you don't need consumerism or mass media to be happy

In a world where most must sell their time for money to survive, free time is true luxury.

Sell your kids on the black market. Poof! Free time.
- President Milei I didn't know you were on the fediverse!
And some contemptible people who have more free time and resources than they know that do to with - they must focus all efforts on acquiring more resources AND making it harder for others to catch up.

It would be reason to pity the emptiness of some lives, were they not so destructive.

I am not talking about people that find their work or their career fulfilling and keep working hard at it. That’s different than a billionaire who spends millions every year to bust unions and prevent raises to the minimum wage. (Or assassinate whistle blowers, as the case may be)
- Isn't it wild how we let people heavy with psychopathy have positions of power?

I don't disagree, just a quite reminder that not everyone can afford this. The meme doesn't say it but it gives "money doesn't buy happiness" vibes and while this isn't false, a certain amount of money is required for this.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the picture, but I thought that's why they were called luxuries - because not everyone gets to have them. Though they aren't what we usually associate with a luxurious lifestyle.

E: just to be clear, everyone should have them, but many are too occupied with the daily battle for survival.
- Yes, I read it the same way, that's why I said that I don't disagree. Still there is this other reading I wanted to "debunk"
Yeah this is lowkey a boogie meme - the majority of people don't live in a work situation that allows for day naps!
- How do we call something that the majority of people can't afford ?
  
  A luxury
You're in solarpunk territory. They want to rid us of money entirely. Sounds pretty nice but requires huge cultural and lifestyle changes.
How much money does one need for a long walk and listening to birds?
- Time is money. If you work 2 jobs to provide for your kids alone, good luck finding the time and headspace to not worry about anything.
  
  Parks and forests aren't evenly distributed. Not everyone can afford living near one or going there.
- In capitalism, one must first pay for basic necessities like food and shelter before anything else. For some people who make low wages this requires an amount of time and effort that interferes with their leisure time.
  
  That said, there are also some people who think they are in this category when in reality their stress is due to self-imposed standards of living that are higher than necessary. Or anxiety and other psychological problems that could be addressed through non-material strategies.
- How much money does one need to not have to choose between spending their evenings on a long walk listening to birds vs delivering pizzas as a third job to avoid eviction?

Thank you for moving day naps higher on the list.
Ⓐ🏴✊
Why add a symbol that is almost solely used by totalitarian governments?

The hammer and sickle remains commonplace in self-declared socialist states, such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam, but also some former Soviet republics following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, such as Belarus and Russia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_and_sickle

Are there any countries that use the symbol that are actually nice places to live with good governments?
- Angola
- I can't tell if you're being ignorant or disingenuous. The Ⓐ should be a clue as to my opinion on government in general, no? As for ☭ - check the first sentence of the article you linked. Or the description written under it, for what I meant to invoke.
  
  I am no USSR apologist. I just consider that symbol useful as a marker for worker solidarity.

Most of these should be rights

This. Especially in modern first-world nations. There are plenty of resources for the wealthy to still be wealthy and everyone to have at least economic security.

mornigs

Are other people just ignoring this or am I the only person who is distracted by this?

Didn't go back to look so it doesn't exist
Didn't notice until you pointed it out
Ignoring
- Ignorig
It was on the news this mroing

a mother in ar who had kill her three kids, they are taking the three babby back to new york too lady to rest. my pary are with the father who lost his chrilden ; i am truley sorry for your lots

You do need time and money, apparently.

Yeah I think it's been found that there is a sweet spot for income and happiness. Having billions of dollars won't make you any happier, but I think it's something around $120K per year that provides everything needed to have a happy life without having to stress much about paying the bills.

Unfortunately the vast majority of people fall way below the level of income needed that's necessary to be able to have a stress free long walk and a good conversation that's not about how to make ends meet, etc.
- That figure heavily depends on cost-of-living in your area. Somewhere between 1x and 3x your local living wage is a good starting point. https://livingwage.mit.edu/
- Interestingly, my personal calculations agree with that general figure.

“The ability to freely express yourself”

—with fire.

Yeah, truth. Nobody has complete freedom in a world of other people. I don't get to run around being an ax murderer, for example (not that I want to be). There are plenty of guardrails and rules and laws, many for good reason.
- I was talking about how the image above “express yourself” looks like fire.

I like the implication that freely expressing myself involves flames.

It does for me 🔥

what are you a millionaire?

Might you by chance be American?

I'm on the fence about hearings birds singing. It is really annoying to get woken up way too early by a bird who just knows two tunes and sings it over and over and over again. Like what the fuck?! Didn't they teach you a third tune at bird school to make your song a bit more melodic and less irritating? Fucking twitter.

There's this big male cardinal who lives in my rhododendron. He's not the problem. The problem are the loud, brash younglings who show up and try to muscle in on his territory. They start before dawn, screaming at the top of a tree, making up for their lack of style with sheer volume.

Plus they sound like fucking car alarms. The Big Boy has a gorgeous call, and perches on the fence between the houses to take advantage of the acoustics, and starts at least an hour after dawn because no lady wants to be woken up early by a fuckboy.

He must be back early this year because there's only been one asshole bird who woke me up.
- Gigachad birb. O7
The birds here are really confused lately and have just been singing all night without a break, it's driving me crazy.
- Light pollution?

everything on the list requires money. but I get the point you're trying to say

I didn't realize I needed money to sleep well... Or to have a slow morning... Or to listen to birds sing?

Even in third world countries you'd have this...
- Hard to have a slow morning and day naps when you're rushing between two jobs because you don't have money.
  
  If you had money, you could be more selective in finding work that provided the balance and flexibility needed to appreciate the things in life that are free.
  
  But all of these things are too expensive when you're time-poor, and most people are time poor because they're desperately trying to avoid being financially poor.
- A lot of people cannot get a good night of sleep because they have to wake up super fucking early in order to arrive at their work on time. A number of them might then go from work straight to classes (like a cheap college-level graduation, in hopes of getting a better paying job sometime in the future), so by the time they get home, their free time is spent caring for the home and prepping for tomorrow. Even those that have "free nights" may not end up spending that time for leisure
  
  Birds singing are rare in big cities. You know, the so called concrete jungles? They'll have a number of pigeons and sparrows, but depending on the city, the lack of trees means that's the only 2 kinds of birds you'll see or hear, period.
- Stress ruins everything

I love me some slow mornigs too

Spell check is the real real luxury.
Of all the ways to misspell that, that is probably the worst way.

These are great but aren’t colorful sunsets (at least in part) a side effect of air pollution? ;)

Or when blood has been spilled that night
Sailor's delight

love my slow mornigs

I know you’re making a joke about the typo but low key slow mornings are for sure one of the greatest subtle pleasures of life
- I agree lol. had one today myself

Sooo being a Hobbit? Yeah I'm good with that

Would also add hugs to this list 🤗

I miss hugs. One of the nicest underappreciated aspects of human connection IMO

And healthy body

Aye... :(

Most of those shouldn't be luxuries, but rights.

Yes, I love when birds wake me up at 5 am from their incessant singing because they can't shut up. It makes me so happy to not be able to sleep.

Bruh they aren't that loud

Parklife!

Mornigs 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

people rejecting these ideas as a whole as they continue to doomscroll online 👌

This is just all the stuff I don't have time for after kids.

reminder that it takes a village to raise a child, it's so fucked up that people are expected to raise kids on their own and just have no free time
- My work moved me away from family, not much I can do about that for the next 3 years.
I had most of these things before having a kid :( life was good back then
stop having kids
- I did after 1

Anybody know some good books? Have been pretty disappointed for the longest time

I know hundreds but I don't know your tastes.
- Honestly, I'm into anything if it's good. I just like really good art, but more towards fiction than non-fiction.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. It's quite uplifting.
- Everything by Becky Chambers is pretty uplifting. She's probably my favorite author right now.
- A friend literally just gifted me a copy of this because I've been feeling so burnt out by capitalism, and let me tell you, I devoured that book. It spoke to my weary soul. And made me want to quit my job (I already was wanting to quit my job)
The Both Die in the End
Got any preferred genres?
- Mainly Fiction
“What the Hell Did I Just Read” is as advertised
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt! Really, all her books but this one especially.

And anything by David Mitchell, though my favorite is 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

If you read these I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
A double feature of Moby Dick - Herman Melville and In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick.

That should keep you busy for awhile.
- Definitely has the vibe of the original Princess Bride. I might have to look around for an abridged version.
- Busy maybe, but will the be entertained.
  
  I read Moby Dick once and it was not enjoyable in the least. It is boring as fuck. Maybe it's imitating through prose the long monotonous stretches between whale sightings, but that's not an engaging read.

Need to add 'a long hot shower' to this list.

College ruined books for me. I no longer wanna touch those things.

My good night's sleep was cut short by listening to birds singing...what now?

Your morning just got longer. Slow morning 🤗

Omg naps... I get like 2 per year. 2 more if I'm sick.

I realized I needed to change my life when I broke my collarbone and those 2 weeks of not doing much were so outrageously enjoyable

I agree these are the real luxuries but they CAN be supplemented by a little happy consumerism here and there. I love to have a good conversation with friends over a good lunch at a restaurant, or going to a nice dinner. Have meals out is a nice luxury also.

I agree although ideally we should create public spaces where you don’t need to pay for a meal to have good conversation if you don’t want to.

I’d also add science - a subset of reading I suppose, but it can lead to experiments and theoretical models. I love it, costs me nothing (thanks Wiki supporters) and there’s still so much to learn and discover.

The weird thing about this is, a few of these things are rather hard once you have kids. Don't know the last time when I slept alone in my bed or had a slow morning. But well, you get other things in return, like the pure love of you children so it's fine haha.

That's because we destroyed the primitive communal family to create the nuclear family. Humans throughout most of history would raise their children collectively, rather than all the responsibility just being dumped directly onto the parents.

And they wonder why we don't have kids lol
- That's true, we also have the unfortunate situation that we don't have any relatives that could support us. All grand parents live at least ~5 hours away. Moving isn't really an option for my wife because of her work currently.
  
  Really sucks...
don't have kids
Congratulations, they are GenLast.

(The planet is dying from an overpopulation hug of death for those that didn't figure that out yet.)

Larry, I’m on Ducktales.

Some species of birds are singing some really complicated non-repeating songs.

Just saw a meme today (can't find it again or I would share it) where a bird is threatening to commit all this violence against another bird, a la Gus Fring talking to Walter White, and all the human hears is a happy bird song.
Yea, mockingbirds are lit!
How very un-21st century of them. I swear most music today is four minutes of two constantly repeating chords.

The other morning my dogs woke me up way too damn early, but it meant I got to watch a very fat pigeon on the power line behind my house, and I got to see the finch population rapidly increase around it. (I swear I saw one little bird and by the time I got out of bed there were 5 jetting around. Pigeon did not move.)

I agree that these are luxuries for a lot of people. Some of them can be found with mindset shifts (from "fuck you dogs" to "oh look, pretty birds" for example) but it's also hard to shift your mindset to positivity when our society tries its damnedest to beat happiness out of you.

Still need money for most of these. Otherwise you'll be working for the basics

Slow mornig

I'm an IT person and it's all jumbled up.

I'll substitute sunrise in place of sunset and remove naps because I rarely sleep during the day because it fucks up my circadian rhythm. Everything else is spot on.

Something about naps I discovered I that there is two kind of naps

short naps around 20-30min where you don't get any deep sleep

long naps around 1 or 2 full sleep cycles, so for most peoples 1.5 or 3 hours nap.

Waking up from a short nap should be easy and you should feel energized almost immediately, if its not the case it probably means that your body started a full sleep cycle.

So to be able to nap during the day we need to find a way to tell or body that this is just a short break and we are not going for a full sleep, usually sleeping somewhere different like the couch or in a different position in the bed

But my time for fun and play is spent on mass media and consumerism!

I'll decide what makes me happy and what I need, thanks mate.

Imagine being this smug when yourself.

Fuck solarpunk. I buy carefully, not mindlessly, based on what I'm getting and for how long, with the intent of not having to replace what I buy. So let's get that out of the way, this isn't about the merits of environmental preservation or efficient use of our resources.

I need mass media because I ENJOY PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. I don't want to live in the fucking "gay space commune", I want to live in a world that feels good to me, and you solarpunk assholes seem to say people like me who escape from reality because they've NEVER been capable of supporting themselves should start a fucking garden?!

Newsflash. I. Don't. Like. Your. "Utopia". I never will. If you ever succeed in making your idea of a future a reality, I'll burn it to the fucking ground as my revenge on you bastards. I hate your idea because all it does is change how I am oppressed as a disabled adult to how I was oppressed as a special needs child illegally taken from my parents by a corrupt mental health system.

You want to see a real utopia? A place where everyone is happy in the world they live in? Fucking find an oneirogenic drug that induces lucid dreams or create a VR metaverse.

Who I am in reality does not matter. Who I am in my mind can't be expressed in a solarpunk world, only online. At least that's how it used to be.

Why am I named the same as an Open Source Game? Cyperprep doesn't have to mean "the future megacorps are not so bad!" but rather "megacorps control this dystopian future but they can't always stop the signal and that means Open Source Software is the way to fight back".

The difference between FOSS for smart devices and social networks and FOSS for games is that games are art and that means paid food production will take precedence over volunteer video games.

And no, you don't get to say "get another hobby". I know myself. I like technology. I don't like preachy people. I stopped buying Apple when I stopped seeing unique-looking devices. I am a gamer. Most importantly, I am a sci-fi writer who wants optimistic stories that don't assume the reader is a fully-capable person.

I am not demanding you write what I want to see. Only that you not try to turn reality into it. If you see this, once again, fuck solarpunk.

No one is talking about you, mass media and consumerism has nothing to do with anything you described. Video games as a whole does not equal consumerism or mass media. Micro transactions and other terrible patterns do.
- When was the last time you saw a video game in a solarpunk story?
I'm a shut-in, with untreated health issues, someone who partakes in escapism, and even someone who likes the idea of programming but can't really do much (I tinkered on rendering polygons from text input last September and didn't even finish it enough to be usable for me).

I haven't seen much solarpunk but I've never thought to myself that it'd be worse for me. If I existed in an environment like that (particularly from birth or at least for a long time) I don't think I'd be the same escapist shut-in. I could see open-source games still existing, and maybe programming being better even if people are less likely to have videogames as their most common activity. I've taken care of already-growing plants before, but it seems to me like a lax solarpunk environment would offer more options/opportunity than employment currently offers. Probably actual opportunity to travel, too.

Even carrying over my current mindset and (lack of) capability, I can't see a solarpunk environment being even half as restricted as my experience now. I mean the whole idea is better community and technology used to help people (not strictly for money) so it seems to me you wouldn't be required to garden.
- To be fair, it seems like I may have had bad luck in the first three solarpunk works I ever experienced. My issue against the whole idea is "this is a society that can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits, it is the future we are headed towards, therefore our present society can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits" that was somehow in all three solarpunk works I encountered.
  
  The three in question were Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, the Necroverse by "RichM", and a story that a fair-weather friend wrote that I no longer have a copy of that showed a dystopian cybersolarpunk hybrid where "Covid-19 has ended the modern age and now everything is powered by wind turbines because most of us are dead".
  
  As a result of such bad luck, I may have overestimated how central that theme of "self-sufficiency or die" is to the genre.
Bro, what does any of this have to do with solarpunk?

Just normal stuff...
This is a Wendy's
So you think hurting people to make things the way you want them is acceptable? Because of video games? You are a dangerous man child (or maybe just a child).
- You build my dystopia, you're imprisoning me. I am a cornered animal, do not fuck with me.
Cool story, bro.