Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.

What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.

The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".

This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.

Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?

If I say, that guy is boring, he's inauthentic/poser/wanna-be, in my opinion I've failed that interaction. I am not engaging with him, I label him too mundane.

Yet, every person has genuine authenticity and need for connection, if you're attentive and patient enough to see it.

If you go around being frank and blasting your true opinions and true passions at everyone, you may miss a chance to learn more about them themselves, and move past the "boring" label you're putting, to see the real, struggling, suffering, but inherently interesting person underneath.

Are you able to sit motionless looking at a tree for 3 minutes? Can you read a book for an hour? Can you focus intensely on a work project for 2-3 hours?

If not, you may need more boredom to enhance your connection with "mundane" things. Trying to be interesting/authentic/not boring may lead to cheap thrills and provocative experiences moment by moment, which de-train your focus and attention for those very hard tasks you need/want to do in life.

I'm sure many on this forum have secondary passions, be it music, visual art, writing, or anything else. Yet most of us realized we need to make money, and that those pursuits can be done at a fairly high level in our leisure time.

In fact, declining population could make the housing problem worse, if there's far fewer workers to make the new housing.

Going out to eat? Going on vacations? Sleeping? Your own health? Your finances? Say goodbye to all of that for 5+ years if you have kids, even more if you have a special needs child.

And despite all that, we love them and we want to have them, and probably the vast majority would do so again. And we will have our children to keep us young-at-heart, learning, active, and to help us in old age. Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old, while we'll have the vibrancy of a family life.

The idea of working and playing at the same time is a bit fantastical. It's true you can flow, you can be creative, while working, but that's not play, and for probably >95% of workers, work won't be play. Work may be meaningful and purposeful, but really it pays the bills and provides meaning/purpose.

Play is something we associate with children and puppies/kittens, with games and sports and make-believe. Play is an enjoyable amusement which might mimics real-life tasks and skills in a safe environment. Work is real, and it isn't going to be low-pressure and fun for almost all jobs, otherwise why would they have to pay us to do it?

I'd look at finding true depth in the work you do, so you're finishing projects on-time, with high quality, in a non-distracted way that enhances your meaning/life. Then you use the ample spare time left to play.

It's about wilderness areas where people hope to see pristine nature, and how humans have tramped all over the world including what we now think of as "pristine".

Ask yourself, would you prefer your family members to be under an IRL pimp or run their own OF?

If you look at this realistically, OF is not nearly as morally reprehensible as an IRL pimp.

I will say, I think the product's technical underpinning is not ideal. Instead of just using SQL, they have a proprietary language built in which has similarities to SQL but is much less easy to read and use. For instance a lot is stored in Metadata tables that are many clicks away from the report they're referencing. Also, there are a few cryptic keywords and things specific to WebFocus, which is obviously not that widely used and doesn't have many S.O. posts about it. So you're left staring at some various mysterious keywords or specific-syntax and thinking, do I learn anything more about this than what I need to, since this product is probably not going to last and will end up in the dust-bin like many other proprietary products. And it's just not a very employable skill like SQL.

Overall, I don't like WebFocus, I think Tableau must be a couple notches better. But hey, my org is under-staffed and we don't have the manpower to change systems, so we're stuck with this.