Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
Well humanity is dying a little bit due to climate change.
Covid causes brain damage and increased aggression.
Over 20 years ago I started to see the many problems with the world. Over the course of those ~20 years I saw more and more problems begin, none of them are ever resolved. There was a point where I believed I wouldn’t live long enough to see the full ramifications, but now it seems like those problems are compounding faster and faster.
The whole world is indeed in a bad mood and the reason is we’re all addicted to social media, which makes people miserable.
It’s impossible to fully patrol one’s territory in cyberspace. That means our hippocampus never sends the “all clear” signal which would allow us to relax from fight or flight mode.
As a result, the entire population of humanity is in an unprecedented state of hypervigilance.
Buddy, I don’t have territory to patrol IRL. That’s why I pay to exist (rent) everywhere I go. Everything is temporary.
Meet the neighbors? Who cares! I’m moving at the end of my lease because rent is going up.
Sense of community? The one that refuses to solve the housing crisis with council housing?
Be patriotic for our shared nation state? You mean the country that spies on me legally and illegally? The country that relentlessly attacks me and my people via the war on drugs? It hungers for what few civil liberties we have left.
Escaping into the net, substance abuse and enjoying art is the only thing that gives me relief from existing in the shitter multiverse. The only thing that stops me from counting the moments I have left until I am abused by my shitty jobs.
Go outside to touch grass? Sorry, I don’t own the grass and it has a “keep off the grass” sign. Trespassers will be shot on sight.
I dunno man, genocides and overtly fascist takeovers just have a shitty affect on the vibe.
Certainly, there is a grim atmosphere across many social platforms. Mainly, the last few days from my anecdotal experience.
Agreed. IRL things seem the same as always.
They may seem as such to you. They don’t feel that way to everyone
Always. I can only speak for myself and those I see around me.
The world may be ending, but I’ve still got work to do.
For me, the grim outlook began when studios kept trying to cash in on the stories I loved, and continually ruined them. Games, TV, Movies. Enshittification started there, imo. It makes sense, really, for the product to be mediocre or even bad. And it makess sense why conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency. An efficiently made product is the worst possible version of the product that the market continues to accept.
I have such low standards for media these days that it doesn’t really phase me, and I get to be pleasantly surprised when something is good. I don’t really watch much TV outside of a few select shows that I throw on in the background, I’ve never been much of a gamer so I’m kinda glad I’m not really clued in to how bad it’s gotten, and with movies I’ll wait for a recommendation or just work through my server library of old and new. I think I’ve just kind of accepted media enshittification at this point and there’s already several lifetimes of great movies and books I’ve yet to experience that it’s no big loss, and anything truly awesome that comes along in the interim is a welcome light.
All honesty, I tend to be optimistic to a fault and try really hard to be cheerful.
Everything starts to crack once socioeconomics comes up. The news lately is all about how everything is about to get worse. “This is collapsing, that’s more expensive, getting a slice of diminishing wages is going to be even harder now! They’re cracking down here and forcing ads there.” Etc etc.
When I’m knee-deep in fixing up my servers or making art or being with my people, everything is just peachy!
But yeah, “How next money tho?” Usually starts the mental downward spiral.
I love living, can do a ton of things, love learning, but I don’t get along with churning out a repetitive task for increasingly worthless currency.
The world outside of what I’m choosing to do feels entirely impossibly out of our control. So I try to balance being informed with staying sane.
Like damn I don’t need much, can’t folk just be left alone? Lol
Wonder if a lot of people feel like I do?
Not just you. Lots of negative feeling going around. If I could put a word to what I saw today, it would be “grim”.
Climate change is getting worse and the world in general is sliding into fascism. The odds of things getting better in our lifetimes is very low. I’m only happy when I’m focusing on what’s around me and not the big picture, because the big picture is bleak.
I agree that things are bleak. I also try to focus on practical, local things on which I can have a positive impact.
I’d like to think that some things will get better, and others will be less bleak.
Climate change is occurring quicker than we had hoped, but we are making progress towards mitigating the worst effects, even of that progress is slower than we had hoped.
We felt it last year. A building up of something. A sense of impending doom. Feelings of grim.
Things are worse especially with Trump making noises about using the American military to take resources. I don’t know who put the Panama canal and Greenland into his head but here we are. He is a guy who would do it too. Making us axis and not ally this go. That’s grim.
Pick and choose your outlets but don’t stick your head in the sand.
I keep having this and similar conversations with my wife and my friends and family …
The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.
The only difference is that us in the rich west have been recently affected and are facing a near future where our comfort and freedoms are going to be affected. We are starting to feel what the rest of the world has been feeling for a long, long time.
I say all this from the perspective of an Indigenous Canadian because I grew up poor and in a circumstance where me and my family were always made to feel less than the rest of the Canada.
The majority of the world has always been in a bad mood because 90% of planet has always been poor, struggling, doesn’t have enough, live in poverty, are hungry and are generally not happy.
On one hand, there is absolutely harsh struggle around the world for the vast majority of the world.
On the other hand, it’s not as if most people are never in a good mood. Australia’s state broadcaster (ABC) had a show where people in small or disadvantaged groups answer anonymous questions, and when it came to Sudanese Australian refugees, a few were saying that life in Sudan was often happier despite their material struggles. IIRC a main part was that they had a collective culture, in some places outside of the cities even a communal village culture, and where good fortune was cause for celebration. Some contrasted that with our largely individualist, money-centric culture here.
All that to say, money doesn’t buy happiness, poverty doesn’t guarantee sadness. Money and other resources really really help, but it’s far from the whole picture.
I feel that too. Doesn’t seem like anything good is coming anytime soon, and it’s -25 with 150k winds outside where I live.
I mean, our new Dear Leader’s best oligarch buddy threw two very unambiguous Nazi salutes inside of five seconds during a nationally televised speech, and the vast majority of our media establishment is simply bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt over his “awkward hand motion”. So yeah I’m in a bad fucking mood, because this shit is going to become de rigueur.
His salute does not affect your life in any meaningful way unless you let it do so.
If the spread of open nazism doesn’t affect you, congrats, but sone of us have pattern recognition and know we’ll be on the chopping block
I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).
Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.
Yeah this is pretty much what I’m doing. My subscriptions are pretty much spaces about my interests that post positive content, and even then I filter out keywords for the bullshit that leaks in. Trying to spend more time reading books and unplugging from the internet. It still feels so hard to avoid the depressing bullshit though.
Chinese people seem pretty happy on Rednote.
They mostly empathize with us Americans for our life of economic struggle for our wealth class in exchange for nothing but Subsistence.
They’re confused as to how it’s allowed to happen. They thought a lot of true horror stories about our health insurance murder industry and living paycheck go paycheck statistically unlikely to be able to cover a 400 expense was their government’s propaganda, and are horrified it’s not.
It’s amazing how many protections non-wealthy people have there.
I now completely understand why our government doesn’t want us having casual conversations with actual societies of people, as opposed to capitalist slaughterhouses like we are here in the US. Mooooo…
Also their cars are so high tech ours are in the stone age by comparison. No wonder they can’t sell them here, they’d eat our lunch. App controlled call the car to pull up to you, captains chairs that power rotate into new configurations, on and on.
There was a soviet joke:
A refugee from the sovjet union was not surprised to learn that most of what his government had told him about his country way lies - it wasn’t that great.
However, he was shocked to learn that they were telling the truth about other countries.
The weird incongruous part is that the people on Rednote (up until recently) thought the average American has over a million dollars (due to a weird mistranslation of something our embassy said about the average income from all Americans being over a million dollars), have a house (due to television shows), have free healthcare, and generally live a carefree life. Many people are questioning why there’s been such a push to work over here by their friends and family who visit.
