Venting Why i think this place is a shithole

[Darkover]

Intelligently, humans are stuck in a shithole situation because:

We start from zero born with no real knowledge, just basic instincts like crying, sucking, grabbing.
Nothing resembling wisdom, foresight, or reason. Everything that makes us "smart" has to be painfully taught or discovered from scratch.

It takes years just to become functional. Decades to become "competent." And even then, most people only ever master tiny slices of knowledge.

Technological disparity few people can understand the deep inner workings of computers — these miracle machines — while many people can barely use them, let alone understand them. That huge gap in understanding exists everywhere and holds humanity back.

Humans aren't born smart. They're born stupid and fragile, and only a tiny sliver claw their way to real intelligence.

Most people remain ignorant — Even in an age of infinite access to information, the majority barely scratch the surface. They stay locked in primitive cycles — chasing basic pleasure, following groupthink like religion, ignoring complex problems.

We don't understand ourselves — We don't know how consciousness works. We don't know why we dream. We don't even fully understand how memories are stored or why emotions can hijack rational thought.



Materially, humans are stuck in a shithole situation because:

Extreme dependency from birth — You're born helpless. You need parents or caretakers just to survive, for years. You can't hunt, build a house, grow food — you're owned by the system before you even know what a system is.

Most people grow up in small houses or apartments. Nowhere near the freedom humans were probably meant to have. Can't even play loud music, can't be yourself, constantly stepping on someone else's boundaries. Like rats in cages.

Wealth is rare — Despite what "motivational" media tells you, most people are not born into money. They're born into a cycle of survival, not abundance.

Work to live, not live to work — The majority have to grind meaningless jobs, just to get basic stuff: food, shelter, water, electricity. The job isn't about passion, or fulfillment — it's about not dying.

Freedom is an illusion — People talk about "freedom" — but realistically, unless you're rich or have extreme luck, your freedom is chained to your paycheck, your boss, your rent, your food bills.

You grow up depending on your parents... then become an adult depending on a boss or the market... then eventually you have kids who depend on you... and the whole damn hamster wheel spins again.

 

[Hollowman]

No kid depends on me. Fuck the hamster wheel.

 

[Nobodi]

Intelligently, humans are stuck in a shithole situation because:

We start from zero born with no real knowledge, just basic instincts like crying, sucking, grabbing.
Nothing resembling wisdom, foresight, or reason. Everything that makes us "smart" has to be painfully taught or discovered from scratch.

It takes years just to become functional. Decades to become "competent." And even then, most people only ever master tiny slices of knowledge.

Technological disparity few people can understand the deep inner workings of computers — these miracle machines — while many people can barely use them, let alone understand them. That huge gap in understanding exists everywhere and holds humanity back.

Humans aren't born smart. They're born stupid and fragile, and only a tiny sliver claw their way to real intelligence.

Most people remain ignorant — Even in an age of infinite access to information, the majority barely scratch the surface. They stay locked in primitive cycles — chasing basic pleasure, following groupthink like religion, ignoring complex problems.

We don't understand ourselves — We don't know how consciousness works. We don't know why we dream. We don't even fully understand how memories are stored or why emotions can hijack rational thought.



Materially, humans are stuck in a shithole situation because:

Extreme dependency from birth — You're born helpless. You need parents or caretakers just to survive, for years. You can't hunt, build a house, grow food — you're owned by the system before you even know what a system is.

Most people grow up in small houses or apartments. Nowhere near the freedom humans were probably meant to have. Can't even play loud music, can't be yourself, constantly stepping on someone else's boundaries. Like rats in cages.

Wealth is rare — Despite what "motivational" media tells you, most people are not born into money. They're born into a cycle of survival, not abundance.

Work to live, not live to work — The majority have to grind meaningless jobs, just to get basic stuff: food, shelter, water, electricity. The job isn't about passion, or fulfillment — it's about not dying.

Freedom is an illusion — People talk about "freedom" — but realistically, unless you're rich or have extreme luck, your freedom is chained to your paycheck, your boss, your rent, your food bills.

You grow up depending on your parents... then become an adult depending on a boss or the market... then eventually you have kids who depend on you... and the whole damn hamster wheel spins again.

painful true. Well said.

 

[Michelstaedter]

Speaking of loud music, right now the (disgusting) neighbors have their music pretty loud. It's already nighttime, and they've been like that for four or five hours. They're drunk, yelling, I can't even tell they're singing. It's disgusting.

Regarding what you say, I think the problem is evolution and adaptation. Human beings no longer evolve, or you could say they've reached their limit, their "peak." Adaptation consists of what you've described: working for what's necessary, and even if times, ways, and eras change, they will continue doing the same thing, like a repetitive cycle.

I dreamed, or at least that's what I consider, of an evolved human being, an advanced society. Where hunting is no longer necessary from the age of 4 or 5, as in some tribes, but rather humans can become more adaptable to a society that can generate their own food without needing to kill other beings (the same damned cycle that makes humans look like animals). In this way, we could reach a point where food itself would no longer be necessary, nor things that ultimately only serve to "kill hunger" and not to feed us.

All of this sounds like a mere utopia, I know, but my central thesis is that humans are evolved beings in the full sense of the word. We talk about Australopithecus or other hominid genera as if they were something belonging to humans' "absurd past," when in reality they weren't that different from us in essential ways (eating, reproducing, defecating). However, my idea is that perhaps we could have made the "great leap" at some point, but no, all of humanity decided to stay put. Just change a few things and let us believe we're intelligent for writing comments on Reddit, Facebook, or any other stupid social network.

P.S. I forgot that for me, "CTB" is a somewhat odd, but still exemplary form of freedom, free will, in relation to the evolved human. We can even speak of true freedom, something that escapes nature and logic. Cut your flesh with something sharp, and immediately your cells, your body, will regenerate (if you're healthy). However, it would be a "great anomaly" if these cells didn't regenerate solely through thought, or in fact without it, which could be "fatal" at some point.

 

[Pluto]

 

[SmilingNoMore]

Location of the shithole with the hamster wheel.
I love how your mind works. I find it hard to comprehend the hugeness, the smallness and the nothingness of all of this at the same time.

 

[Darkover]

Why the Speed of Light Makes the Universe a Shithole

The speed of light is often portrayed as this wondrous, elegant constant of nature — the fastest anything can travel. But from a functional, experiential, and computational standpoint, it's not fast at all. In fact, it's pathetically slow in the context of what intelligent life would need to thrive, understand itself, and explore the cosmos.


Let's explore why this single physical constant creates a bottleneck that renders the universe inefficient, unscalable, and, in many ways, hostile to meaningful existence.

---

1. It Makes Real-Time Understanding of Reality Impossible

Imagine trying to fully simulate even a single biological cell — with all its molecules, proteins, water, and ions interacting in real time. To do this faithfully, you'd need to:

• Track every atom's position and velocity.
• Calculate electromagnetic forces.
• Simulate quantum effects.
• Ensure causality by propagating information at or below the speed of light.

The result? You can't simulate reality at the speed it happens. You'd need a computer the size of a planet, running for centuries, to simulate seconds of a real cell. Why? Because data can't travel faster than light. Your processor, no matter how fast, still has to wait for bits to move from point A to B.


Conclusion: The laws of physics prevent us from fully understanding the smallest unit of life in its natural rhythm. That's a design failure.

---

2. It Destroys the Dream of Interstellar Civilization

Let's say we somehow survive our self-made mess on Earth and want to explore the stars. Too bad:

• Nearest star system (Proxima Centauri) = 4.24 light-years away.
• Even at light speed — which is currently impossible — that's a minimum 8.5-year round-trip message time.
• Realistically, with our tech? It'd take tens of thousands of years to get there.

This means:

• Colonizing planets? Not in a single lifetime.
• Communicating with distant outposts? Practically useless.
• Coordinated galactic society? Unrealistic.

We live in a prison of distance where light — the fastest thing — is still too damn slow for meaningful connection beyond a tiny cosmic bubble.


Conclusion: The universe invites us to explore… but locks the doors.

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3. It Limits the Speed of Thought

Even your brain suffers from light-speed limits.

• Neurons send signals at speeds far slower than light (just ~100 m/s), but even in hypothetical future AI or brain–computer interfaces, light speed is still a cap.
• If you built a planetary-scale brain — a giant AI spread across the globe — communication delays from one side to the other would be measured in tenths of a second. That's eternity in processing terms.
• You could never have a unified, conscious "self" stretched across long distances. Your thoughts would fragment.

Conclusion: You can't scale intelligence beyond a certain point — not because we lack technology, but because the universe is built on lag.

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4. It Robs the Universe of Synchrony and Wholeness

In your day-to-day life, you assume that everything is happening "now." But due to the finite speed of light:

• You're never seeing anything in real time — not the stars, not the Moon, not even your own reflection (at microscopic scales).
• There is no universal "now". Different observers in different parts of space disagree on what "just happened."

This destroys the idea of a shared present. Reality is smeared out, causality fractured by distance.


Conclusion: Even time itself is fragmented. The universe is not a unified experience; it's a mess of isolated snapshots pretending to be a whole.

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5. It's a Built-In Barrier to Transcendence

All of humanity's higher goals — from understanding the mind to simulating nature to building utopian societies or exploring the stars — are throttled at the root by this one unchangeable law. No matter how far we evolve:

• We can't "hack" the speed of light.
• We can't outpace the latency baked into spacetime.
• We're stuck building in a sandbox where all progress is bottlenecked.

It's as if the universe was coded to fail at scale.

---

Final Thought: This Isn't Just Inconvenient — It's Cosmic Incompetence

If you were designing a universe for intelligent life to thrive — to grow, to explore, to understand — you wouldn't cap communication at 300,000 km/s. That's like building a city with only dirt roads and no bridges, then wondering why no one arrives on time.


The slow speed of light isn't just a physical limit. It's a cosmic design flaw, a silent but absolute veto on transcendence, cooperation, and comprehension.


And that's why — at the deepest, most fundamental level — this place feels like a shithole.

 

[Pale_Rider]

Well in my best moments I would say it's the ride that is exciting, but lately I have no argument.