We don't earn it.

I mean, you picked like one of the handful of socialist market economies that does that.

Canada nominally provides you with money in the form of social assistance if you're unemployed. It's not enough to pay for rent on a studio apartment. Let alone food.

The point is that being alive is not a voluntary contract. We don't ask to be born, and we are continually told by society that suicide is unacceptable. This is fine, I think that it's generally a good idea to promote being alive. But capitalism has actually decided that being alive is only half of it. You can't kill yourself, but you can't exist if you're not useful to the capitalist system either.

So basically if you're mentally ill, if you're disabled in any way, if like me you have medical conditions that make routine employment significantly harder than it is for people without these conditions - you're just screwed. Here's your 600$ a month social assistance check. Rent is 1000$ on the absolute most basic apartment in your area. Bare minimum groceries for a single person are close to 300 a month. You might be able to afford to live in a multi bedroom dwelling with strangers without central heating and lead plumbing that often doesn't work. At that point, your best bet to eat is at food banks, which are overcrowded and underfunded. Every single person, company, and political group across the entire country will demonize you as being essentially worthless and openly talk about how you should be forced to output labor that you are unable to output.

All this while like 10% of apartments sit empty, we throw out like 30% of the food we produce, and most labor in society has become about capitalist maintenance (office job, desk job, working for companies that essentially do nothing to feed or house people, that produce unnecessary goods in mass quantities for profit motives). Like capitalism has openly determined that we are worthless. We're worth less than garbage. They'd rather throw food away than feed us. They'd rather leave perfectly functional working apartments empty than give us homes. Capitalism has no use for people who cannot produce capital. This isn't new, and it is a fundamental aspect of the system. They call it merit. How much merit do you have? How much do you deserve to be alive and be happy?

And I work 40 hours a week and have for years. I take medications that make that possible, and I'm very lucky that medications exist that can essentially make me compatible with the capitalist labor system. But I lived that life before, and have many friends who still do. Barely surviving because society has decided that it's not worth it for them to live.

Not everyone can output labor. The point of society should be to ensure that all members of society can live healthy safe and happy lives. There is no reason this cannot be the case. It has just been decided by those with majority power that it shouldn't be the case. Suffering is legally mandated.

Nothing you said changes the fact that only a small portion of humans need to work for the rest of humanity to survive. Or everyone could just work 10 hours a week and everything would still be fine. Problem is most people spend 40 hours a week doing bullshit number shifting jobs that just serve speculators to get richer. Nothing being produced. If we actually focused our productive forces into use-value instead of trade-value and completely removed financialization, we could all live lives of abundance while barely working at all. We are at that point, technologically and in the total productive forces of our species. It’s simply a matter of political will. But the ruling classes would never accept that.

Sounds nightmarish. I bet education doesn't even saddle you with unforgivable debt.

This is our only hope for climate change.

Things get better when solar out-competes coal and other fossil fuels. We're just missing the deployment rate right now I think to be able to just stop fossil fuel use from growing.

But we could have reduced consumption instead and done this much, much faster. The economy might have needed to shift to deal with this and a lot of old industries should have been shut down within only a few years, but it would have had a major impact. Instead we wait for new industries to grow alongside the old, while still growing the old!

Basically if billionaires can capture carbon, they will probably use it as a way to make governments pay to clean the air, which is essentially an ongoing tax from a private entity to a public one, which could conceivably go on forever (or until people try to nationalize it).

Those are rich, educated, liberal cities, not typical of larges swathes of the U.S.

When was the last time you fixed any carbon, you lazy, entitled heterotroph?

They still do stuff, just a bit slower.

I, too, want to just sit here and photosynthesis all day.

They do stuff, but they’re playing a city building game instead of an rpg

Yes, plants are autotrophs and can generate their own food from sunlight and the atmosphere. They still need some nutrients from the troposphere, like minerals, but they have it made.

Heterotrophs are where things get wild

The comment is saying work is natural...

You can do other stuff, it’s just highly beneficial to have food/water/shelter before you do other stuff

It's really not.

It's not we shouldn't strive for a society that's caring. It's just that it isn't a given. We have to work to have that kind of society.

Entropy is a bitch. Nothing lasts forever without doing work to maintain it.

That used to be the reality of life. It's only very recently that we've produced machines that far outpace what humans can do. The reason we aren't seeing the benefits is that a select few own those machines and have consolidated their wealth.

There's a certain balance we've yet to strike. Not necessarily having a living handed to you, but being in a situation where if a rough couple weeks knocks you out on your ass, you can meet your basic needs while you get back up on your feet.

Sure, and we should define "growing up" as having mental capacity to provide for yourself. That's kind of getting into the weeds here though.

Hitler broke a vital and important contract with others. Live and let live. The moment they broke that implicit contract they totally opened a can of worms and whoopass upon themselves. They totally earned it

More folk need to understand about the contract of tolerance and the golden rule.

Ok but not every animal is a lion.

Sloths just wanna chill in the trees eating leaves.

I say make a living, because it implies it being your project that you're building up as you want and need to.

I’m sorry you feel that way.

I've got plans later. Dying would seriously mess up my schedule.

Your mileage may vary. Yeah, there are a lot of bad things in life, but that doesn't mean life as a whole is bad. You don't get to make that call when there are so many people who enjoy life. Not even if you define life's pleasures as merely relief from life's needs and strains.

To be clear, I'm not saying you should be having kids. You're fully within your rights to judge the circumstances of your own life and where your kid would end up to decide if it's right or wrong. Obviously it'd be wrong to have a kid in the freezing arctic with no hope of escape or survival for more than a few years. But you can't say having kids is unequivocally wrong for everyone in every circumstance.

And if you truly believe life is wholly bad, that might be a symptom of depression.

Which is why it's a good thing suicide is a human right we all deserve and have available to us, should we wish to take it.

I agree we don't owe anyone else anything, which is why is see suicide as a right.

There is way more suffering in life than pleasure

If you (or anyome out there reading this) truly feel this way, please seek professional psychological assistance. At the very least make attempts to find a better living situation for yourself, if it's your current conditions that are driving this belief.

This is blatantly disordered thinking, a sign of trauma, or a sign that there is something seriously wrong with the immediate conditions you are living in.

I'm not talking about the general doom spiral of the world as conditions, but things directly around you day to day. If you can't live your day to day without awareness of the general doom spiral, see what choices you can make to limit your exposure to it (in short: stop spending so much time online and reading articles about how fucked everything is).

There are always choices available to you to improve the world around you and your position in it, no matter by how small a margin. I've been where you're at, and things don't have to suck forever.

Is it a Hallmark card platitude because it's short or because it sounds cheery? Why can't it be actual philosophy? Logically, there's no way for you to earn a shot at life before you're alive. Since it's always given undeserved, earning it is entirely irrelevant. There's no way to earn it, even by living perfectly. If you could earn it, you could earn a second life. I'm not talking about "oh wow, you're such a good person" kind of earning it. Being a good person won't earn you the throne of England either.

A good thing given undeserved is a gift.

And that fact you're salty about that shows that you clearly do believe people have some responsibilty to earn their income, rather than laying idle.

Look you live in whatever imaginary land where we've reached some star trek utopia where everyone's needs are meet; and I'll touch grass and live in the real world where a vast majority of the planet would kick your ass out for not contributing, and those that would let you live and eat off their work probably live is some of the most impoverished conditions you deal with.

Pragmatic thinking is dead replaced by this vapid rhetoric. You can support you fucking fellow person while expecting them to contribute.

Our society exists entirely to shield the individual from the horrors of the universe. However our society also only has the power to do so because of individual contributions. Now I'm all for making our society efficient enough that we can create a safety net at the lower end. But we must take care, because the more a group is removed from this give-and-take the less bargaining power they have to change how the society is run. This is already happening and it's kind of inevitable that it will get worse, so we'd better figure it out now.

No, our society is not capable of keeping everyone alive without effort.

I don’t know how that could make any sense to you, but whoever it is that said that to you needs to be treated with skepticism from now on.