Hard to care about war and climate if you can't afford rent.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Work and money worry young people more than culture wars or climate, UK poll finds
(www.theguardian.com)
The problems we care about tend to be those that are most immediate to our survival and security.
Housing, food, and financial security are all real problems the majority face, especially young people. Caring about things like climate change or authoritarianism, especially foreign, are a luxury if you don't know when you'll be able to eat next, or have nowhere to sleep.
Culture wars are a manufactured problem that don't even exist, except for the problems the culture warriors themselves create.
The article doesnβt say that they donβt care about wars and climate.
In other words, keep the proles low on Maslow's Hierarchy and the oligarchs have free reign to rape the planet and gain even more power in a vicious cycle.
It's the reason said proles can't care about higher-order stuff like politics, but desperately need to anyway.
Yea, my pyramid is broken.
I check basically all boxes (except the blue one perhaps), yet somehow each segment feels like its gonna collapse any moment. Perpetual anxiety is the result.
Sounds like you don't check the yellow box
Depends on perspective.
Technically I am safer than most humans. I have a job, a flat, etc. I live in a country with a good social net even if I were to lose my job.
Yet still it feels like standing at the edge of a cliff for either no rational reason or many small convoluted reasons.
Human experience is never absolute. You can't really compare what you feel with what another person feels by looking just at your immediate situation. Experiences depend on personal history and expectations, even if you try to rationalize that other people are objectively in worse situations than you.
Isn't that the point of our current system? If everyone is too worried about surviving, they don't have time to hold the 'ruling' class too account. Can't take time off to protest, if you do it's now illegal, can't get work with a criminal record. The only real difference to slavery for a lot of people, is that sometimes they have choice in their masters.
Shocker that people are more worried about eating than geopolitics.
Hungry people dgaf about foreign wars and pronouns.
Work and money worry ~~young~~ people more than culture wars or climate
Fixed the title. It's hard to worry about the existential potentially world ending crisis of climate change (especially as we're told again and again as individuals there's not much we can do) or about the totally made up issues that are culture wars more than whether you're going to be able to afford to keep the lights on.
This just in! Reality does not match the online content farms and why worry about the climate when there is nothing you can do about it. If you don't have enough power to eat and slip with a roof over your head.
why worry about the climate when there is nothing you can do about it.
Nothing you can do about it?! Climate change must be the single issue where everyone can do something about it!
While I was agree the problem is like the recycling paradox the industry told you to recycle. While they did nothing so you would blame your neighbor instead of them. That's why most recycling is ether landfill anyway or shipped to a poor country. Nothing in recycling is standard and no body that has power cares.
The point was to blame yourself or your neighbors but not them cause look they created a recycling program. You must have just not sorted your paper and plastic enough. You could reduced every carbon including breathing your whole life and not offset 10 mins of carbon output of any of the fortune 100.
Everyone should do what they can but I think it should be prepositional to the amount your choices add carbon or plastic to the environment.
So with that said people with homeless and food on their mind don't be a dick and litter but the rest you get a pass.
If you can barely afford to live you cannot really do anything outside trying to survive sadly.
I wonder if the amount of media coverage per topic might have something to do with that...
Shocked_pikachu.png
Also a question in the regard, what can we influence? The work we do and what we do with our money or culture and climate? 1 is something we have basically direct impact on (and that directly impacts our daily life) the other is basically caused by the top 1% (people and companies) and making our small impact even smaller doesn't change much and also won't let us garuantee we can eat tomorrow.
I am a big supporter of being more climate friendly, but I also don't think we individuals can make a big dent. We can make small impacts by changing our buying patterns and choosing more ecological when financially possible, but that's also coming from a position of having the privilige to have enough time and money to focus on that.
what can we influence?
Everything and I think it's a process. We influence what we can in all scales, large, small, etc. The more we do this, the more we evolve and the better we get at it. And there is room for all sort of approaches. I mean, we get better at it regardless of a specific approach. Something like that.
Completely agree than if we make small changes we can have a big impact together / over time. The issue is that these small changes usually come at a cost (financially, time consuming, effort, etc) that young people just cannot really afford easily.
My message was written more to give the perspective of young people already struggling. If you're stressing each day about making rent and putting food on the table, why would you take the time to be worried about global issues? It's really just thinking about the Maslow's hierarchy of needs
About the headline: "Yeah, no sh*t!"
It was difficult to pinpoint whether the article was about a very obvious observation, the fact that the UK is now simply dealing with the downfall of their economy (welcome to the rest of the world) or the fact that Gen Zs think they are somehow special and deserving of more attention than the other age groups.