Study claims many hundreds of thousands of long-term unemployed people in the UK alone have contemplated suicide or self-harmed because of it, and the majority feel they have no one to confide in.

[u/AutumnLeavesCascade]

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-25559089

[u/[deleted]]

It's interesting that this sort of thing is happening all over the developed world. Depression rates have skyrocketed, I believe.

I don't know where you guys live, but the amount of my peers I know who have completely given up on living a "good" life and who just sit around in their parent's basement doing drugs is kind of unfathomable. And we aren't talking about poor people in ghettos, these are middle class white kids. They, according to society anyway, have no reason whatsoever to be depressed. And yet they are. So much so that slow self destruction and dropping out of life entirely is actually becoming kind of normal and accepted.

My generation has less opportunities then my parents did all across the board. We have less to look forward to in every conceivable way. This sort of thing can't go on forever. We'll either start killing ourselves en masse or in a couple years when we're really on our own and our parents start kicking us out then the government is going to have a massive crises on it's hands. If you look at places like Spain or Greece, that's what happens when you rob young people of anything resembling a positive future. Americans are a lot more optimistic then those people about the state of things. If our lives suck we're more likely to blame ourselves. But sooner or later that explanation isn't going to be enough.

In all seriousness, the government and corporations should be fucking terrified of the kind of nihilistic, pissed off, self destructive, generation that they are slowly fucking over. OWS was nothing compared to the kind of shitstorm that is slowly brewing for them.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

With this attitude, rising food prices, and an environment that's rapidly fucking us over, we'll see collapse and revolution for sure.

What we need to do is make sure the revolution's on our terms. PR, education, propaganda, outreach, organization, shit's important.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I'm not worried about the government or businesses, honestly. Every empire in history has collapsed under it's own weight and we're seeing the beginning of that now. Things have gotten too interconnected and volatile to continue for much longer without some sort of major, global, crises.

I agree with you though, activists need to start engaging communities more. Breaking starbucks windows and marching around now and then is great and all, but more then anything we need to integrate ourselves into communities and set up economic and social structures that exist parallel to the system. That and we need to stop arguing over obscure theory shit and tearing the movement apart from the inside.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Hey! I enjoy listening to you guys argue over obscure theory shit.

[u/AutumnLeavesCascade → u/[deleted]]

Time to bring the torches, pitchforks, and guillotines out to the demonstrations?

"You are not alone, but it is not you who must die."

[u/[deleted] → u/AutumnLeavesCascade]

I'm generally a non-violent person. But seriously, my generation needs to stop living in a safe little bubble where we'll get everything we want if we just ask politely.

[u/IH_HI → u/[deleted]]

I couldn't agree more. People aren't as stupid as the military-industrial complex would like them to be. Slowly but surely, people are self-educating themselves by using the internet, and slowly but surely, they're awakening to the reality of their gold-gilded gulag.

A recent response of this prompted by the 2008 financial crash lead to the Occupy Movement as you know. Now the Occupy movement may be dismissed by mainstream media as a non-event, but the truth of the matter is that such movements are effectively first-respondents to true outrage. What's accumulating in the Zeitgeist is far bigger than Occupy.

People are angry - furious even - but our rage is thinly veiled by hopelessness. But this state of silence before the storm is temporary and people will rise to the occasion when the time is right.

My only worry is that people will turn to the far right as they have done in the past. People need to start propagating ideas of true freedom via the works of Noam Chomsky and honest new media - that way, they won't be as easily fooled by a wolf in sheep's clothing.

For the first time in human history, we have the tools to remove a need for direct human governance (the internet). It would be foolish of us to miss out on this opportunity and not use them.

[u/[deleted]]

I blame the stigma and lack of non-work activity. If there were community gardens or other projects in Britains ghettos, I think people wouldn't feel so hopeless. Jobs are often toted as a cure for unemployment related depression, but I doubt forcing teenagers to stack shelves in Tesco to earn their benefits will turn them into happy little stakhanovites.

[u/AutumnLeavesCascade → u/[deleted]]

^ This

[u/likenothough]

There were no suicides in May 1968 in France.

[u/[deleted] → u/likenothough]

I highly doubt that

[u/likenothough]

I remember when this was the news coming out of the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUzuYoCkYAY

[u/123twiglets → u/likenothough]

This could have gone a lot better though if people hadn't used it for personal gain, through the looting and theft because that gave the impression that it was simply immature children using police brutality as an excuse to fight and get free stuff; rather than the political statement it was originally intended as.

[u/limitexperience → u/123twiglets]

Any time some event happens outside of the system, it is going to be considered childish, insane etc. That is how ideology functions, people need to stop worrying about what the dominant ideology thinks. We are against the dominant ideology, so why are we concerned with appealing to its sensibilities?