While there is progress in certain areas and certain things are better now than in previous historical times, the need to look out for the downside of various processes is undeniable and possibly more urgent than ever, for the simple fact that power becomes dangerous without developing one’s responsibility accordingly.
No wonder some of the mental or real-life pictures of the contemporary world can leave us feeling… dystopian. These can include the massive amount of non-nature-friendly trash being produced and dumped all around the world, or attempts to imagine the implications of AI on our near future if we don’t take the necessary precautions to play it safe.
People online stepped up, trying to raise awareness, answering one Redditor’s question: “What’s something that is accepted as normal, but is really dystopian when you think about it?”
More info: Reddit
#1
Jailing people for stealing food while throwing away tons more every day.
Image credits: Vegan_Harvest
#2
All of those “Feel good stories” about people working extra super duper hard just to barely scrape by.
“Kids make business to help another disabled child buy a wheelchair”
“Teacher runs out of PTO days fighting cancer so the whole school district started to donate sick days”
“Man walks 15 miles for a job interview, community raises money for a bicycle.”
Image credits: Eyruaad
#3
Privatized-for-profit prisons, healthcare, and education.
Corporations and foreign entities buying up all of our land and housing.
Lack of Congressional term limits and self-oversight of Congress and Scotus.
2A absolutism.
Forced sex, forced birth, forced sterilization, and the medical community treating women as if being female is a “condition” while using male bodies as the standard.
Outlawing the act of collecting rainwater, while charging for the amount of runoff attributed to your property (my city has both of these).
Image credits: phoebeluco
#4
Advertiser friendly language in daily life. Like people getting used to not being able to say words like “dead” on Tiktok because advertisers don’t like it, so then you see a bunch of people saying words like “unalive” in real life.
Image credits: Foxlikebox
#5
Subscription for everything
Image credits: NotToast2000
#6
Corporations being considered people and having more rights than real human beings.
Image credits: anon
#7
Claiming drag queens are child predators, and ignoring all the abuse going on in the church, cause that, and all the new laws being proposed…seems kind of dystopian.
Image credits: Spankywzl
#8
Homelessness in countries with enough money to keep it from happening
Image credits: AlthorsMadness
#9
Ads everywhere you look 24/7
Image credits: chopsthedrummer
#10
Working full-time for a wage that won’t support a family.
A family?? How about 1 person.
Image credits: Famous_Bit_5119
#11
The existence of billionaires whilst so many people are living in poverty. Justified cause they supposedly “work harder” or “earned it”.
Image credits: intellectkills
#12
The way women have control legislated away from their own bodies. Not even just abortion, but abortion laws that prevent women from being able to get medical care for their own conditions. Women who have to get close enough to death to get treatment, regardless of their present suffering or other long term effects. Prostitution laws. Certainly parts of them make sense but why is it illegal for some stay at home mom to give handies for spending money at home while the kids are in school?
Image credits: Melvolicious
#13
Reality TV.
Image credits: Muadib333
#14
The amount of trash we humans produce. How distanced we are from the natural world.
Image credits: biscaya
#15
Factory farming. Utterly horrific.
Image credits: Singly-Errancy143
#16
The cost of rent. Or mortgages. Or the wealth gap. And the way minimum wage was ignored for decades while the top 1% took higher and higher raises and bonuses while paying very little to no tax. Trickle down economics.
Image credits: Graceland1979
#17
Health insurance.
Image credits: Rare_Cranberry_9454
#18
Anti-intellectualism.
Image credits: Potential-Ostrich-82
#19
American burial traditions. Spend thousands of dollars to preserve the body, pack it in an expensive box and bury it, sometimes in a concrete vault. To keep it from naturally decomposing? Why?
Image credits: kateinoly
#20
Working until you’re in your late sixties when 50 billionaires control most of the wealth in an entire country.
Image credits: bkornblith
#21
The fact that we cannot do much on the internet without consenting cookies.
Image credits: icsulescu98
#22
The way big companies have conditioned us to say things we pay for are free.
“You can watch it for free on netflix”
“It’s free if you purchase this bundle”
“They keep updating the game, the next DLC is free!”
Anytime you go to say something is free, try saying “it’s included” short for “included in the base price”
Image credits: Altimely
#23
The complete lack of privacy we have in 2023. People can record you in public for their TikTok, and everyone will say “BUT ITS LEGAL!!”
Image credits: cruelsummersadness
#24
Running out of sick days, so you work sick.
Image credits: inmatenumberseven
#25
Militarization of local and state law enforcement.
Image credits: Strong_Somewhere_985
#26
Normalization of debt
Image credits: Atotallyrandomname
#27
Food and housing insecurity in a world in which other people are billionaires.
Image credits: tangtheconqueror
#28
Having to work more than one job.
Image credits: DanMontie
#29
The rhetoric and life behind social media. It’s totally a landscape that determines your worth by how others feel about you. It’s kinda scary the more you see its use.
Image credits: GabeBlue180
#30
Homeless people
Refugee boats and sinking
Anyone anywhere being hungry
Bombing civilians
Image credits: buckwurst
#31
Obesity – everywhere… causing death, deceases and low quality lifes and btw impacting environment badly.
#32
Huge corporation and how much control they have over mere mortals.
Image credits: Boris-Lip
#33
Tying healthcare to employment
Image credits: heyodi
#34
Cameras everywhere.. “1984”.
Image credits: CommissionOk9233
#35
Credit scores.
Image credits: raytaylor
#36
US ‘healthcare’
#37
Censorship.
Image credits: ifonlythiswasreal403
#38
Prevalence of social media in daily life
Image credits: panic2u
#39
Don’t even know where to start… but when thinking about how much of the meat we eat daily is actually produced and how the animals we eat are actually treated is really sick to think about.
Also adding how normal it is to buy things “made in china” or other countries where it’s so clear that the people who produce our c**p is practically living as slaves on huge factories where they don’t even earn enough money or get paid at all to feed themselves, and often die early but in a very slow and painful way…
#40
Working at all just to have shelter is dystopian. Whats even gonna happen when all the jobs are done by robots? Yeah more tech related jobs will open up. Whats going to happen to everyone else? Either the governments starts giving people free shelter or everyones going to be homeless.
#41
40 hour work week
#42
The News.
Image credits: Muadib333
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