Do you ever wonder way society is set up the way it is
November 16, 2025
Im in my 30’s and spend most of my time doing meaningless work, in the grand scheme of things and its seems i have no way to get off this wheel
31 comments
Man I’ve wondered this since I could rub two brain cells together. Got too much to say on the subject. Anything in particular on your mind?
The only meaningful thing is ur own consciousness. Everything else doesn’t matter and is not real. Do everything u can to ensure you maintain the highest level of consciousness.
Do you not get paid for your meaningless work? Because if you do, then clearly it’s not meaningless. Life is about perspective, if you only want to see things that are negative in your life, that’s what you’ll see. If you can’t find just a single thing that you find positive, I’m so sorry to read this.
So the rich bankers and old money families that run the world keep the minions under control. Keep them stuck in the rat race, make them debt slaves with student loans, keep raising the cost of living so everyone becomes renters instead of owners, keep everyone sedated with religion and sports, keep everyone divided with politics.
I mean, you call it meaningless work but it must have value to someone if they are paying you to do it.
We’re stuck in modes of thinking that are often complete nonsense, but a lot of people choose to ignore that and just focus on parts of their life that give them meaning and go on autopilot through the rest
The only meaningful thing is your own happiness as long as it doesn’t negatively impact others
You could be a soldier in Ukraine, a slave in Dubai, a citizen in one of the many countries in the world that are completely fucked
A saying that I live by is “things could be better….. but they could also be much worse”
The “meaning” of your work is to provide for yourself. Dont galaxy brain it. And lead with gratitude and perspective.
Because our parents thought Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were cool and got suckered in to trading the progress we had been making since the 1940s for short-term victories and insatiable greed
Hierarchies skew towards dark triad traits at the top: selfishness, Makavelianism, violence, manipulation, lack of empathy, power hungry. The average human doesn’t possess these traits in high quantities but the 1% of mostly men who do run the power game.
[removed]
It’s set up this was so the 1% are protected by the next 10% telling the rest of us we should strive to become rich so we don’t have to work as hard but the reality of that will end up with too many people making money off of other peoples work. Best example is landlords who provide no value to society but somehow make some of the best incomes, or at least enough that they don’t have to actually work like the rest of us. We need a revolution and a better way to live because suicide is on the rise because people aren’t willing to work their ass off just to survive in this world, myself included!
Society isn’t ‘set up’. It’s a result of uncountable decisions and real life things that feed into those. All humans are on a wheel, our species isn’t promised anything and needs to work to live and sustain itself. Don’t allow yourself to be one of those who projects their own inner turmoil outward. Be a man and follow the old saying: do the best you can, with what you have, right now.
There’s no Law of Physics that says you’re “required to do meaningless work”.
Society really isn’t “setup a particular way”. Society is just the result of millions of people’s small decisions. If you want something different in life,. chart a different path and make different decisions.
It’s the result of an accretional process where layers of social convention, bureaucracy, experience, greed, and neuroses are stacked on top of each other over generations, especially after world war two. The system (or rather, interconnecting systems) evolved organically in reaction to external pressures to ensure that human beings were able to cope with various different scenarios at a societal scale. Also, when things benefit people in positions of power and influence they tend to promote or maintain them.
A long time ago the people before us got bamboozled and the way the elites brainwashed them was so effective that most people still don’t question what has been sold to us as the status quo. When the reality is that most of our civilizations are just gigantic pyramid schemes tailored specifically to serve those with money and authority while keeping up a facade of choice and freedom. Authority they made up and gave to themselves by way of religious dogma or political manipulation.. but again many people never question it. They have very effectively gaslit masses of people into believing that the rich and powerful got there by honest means and if we peons would just bootstrap harder we could join their club. It’s a sham.
No, because free will is an illusion and we are just consciousnesses popping into exist and all are following the laws of physics to some inevitable conclusion the likes of which we will never know nor predict, and the sum of all our actions is a chaotic symphony in which no individual is free from the weight of history or the riptide of progress.
I never seem to get this question when it pops up. Here are some alternatives for you:
* You are born in the same year, but instead of a developed country, you were born in Sudan. You currently just watched an army wipe out your family because you believed in the wrong religion.
* You were born 100 years ago and sent to fight a world war at 20 years old. You come home and have nightmares the rest of your life.
* You were born 500 years ago and die from a cut at age 8.
The list goes on. Humans have never had it better. Especially if you were born in a developed country. I mean, you can go spend the rest of your life in the Peace Corps as we speak. There’s a reason 99.9999% of people would never do that though. We enjoy modern society as much as we tend to complain about it.
There are ways to “get off the wheel”, but no one wants to live like people did 1000 years ago.
No it’s by design. Slaves don’t feel like slaves if they have a nice box to live in and another box to stare at.
Same reason they had the coliseum back in the day.
Distraction is effective.
Capitalism and country. The two power structures that keep the average person down.
Not really but I do wonder why I’ve stayed in a toxic relationship for so long. Oh wait, no I haven’t wondered that. Have 2 kids with the psycho.
Millions, possibly billions of decisions made in how to organize and arrange groups stretching all the way back long before writing and possibly even complex language to a time when you had a couple of people, some of whom were better at certain things than others – Thog fished, Urak weaved, etc.
Somewhere along the lines some people in certain jobs started thinking they were a little more important than others. This may have been factual – if everyone in your group can fish and dig up roots, but only Grax knows which red berries make you shit blood and which ones don’t – Grax is pretty important when your diet is 30% red berries.
Millions, if not billions, of minor decisions (with occasional major upheavals) later, here’s modern society, where you have a group of people who believe they are superior and are in positions of superiority not due to any particular specialized knowledge and skill, but often just happenstance or a logical outcome of how our economic systems are arranged.
The entire existence of humanity is meaningless. It’s setup the way it is to cope with that fact. All society is,.is an attempt to calm the chaos.
It’s by design to keep society functioning, if you do make money you’ll find lifestyle creep which will vice you back in, reality is if we all decided to roam freely and do what we want everything would collapse, no food delivered, no water pipes repaired, even if we talk about your job you feel is meaningless, no tax payers and your city shuts down, a lot of people are stuck in a cycle since school, work takes a large chunk of time, the best thing you can earn is your freedom and time back, but that’s a massive luxury, especially when you like at house prices these days, it’s built to stick you in it for 25 years+
To blatantly exploit the middle for the benefit of the rich while sprinkling a few crumbs to the poor to keep them quiet. Soul crushing but true nonetheless.
I don’t really spend time wondering about this, because I have read the works of David Graeber – namely Bullshit Jobs, Debt, and The Dawn Of Everything, which pretty clearly explain the journey from the first civilisations to the modern day
Hell, you could have lived as little as 150 years ago where infectious disease and food insecurity were commonplace. I’m betting if you went to the last Great Pharaoh of Egypt and told him you had running hot water, endless entertainment, immunity to poxes and a home that stayed at exactly what temperature you wanted in exchange for 40 hours of work a week he would trade with you.
A series of weird decisions by the people in power have led us to this (basically it’s not capitalism as opposed to the people in power)
Habits are first developed in the home, and are then either reinforced or extinguished by society. By the time we get out into the world, a behavioral framework has already been developed. It’s the way we move through the world to avoid getting hurt (physically or psychologically). But each person’s framework changes ever so slightly as they move through the world. So what happens when a huge collection of different frameworks collide? And, much like a table of unsynchronized metronomes, how does one find peace amidst the chaos?
Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order is a pretty good read.
Hariri’s Sapiens is not, it is mostly pop-science bullshit.
““Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “All is vanity.” Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all.”
Ecclesiastes 12:8, 13 NKJV https://bible.com/bible/114/ecc.12.8-13.NKJV
31 comments
Man I’ve wondered this since I could rub two brain cells together. Got too much to say on the subject. Anything in particular on your mind?
The only meaningful thing is ur own consciousness. Everything else doesn’t matter and is not real. Do everything u can to ensure you maintain the highest level of consciousness.
Do you not get paid for your meaningless work? Because if you do, then clearly it’s not meaningless. Life is about perspective, if you only want to see things that are negative in your life, that’s what you’ll see. If you can’t find just a single thing that you find positive, I’m so sorry to read this.
So the rich bankers and old money families that run the world keep the minions under control. Keep them stuck in the rat race, make them debt slaves with student loans, keep raising the cost of living so everyone becomes renters instead of owners, keep everyone sedated with religion and sports, keep everyone divided with politics.
I mean, you call it meaningless work but it must have value to someone if they are paying you to do it.
We’re stuck in modes of thinking that are often complete nonsense, but a lot of people choose to ignore that and just focus on parts of their life that give them meaning and go on autopilot through the rest
The only meaningful thing is your own happiness as long as it doesn’t negatively impact others
You could be a soldier in Ukraine, a slave in Dubai, a citizen in one of the many countries in the world that are completely fucked
A saying that I live by is “things could be better….. but they could also be much worse”
The “meaning” of your work is to provide for yourself. Dont galaxy brain it. And lead with gratitude and perspective.
Because our parents thought Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were cool and got suckered in to trading the progress we had been making since the 1940s for short-term victories and insatiable greed
Hierarchies skew towards dark triad traits at the top: selfishness, Makavelianism, violence, manipulation, lack of empathy, power hungry. The average human doesn’t possess these traits in high quantities but the 1% of mostly men who do run the power game.
[removed]
It’s set up this was so the 1% are protected by the next 10% telling the rest of us we should strive to become rich so we don’t have to work as hard but the reality of that will end up with too many people making money off of other peoples work. Best example is landlords who provide no value to society but somehow make some of the best incomes, or at least enough that they don’t have to actually work like the rest of us. We need a revolution and a better way to live because suicide is on the rise because people aren’t willing to work their ass off just to survive in this world, myself included!
Society isn’t ‘set up’. It’s a result of uncountable decisions and real life things that feed into those. All humans are on a wheel, our species isn’t promised anything and needs to work to live and sustain itself. Don’t allow yourself to be one of those who projects their own inner turmoil outward. Be a man and follow the old saying: do the best you can, with what you have, right now.
There’s no Law of Physics that says you’re “required to do meaningless work”.
Society really isn’t “setup a particular way”. Society is just the result of millions of people’s small decisions. If you want something different in life,. chart a different path and make different decisions.
It’s the result of an accretional process where layers of social convention, bureaucracy, experience, greed, and neuroses are stacked on top of each other over generations, especially after world war two. The system (or rather, interconnecting systems) evolved organically in reaction to external pressures to ensure that human beings were able to cope with various different scenarios at a societal scale. Also, when things benefit people in positions of power and influence they tend to promote or maintain them.
A long time ago the people before us got bamboozled and the way the elites brainwashed them was so effective that most people still don’t question what has been sold to us as the status quo. When the reality is that most of our civilizations are just gigantic pyramid schemes tailored specifically to serve those with money and authority while keeping up a facade of choice and freedom. Authority they made up and gave to themselves by way of religious dogma or political manipulation.. but again many people never question it. They have very effectively gaslit masses of people into believing that the rich and powerful got there by honest means and if we peons would just bootstrap harder we could join their club. It’s a sham.
No, because free will is an illusion and we are just consciousnesses popping into exist and all are following the laws of physics to some inevitable conclusion the likes of which we will never know nor predict, and the sum of all our actions is a chaotic symphony in which no individual is free from the weight of history or the riptide of progress.
I never seem to get this question when it pops up. Here are some alternatives for you:
* You are born in the same year, but instead of a developed country, you were born in Sudan. You currently just watched an army wipe out your family because you believed in the wrong religion.
* You were born 100 years ago and sent to fight a world war at 20 years old. You come home and have nightmares the rest of your life.
* You were born 500 years ago and die from a cut at age 8.
The list goes on. Humans have never had it better. Especially if you were born in a developed country. I mean, you can go spend the rest of your life in the Peace Corps as we speak. There’s a reason 99.9999% of people would never do that though. We enjoy modern society as much as we tend to complain about it.
There are ways to “get off the wheel”, but no one wants to live like people did 1000 years ago.
No it’s by design. Slaves don’t feel like slaves if they have a nice box to live in and another box to stare at.
Same reason they had the coliseum back in the day.
Distraction is effective.
Capitalism and country. The two power structures that keep the average person down.
Not really but I do wonder why I’ve stayed in a toxic relationship for so long. Oh wait, no I haven’t wondered that. Have 2 kids with the psycho.
Millions, possibly billions of decisions made in how to organize and arrange groups stretching all the way back long before writing and possibly even complex language to a time when you had a couple of people, some of whom were better at certain things than others – Thog fished, Urak weaved, etc.
Somewhere along the lines some people in certain jobs started thinking they were a little more important than others. This may have been factual – if everyone in your group can fish and dig up roots, but only Grax knows which red berries make you shit blood and which ones don’t – Grax is pretty important when your diet is 30% red berries.
Millions, if not billions, of minor decisions (with occasional major upheavals) later, here’s modern society, where you have a group of people who believe they are superior and are in positions of superiority not due to any particular specialized knowledge and skill, but often just happenstance or a logical outcome of how our economic systems are arranged.
The entire existence of humanity is meaningless. It’s setup the way it is to cope with that fact. All society is,.is an attempt to calm the chaos.
It’s by design to keep society functioning, if you do make money you’ll find lifestyle creep which will vice you back in, reality is if we all decided to roam freely and do what we want everything would collapse, no food delivered, no water pipes repaired, even if we talk about your job you feel is meaningless, no tax payers and your city shuts down, a lot of people are stuck in a cycle since school, work takes a large chunk of time, the best thing you can earn is your freedom and time back, but that’s a massive luxury, especially when you like at house prices these days, it’s built to stick you in it for 25 years+
To blatantly exploit the middle for the benefit of the rich while sprinkling a few crumbs to the poor to keep them quiet. Soul crushing but true nonetheless.
I don’t really spend time wondering about this, because I have read the works of David Graeber – namely Bullshit Jobs, Debt, and The Dawn Of Everything, which pretty clearly explain the journey from the first civilisations to the modern day
Hell, you could have lived as little as 150 years ago where infectious disease and food insecurity were commonplace. I’m betting if you went to the last Great Pharaoh of Egypt and told him you had running hot water, endless entertainment, immunity to poxes and a home that stayed at exactly what temperature you wanted in exchange for 40 hours of work a week he would trade with you.
A series of weird decisions by the people in power have led us to this (basically it’s not capitalism as opposed to the people in power)
Habits are first developed in the home, and are then either reinforced or extinguished by society. By the time we get out into the world, a behavioral framework has already been developed. It’s the way we move through the world to avoid getting hurt (physically or psychologically). But each person’s framework changes ever so slightly as they move through the world. So what happens when a huge collection of different frameworks collide? And, much like a table of unsynchronized metronomes, how does one find peace amidst the chaos?
Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order is a pretty good read.
Hariri’s Sapiens is not, it is mostly pop-science bullshit.
““Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “All is vanity.” Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man’s all.”
Ecclesiastes 12:8, 13 NKJV
https://bible.com/bible/114/ecc.12.8-13.NKJV