Total and complete loss of faith in humanity

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LOL...Don't knock it until we can actually get there

(the Andromeda Galaxy, I mean).

I feel like I've arrived a bit late to say much about humanity that hasn't already been said.

What I might add though - I feel a good portion of my adult life, nearly all of it since graduating college has been trying to walk across an economic landscape where it feels like every floor board is rotted and every new job is like the plank of a bridge that's giving you just enough resistance to step forward onto it as it's giving way under your feet and it's a bit like always being forced to find my next step under those circumstances (from 32 to 38 especially it was nothing but temping and 'We love your work but HR...' or 'We love your work and we said six months to hire but they cut 2/3 of the company right after you came on so...', etc., etc.). It's a state where it's a bit like no matter how hard you work you can't become an adult.

Becoming an adult's always been fabled at least about being able to stand on your own two feet economically, to be able to handle your affairs in the sense of responsibilities of a scope that you can claim accountability for. It seems on some level like part of the problem is that we came into a deteriorating economy, one that's been deteriorating since the 1970's and so it's been constant cloak and dagger and fakery, in a landscape - business - which was already like that even at the best of times. I remember graduating Suma Cum Laude, not from the most prestigious school and maybe not with the most prestigious degree (BBA in accounting) but my first job was at what I'll call here The Adam's Family CPA. No training, getting shoveled work that even if you'd already taken the course work in school (I hadn't) it would be fraud because you're being constantly asked to get 'creative' when clients give you incomplete or missing information. In 2020 you can indeed do everything right, even have a list of past employers with nothing bad to say about you, and live at home single at 40 without any reasonable explanation as to what you did wrong. I think Eric Weinstein has said it beautifully that in the lack of economic growth we came to see each other as a protein source.

Times and eras do shift, public behavior does change, just that to move a whole society off of playing games where everyone's too afraid not to participate in whatever arms race is making the whole scene wreak of cowardice, lack of imagination and integrity, I think it's beyond anyone's imagination as to what shakes such an electrified system into a new shape. That may be the thing that would make being an amateur historian really interesting, ie. being able to see those shake-ups and phase transitions, just that my best guess would be that it's never a head-long rejection of what set the undesired dynamics in motion so much as either inevitable collapse of the ground that the game was getting played on or necessities of some kind forcing a shift of priorities.

I try to take what solace I can in great thinkers of past and present as well as the best music I can get my hands on. The other piece - fighting to preserve the person who 'landed' here as a kid who had the will to make the world better in some way and wring out whatever static or disorder I could find. That's been my uphill struggle at my current job which I've been at for maybe 3 years (shifted from accounting to programming) and I'm really hoping that whatever skillsets I have can hold the chaos of the outside world at bay enough for me to both succeed and make some sort of space for shelter and sanity around me if I do climb in the organization. IMHO life is too short and the consciousness we're given too precious to be stuck in a place where no one can find any peace and where everyone's expecting the person next to them to stab them in the leg in some manner and take off running.

I remember checking into John Gray a while back and someone else here read Straw Dogs and highly recommended it. He wrote it in 2002 (relatively short - only 150 pages) but it sums up the human condition and my collected observations up until the time I'd read it quite well. Our animal side is bouncing out regularly, and when we're in a society with mangled incentive structures that combination is not pretty.

I was kinda of misanthropic when I was suffering from a psychotic depression in my early 20s. I got over the depression but I started becoming a misanthrope again in the last few years. Everyday when I read or hear the news, I despise humanity more & more. I kind of wonder if I'll eventually start slipping into nihilism before I die from humanity destroying itself or destroying our whole planet.