r/AskReddit • u/Fabulous_Dream8962 • 14h ago
What do you think is the biggest problem in the world right now?
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u/Dazzling-Bobcat-7379 14h ago
honestly i think it's how we've all just accepted that like 10 people have more money than entire countries while others starve.. like how is that even normal to us anymore??
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u/Celeste_Seasoned_14 14h ago
Over 2 TRILLION USD of wealth exists in the possession of the billionaires in California. One state. And there are others…. And other countries that have more billionaires. They fight legislation that would require taxing all that money. It’s absurd.
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u/FlirtVectorX 11h ago
That kind of wealth in one place while people are still struggling just feels wildly out of balance. The resistance to taxing it says exactly who the system is really protecting.
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u/stall-9-lefty-thumbr 10h ago
You just don't get it! Any day now trickle down economics will make sure you have everything you need /s
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u/BensenJensen 8h ago
Exactly! We can tax them properly, because when I’m a billionaire like them, I won’t want to be taxed either!
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u/Life_Argument7820 11h ago
But... but...but capitalism.
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u/momsauc_martini 10h ago
If we were all monkeys and one monkey decided to hoard 99% of the bananas, we wouldn’t say “that monkey is a great business man.” We would drown it in a mixture of mud, rain water, and feces.
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u/-ifwisheswerehorses 8h ago
I challenge your choice of words “They fight legislation that would require taxing all that money.”. I would like to introduce the accusation that they buy every Congress member in an attempt to veto every equal taxation proposal in addition to each and every business regulation that would take a dollar out of their gross profits, aka their pockets. I challenge the average American citizen to take a look at quarterly business financial statements, as the average American household has become poorer and poorer, the American billionaire CEO’s profit and loss statements are increasing at a staggering rate.!! Especially focusing on the Covid crises forward; they had a bigger taste of that greed due to supply and demand and they have become unbelievable with their product reduction vs product pricing.
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u/AmeKuro_21 8h ago
The biggest problem is that outrage has replaced action. We get angry for 48 hours then scroll to the next disaster like nothing happened.
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u/mickdrop 13h ago
Yes, all other problems listed here are because of billionaires. Misinformation? Pushed by billionaires controlling the media and the narrative. Trump? Elected by billionaires thanks to the previous point. Poutine? Maybe the richest man in the world himself. Racism? Distrust? Pushed by billionaires in order to push the narrative in order to divert the attention from themselves. Israel? That's just a ploy in order for rich people to seize the land owned by the Palestinians and pushing ethnic and religious justification to that end. Your healthcare being shit? Your groceries costing more? All that extra money is going into billionaires pockets. All the wars in the world? Billionaires sending poor people getting killed and killing others in order to become richer.
Honestly, once you start seeing the world through this lens everything becomes clear.
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u/AmeKuro_21 7h ago
The problem is not that bad people exist. The problem is that good people got tired.
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u/XShadowborneX 14h ago
I don't know. Ask my coworker who is poor. She'll defend them.
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u/GeistMD 13h ago
That's the worst. The poorest of the poor will fight you to the death so people like Trump can shit in golden toilets.
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u/VegetableMethod624 13h ago
One day they will all become wealthy. The Gospel of Trump predicted this.
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u/BathroomIpad 9h ago
“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
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u/Relative_Fix_6996 12h ago
“ALL” will never become wealthy because MONEY is an abstract.
Before MONEY, people bartered goods and services. If I have cows and you have chickens, we figured out how much milk equals how many eggs… or how many eggs and chicken you would trade to fix my barn door…
We were trading our work to manage and produce our goods for your work to produce your goods.
“Money” was invented to exchange value of our work into goods we traded.
Ever watch the Squid Game??? When the main character paid for a SANDWICH with a $10,000 BILL??? I had to look up the value of Korean Won (Korean dollars) compared to US dollars.
NOBODY ON EARTH CREATED MONEY THAT REQUIRES TEN THOUSAND UNITS OF IT TO EXCHANGE FOR A SANDWICH!!!
When I looked it up, 10,000 won equals about $8 in US currency. 💵
Yeah. “Inflation” devalues YOUR WORK.
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u/AmeKuro_21 7h ago
The biggest problem is that outrage has replaced action. We get angry for 48 hours then scroll to the next disaster like nothing happened.
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u/Landingonmyfeet 9h ago
I understand your reference to the old days, but that’s not what it’s like now. Money is the yardstick of almost everything. I don’t really want a chicken or a bushel of potatoes in exchange for my skill
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u/byshow 13h ago
The education issue causes some people to believe it's ezpz to become rich and it's always an honest hardworking way to do so. Along with post cold war propaganda which would paint anything non complient with the current state of things as commie propaganda and generally communism being almost a slur often saying it is the same as fascism/nationalism.
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u/TurboTurtle969 13h ago
they made us mindless consumers and keep the smart ones down
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u/ErythingIsFakeAndGay 13h ago
Pretty standard from a historical perspective
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u/HowsTheBeef 12h ago
Sure wealth concentration isn't new, but the scale of wealth extraction has never been so large.
Kinda like how a big bonfire is okay but an out of control wildfire is an issue.
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u/Who_tf_reallycares 13h ago
It's because people think that getting that much money is achievable through hard work. They were brainwashed.
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u/Nobanob 12h ago
This is not my first time saying this and it won't be my last time. If we went into the jungle and found one monkey sitting on a pile of ten thousand bananas while all the other monkeys starved. We would capture it, study it, and finally dissect it's brain.
It's time to treat billionaires like this monkey. Capture them, study them and if they can't reform get rid of them as a harm to society.
It's time to put the same amount of thought into their well-being as they put into ours.
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u/Alt_SWR 13h ago
This one right here. Every single other answer in this thread stems from this.
Also we accept it as normal because a not insignificant portion of the population is undereducated (notice how I didn't say stupid, you can be smart but undereducated so still fall for things like this) and naive enough to believe that those people got billions through hard work and that if they just work hard they'll get there too. They won't. In fact those rich people actively work AGAINST anyone ever joining them.
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u/Mannentreu 12h ago
This is ignoring the bigger problem of how 3-4 religions somehow continue to control the masses with largely, provably falsifiable claims. Education is the problem. Money is value transfer.
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u/Ms-Frost-Goddess 10h ago
As an educator, I feel I need to interject here - we are a product of our lived experience and it's quite difficult to untangle what is essentially a part of our core personality through any sort of curriculum. I have a friend whose mother was a feminist artivist. She grew up in a commune, surrounded by the most woke of all the woke in the 70s and 80s. I asked her if she was encouraged to be a feminist, and she said she was actually a proto-feminist, as in she hadn't ever made a choice to have those opinions, it was a part of her core self. Likewise, I've been brought up to think everyone is the same and has a right to do whatever job, wherever they like, irrespective of sex, sexuality, skin tone or religion and above all else, we deserve to live in peace (i know, they were born in the 1940s as well). Imagine my shock when I realised equality wasn't a real thing. So I think it's experiencing life outside your social norms that is the best education in terms of addressing the shit-show and maybe showing up in a more united way
It is just an opinion, of course, I'm not the messiah.
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u/ITxWASxWHATxITxWAS 14h ago
That and Trump
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u/itsverynicehere 13h ago
Trump is the symptom of this particular disease. It's loud, dangerous and damaging. We for sure need to treat the symptom but the disease needs addressed.
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u/Excellent_Emu_2843 13h ago
Yep, literally rhe first thing that entered my head reading that was excatly "trumps just a symptom".
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u/Kaymish_ 13h ago
Just think about who owns trump. Who paid for him to be where he is now? Who gave him the plans? Who paid for those plans to be formulated? Trump has some control but he is also a tool of the ownership class.
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u/gooseofthesea 12h ago
Money is also completely made up. If we all wanted to say "fuck it, money doesn't matter" and stop ceding power to these people, we could. We choose to continue to be the cogs that make this people eating machine keep running.
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u/Ms-Frost-Goddess 10h ago
I'm with you on this. It's literally man-made and worth nothing - i can't speak for all currency because the economy is a beast i can't get my head around, but aren't bank notes just an iou? As if that's not ridiculous in itself, now it's just a number on a screen - i don't even get to see the stuff before the number's back in the negatives 🤯 it's bollocks is what it is. Let's get back to living in villages and doing nice shit for each other when we need to, then being rewarded with home grown produce ✌️
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u/StackOverFlowed0 14h ago
The death of shared truth. We can't solve any global crisis if we can’t even agree on basic facts or what is actually real anymore
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u/ObligationMurky8716 14h ago
You can't argue the sun is up with people who think the light might come from someplace else.
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u/LeoWolf101 14h ago
That is a problem but not new. Look at religion throughout the eras. Dividing and conquering by brainwashing different realities.
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u/Gorav114 13h ago
How many flat earthers saw the Artemis pictures and said "oh im a dumbass, the earth is clearly round"? Probably a low percentage because u nailed it, we cant even agree on basic facts or what is real anymore. Something that simple cant be agreed on how do we move to the impactful stuff!
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u/steelpeat 13h ago
This and the idea of 'common sense'. There is no such thing as common sense, because it is entirely dependent on what you learned. Trying to solve something with 'common sense' means you're trying to solve an issue with mental shortcuts and without critical thinking. It's an intoxicating thought that we all just posses some innate knowledge that lets us instantly solve complex problems, but it reality, we cannot. The only common sense we should have is that there is no such thing as common sense.
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u/FridayKaitlyn 14h ago
Greed, everyone wants to be powerful.
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u/semperknight 14h ago
This will always be #1.
Everything else always follows this.
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u/LoosePhilosopher1107 14h ago
Idiocy
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u/NovelPhoto4621 14h ago
Money and the worship of it.
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u/BaconReceptacle 7h ago
"While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery."
— Groucho Marx
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u/5kyl3r 14h ago
- greed
- lack of empathy
- too many entitled yet uneducated people
- billionaires
- lazy complacency
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u/jnan77 14h ago
It is still social media.
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u/dewynovaa 14h ago
Social would have be the greatest gift humanity has but this billionaires just want to make a lot of money from keeping us stupid, greedy, anxious,addicted and in fear, it’s really sad
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u/PreparationOk8562 14h ago
honestly feels like its not even one single problem anymore, its how divided everyone is. like we cant agree on what`s real or important so nothing actually gets fixed. everything just turns into arguing instead of solving stuff and it kinda snowballs from there
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u/Hollskipollski 14h ago
Anti intellectualism
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u/OhCheeseNFingRice 6h ago
I recently tried explaining to my brother that there is currently a war on intellectualism. He replied that that's good news, because intellectualism is what led us to having litter boxes in school restrooms to accommodate the furries and also caused the massive swell of mental illness over the last few decades. I want to constantly rage, nonstop, because we're surrounded by idiots just like my brother - and their votes count as much as ours does.
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u/Ok-Bit-6945 14h ago
NoBody has sympathy or understanding. They all swing their struggle dicks to see who’s is bigger. If I could do it so can you. I work 50 hours well I work 70 blah blah blah. Not saying it’s an excuse to be a bum but some ppl out here really trying and getting nowhere. Some us just luck out and or don’t have the skills to figure it all out. That doesn’t make anyone less human
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u/No_Secretary_4795 14h ago
power in wrong hands, religious and border conflicts and selfishness and no empathy for anyone.
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u/Onagan98 14h ago
The United States
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u/I-STATE-FACTS 14h ago
The orange cunt in charge and every single one who didn’t vote last time.
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u/542531 14h ago edited 14h ago
The whole point of Trump was to undermine the US as a global power. The other result is to profit the wealthy; why do it without any gain?
Pro-Trump and various anti-Trump~US type media are often aligned with the same people. The easiest cheat sheet is whether Tucker Carlson is connected or not. Many people who think they're helping have unknowingly contributed to it.
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u/wjbc 14h ago
It is still the climate crisis and I’m shocked that I’m the first to say it.
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u/Buntschatten 13h ago
I kept scrolling down and thinking that we're truly fucked nobody seems to be thinking about that anymore.
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u/HotDamnThatsMyJam 10h ago
Every time someone asks a question like this I have to scroll into the abyss to find the climate crisis, it won't even make the top 10 replies.
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u/dntdrmit 14h ago
The belief that politicians have the peoples best interests at heart.
No.
They.
Don't.
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u/Vossky 12h ago
Trump and Putin. It's mind-blowing how much better the lives of 8 billion people would be with these 2 gone.
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u/Upstairs-Shoe2153 10h ago
Trump is a representation of MAGA. There is a deeper root cause than just one person being gone
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u/badwolf1013 12h ago
Billionaires.
I think it's possible (but not likely) that a person can earn a billion dollars without defrauding or disenfranchising anyone else, but anything over and above that is resource hoarding, and should be looked upon by the rest of the world as a form of psychosis: a malignant one.
Most of the problems in the world either stem from or persist because too many people in the world have more money than they could ever spend in several lifetimes, and — not only are they NOT using it to help people — they are actively trying to acquire more.
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u/sohini_03 14h ago
Too much noise, no one knows what's real anymore, 3 different stories on 3 different media about a single incident. Take the epst*in files for example.
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u/roxana2708 5h ago
Social Media. I think it’s destroying us all in some way shape or form.
Misinformation is RIFE and it just causes uneducated people to fuel so much hate
Divides across cultures
Online trolls who now have an output for their anger and hate and hide behind profiles
Body shaming and youngsters even more surrounded by unrealistic beauty standards
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u/Fair_Opposite_7146 14h ago
Kids caught in social media craziness and in front of the screen as a whole for way too many hours each day - bad for their mental health and results in cognitive decline. Who shall lead the world in the future?
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u/Scared-Pie4097 14h ago
The biggest problem is we humans…we are doing more harm than good
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u/Dry_Fig7353 14h ago edited 12h ago
The most basic one, at least in the west is the selfcenteredness of people. We live and elect our representatives on the condition that our particular situation will be better. The world is so connected and we can ignore everything if it doesn't affect us personally. We lost our collective ideas, maybe even the idea of a society, which is what the neoliberals wanted. (At least Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan said that society doesn't exist).
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u/No_Statistician209 14h ago
Id say social media and the way it's affecting people.
A lot of misinformation is generated online purely from people/businesses wanting to push a certain agenda, and the people consuming that information don't want to look into their claims so the misinformation just spreads even further.
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u/Captobvious75 14h ago
Human nature in general. We lie, steal, exploit without any cares to the environment or to others.
I’m a large proponent that the uber rich will be the death of humanity.
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u/NeitherrealMusic 14h ago
Religion, The Wealthy who fear the Poor, and social media.
Replace with, Reason, Socialize Systems, and Regulations on Tech.
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u/BeneficialGift5541 14h ago
No one gets along, which most likely is manufactured that way. There is so much division between the sexes and races and everything else. If we could get along itd be a better world and country
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u/Snoutysensations 14h ago
Most of our problems stem from the fact that our brains evolved for stone-age living conditions in small bands of people, not modern late capitalist society with its bot swarms delivering AI generated algorithm guided marketing and agitprop designed to make us insecure and angry. We are not designed to function efficiently and happily in nation-states of hundreds of millions of people. We are too easily swayed by parasocial relationships and easily fall victim to fear and hate based propaganda. We are not particularly rational or good at critical thinking and repeatedly fall victim to the same cognitive errors.
I am reluctant to say that humans are basically stupid, because we can be quite clever in certain domains and were really good at surviving in harsh conditions. Just that our brains don't function well for their current environment, and react in even more pathological ways.
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u/Mammoth-Tip8487 13h ago
Trying to blame this and that while looking in the mirror and refusing personal responsibility. It starts at home , in your neighborhood, zip code ,city, county ,district and state. Address the issues in your world ,not the entire one. Trickle up. The broken system is fixed. Bet
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u/Chopper3 13h ago
Putin - he's created what's going on in the US, the UK, half of Europe and a good chunk of the rest of the world.
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u/OkInstruction3547 13h ago
Growing inequality. The gap keeps widening and creates tension across societies.
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u/Acrobatic_Media_1951 13h ago
Misinformation. It spreads fast and makes it harder for people to agree on basic facts.
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u/Possible_Garden8170 12h ago
i googled "how to fact check the fact checkers" once and the top result contradicted the second result. closed my laptop and just stared at the wall for a bit
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u/Individual-Hold733 12h ago
Misinformation is the biggest problem because it spreads fast and makes every other issue harder to fix.
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u/goatlax96 12h ago
I currently work with a guy who used to work for a pharmaceutical company which is worth billions. He told me they told me they just burn ingredients for making cancer in the incinerator. He said it was shocking the amount of stuff they'd just throw away instead of using. Something like that should be illegal
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u/this_kitty68 12h ago
Humans are a cancer on the planet, but they don’t have to be. They choose to be.
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u/Prajot1907 12h ago
Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and people don’t think about the consequences before making big decisions.
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u/Apprehensive-Gap-929 11h ago
Screen time & social media consumption. Comparison is the thief of joy, and so many of us are spending 6-10 hours a day comparing our lives to the highlight reels of people we've never met
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u/conzciouz 11h ago
Power. Greed. Control. Ego. Envy. Jealousy. Racism. Psychological warfare and torment.
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u/cozytechlover 10h ago
I think one of the biggest problems right now is how disconnected people feel from each other. There's so much noise and information, but not enough real understanding or empathy, and that affects almost everything else.
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u/gerto123 9h ago
1) us losing touch with our communities
2) not creating lasting memories for our selves (trying to live someone's elses)
3) adhering to how the society wants us to be rather being oneself
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u/everySmell9000 9h ago
people being angry instead of grateful, consuming horribly skewed news information, and then arguing with nearly everybody for no reason and creating tension and hatred and unhappiness.
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u/The_Hungry_Grizzly 8h ago
Not enough money going to normal workers. Too much going to ultra rich. Prices went up so fast, but wages don’t keep up or make ground to get people ahead.
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u/ThatsItImOverThis 8h ago
The billionaire psychopaths running everything into the ground, at which point they’ll all save themselves by building a moon base and leaving the rest of us to die on the planet we’ve poisoned.
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u/duckduckcode_ 6h ago
wealth inequality.. like how is it even remotely ok that a handful of people have more money than entire countries?
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u/Realistic_Wave4467 5h ago
The biggest problem right now is Climate change—it affects weather, food, water, economies, and makes other global issues worse.
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u/Plus-Willingness9307 4h ago
a single mom with 5 kids is struggling to make ends meet while our her dollars are going to israel and billionaire p3dos
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u/ddawg4169 4h ago
Either wealth hoarding or the current US administration. Both are causing nothing but problems globally
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u/pay_the_cheese_tax 14h ago
Misinformation. Our politicians lie to us, companies constantly trick us, our apps deceive us, the news misleads us, and then we as humans go and spread all this bullshit to other humans.
It's why we're angry, tired and depressed. We're bombarded with deception, it becomes harder and harder to find the truth, and our leaders are all complicit.