[jancsika]

Let me tell you, we used to dream of living in the non-US/Western European world!

What I did there-- and what you are doing-- is referred to as "one-downmanship." Essentially, attempting to ignore or downplay suffering by talking about a case of worse suffering that you have experience with.

When not part of comedy sketches[1], it's usually considered disruptive.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

[albntomat0]

Do you allow literally anyone, regardless of situation, to claim "woe is me"?

I understand that "one-downmanship" can be used to dismiss legitimate claims, but the existence of such tactics does not automatically validate anyone who claims their lives are hard.

The original article used a line from Hobbes regarding existence pre-society, which does not apply. The author could have used many valid other things in the US (homeownership and marriage rates, opiod addiction, savings rate) that would have made that part of their argument valid, but decided to go to the rhetorical extreme.

[jancsika]

> Do you allow literally anyone, regardless of situation, to claim "woe is me"?

As far as one-downmanship-- it can make sense in personal situations where trust is high and someone opens up about suffering. Perhaps in other high-trust instances, where it's likely to be interpreted as bonding/guidance and not muscle-flexing. But even in those cases it can quickly become unhelpful, hence the Python sketch getting lots of laughs.

In the case of political rhetoric, do you know an example of one-downmanship that isn't mere muscle-flexing? Just look at the example here-- OP said they find it "funny" that a generation of people are frightened by decreasing opportunities and the dangers of climate change.

Perhaps pre-internet this was a way to at least get a dissident message out before one got cut off in a live interview. A kind of "sign of life" to sentient beings in the audience. But on HN-- where those constraints don't exist-- it looks to me like the kind of low-effort disruption on par with asking, "What about Visa/Mastercard monopoly, or the telcos," on the next thread that discusses the Google monopoly case.

Edit: clarification

[pcstl]

For what it's worth, I can tell you I'm being completely sincere here and I just wish the literal most privileged people in the world would look a bit around them before claiming to live oh-so-horrible lives.

I say so being a third world inhabitant who has spent some time in the first world and noticed people there simply do not know how much they have it good.

[jancsika]

> For what it's worth, I can tell you I'm being completely sincere here and I just wish the literal most privileged people in the world would look a bit around them before claiming to live oh-so-horrible lives.

You're conflating two unrelated things:

1. American's poor understanding of conditions in the wider world, and of history.

2. How Americans feel about worsening conditions of poverty and health in America, or-- frankly-- how Americans feel about anything they feel is missing in their lives.

The times when Americans have implicitly conflated those things-- e.g., after WWII when a steep increase in depression among middle class women accompanied unparalleled prosperity in the middle class-- Americans actually prolonged their own suffering instead of ameliorating it. AFAICT, trying to "jolt" oneself out of depression by convincing oneself there's no good reason to be depressed is similar to trying to drink oneself out of alcoholism.

In fact, the idea, "You don't know how good you have it," is so hammered into the American psyche that one of the most popular Netflix series-- The Queen's Gambit-- is essentially an 8-hour long refutation of that idea from exactly that same time period. I'll save you the time-- that idea does not work.

Communicating with ignorant people by telling them about your experiences can be fruitful. Teaching your own coping strategies to people even though they are only experiencing first-world problems is graceful.

One-downmanship is simply not an effective tool to achieve either of those goals.

[pcstl]

Fair enough. But my point is to be disruptive.

I don't think the author has a point here. I think he's appealing to the fact that, on an emotional level, humans think they're entitled to always have their standards of living be equal or better to what they were before to make people think they live in uniquely hard times.

Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

I think it is important to differentiate people's subjective feelings of being let down from there actually being a problem, or their lives being "nasty, brutish and short".

[Zababa]

> Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

My understanding was that this is the opposite. In the US, the standard of living is pretty high, but not improving. In most of the world, standards are lower but improving. I think your point is that people should focus on what they have compared to the rest of humanity and the world, rather than compared to the generation before.

Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood you.

[pcstl]

My point is that even if US millenials' standards of living are decreasing, they still have it better than most of humanity. This is not to say that US people aren't allowed to try to claim a better future, just that keeping problems in scale helps ward off overreaction that might just worsen the issue.

[Zababa]

Fair enough, thanks for the clarification.

[dontbeevil1992]

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.

[pcstl]

Life is not a zero-sum game. The reason why some people have little is not that some people have a lot. This is not something we will agree on.

I agree that the distribution of wealth could be a lot more equitable, but I fundamentally disagree with this idea that "If some people have little, that is only because evil/stupid people don't want them to have more". The world is a lot more complicated than that.

I live in a country with crushingly high taxes. Our public services suck. If it were just a matter of raising taxes, we'd have no issues.

[dontbeevil1992]

Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

[licebmi__at__]

Physics is also a lot more complicated, but we have some simple approximations that help us describe a lot of our world.

I agree, life is more complicated than a zero-sum game, but can you argue that it doesn't behave like it is for most people?

[pcstl]

I don't think it does, no. I think our intuition is that it does, because that intuition works pretty well for tribal, hunter-gatherer life, but it doesn't really work in modern society.