[thisiszilff]

The improvements that our country needs are broad structural improvements that prepare us for where we are and where we're going. The idea of "bear your cross and accept suffering without malice" makes sense, but it also tends towards championing individuals as both causes of their problems and the ones capable of solving them. It IS a great philosophy when there is some meaning to your suffering, when your cross is something you want to carry, but these days that philosophy ends up sounding like "shut up and get a job" in an rapdily changing era where we have to rethink our basic societal organization and our attitudes towards work. It's an attitude that reinforces ones adherence to the status quo rather than recognizing that what worked for our parents doesn't necessarily work for us.

[hi-im-mi-ih]

Well the problem is that you think you somehow know how to adjust the status quo correctly in order to properly set up your nation for the rest of the 21st century. But the reality is that you have no idea, probably because you're a programmer, but also because you have not borne up the responsibility of acquiring deep knowledge of policy, government, social science and everything else required to make those calls. You say we need broad structural improvements - and what are those, exactly? And how are they going to provide a utopia to us that is better than the one we currently have, where most people can work their way into a mid to high paying career and raise their families in almost complete safety for decades and decades to come?

The truth is that it's easy to say something needs improvement, but it's not easy to take the 10 years studying the problem to deeply understand the solution, and even a partial understanding of possible workable solutions is something neither of us have, because we're spending our week nights wasting time in one way or another instead of paying sharp, _sharp_ attention to the studies and data collected now and in the past to broaden and deepen our insights.

Also you mention that my advice boils down to "shut up and get a job" which is really fantastic advice for most people, because even getting a job carrying 2x4s up scaffolding all day would be so damn tough and tiring that you'd come out of it healthier, persistent, and basically a terminator capable of any hard, physical labour. A good skill! And that skill carries with it an appreciation of the physically gentle computer work we all do, thus making your future tech career more enjoyable.

I think I've made a pretty good counter argument here but feel free to rebuke it.

[thisiszilff]

I don't know, that's why the point is relevant. Were I to know then that would be my cross to bear and I could work towards that. I don't know where you live, but where I live I'm seeing a steady decline in quality of life and increased mental health problems in youth mainly related to anxiety about their future. A high paying career isn't a question of simply working hard for them, not is it available to all them. Many of them live with the risk of dipping into poverty at any moment and their safety nets have been chipped away over the years to be ineffective. They don't see a clear path to home ownership and many of them are straddled with debt for a degree that they now find out isn't particularly useful. They are in all cases set up to have worse lives than their parents. Aside from that they live with the looming specter of environmental disaster and political structures unable to effectively deal with the problems of the future. It isn't a question of wanting to change things so much as recognizing that things cannot continue as they've been. I'm not saying people shouldn't be getting jobs and pursuing economic stability, but that we have to be willing to rethink those systems to be sustainable.

[hi-im-mi-ih]

Situation is bad, what to do? Work to change it. Criticism without means to enact improvements is meaningless. Then let these weak men suffer and wither. Harder working men will prevail

[thisiszilff]

You would think that we might one day get past this whole "strong vs weak" rhetoric, but therein lies the problem: we exit from the state of nature only to recreate those same conditions in a slightly more civil form.