Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
People have been trying to ignore the world so they can get their high for the last several decades to the point where one the largest companies advertising on the internet is one where you pay people who label themselves as “councilors” with barely training to gaslight you hopefully to feel better and people know brand name drugs for helping them feel better and suggest them to others if you are wealthy enough. And been struggling to hold onto that sense of normalcy at all costs of the world.
And all of that avoidance meant jack-shit when the real world changed anyways and it didn’t just stay the same.
People likely feel lied to and that miserableness spreads like a virus of selfish people doing anything to prove themselves better than others at the cost of others.
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.
every day that tub of elemental lead looks more and more delicious
Mercury. Be mad and dance at your own parties while everyone else loses their head.
I dunno man, genocides and overtly fascist takeovers just have a shitty affect on the vibe.
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.
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?
I feel this. Though I don’t tend to be optimistic in general about the state of my little place in the world , it definitely gets worse when I think of the big picture stuff that I have even less control over. I really wish I knew how to help, but I guess all I can do is relate and hope that you’re doing okay. At the risk of sounding insincere and acting weirdly intimate to a stranger online, we might never see each other in our lives, but we are fighting and suffering a reality that was forced upon us together. Hopefully things get better, but even if it doesn’t, we aren’t alone in this.
Hey friend, I really appreciate it. :)
That sincerity and love can change the world, and you’re all the more courageous for it. Even if things suck, I’m glad we’re not alone and there’s people like you here by our side, figuratively or otherwise. :)
I always come back to a few sources of timeless wisdom in the face of all this nonsense. A lot of it found in the Bible, which I know won’t get great reactions thanks to current events.
As a Christian anarchist, I’m also trying to do what I can to combat against the most evil cult of greed, hate, bloodshed, and misery that has become the American state-sponsored religion. It’s a lot of grief and pain to watch the Gospel of selfless love be trampled and peddled by fascists, and the reactionary hatred of it from the oppressed in turn, who’ve only ever known its perversion against themselves.
But I digress. Here’s a some wisdom I keep returning to, etched in my soul. Perhaps it will empower you as well. :)
I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
-Ephesians 6:12
“Do not pray for an easy life; pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”
-Bruce Lee
And lastly , I’ve posted it many times before but damnit if this doesn’t remind us why we’re still here in the face of all this madness:
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
–Samwise Gamgee, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (film version)
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.
Not just you. Lots of negative feeling going around. If I could put a word to what I saw today, it would be “grim”.
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.
Seems like mostly just people in the west because western world order is now visibly collapsing.
America is not the Western world.
It does, however, control a lot of the Western World’s media, and there’s a clear agenda to make people frightened.
It’s not just America. Look at the political climates in a lot of Europe, and there’s economic and housing crisis in much of the west, especially the anglosphere.
The EU countries had a chance to cleanly decouple from the USA and mostly continue being neocolonialist and subsidised in the same ways, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Probably could’ve corrected it with the correct diplomacy or just looking the other way. Now the integration with the USA has been strengthened and all the messaging needs to be slowly undone and pivoted if we don’t want to sink together. And even then no one will be able to trust us. Trust matters more for financial and service industries than it does for manufacturing economies.
Maybe USA in their stupidity will try to cut us loose, and we can be forced into a miraculous late pivot just in time. Israel’s genocide crusade was a perfect excuse to aggressively decouple, since by Oct 2023 it was obvious USA lost. But we didn’t take it, getting to be Nazi’s again was too nice a treat I guess. So it’s perfectly possible USA starts exploiting us worse, and we just decide to cope with a lowered vassal tier status rather than actually clawing back some sovereignty. And the obvious result of that of course is more allies and members will want their own sovereignty enforced, and will break with or be pushed out of the EU-unity, which will make the remaining partners even weaker.
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
