Alcohol.

Lots and lots of people lean heavily on it and think that alcohol is the spice of their life. When, it contributes to so many problems than it’s so-called benefits. We tried, in America anyways, to outright ban alcohol. Problem was that the person who wanted it banned, was too extremist.

Like he didn’t think it all through and think just going for the jugular of the problem is what will work. When, it didn’t and just made people work around it until eventually the ban was dismantled.

So, since then, we’ve been putting up with drunk drivers, drunk disputes, drunk abusers and other issues. I still wish we could just slam our hands down at the desk and demand we sit to discuss in how to properly deal with this issue than people proclaiming that it’s not a problem.

  • Mangoholic@lemmy.ml
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    1 hour ago

    In sweden they raised the price of alcohol 10 fold making it a luxury good and not something to drain your sorrows with. I think the hardest problem to solve is human greed.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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    26 minutes ago

    Probably that many people are like exclusively emotion driven. I don’t think we should all be like purely logical Vulcans. Emotions are very fast and can be a good survival tool. Like if you’re waiting for the train and a bear wanders onto the platform, you don’t need to wait to logically evaluate if it’s a threat. Just run.

    But people rely on emotions for everything. We all do this. So you have like someone telling you something factual and uncomfortable, and you just reject it.

    “Eating meat is bad for the environment and is cruel to animals. We should all eat a lot less meat” makes a lot of people’s emotions flare up. The facts don’t matter. They feel like they’re being insulted, that the other person is a blowhard, blah blah blah.

    The oatmeal did a comic about this, actually: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

    I think this is why we can’t have nice things.

  • pineapple@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    I don’t really agree anything is impossible to fix. Maybe I’m optimistic but I think with enough time things can get better. As far as I know alcohol is much less common among younger people and there are more people avoiding it entirely now. Or maybe by impossible you meant really difficult.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    The idea that people in charge should be better, so their actions can’t be questioned; rather than that they should be better, so their actions should be scrutinized. It’s so backwards and it enables nearly all of the worst abuses of power. It might be harder to fix people being attracted to power or being straight up malicious, but if we could solve the authority problem, then those would have a safeguard in a lot of scenarios. It’s so close to being solvable, too; people grow up experiencing misuses of authority that hurt them, they should understand the problem. But somehow it still seems so prevalent, that authority is treated as being above questioning or consequences. I hate it. But it is possible to change.

  • Boiglenoight@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    Guns in America. The need to act inspires fear on part of enthusiasts to buy more guns, ammo, support politicians that bolster stonewalls to any legislation that could make the country safer from irresponsible gun owners. The lack of meaningful action while this is happening shows how screwed the nation is as a gun cult continues to grow and grow.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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    18 hours ago

    In the US and Canada?

    Car dependency / Car centrism.

    Sure, we have a few large cities with non roadway mass transit.

    But uh, in general, we’ve got terminal car brain, and I do not see this fundamentally changing.

    The vast majority of places will continue being designed around cars instead of people.

    Cars and fuel costs will keep going up, less and less people will have them, and (again excepting a few extremely dense and expensive cities) we will just go to mass private car rentals/shares instead of actual mass transit or meaningfully redesigning cities.

    Sidewalks? Bike lanes? Go fuck yourself, you don’t matter if you don’t own a car, wait an hour for a bus (if one exists), get an uber, have a friend with a car.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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          2 hours ago

          Are there EV longhaul trucks that are at cost and performance parity with ICE longhaul trucks on the horizon?

          I don’t think so.

          That means that logistics costs for basically everything gets significantly more expensive when ICE fuel costs go up.

          We could lessen this problem by building out more freight rail capacity, and a whole lot more minor rail lines so that trucks don’t routinely drive halfway across the continent and are used less often…

          …but we are not.

          So, that means that when gas/diesel prices go up, everything gets more expensive… including ICE and EV personal vehicles.

          Currently, generally, EVs (and Hybrids) are already 20% to 30% more expensive than their ICE counterparts, even after subsidies/rebates, and are only less expensive than the ICE counterpart in a long run of 10+ years due to lower ongoing fuel costs…

          But if gas/diesel prices significantly rise and never go back down…

          All vehicles become more expensive.

          If ICE vehicle ongoing fuel costs are now so high that an average person can’t afford them…

          The only other choice is EVs … but those now have a stupendous sticker price.

          So you end up with even less people being able to afford any vehicle whatsoever, but a society that is physically designed to… require one.

          So then you end up with a society of an upper class of EV owners, and everyone else who used to be able to afford a midrange ICE car now having to use ICE/EV motorcycles or EBikes… for daily commutes, in all weather.

          No more AC or Heating for your completely environmentally exposed 30 minute to 2hr commute to work through a heatwave or heavy snow or rain.

          They’d have to rent an EV vehicle to do 2 weeks worth of grocery shopping or move any kind of substantial cargo like a bed, or move more than 2 people a considerable distance, start arranging ride shares to and from work in some kind of comfort.

          Oh, and a ton of Americans are functionally too obese/unhealthy/injured to be able to actually use a motorcycle or EBike. So just count them out of the workforce if they can’t find ride shares I guess.

        • blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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          14 hours ago

          As they do, they’re quickly turning into indicators of privilege. If/when the petro dollar crashes I totally don’t expect billy bob that drives his eight cylinder diesel to hold any resentment towards EV drivers when he’s stuck paying for something that he can’t afford gas for. But hey what do I know I prefer old school bicycles.

        • Sam_Bass@lemmy.ml
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          14 hours ago

          If I had more time under my belt I’d probably buy one. The 100k+ pricetag is just too much right now

          • Rexios@lemm.ee
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            42 minutes ago

            $100k+ in what currency? The base model of the EV I drive is under $45k

  • mub@lemmy.ml
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    14 hours ago

    Our inability to trust anyone foreign or unfamiliar. This legacy of our evolution used to be the safest way to live. No it just holds us all back.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      I think this one is closer to being solved than we think, because we know the things that can help. Travel and simply meeting other people being the big one. And there are enough people who are accepting of outsiders that we know it’s possible on a large scale.

  • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    18 hours ago

    alcohol is especially hard to ban because it’s just sugar and yeast, and you can even use natural yeast if it gets banned, and you can use fruit if sugar gets banned. While with drugs some tyrannical empire might be able to ban every single lab-related equipment and chemical (and even then, you would be surprised what people can make by themselves without anything else other then natural resources, I mean that’s how we got here as a species), alcohol is such a simple recipe that it’s just plain impossible to regulate effectively, and the current way of having it cheap enough that people don’t brew their own but expensive enough that the 99% of the population doesn’t turn into alcoholics is good enough

    • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works
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      19 hours ago

      Similar to this, I’ve got a real beef with our unresolved insecuritues we have as a people (in principle. Obviously in practise this is hard).

      I feel like the insecurities that essentially, drive us, are really holding us back from meaningful progress on our legitimately hard problems with climate, energy/food distribution, etc…

      We’re still drawn into BS distractions and opposing teams and whatnot like a bunch of monkeys with sticks (which is apt, to be fair)

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    18 hours ago

    Nearly every societal problem has a solution, but you need a medical / buddhist / marxist / approach (probably a lot of other disciplines / lenses use this approach too, those are just some ones that more or less follow this).

    • Correctly identify the actual problem.
    • Find the root cause(s) of the problem.
    • Name / describe the state without that problem.
    • Outline the cure / steps to carry it out and reach that goal.

    The only problems that aren’t solvable, are things that would break the laws of physics.

    As for drugs / alcohol use, lemmygrad and hexbear have a lot of good threads on drug / alcohol use, and how to view it, and handle it collectively. The USA is probably the worst example of a country to look at for alleviating the societal ills brought about by alcohol and drug mis-use, so its good to look at how socialist countries have tackled it throughout history. If you can’t find a thread I’d recommend asking over there, because you’ll get a lot of good answers.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

    It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

    “Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

    Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

    But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

    This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

    Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

    When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

    And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

    For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

    That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

    Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

    Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

    And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

    But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

    We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

    This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

    This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

    We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

    But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

    These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.

    • locuester@lemmy.zip
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      15 hours ago

      Thanks for this. Was very thought provoking. It goes along with something my generation teases about with growing up in the 80’s. It was an entertaining and dangerous world and we didn’t have time for all this anxiety depression stuff. Haha

  • Etterra
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    1 day ago

    Poverty. Not for lack of resources or ability, but for lack of will.

    • Allonzee@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      For schaudenfreude. Capitalism would collapse without the schaudenfreude of enforced inequality.

      Almost everyone trained to worship capitalism is always taught to see their worth as a function of how badly other people are losing. That’s why homelessness is an expensive problem we choose to pay extra for.

      Studies have shown that all the conditioned shelters, programs, and cleanup are far more expensive than just providing conditionless basic housing for everyone without. But the homeless serve an essential purpose under runaway capitalism that takes control of a society instead of being a lowly tool of it: Capitalist Scarecrows and to look down on and fear becoming.

      How can I feel rich if there aren’t poories dying in the streets?