system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Are you familiar with feudalism? Serfs? Peasants? Share-croppers? Slavery? Immigrant labor during the Industrial Revolution? If you think exploitation and working for peanuts is a new problem you need to go back to history class. Society’s problems may look different, but they’re the same issues any non-subsistence community has across history.
gpt
Economic exploitation isn’t new at all and has taken vastly different forms throughout history, but I would argue our social situation today is uniquely immiserating. At least in a European context people a few centuries ago had much more reliable social connections and could rely on faith communities and religious explanations of their distress. in general their lives were more preoccupied with their work vs their inner world than what most of us experience today, and the amount of time the average person spends dwelling on their mood and the future is something a contemporary amount of leisure and exposure to outside perspectives affords us these days which can increase a person’s proneness to depression. This is all aside from the obvious reality that in today’s post-industrial liberal democracies people are increasingly facing stagnating wages, privatization of the social safety net, a general decrease in living standards and the beginnings of climate catastrophe. How deeply presentist and moored in your contemporary context do you have to be to think the prevalence of severe clinical depression we see today is natural?