@lain I have complicated feelings about it because being depressed because of circumstances is valid but it seems clear that circumstances that inhibit your ability to normally interact with others is worse than being poor or even not seeing a lot of hope for the future (being poor is worse for other reasons, you can be not-depressed and die young)
@sun yeah, i don't doubt that many people are really depressed and i know that it's not something that you can just snap out of, but the solutions seem lacking. actually changing your life to one that you don't hate is not often discussed.
@sun a. there's a different allocation of badness in the conditions. Mass loneliness and child labor are both a single bad thing to put on a list of bad conditions, but don't have the same effect on general human happiness the same way. b. there's a different point of comparison. Just like the coldest you might ever feel is in the middle of a desert at 100+F because your body had adapted to 130F and the temperature changed much faster than you're used to, the west remember really good times and now have mediocre times, whereas the non-west remember abysmal times and now have sub-mediocre times. c. depression is an independent variable from bad conditions, and observing it in a society is like observing rampant endemic disease in a body: such disease is not the cause of ill health, but its growth is an opportunistic response to the immune system's collapse.
@lain When I look back at my education I don't believe it trained me in any way for self-actualization, it pretty much just trained me to be a worker bee with time for hobbies.
@lain@sun >actually changing your life to one that you don't hate i did this and i still get depressed. even in fully automated luxury gay space communism, people will go through "tough times". i believe its just a feature/bug of the brain, like sleep or nostalgia or deja vu
@sun@shitposter.world@lain@lain.com humans are social animals and modern 1st world society doesn't satisfy those needs. if we had the social requirements of cats or sth we'd probably all be incredibly happy
@anemone@lain we probably should not have systematically destroyed or subverted all socialization in the west trying to prevent fascism, that was short-sighted
@lain mine was good actually! but it trained me for a world that doesn't exist anymore. So I know all kinds of facts about things that you used to be expected to know and kind of had use before socially.
@lain@sun The only education outside of primary/secondary and to some extent high school is the type of education you can immediately forget after completing an exam/finishing studies. Nothing that has impact in the real world.
What makes this even worse is that you will likely never be taken as seriously as someone that has a degree in the same topic if you are self-taught. Even if you have the same or better knowledge about the subject.
part of the post ww2 order was replacing all social order with government programs that could be administered top down. deep fear that what happened in germany could happen in usa through social clubs and fraternal orders.
@sun i get suspicious when things go too well, like there's a natural amount of problems and if they're not cropping up someone trying to fool me, no free lunch
@lain I am still trying to figure out my feelings on it but things like the composition of the different planets or biology/chemistry just doesn't help you in life. but getting exposed to a bunch of things can help you figure out what you're interested in so it's not worthless. I know some homeschooled kids that were better at figuring out their interests and they have super interesting and fulfilling lives, moreso than the people I went to school with (my life is good, I was fortunate in a variety of ways)
@sun > but getting exposed to a bunch of things can help you figure out what you're interested in so it's not worthless.
i think the way it's done in the schools that i know it's less than worthless, because everything was taught in a way that could make the most interesting subject feel boring.
@lain@sun and the "exposure" is always in the context of spending most of your time doing literally nothing, - waiting in halls, waiting to eat, waiting for class to start, waiting for the day to end, waiting to get permission to go pee, waiting for the bus, waiting for noise to die down, waiting for others to finish. What you learn can't be focused on a productive task but has to be squeezed into information that can easily tested. You can't have high standards because too many people won't meet them. You can't ask questions that get real answers because it'd mean too much discussion outside what's on the test. In any conflict the real crime was always against classroom order and, actually, you're worse than the instigator for 'escalating' and not letting the conflict die out as soon as the instigator was done abusing you.
There are benefits, but the point of comparison isn't "no benefits", it's the benefits you would've gotten in the alternative. The tall dude on the Angry Joe show, describing a movie that he got something out of, described the experience as like enjoying a "second harvest" - eating shit that has indigested food in it, so that you can get nutrition from those little bits of food.
@apropos@lain I do want to mention that focusing on the test wasn't ever a big thing in the USA at all compared to europe, at least until AFTER "no child left behind" which, in my unique analysis, was really an indirect way to fire incredibly bad teachers by just shutting down the entire school (and implement "school choice"/private/magnet/etc.) and the tests you got for that were really "oh please god you should at least know these things" like, if a school had to switch to only "teaching to the test" then for all the alleged benefits of well rounded schooling students weren't ending up learning the most important things they should have been learning.
@sun I don't know if living in Costa Rica would make me less depressed, but right now the issues at hand are manageable where I live, but I suppose in richer countries the problems seem too difficult to fix.
@union@lain so, I did find out that some teachers wanted me in some gifted classes but the process was your parents had to beg to get you in and my parents didn't know this.
most of the people in the gifted classes I knew about never left my home town :-(
@sun@lain About training worker bees, I saw something else as my kids were growing up, although it might've not been the case for you. Every step of the way, every teacher or counselor aimed to separate kids into two groups: "sheeps" and "leaders". They focused heavily on identifying leader candidates, and then fostering them. Everyone who failed selection was dumped into a worker bee class. By the high school time it takes one glance at the admission statement to tell who was in and who was out. The process was egalitarian, although parents who were conscious about it could prime the child for passing. The "leaders" were taught to dominate the worker bees effectively.
@sun@lain I did all of that. One time we traveled for a gifted youth camp in JHU in Baltimore, where a homeless badgered me until I gave him $20 (because I had a small girl in tow, I could not try him out). Another time we sent her on a gifted youth cruise at a sailboat, and she returned with lice.
@lain@amerika@sun Well duh. It's a top-down crisis of competency. They can't even shoot Trump from 100 meters away. But this is how the machine used to work, I provided the testimony.
The ultimate result in my daughter's case was this: she spends her time sitting in her pajamas, abusing her worthless underlings remotely, and sharing the hate of Reagan on Tumblr all day long. She graduated from a college that had 90% job acceptance rate and worked in the field where she majored. But that's where she ran out of steam.