Post: #51

In the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama there is this Kunis tribe that is also very poor. When I was there I was amazed how happy and healthy everyone seemed. Maybe they struggle and I didn't see it but I was strongly impacted by their little society and wondered if that simple life is how we were intended to live.

Meanwhile I live an extremely easy life with an abundance of almost everything I want interns of money, women, freedom but still manage to worry about petty things and get pissed over politics or something inconsequential.

Maybe life is too easy for most people and that's why so many are so insane and deranged in America.

Post: #52

Mark Twains the Prince and the Pauper comes to mind.

Post: #53

As an example, similarly, gold and diamonds "should" be cheaper in Africa, the place of origin of the raw goods, yet they aren't as the finished product is manufactured outside Africa, and Africans have to pay a premium for the (now) imported finished product. What's worse, Africa is a peripheral consumer market for the finished products.

I wouldn't know if that Cadbury or Lindt I ate, was the result of the "teamwork" of a 7 year old Ivorian. Sad.

Post: #54

Just adding my 2 cents on the aspect in this thread about of the happiness of the toilers in the third world:

Happiness is an internal thing.

Living in Thailand has taught me that you don't need money, stability, a house, a sexy girfriend or a great car and job to be happy.

Its all in your (own) head.

Post: #55

(05-20-2017 08:06 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:  Just adding my 2 cents on the aspect in this thread about of the happiness of the toilers in the third world:

Happiness is an internal thing.

Living in Thailand has taught me that you don't need money, stability, a house, a sexy girfriend or a great car and job to be happy.

Its all in your (own) head.

Happiness is primarily internal. Though most people are hardly able to retain it under especially difficult circumstances. There was the case of this one Jewish doctor who spent years in Ausschwitz. Early on he made the decision to focus on love instead of hate or desperation. When the camp was liberated the soldiers thought that he was a new prisoner because he looked so fresh and helped others, but turned out that he was one of the longest inmates.

But these are very strong saintly people - for the general population it works like this:

Happiness depends on basic social factors like basic needs met (food, water, basic shelter), family, sex, no strenuous work schedule (80 hour weeks in a factory will never make you happy), minimum of status and comparative wealth and status. In a simple tribe or small village with low difference between their peers the people are happy. Also the basic needs are met and they have sex and a family.

If you built some modern houses next to the village and gave 5 families of the small tribe each a modern house with all modern amenities, then those 5 families would wreak havoc on the local happiness-scale, because the other ones would suddenly be much worse off, thus unhappy.

Happiness studies proved that in Western society happiness increased somewhat to a certain financial level and then it stopped.

I think that happiness is mostly internal and next after some basic needs left comparative. Also the comparison has to be made between their own peers and not outside groups.

Post: #56

Indigenous people in their natural state the world over can often be seen to be happy with their lot in life however poor it may be. Then we have the indigenous in places like Canada and Australia who have everything handed to them (free housing, education, healthcare, generous welfare, tax breaks, etc) and they are some of the most destitute people in the world with rates of suicide, alcohol/drug abuse, domestic/sexual violence through the roof.

Post: #57

(05-18-2017 07:21 PM)Scoundrel Wrote:  What struck me most about the vid is that these guys have likely been farming & harvesting cacao for years (if not generations), yet claimed not to know what it was used for.

I can't help but think that this is a key insight into the mindset of people in this part of the world. Hardworking, no doubt, but with little intellectual curiosity. They just get up every day and do their tasks in order to eke out a bare subsistence living, with no thought of the larger meaning or significance of their work in the world.

I used to put together financial and operations reports for some of the biggest companies in my state and to be honest I couldn't give half a fuck what they were using them for. I presumed a lot of them they were using them for pitches for funding or to new clients but I never asked and I didn't care. The only thing I cared about was getting the fuck out of that office so I could go home and cook or go to the gym. And I got paid a shitload of money.

I don't think their situation has anything to do with a poor mindset, they treat their job exactly the same way I treat mine. The only difference is I came out of an American vagina and they came out of a Ivorian one.

Post: #58

Hmmm...
I'm suddenly getting the impression that with a small truck load of chocolate.
I could bribe half of the Ivory Coast into making me their king...

Post: #59

I'd like to offer my services to you in fulfilling the vital role of Minister For Slouch Hats.

Post: #60

It was humbling to hear them say that it is a "privilege" to eat some of that chocolate. Nowadays, you have all these dipshits throwing around that word for things like white privilege, male privilege etc. Those idiots need to watch this vid and realize what privilege is and isnt.

People saying "its my right to x, y, z dont have 1 iota of common sense. In a way we are all privileged, for we also could have been born as a cocao farmer in the Ivory Coast.

Post: #61

(05-18-2017 08:09 PM)scorpion Wrote:  From our perspective these guys have nothing. They're illiterate peasants who do manual labor all day in the tropical heat. But they seem rather content with their lot, jolly even. It's very interesting to see. It makes you realize that we are the weird ones (we, meaning people living with the benefit of advanced technology in Western countries). We're the ones completely out of step with the vast majority of human beings who ever lived, whose lives had much more in common with these happy cocoa farmers than they did with ours. Modern life is an almost totally artificial construct. We worry about things like going bald, or the size of our muscles, or the difficulty of securing sex through hookup apps, or the value of numbers on a screen. These guys' worries are much simpler, much more human, much more immediate. It's why they seem so happy despite living in what we would consider a state of utter poverty and destitution. Their lives have inherent meaning - survival. Each day is its own reward. The journey is the destination. Every day they can get up and move around and have some cocoa to harvest with their friends, they're happy. That's all they need. Another day in the books. This is the natural state of human beings, it's the natural psychological framework that makes for a healthy human mind. Death, that wonderful motivator, is a constant presence just outside the door. Never forgotten, never exiled away until the very end, never denied and papered over with the innumerable distractions that clutter the modern Western life. For these guys, and for most humans who ever lived, there was only life and death. And as long as you were on the right side of that equation, you were feeling pretty good. That's all it took. There was no existential angst or finding oneself or search for greater meaning. Living was meaning enough. There's something very refreshing about that. It's been almost entirely lost to us, and we suffer for that.

I have wondered too why poor girls in SEA seem to have such more genuinely pleasant attitudes and lower incidence of mental illness than such spoiled and privileged american women. It is always repeated ad infinitum that more money equals better "quality of life", a large part of that being presumably "increased happiness". But all I see are simple people living simple lives, of course not without great difficulty at times, nonetheless being far happier and mentally stable than the people in those places they might aspire to one day inhabit (USA/CA/UK/EU).

Post: #62

(05-18-2017 08:09 PM)scorpion Wrote:  From our perspective these guys have nothing. They're illiterate peasants who do manual labor all day in the tropical heat. But they seem rather content with their lot, jolly even. It's very interesting to see. It makes you realize that we are the weird ones (we, meaning people living with the benefit of advanced technology in Western countries). We're the ones completely out of step with the vast majority of human beings who ever lived, whose lives had much more in common with these happy cocoa farmers than they did with ours. Modern life is an almost totally artificial construct. We worry about things like going bald, or the size of our muscles, or the difficulty of securing sex through hookup apps, or the value of numbers on a screen. These guys' worries are much simpler, much more human, much more immediate. It's why they seem so happy despite living in what we would consider a state of utter poverty and destitution. Their lives have inherent meaning - survival. Each day is its own reward. The journey is the destination. Every day they can get up and move around and have some cocoa to harvest with their friends, they're happy. That's all they need. Another day in the books. This is the natural state of human beings, it's the natural psychological framework that makes for a healthy human mind. Death, that wonderful motivator, is a constant presence just outside the door. Never forgotten, never exiled away until the very end, never denied and papered over with the innumerable distractions that clutter the modern Western life. For these guys, and for most humans who ever lived, there was only life and death. And as long as you were on the right side of that equation, you were feeling pretty good. That's all it took. There was no existential angst or finding oneself or search for greater meaning. Living was meaning enough. There's something very refreshing about that. It's been almost entirely lost to us, and we suffer for that.

It's true we suffer for that, but there's a lot we DON'T suffer for that also. For example, you don't see anyone who is dead from AIDS or some other disease. You don't see any of the grief they might experience from losing a child to malnutrition. Life expectancy there is like 53 years. You can take a 15 minute video of western people appearing to be quite happy and carefree, too.

I'm not saying they aren't happy and there's nothing we could learn from their outlook on life, but to some extent you have to pick your poison.

Post: #63

I could imagine a hilarious parody video of this:

Bolvian Coca Leaf Farmers try Crack Cocaine for the first time.

The sketch practically writes itself.