Why are people so shit? Part 1.

Why are people so shit? Part 1.

Once or twice a week after I’ve picked my kids up from school I hang out with a bunch of parents while the kids play in the bush. 

One afternoon while chatting about ideas to support a family in the community, I went off on my soap box about how I want things to be in the world. 

How I want to live in a world where everybody has enough. 

One of the parents is less vocal. But he has a presence that when he speaks, I’m drawn to listen. 

He seems like someone who knows a lot – not just intellectually, but with his full self – knowledge that is lived. 

And he said ‘it won’t work because people are shit.’  

I could feel my whole body soften deeper into gravity. Because those words felt so true. 

Simple yet true. 

People are shit. 

Because we can do what we like to defend the good humans. Protect our own identities of how good we are. And tell the good stories. 

But as a human race, I felt the truth of it. 

We’re shit (myself included).

I’m not sharing this to fob off possibility. And I’m also not here to bypass another truth. 

I'm here to write about why I think we're so shit to begin with, and perhaps what we might be able to do about it.

To be honest, I think we’re shit because care has been slowly stripped away from us over the last number of centuries.

Care has been eliminated from our skillset. So gradually that it almost feels unreal. So gradually that many aren’t even aware it’s happened.

You see, for most of human history, care such as tending to the sick, the young, the dying, the community and the land, used to simply be part of what it meant to be human.

Everyone participated in making the world a better place for all people – because we needed each other for our survival. We needed the Earth, the plants and the animals too.

Then things began to change.

The changes were so layered and complex that I can’t pretend to know where exactly it began. But here's a simplified version of a few of them.

Factories and formal employment came along, leading to a restructure of human values.

Money, growth, convenience and productivity came to the top of those values. While slow, relational, unglamourous work was pushed down to the bottom. Necessary, but not recognised or celebrated. 

Care became gendered through a reorganisation of who did what and where. And that reorganisation concentrated social, emotional, economic and political power in one direction, and unpaid, invisible labour in another. 

Throughout the industrial revolution, the family unit restructured. Previously woven into a web of support and community, nuclear families became more separate. While men were working long shifts outside of the house, the woman ended up carrying care and tending alone – no longer having the web of support around her. 

Now, when the family unit struggles, it feels like we are failing or not coping, never questioning whether the structure itself is asking too much. Nor who it is designed to serve.

Colonisation fractured something even deeper. 

Many Indigenous and non-Western cultures held rich, communal understandings of care – for bodies, community and Country. What was lost wasn’t just land or language. It was entire ways of knowing how to be in relation to one another and the land. 

Then care got a price tag.

The move toward institutional care and education filled real gaps that community and family could no longer hold. But commercialised care brought a distortion: care you pay for became more legitimate than care you simply give. Tending was assigned a dollar value. While the  relational, reciprocal and informal became harder to justify in a culture increasingly oriented around transaction, power and money.

And when women moved into paid work across the 20th century – a genuine and hard-won expansion of freedom – care didn’t get redistributed. It got left behind. The cultural conversation moved on without ever asking: who is doing the tending now?

None of this is about blame. These were complex, layered shifts – many of them driven by real needs, real hopes, real hungers for something better. And the truth is that some things did get better. But many things did not. And some – got worse.

(In Part 2 I talk about: what's still alive underneath all of this, and where I think we go from here.)

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