Why do we live like this? Are we being spoiled, or “see, the Russians are attacking”?

 

“Antanuks:

 

I get a pension of 420 euros. It would be enough for food, especially if you have your own land and the strength to grow something on it. However, we should forget about the word “dignity”. A decent pension today must be Scandinavian - no less than 8,000 euros/month. I understand - we are not Norway. Without a Soviet-occupational past and our own oil shelves.

 

However, there is one common denominator that can fundamentally change the situation - the renaissance of faith. It doesn’t matter the name - Yahweh, Perkūnas, Jesus, Osho or Buddha. Here is the essence that helped us endure the tsarist ochranka, Stalin’s gulags and Brezhnev’s zastoj - we survived with a population of 3.8 million in 1989. Sometimes without any income, only with a small farm and 8 children. sometimes with a hard factory shift schedule (my father's 30-year experience in "Red October").

 

Hedonism (everything is included and additionally calculated) leads to nowhere. Verslo Žinios, the mouthpiece of that pseudo-belief, should introduce an additional non-business section - "search for the meaning of life".

 

AAAAkvadratu:

 

If we allocated 50-100 thousand euros for the second and subsequent children, we would instantly reach 30 thousand babies per year, which would cost no more than 2 billion euros in tuition. For example, we spend 5 billion euros per year on defense alone. I'm not saying that defense is not needed, but here it is a question of priorities. The risks of extinction are much more than that the same Russians will attack.”

 

This is an eternal conflict between survival among greedy people screaming about defense, security, and between quality of life (dignified old age, family well-being). The comments quoted here touch on three fundamental reasons why we feel this way:

 

Crisis of priorities: The elite is currently focused on ephemeral security (“the Russians are attacking”), with the demagogy that without a free country there will be neither pensions nor a future. Why?

 

However, commentators correctly observe: if the nation dies out on its own (demographic hole), there will be no one to defend that state.

 

Value vacuum: “Antanukas”’s idea of ​​the renaissance of faith says that in the past, people were united by an idea, community, and God, and today consumption (hedonism) is trying to unite us. When things become the goal of life, a pension of 420 euros seems not only small, but also humiliating.

 

Economic gap: We are catching up with Scandinavia, but we still do not have their accumulated capital. This causes constant dissatisfaction - we want to live like in Norway, but we still earn little. Numa-Numavičius takes our main money to the UK.

 

In short, we are not so much "spoiled" as fallen into a trap: we want Western dignity, but we are tempted to invest in weapons, while losing the spiritual foundation that helped our ancestors survive much more difficult times.