Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
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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.
Now playing Nine Inch Nails - Every Day Is Exactly The Same
New NIN tour coming. Not much but its something
For me, the grim outlook began when studies 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.
conservatives are so obsessed about efficiency
They say they are, but their actions are the opposite.
Our wealth is taken, no one does anything.
Our health is taken, no one does anything.
Our privacy is taken, no one does anything.
Our voices are taken, no one does anything.
Our citizenships are taken, no one does anything.
The reason is apathy, which feeds inability, which feeds apathy, which feeds inability to do anything.
When our lives are taken, most people will be both ultimately unable and unwilling to do anything.
Even if people don’t know it outright, they feel it.
More than this, we feel a disappointment and a shame in our bones that can’t be shaken off because it is that outrageous and primal fear of losing anything more that drives our inaction, and so we feel ourselves to be cowards at our very core.
This is what grinds away at our souls daily.
When you eventually decide to do something, you will see you are no longer apathetic or unable. Your fears will begin to heal, and in this way it will save your soul. This is the power of courage. It is something you have to make for yourself, but hope is what drives it and hope is given.
I think apathy is a part of it, but its not that people shrug and arent moved by whats happening. They dont have anything meaningful or tolerable they can do about anything
Yes, I suppose I could have worded it better, but what I intend to say is that because people can do seemingly nothing (are prevented, or feel as though they will find no meaningful result from their effort), they figure there is no reason to try to do anything in the first place.
I don’t mean to say that they shrug anything off or are not moved. Quite the opposite actually.
Username checks out
You may be right, but I’m not sure which comparisons you are making specifically and am interested to hear what they are if you are interested in explaining them to me.
Honestly it was just a vibes thing. Golden because I agree with you and think it’s an important perspective, and zealot because of your almost religious manner of speaking. You’d make a good orator.
I see, thank you!
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.
My coworker said to me today that all the news outside of the US is calling us Nazi America and this goes hand in hand with my own international news reading experience in the last day. I think everyone is acknowledging how dumb we look and how it affects them?
As someone from “outside the US”: It isn’t much better elsewhere. Italy has a fascist government, France is fucking up everything, Sweden has a governemnt depending on a borderline fascist party, the Netherlands has borderline fascists as part of the government, in Germany open fascists poll at 20% as the 2nd most popular party (elections are next month), Georgia is on the brink of civil war, Korea is in a utterly weird crisis/coup mode, in the middle east we are having a genocide happening, Sudan is in chaos, and so on and on.
On the bright side: Things appear to be somewhat okay in Spain and Belgium seems to have a somewhat half-working government.
Belgian here, we have a working Flemish and Wallon regional governement, as well as for the Flemish (is same as régional) and French and German speaking communities’ governements, but the Brussels region and federal aren’t getting anywhere. It’s only been 227 days tho… ETA: radical right was almost largest party in Flanders, and the ´libéral’ party in Wallonia won with a radical right agenda
Ah okay, I thought this Caretaker government turned into a somehat working stopgap. Okay, so, everyone, ignore my comment on Belgium. :)
Spain’s unemployment rate is 12.29% so not that great there.
Sounds about right. My wife has friends abroad that have been calling and asking if everything is alright, then start the questions of how we let this happen, why don’t we do anything about it, etc. And I’ll be honest, I do feel pretty helpless at the moment and very uneasy about the next period of time. I’ve been reading quite a bit about WWII and how Germany got into their situation, and almost too much if it parallels. Most of the population was sick of the status quo and wanted change, those who spoke up and tried pointing certain things out were labeled as worrying lunatics, and most of society was too ignorant to care until it was too late. I mean, what the hell is an individual to do? I could grab my rifle and take to the streets, and immediately get gunned down by cops, or start writing letters that will pretty just get me added to a list at this point.
Well they didn’t have any past government examples to use as a warning. News and communication back then was also much more limited.
I could grab my rifle and take to the streets
They literally had street battles with armed communists and ww1 veterans fighting each other. The average person was so horrified of living in a war zone that they voted for any party who could stop it.
Delete Facebook and hit the gym
Leave your phone at home.
Considering most other countries are voting in right-wing governments, sounds like they’re in the process of “letting it happen” as well.
No doubt there’s a major push globally to descend into authoritarianism, arguably under the auspice that people are fed up with capitalism and voting for something different. But it’s hard to convince billions of people that the real root is a handful of billionaires playing Pinky and the Brain. We’ll just have to see, unfortunately.
You’d think the three billionaires standing behind Trump at his inauguration would be a bit of a clue.
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I’m reading about the Nicaraguan fascist takeover because I already know enough about WW2 that I wanted to extend from the data I already get. I recommend Victoria Gonzalez’s “Before the Revolution” - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/abs/victoria-gonzalezrivera-before-the-revolution-womens-rights-and-rightwing-politics-in-nicaragua-18211979-university-park-pa-penn-state-university-press-2011-pp-xxviii224-6495-hb/D8272AB5737CA6237F2A67CD5B4EC444
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.
It helps me to remember that informed voters 50-70 years ago were people who read the papers. Not even regularly, just those who knew what was going on in the world on a regular basis. It is not normal or healthy to have a constant barrage of news and input - and more than that it’s not wrong to take a break from it. I had to learn that the hard way, that it’s okay to take a break, it doesn’t make you a bad person, that online is making you anxious. I folded in on myself, I had panic attacks, I couldn’t function - and I got help. That help helped me realize that I don’t have to shoulder this alone, I do not have to keep watching and listening. I’m informed, I know what’s going on, I know what happened today - but that doesn’t mean I’m going to turn my filters off either.
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.
It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.
What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions
Don’t know why you were downvoted but you’re absolutely right. We thought we were moving in the right direction, only to have the foundations blown out from under us.
Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.
To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.
Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.
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.
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
You recognize patterns by observing long-term trends, not by overreacting to whatever most outrageous news headline you see right now
Hey what happened last time nazis got big
Why don’t you tell me what the long-term trend from 2015 until now has yielded?
Spoiler alert: it’s fascism.
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 don’t know who put the Panama canal and Greenland into his head
Seriously, it feels like he just crawled out of his basement full of bizarre obsessions.
Not just you. Lots of negative feeling going around. If I could put a word to what I saw today, it would be “grim”.
I dunno man, genocides and overtly fascist takeovers just have a shitty affect on the vibe.
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.
wouldn’t you believe it, there’s a tub of mercury RIGHT NEXT to the lead!
please don’t tell the EPA
Rent is due in 11 days
God how I hate that I don’t know if that’s a diffuse model or by an actual artist. And we’re just at the start of this!
Thanks for sourcing it! I found it a long time ago and it definitely was not on Instagram when I found it.
Figured it represented the black dog of death, but it really does feel like this fucker is chasing me through time as my rent bill.
Month after month. Day after day. Every day, I run and run. But one day I won’t be fast enough, and it will catch me. And then I will be homeless (again).
Nice. Insta is blocking me though :/
Oof dat ui on mobile
Does matter tho?
What is Guts doing to that poor man
Gutting rent outta poor folk.
Idk, some leftist people (including minorities) are energized and motivated, so it’s important not to get stuck in some weird self-defeating trap. Political up and downs happen every generation. Don’t fall for the doomer BS, it’s important to keep following through with your personal goals and persevere. Find a community and volunteer, take care of each other.
Ultimately people should seek to close gaps with others, and try to find common ground, while acknowledging that there are some values which cannot be compromised, like sacrificing someone’s humanity and (personal/psychological) safety.
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?
oh yeah I certainly do. I mean even the churning would not be so bad if there was any indication it would end.
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)
