The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can’t be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It’s so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It’s so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.

In the US and Canada?

Car dependency / Car centrism.

Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.

But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.

The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.

Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.

Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.

“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i’m not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)

We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement

Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye

Lying in bed, debating if you have to pee bad enough to get up

I don’t think we will ever have a society that is truly saved from class warfare. I think that the upper classes will always exist in some form and they will always oppress the vast majority of the population, with varying degrees of brutality. I also think this is the most important issue in our society and must be dealt with. It’s depressing.

Greed.

America is a great example of this.

Greed.

Getting consent to creating a life from a unborn child. Every human being was raped into existence by their parents.

Rent is due in 7 days.

There’s no problem in society that can’t be fixed. But the problem is there’s too much conclusion without proper understanding

It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.

alcohol is especially hard to ban because it’s just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that’s how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it’s just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don’t brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn’t turn into alcoholics is good enough

I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.

Human beings. The issue is humans.

Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That’s the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it’ll find another avenue.

anything harder than wearing masks