🤔

[solarpsychedelic]

When I doom scroll, I could stop and write essays on any number of articles. Yet it seems to me that each outrage comes down to a basic list of problems that eventually took shape in the post-WW2 and post-Cold War eras:

• We (collectively) have amused ourselves to death.


• We allowed egotism and narcissism to damage the social contract, putting the deification of the ego above common sense.


• We put too much emphasis on the material aspects of life.


• We have denigrated education, dumbed the discourse down to shouting matches, and devalued smart and educated people.


• We allowed every topic to become politicized and then polarized, again overriding common sense.


• We sold our souls (to low bidders, really).


• We place the fraudulent above the authentic.

Unless we collectively take responsibility for these problems and start valuing common sense, intelligence, and the basic dignity of the human being, things will continue to get worse.

Having grown up and come of age when things were better, I grieve about what’s been happening to us. Too many of us took things for granted and chose the easy, stupid, and convenient over what takes time and requires thought.