Like, it's probably more noticeable that you don't have any romantic or sexual relationships than it would be if you don't have any true, close, platonic connections. Romantic and sexual relationships have things that are very obvious and for the most part, exclusive to them, such as kissing, making out, sex, etc. Platonic relationships that are true and close are not as visible, they're more feelings on the inside (not to say that there's none of those feelings involved with romantic and sexual relationships). If you look exclusively at the activities done with a platonic friendship, it's not very different from an acquaintanceship, or an activity partner.
I've met people who claim they have friends, but they're just coworkers they talk to a bit, guys they play games with, or guys they see at the sports bar a lot. Not people who actually support each other or any true connection. Now granted, there's nothing wrong with having those acquaintanceships or activity partners, and it can be argued that they're necessary for a fulfilling life, but they're not the same as a true connection or friendship. If you've never had that or hadn't had it in a while, it can be hard to tell what that feels like.
The only way to make these connections is through social skills, which a lot of people lack. They lack social skills, so they don't make connections, platonic or romantic. Since romantic and sexual connections have more exclusive activities, it's more easy to notice them than the lack of true friends. So I'm wondering if all this talk about the lack of romance and sex is really just poor social skills.
Idk about that. Particularly during the peak of COVID, time was the one thing people had in abundance. Even afterwards, there's still a not-insignificant chunk of unemployed and underemployed people - particularly young people - who can and do have a surplus of free time that could be spent socializing.
Video games and social media are two sinks for this surplus, but they're hardly the only ones. People have used books, Radio/TV/Movies, arts & crafts, cooking, and a host of other private recreations to "voluntarily" alientate themselves from the general public. Hell, the very core idea of the "dorks" and "nerds" - alienated typically young people with very peculiar hobbies - predates electronic entertainment by decades.
I'd argue that the primary barriers to human interaction are a combination of physical distance and an increased degree of social distrust created by a more migrant population.
The suburbs and the modern private home have very physically divided large bodies of people from one another. We must travel larger distances to see friends and family. It takes me 45 minutes of drive to get from my home to my mom's house, for instance. It takes me 15 minutes to meet up with friends who live in the same city. I get to see my nieces maybe once or twice a year, because they're a 3 hour plane ride away. Visiting my sister is another 3 hour trip in the opposite direction. I am not lacking for free time in a pre-modern sense. I am lacking the ability to cover several thousand miles in the time I have available.
I come from a family that had two really big moves to chase the job market (and a few minor moves that hindered my ability to make friends in the short term). They really do fuck you up in a material way. Imagine the trauma of being moved, but normalized into a salesman's or traveling engineer's or nurse's lifestyle. Nevermind dating. Its impossible to make any kind of long term friendships this way.
Then there's the issue of stress and anxiety around strangers. We've entered a period of human civilization in which many of the people we interact with, daily, are functionally strangers. Our commutes are full of strangers. Our offices are full of strangers. We only know the people who live on our street, because our houses are so fucking spread out. We definitely don't know our trash guy or our mail guy or the guys that cook our food at lunch. We certainly don't know our local pigs or our city councilor or our fucking mayor. That's the baseline for human interaction. Then pile on the fear that comes at us from all angles - fear of fraud, fear of theft, fear of being injured by accident (drunk driver) or on purpose (road rage). Everyone is constantly feeling one another out, because we're all raised to believe that Strangers Are Dangers.
Sure, yes, obviously. But I don't think that solves the problems above. I think it solves the conditions that incentive the economics. But once they've become entrenched, I don't really think a Worker's Soviet chaired by the same folks that run my HOA would provide me a meaningful lifestyle improvement. Certainly not if they're a bunch of weirdos I've never met before.
I would argue that much of the "failure" of post-revolutionary soviet states has stemmed from this unimpeded march towards alienated lives and livelihoods.
I strongly, strongly agree with all this. I feel like I lucked out in this game, despite being an incredibly awkward and homeschooled kid, by ending up part of a strong community of young people of various ages, with a unique internal culture, in my teens and early twenties. There's a kind of connection and trust you can have in that sort of situation that forms deep and lasting bonds. Many of those people are still my closest friends to this day, and we plan regular camping trips and such together. I can reconnect with many of the others from that time period, who I didn't regularly keep in touch with, out of the blue and the love and trust is right back to where it was. There are more introverts than extroverts in this group.
I have no idea what kind of person I would be without that. I'm a little scared of the prospect tbh, but that's the reality that who knows how many people - maybe even the majority? - are living with today.
Oh absolutely. I'll openly admit it wasn't great for my GPA, but the best choice I ever made in college was getting a few old high school friends, putting out a folding table, and starting a college club for our nerdy hobbies.
Just, totally transformative from a psychological perspective. The friends I made back then are with me over twenty years later. And the friends they made have become my friends in turn. In fact, friends-of-friends introduced me to my wife.
Part of me just assumes that I'd have a different circle of people today. But who and what kind of people? Idk. My early twenties were rough, and I have no idea how I'd be living today without the folks I bounded with so long ago.
At the same time, I had friend groups in my prior moves, too. I have to wonder if we'd all just be people we'd known since elementary school... who would we be today?
I wish I could meet other young people who are in this situation, but I don't know how. I live in a rather small city and don't have a car (which is nearly required to do anything interesting) and everyone else my age seems to spend all their time indoors anyways, or is already full up on friends or is married or busy with a career, etc.
I'm just stuck :sadness-abysmal:
how are homebodies supposed to find eachother? Certainly not on capitalist dating services.
yeah, definitely true. just wish I knew what to do about it.
I mean, I can find people like this with relative ease. When my city throws a free concert at the big downtown park, they gather in droves. When there's a festival or parade, they fill the streets. When its a weekend, they're all across the popular drinking and clubbing spots, particularly the cheap ones. They're all over college campuses, too. Yeah, I can find people.
But then what? Approaching people is so much harder. Making a sincere connection is hard. The people I find who are the most engaging are inevitably the flakiest, too. The folks who are more reliable tend to be withdrawn and skeptical, plus they also do tend to have their own shit going.
This is why "entryism" is so appealing. You don't need to break a bunch of new ground. You just find a pre-existing group of people who have already flagged themselves as interested in doing shit, and you engage with them directly. Its why organizations like churches and political parties have so much staying power. They're magnets for people with more time than sense or personal direction. At some level, the DSA - for all its flaws - is a powerful organization simply because it exists and people recognize it as such and they come to you rather than you running around town looking for like-minded people. And its a known quantity, so when you go out and say "There's a DSA meeting would you like to come?" you don't have to explain what the hell you're inviting people to in quite as much detail.
But a lot of these organizations can feel like dead-ends, too. Easy to get in, but there's nowhere to actually apply your time productively. Its just an engine for self-promotion. So you leave and go looking for something better.
Hey, I feel ya.
On the contrary sir, Bhagavan Shree Matt Christman (PBUH) has the answers.
This was a semi-intentional "feature" stemming from the deeply ingrained colonial delusion of the "American Dream" that could theoretically be corrected with a more socially oriented paradigm towards urban planning. One of the hypothesized reasons why the left in CANZUK countries is in such an abysmal state is the suburb, because of the effects you highlighted.
This will be less of a problem without the market. The resulting superstructural logic of capitalism leads to increased levels of hierarchy, domination, and transactionality within social relationships. When life is a competition "stranger danger" is amplified.
They won't be. By the time capitalism goes and something comes to replace it, the vast majority of us who were born of the machine will be dead. Those who come after will be fundamentally different to us as we are different to European Peasants living during the time of the 30 years war. We won't know whether things will be different better or different worse, however the only thing that can be guaranteed is difference.
Sure, in theory. But, in practice, markets are very useful tools that are difficult to surrender. Lenin couldn't manage it, and he had near dictatorial control over the shambling remnants of the central Russian Empire. Fidel couldn't get rid of markets after fully galvenizing the majority of the Cuban population. The Kims have, if anything, relapsed into market mechanics despite three generations of near-uncontested rule in North Korea.
I think you're putting the cart well ahead of the horse if your plan is to simply abolish markets.
It also provides durable lines of succession, rapid decision making, and an abundance of surplus wealth. Capitalism hasn't dominated the economic ecosystem by accident, even if it has come at a hellish cost.
I mean, there are definitely places in which traditional merchantilist capitalism is dead and buried. But the vestigial remains persist in dictating social norms. You're seeing the Chinese struggle with vestigial capitalism, while the Russians have gone into a full relapse. There is no bright line between the end of capitalism and the beginning of what comes next. Its all interwoven.
What's coming to an end is the :free-real-estate:. It is no longer trivial to do an Adventurism in a foreign country with a dozen heavily armed dudes and topple a sclerotic empire. The stresses and the contradictions that propel people out of the imperial core still exist, but there's no longer a California or a Texas for them to flee. What's more, the modern concept of "home ownership society" combined with suburbanification has created a new foundational element of infrastructure that isn't going to be quickly or easily replaced. Our grandparents carved grooves into the earth, and then our parents and now we spill like water through the cracks, because it is the path of least resistance.
Again, look to Russia and China. I don't think its fair to say that "capitalism goes" in a straightforward manner. I think the structures carved in the name of capitalism will endure as subsequent societies exploit and exhaust them.
But even beyond that, we're carving our own groves. We're dictating where our kids and our grandkids will flow, because of the trails we blaze. That's what so much of this conversation is ultimately about. We're not going to live to see the far-flung consequences of our decision, but we are going to make those decisions and propel subsequent generations down those paths.
What do you call the black market in a non-socialist country?
The market.
I mean, its the anarchist's dilemma. What happens when you have a revolution and tell the current crop of landlords to cut-it-out, but then people just start doing capitalism again?
As they exist now they're only useful for the elite and cause vast human misery for everyone else, the misery increasing exponentially with distance away from the Centre of Power. Kim and Fidel had no choice but to fundamentally surrender to markets as this is the dominant socioeconomic system on planet earth. China and Russia are both capitalist economies for the same reason.
Capitalism is a powerful robust system of social domination and organisation, as you have pointed out, but, like any such system that came before, it is not infinite on large timescales. It will not be surrendered, it will eventually crumble and be blown apart by the winds of history.
Yes the plan isn't simply to abolish the market, it is to destroy the infernal ancient Demiurgical power structure that it is a part of and therefore create the horizon of possibility required to replace the status quo something better as opposed to having the Demiurge decide. I don't know what that something is but it will come out of an upheval of the status quo. According to Bhagavan Shree Matt Christman (SWT), leftism sprang from a religious utopian horizon of an emancipated humanity, a social existence where God exists through a communion and unity of all. An existence where meaning is derived from the common good.
As such, the plan isn't necessarily to annihilate the status quo, but to move in the direction that will hopefully bring forth this utopian vision, to slowly create a world in which it can be considered a reality in striving for the endpoint (and possibly beyond).
Yes that is correct, as capitalism itself has mutated and appropriated the religious superstructures set up to support earlier systems like feudalism (and ancient rome in terms of property laws). When status quo is truly overturned and the world as we know it ends, there will be some parts that remain. However, at that point in time, no matter how slow or subtle the process, the world will have ended, and the totality of capitalism as it exists right now in its complete form will have been vanquished. The questions that emerge for us are; what will remain, what new world will be birthed from the ashes, who will direct the remnants, and to what end?
The hope at the end of the day is that somewhere along those paths, our descendants will find that the cycle of exploitation will lessen and disappear. Whether it be because the Demiurge is replaced by a benevolent system that is alienating but is fundamentally oriented towards the care of humanity, or we cease to rely on alienating structures of domination all together.
pretty prose