One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for… well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.

I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.

The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.

Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.

Think about how many joooooooooooooobs this guy made.

Don’t worry, I’m sure his assets will be distributed among the poor and starving people in the world.

Right?

I haven’t looked into the methodology but I would wager off the top of my head that it has to do with the large migrant population in California. (you’ve probably seen a little bit of news about it) California being a highly populated, coastal state with a booming economy means it has more of everything. It has the most problems and conversely it has the most solutions, the most high-tech, progressive ideas and industries across the street from homeless tent-towns.

Dreams may or may not have anything to do with reality, but how you interpret your own dreams upon waking is absolutely grounded in the reality of your own mental state. A lot of people have dreams like this where they want to do the thing that’s fun but something gets in the way and we go “haha wild that dreams are always like that” and we don’t dwell on it.

If you’re mentally unhealthy, have wrecked self-esteem, or battling depression, anxiety, other issues, you’re probably going to find a lot more meaning from very small things than someone healthier. These kinds of things are a wake-up-call that you need better self-care, and that can include just learning to not ruminate on your feelings.

It’s not about “her” because “she” doesn’t exist.

This is about self-esteem, not sex or consent. It’s not even about his dream, because plenty of people have dreams where they don’t get what they want. It’s about how he views himself. I’m confused how this post is like, 3-dozen comments about consent and relationships when it’s one kid viewing himself through… himself.

It was his dream. She’s not real. She is a reflection of his own subconscious.

I’m happy it helps you and the things you do.

I’m still not sure what it’s “great” at other than a few minutes of hilarious entertainment until you realize it’s just predictive text with an eerie amount of data behind it.

It’s very hard to see past the marketing, the social media and the fakeness that we swim in every day to realize that “average” is exceptional when it comes to people you have connection with, and realistic is beautiful when you’re happy with someone.

Very hard to pass this message on to porn-addicted boys right now, part of why it’s hard to talk sense into this current generation of man-o-sphere babies who rather be helpless victims of progressive politics than admit they’re just horny kids who need to talk to real people more and get a handle on their rumination.

Welcome to being old, fellow oldie. How’s oldness olding up for you.

You don’t sell books to teenage boys and 20-somethings by telling them they need to be more appreciative of small blessings, not when they’re so horny that they can’t think straight. You gotta sell them the idea that they can embrace all the same toxic traits that are making them miserable, but with a branding that sounds legitimate.

Most young dudes who subscribe to “stoicism” think it means getting a square jaw from the square jaw store and then not showing happiness about anything. Like they already do, but now with self-help terminology backing it.

I’d love to see a new movement where guys learn to express overwhelming joy at small things in life and can be genuine with each other about literally anything rather than making every moment together the Sarcasm Olympics.

Lost everything in my life at one point, started over.

Now I live by post-apocalypse rules for happiness:

Roof? Check. Food? Check. Not bleeding? Hell yeah, gonna be a good day.

Isolated incidents of ignorance are common, but I have seen a clear shift on a larger scale. There are a lot of statistics that back up a larger-scale decline in cognitive abilities in Americans in particular.

A lot of people start thinking real fast when they have to face the consequences of their actions.

Our population only “thinks” when they’re struggling, trying to overcome an obstacle,

I’m not talking about my isolated incident, I’m noticing a larger issue, isolated incidents are becoming more common, that’s what I wrote out.

I think I’m more forgiving if it’s literal kids, like teenagers and younger, at least they have the excuse of not having fully formed brains yet and are always distracted anyway, any generation.

My worry is the people I referenced in my anecdotal lament are well into adulthood, and it’s not isolated. I clearly remember a time when things were different. Everyone is acting like distracted teenagers through conversations, business calls, work appointments and using services. When your primary view of the world is through the lens of the broad internet, it can be easy to miss because there is the slimmest barrier of entry to get to a site like “Lemmy” but now most average internet users just scroll the home-screen on their phone or use social media apps that aggregate content. We’re at a 20% functional illiteracy rate for the US and this should be some kind of alarm that goes off and locks the entire country down when seen in at the same time as a 500% increase in reported "air rage incidents."

We’re heading for a zombie apocalypse.

My less cheeky advice for not doing it, is that it’s also very dusty there, and leaving water pooled on the floor anywhere basically just makes thin layers of dust/skin concrete that build up over time, it will be a gross pain to clean someday and will provide a nice little starter-ecosystem that holds moisture better.

It’s all fun and games until you see your first monster scuttle out from under there during a monsoon season.

I have a relative, full grown adult, they threw away a big-gulp cup almost entirely filled with ice into my trash. I do not have industrial trash-bags, I am not a mall, we do not have wheeled bins to collect solid and fluid waste at the end of the day. I have flimsy dollar-store trash can liners, because like most people, I am but a human of limited means.

I grabbed the cup and asked them why they did that. They stared at me without a hint of recognition or understanding. I pressed.

“The cup full of ice, why did you throw it away in the trash? The sink is two feet away.”

Still puzzled. “So? it’s just ice.”

“WHAT IS ICE MADE OF?”

They shrugged. I sighed and let it go.

This story doesn’t end there though. Because it led me to the most depressing epiphany of my adult life, which is that people broadly are not thinking. And I don’t mean it in an edgy “I’m smarter than everyone” way, because I realized I am equally unthinking about a vast number of things, it’s just that most people run on autopilot through their entire day, their entire week, their entire lives. You can be very, very smart and educated, and still not think.

So what is thinking then? It’s conscious narrative exploration of current events in one’s head, using language, using questions, using tools to rapidly explore the world around you as you move through it. I realized that I do that constantly (and that’s also considered being on the spectrum.) It’s why I don’t throw full cups of liquid into other people’s trash bags, but it’s also why I’m miserable and overthink everything and have severe anxiety. No filter, no autopilot.

Our population only “thinks” when they’re struggling, trying to overcome an obstacle, and for most of us, our obstacles are so abstract and hard to quantify that we just ride through our days. Capitalism has fueled an incentive to seek comforts and conveniences, so the vast majority of our day is in pursuit of comfort and conveniences, so we can stop thinking. The reward we seek is also our doom.

If your default response to things on the floor is to kick them out of sight, then you probably have those worse issues.

Ooh ooh, I want to escalate this thread into entirely new levels of unrealistic pedantry by talking about both hydrogen atoms and our own neurology and perceptions.