, we can correct it, whereas for an AGI, the first unaligned deployment might be an existential risk.
Ah, the crux.
There was never any point. Find your own meaning and don’t give up.
I think it has always been like this. We have always been on the edge of progress or total destruction. You may want to watch the Oppenheimer movie as the fears we have now about end of the world, were the same then, maybe even worse.
Throughout history people have worried about the end and while they are not wrong to have concern as there are just so many vectors to take us out, some self inflicted, we have survives and thrived. Fearing the doom scenario seems normal but we have been doing for so long despite doing so well on so many key metrics overall that I think this reality needs to be the focus. Although, I did read a paper once that said worry is just mother-natures way of ensuring we avoid bad things by making them uncomfortable. Maybe we all need to lean into the uncomfortableness as it will come to us sooner than later anyways.
What else you gonna do, lay down and die? Life is a short amount of time anyways. Just make best with what you got. YOLO
This is a very pessimistic perspective.
Also poverty and hunger are lower than ever before (considering previous eras, and it's not yet good). More and more people are getting education. Fairness towards women and minorities used to get better.
We're having scientific advancements every day and can easily communicate with people around the globe, and it's even cheap and available to many people. Some people think we'll soon invent general artificial intelligence and maybe robots will do the unattractive labor for us. Some people (i'm not sure if i trust people like Elon Musk(?)) even say science is soon going to solve things like overpopulation and climate change. They want star trek to become true. Also medicine is getting better each day, we can cure more and more things and people need to suffer less and less. Maybe there is a cure for cancer coming up in the next decade.
Is it really on the decline? Are we having less or more wars than we used to have? Can we afford more or less stuff than our parents or grandparents did? I'm not sure... Things are a bit complicated and sometimes something gets worse while other things get better. Sometimes it's for short or longer periods. I get what you mean and it's a problem. And too many people around the world are suffering things we could have fixed by now. But this is only half of the story.
I wonder about this sometimes. Things aren't great and will get worse before they get better at the very least.
I figure that even if the world is ending and there's nothing I can do about it, I can still do small kindnesses whenever possible. The question is how small to go for maximum effect. If you could be a little more ambitious and definitely succeed it follows that you're not doing enough, so the optimal amount of ambition must have some risk of failure.
Check out some videos on Eternalized channel on youtube
Yes and shutup we're fixing shit.
There's nothing we can do as individuals unless you own a multinational corporation, and we're all going to die in a few decades, so just have fun now
That's literally what they want. You depressed and suicidal. The task is reducing population by like 7.5 billion.