No Stupid Questions

By avoiding social media and living my life through memes and video games.

Running on hope isn't sustainable in this world, you gotta run on spite!

Study of history.

People have been prophesying the end times for millennia now, for this reason or that reason. I think that ultimately they just don't like the basic fact that change of some sort or another is inevitable in the world, it will not remain static and no system or institution will last forever. This does not result in any concrete end, however.

To quote Morpheus, "I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me."

There's also a fair bit of profit-driven exaggeration in just how bad things really are in certain arenas. Bad news makes good clickbait, good/neutral news less so. So the ratio of bad to good news we receive is not actually representative of the full picture of what is happening in the world.

Find a small corner of the world you can improve and focus on that. Can only effect what you can. Not worth worrying about the other stuff.

As hokey as it sounds 🤷‍♂️

Over the past few weeks, I realized that I wasn’t reading the news to “stay informed,” I was reading it because I was bored. As a form of entertainment, it’s pretty awful. 99% of what I read will have no direct impact on me or my family, and just sitting there and worrying about it without doing anything to fix it serves nobody.

Also, I’ve learned to be skeptical of basically every headline good or bad. I saw a headline this week about how upset Trump supporters were with his cabinet picks. Comments in the thread were talking about leopards eating faces. The article was a collection of 8 tweets from supporters showing disapproval.

This news site was just preying on people’s hopes and making a story out of absolutely nothing.

So I started focusing on some personal hobbies and have tried to re-teach myself how to focus by reading some long form fiction.

Honestly? I have no idea. Probably spite. Why should I kill myself? It's the world that sucks.

Donald Trump will die (don’t care if from natural causes or not) at some point in the near future. Just want to be alive to celebrate.

There's still a bunch of kindness around. There's good food to be eaten and culture to be consumed. There's drinks to be had and friends to be made. Dances to learn and skills to master.

There's a lot of things to be hopeful about, aside from the whole everything going to shit thing. And if you can brighten up people's lives by doing it, you might even contribute to the world going slightly less to shit.

I think it's time to recalibrate and focus more on the closer things. Doesn't mean one should ignore the world, but we're not fixing it by stressing out, doom-scrolling, and posting about it online either. We tried.

My Factorio engineer can't keep the thing going without me.

I deleted all my social media the day after the election, except for my lemmy account. Mostly because I forgot about it. Now I just read a few news headlines and solve a crossword every day. And WHOA - talk about having bountiful free time now. It’s kinda scary.

Am I less stressed? Meh, maybe a bit. But I’ve decided I’m going to find beauty and amusement in the utter self destruction we are about to witness. I’m going to stand over here and watch the fire while I drink my beer in peace.

I keep hoping that everything is exaggerated and it won't be that bad. That he'll be out in 4 years and not become a dictator with no more term limits.

My dogs. I stagger their ages so that I'll always have at least one and thus would feel too guilty to ever kill myself.

Jack Smith dropped the charges without prejudice so they can be re-filed the second he leaves office.

What else are we supposed to do?

Edit: that's a rhetorical question, don't come at me enumerating the alternatives

Easy. The world isn't ending. Ignore the doomers. Problem solved.

What keeps you going? Why do you still get up and go do what needs to be done when the world seems to be ending around us? For me it's my family , my own goal like playing gta 6 (even I don't think I will play) but for me big reason I have friends I like to talk with them and enjoy with them. Because nobody like loneliness even iam introvert guy I still like to share my thoughts with others and knowing thier thoughts.i think it's enough for me keep going .I wanna suggest you to search about absurdism or watch the movie everything everywhere all at once .

I don't have any. I'm just taking care of my family until I run out of living relatives to give a shit about, then I'm out. Peace.

Touching grass. It's important to remember that the entire world isn't online and the world isn't as dire as all of us chronically online doomers would have you believe. Things are chaotic-shift-in-the-status-quo bad, not civilization-ending bad.

The wheel turns, right now it's in a muddy rut and the people on the bottom (sexually active women, people of colors, and the queer community) are drowning, but all the little people on the outer edge are eventually in the dirt. Fuck the world, fuck the country, the people you have personal relationships with are the only thing that matters because all we have is each other.

Personally I have been trying to be more proactive, which has helped me have a sense of agency amidst the chaos. Everything I own fits in my car in case I need to leave quickly because of a climate disaster or the legalization of hunting trans people. I haven't bought a new thing (used, diy, or do without only) since lockdown because it's significantly cheaper and makes me feel like I'm doing my part to fight final form capitalism. I've also been exploring alternate ways to support myself and live that are more sustainable.

Keeps me going? drugs and food. Life right now is just like a zombie from 6:00-15:00, and later From 15:00-3:00 life can feel good in rare occasions.

I have a teenage son - a wonderful kid who keeps me going.

Not sure what I'm going to do in my dead marriage after he moves out.

Personally, I turn to activism. I realized that regardless of how horrible the future will be, there's good to do in this world.

The world is full of people who are as scared as you and I are. I can make their lives a tad more positive.

The environment is collapsing? Educate and organise, think about how to build mutual aid systems and how to sustain yourself small scale.

The economy will crash? Help others, people who got thrown to the curb by the social system, homeless people, orphans,...

Civil rights are ending? I'm trans and scared. And there's so many other trans children that are counting on me to be the representation that I wish would have had when I was their age. I'm not going down without a fight.

Democracy is ending? Let's focus on preserving what we can and try to rebuild. It won't be over forever.

People being nice to and helping me often makes my day in an otherwise miserable time.I want to be that person for others.

I'm sticking around to witness the collapse, in the hopes things go full mad max. Because that would be a better existence than the one I'm currently living in.

I'm not sure if I'm half joking or being entirely serious.

Spite.

Prozac.

Almost none of the crap going on will directly affect your life. Just live, enjoy, don't read the news. You'll be fine

Why not?

In general, humanity (at least in Europe?) developed positively over the past few centuries. There were of course setbacks, but they didn't last too long and sometimes even lead to great progress. Nevertheless we must fight for progress and shouldn't give up just because the world once again seems to get even worse. Even more important when it comes to problems we have just a tiny period of time to fight against like climate change, we need to act now and can't waste ten years being (ruled by) facists.

Fear of death.

Like its either nothing. Which is in itself terrifying.

Or there could be reincarnation, which is even more terrifying. Imagine being reborn in North Korea. Or if time isn't linear, imagine being some enslaved person in the dark ages.

Or being born in some universe that paranormal stuff are real. And evil creatures chase you all the time.

Or being in a dystopian futuristic world where every newborn is implanted with a mindcontrol chip.

Like nobody knows what happens.

Thats the only reason I haven't killed myself.

I work in disability support. Some of the kids I am working with have gone over the last year from non speaking to using sign and are making real meaningful progress in their self care skills. They can keep going in the face of difficult times, so my problems don't seem so hard.

Also, in Australia we have the NDIS, a system for funding disability supports in a socialised manner without restricting what options someone uses too much. While all governmental systems (or any systems with money) are susceptible to grift progress is being made on catching fraudsters and prosecuting them while also closing the loopholes they exploit. The NDIS will be around for a long time to come and will help Australians with disabilities determine their own futures and make them a reality. There are problems with it but honestly it has been a game changer and I think it is a model for the rest of the world to aspire to.

I don't know what will happen. It is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Uncertainty is uncomfortable for me, but that very same uncertainty is why I keep going.

TL;DR focus on the things you can control and do literally anything to try to improve things

The thing that causes trauma isn't the bad event but the helplessness that accompanies it.

The main (and sometimes only) tactic that we are taught for dealing with problems is to find an intermediary who can do things on our behalf; seek the nearest authority who will take up your cause. Viewed that way, the fact that institutions and authorities are failing is disempowering; the problem is impossible because the schools/cops/companies/non-profits/politicians/media/etc aren't helping. The only option that perspective leaves you is to take the blows and hope you're strong enough to last until a better intermediary arrives. That shit will wear you down real fast.

We need to unlearn the dependence on intermediaries. We can't stop the bad events from happening (and boy are they happening) but we can combat the helplessness. The antidote to helplessness is exercising agency and feeling control over our actions and their consequences. Find a way you can make things a little bit better and then show up and do it. Anything is fine, if there's a cause you're passionate about then do that, but if there's not then pick something you're kinda sort of good at. Write, draw, make phone calls, create memes, cook, drive, listen, etc. Any skill, no matter how small, can be leveraged to improve the world around you if you're clever about it.

The fight is the point.

Taking action to control what you can is powerful. Maybe you'll succeed and maybe you won't but taking action is where you'll find resilience. If what you do doesn't work then learn from the experience and deepen your understanding. You're not failing to solve the problem you are building up your capacity to tackle it and that shit takes time. Pursue this as vigorously and as passionately as you are able but also know that it's okay to take breaks and step away sometimes.

Also, humans are social creatures so if what you do involves other people that's even better.

The alternative seems really boring.