Cyanide & Happiness

2019? Oh... oh dear.

In other news, birth rates are inexplicably plummeting across the globe. Governments remain baffled.

Most people aren't these YT commenters or Twitter megaphones like Donald Trump.

It's an attention amplification mirage. But we've fed the trolls and given them power.

IMO if folks were largely aware of that, they'd be burning down the headquarters of Big Tech, Big Media, stuff like that. Instead, it makes them depressed because it looks like all other humans are mad, and I find that really sad.

One of those comics that only get more depressing as it ages

My son was born in December 2019. Not a day goes by where I don't feel this in my soul. I hate knowing the suffering he is likely to witness or experience so a few can have it all. It equally depresses and infuriates me.

Literally my number one reason not to have kids

Fuck that's a depressing comic

Governments when theres no parental leave, unaffordable childcare, skyrocketing cost of living, no social spaces, and they actively sell out the future yet for some strange reason nobody is having children:

There are lots of children already here with even less support. I know it's not easy in a lot of places, but adoption is a compassionate alternative.

OP: My desire to reproduce outweighed my capacity for foresight!

This here is straight up one of the biggest reasons I do not want a kid. Right now it sure seems like the best thing I could do for my children is not force existence upon them.

2019... The good old times. And then things went bad.

This is why, as a father, you go on a search for the amulet.

Every generation has had to deal with some version of this, either they could see it coming or they got blindsided by something. Not saying that makes it ok, it just happens.

Get a vasectomy, you save on having kids and buying condoms. The only disadvantage is her having to clean up all the creampies.

Littering is seen as more common than it really is in the public perception thanks to all kinds of cynical messaging from industry groups, like, for example, Big Tobacco and the infamous “Crying Indian Ad”.

This messaging has the effect of shifting the blame of environmental devastation away from industry and onto individuals, much like how the fossil fuel industry popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ and shifted the onus of fossil fuel emissions away from the fossil fuel industry and onto individuals.

As for the disgusting types of comments depicted in the next panel of the comic, a great deal of that is generated by bots to divide us. It also doesn’t help things in this particular case that only 1 of the 2 main parties/sides in the world’s most “important” country (important and dominant culturally, economically, etc.) is willing to consider any changes to approaches to widespread availability of guns. Creating division is as easy as having bots go around blaming anything (even victims!) except the relative ease of access to guns in the US.

This comic sadly plays into exactly the kind of thinking that leads to defeatism and broad mistrust. The common person is not, in fact, bad.

In fact, it is instead a relatively small number of psychopaths that perpetuate many of the kinds of problems depicted in this comic. The CEOs of any given Big Oil or Big Tobacco company are almost inevitably psychopaths. And we almost cannot help but continue to give power to these kinds of people. They are, after all, often the only ones who think so highly of themselves and their abilities to even offer to take on a leadership role. Sometimes they crave little more than the power itself. And they are the ones with the most power to steer the directions of messaging towards individual blame and individual misdeeds, rather than towards faith in the common person and blame on the corporations they lead.

In other words, the comic’s author is falling right into the trap of being led to see the world misanthropically. When you think “the problem is people,” instead of “the problem is a few people,” there is very little to do except become depressed and inactive.

To solve many of the world’s biggest problems, we literally just need more of the people who first doubt that they themselves could be a good leader to instead raise their hands, instead of letting only the psychopaths and narcissists raise their hands and rise to power.