[throwaway-11-1]

They aren’t valuable to markets, but like I have neighbors who are treasured by the community and genuinely bring joy to everyone. But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.

[abcde666777]

True as well. I've had similar communal experiences where you get a taste of the old way, the way humans would have operated when we lived in tribes. And on that level I think we are capable of valuing each other as beings - the instinct to look out for each other kicks in.

But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.

And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.

It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.

[encrypted_bird]

> Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food

And, you know the sad part? A lot of places don't allow you to even try to learn. For example, my current place that I rent has a yard (it's a nice little trailer home), but I'm not allowed to have a garden. They even chopped down the nice tree that was growing in the yard when I first moved in.

Oh, I can certainly try to grow stuff inside in containers, but that means I gotta get containers (which I can't afford) and I get an increased risk of bugs & dirt being in the house (not a fan thanks).

[BobbyJo]

To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient. Agriculture is one of the places where economies of scale shine very very brightly.

[wolvesechoes]

> To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient

Life is not an optimization problem.

[amiga386]

However, had we not tried optimising, Malthus would be right and we'd all be dead.

So let's hear it for optimisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...

[BobbyJo]

No, but staying alive is, and food is for staying alive.

[kuerbel]

Not really. Only if you discount all external effects on the environment. There are more productive agriculture systems with more yield per sq* but more manual input, but less side effects. E.g. permaculture.

[lynx97]

You can't afford a $10 plastic container for growing plants? If that is true (which I doubt), I would be willing to drop you a few bucks via PayPal.

[amiga386]

A $10 plastic container doesn't have nearly enough space for sustenance farming. Neither does a typical city home's garden. And for health reasons they're not going to let you raise animals (there are pretty funky diseases you and your neighbours can get from even just poultry, never mind pigs and cattle)

You can certainly grow various fun things in buckets - tomatos, herbs, etc. But you can't survive on it. Not with a small city garden.

And that's the point - in pre-industrial times, you had to survive off what you could grow, and you had a lot more land, which you used most of to grow your own food, and used most of your own time to grow food, and you were fucked at the first bad harvest (though you would likely have been part of a social contract where your local landowner took a portion of your crops to cover for these eventualities)

In post-industrial times, peasants found they could work in factories and earn much more than they could selling a portion of their crop. Countries stopped being 90% farmers. Normal people could specialise, not just the landed gentry who didn't wonder where their next meal was coming from.

And here we are typing to each other on websites.

It's sad if the city or your landlord won't let you have a garden. Gardens are wonderful things. You should try and grow something. But we're in a discussion context of "people don't even know how to grow their own food any more". Thank goodness for that, because if we did, we'd be spending all day tending to our crops, living in abject poverty, at constant risk of starvation, and we'd have no time for computers. Thank goodness for modern agricultural practise.

[lynx97]

The person I replied to wrote about indoor gardening. So sustainability was always out of the question. Besides, you dont have to go back to preindustrial times. My parents had enough "land" to grow food for us. It basically ended around 1985 when they finally realized it was far easier to just buy stuff at the supermarket, because, as you already mentioned, growing your own food is very time consuming. Around that time, almost everyone I know stopped to try to be self-sustaining.

[encrypted_bird]

Nah, it's okay. I'm not gonna be homeless thankfully. My bills are getting paid, food is on the table, and so forth. But that also means I don't really have much money for nonessentials. For example, my _monthly_ "Fun" budget? Only $8.10.

What can I say? Retail does not provide a living wage.

[chr1]

When we lived in tribes, people knew who did what job, and those who were taking more than they were contributing were punished harshly.

Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.

Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.

Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.

[lynx97]

Ha! I grew up in a rural area, "communal" if you may. And leaving that hellhole of dishonesty and depression was one of the most important moves in my life. I guess it really depends on how you deal with communal life and how much you are able to ignore people who think they have the right to comment your lifestyle/situation. Well, maybe I am too harsh, and this phenomenon isn't obvious to non-disabled people. But the amount of patronisation I usually get in communal situations makes me LOVE my urban life.

[beeflet]

You and your neighbors might mutually provide joy for each other, but there is a third party in this exchange: the massive industrial complex that provides the food and shelter you need to live. Unfortunately the industrial complex does not accept joy as a form of payment, so this whole system isn't going to work out.

[wobfan]

It does not work as long as you stay strongly intertwined with the capitalist complex, correct. But I'd argue that in basically every region of the world, you have the choice. It may be harder or easier, but you have it.

[beeflet]

the capitalist complex is strongly intertwined with reality and power.

You have the choice to stick your head in the sand for a while and try to ignore it, but eventually your sand castle will get bulldozed by a group of people that don't.

[charcircuit]

Doesn't that work its way into property values. People want to live in a good neighborhood and community and are willing to pay more for it.

[wobfan]

Yes, if you try to force a material value on everything, you will get a material value.

I would pay a shit ton to have loving and supporting friends, but this is not how it works. Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.

This works for "good" neighborhoods if you replace "good" with "low-crime", as people with a higher income tend to do less crimes, if we count out tax evasion and other anti-society behaviours.

But this is not what it's about. You reap what you sow. You try to increase your value for people to like you and want to be friends with you? This can work, but the price for it is (1) purely extrinsical motivation which more often then not does leave you feel empty and (2) friends who will leave you as soon as your worth decreases, e.g. with age or illness, or if a different person with more value comes around and offers their friendship.

[charcircuit]

>Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.

The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.

[wobfan]

> The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.

Making friends = paying a service to find friends for me?

[BobbyJo]

> But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.

Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.

[wolvesechoes]

> Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources

Even a little bit of anthropological study shows this is false.

[ajb]

Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?

[BobbyJo]

Modern society has the luxury of surplus resources at the moment, and we are able to take care of the old and weak, which we indeed choose to do. If/when that ceases to be the case, the harsh reality will apply to everyone, me included, yes.

[necovek]

Another thing humans are arguably good at is making a longer term plan and investment: if we see that old people simply get shot, we won't be investing surplus value into our retirement funds — at least not of the same sort. Perhaps we'll be building fortresses when younger, accumulating wealth to be able to pay soldiers to protect us etc...

Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).

[sjsdaiuasgdia]

It is a luxury we can, as a species, afford!

We actually have the capacity and capability to house, feed, and clothe everyone on the planet, and then some.

The frame can shift because our capabilities have increased.

[BobbyJo]

I mostly agree. We have the capacity at present, but only because we are burning a ton of non renewable energy.