I try to enjoy the absurdity of it all. Like I was laughing at Musk's "hypertube" in Las Vegas for a week straight.
Plus I feel there's a certain pride that comes with being a Moses generation. If socialism wins over barbarism and future generations live in a liberated world, I'd like to think that they'll remember our time the same way we remember the late 19th/early 20th century: dark days with brave people willing to fight for better tomorrows.
dark days with brave people willing to fight for better tomorrows.
Hot damn, that's a fire quote!
iI hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me
Good advice but it's also a tongue-in-cheek Hunter S. Thompson quote.
I'll piggyback and say that while alcohol is a wonderful short term solvent for anxiety, over time it ends up producing more anxiety and fear.
Escapism, mostly. :doomer:
There's also some small solace in the fact that communities like this one even exist in the first place, and that there's still a shred of hope for future generations, if we don't boil the planet first.
Revolution. Seriously, the lack of a better future is one of the primary things that pushes people to overthrow the government. just look at what the fucking Trump hogs are doing these days, all they do is think of magic ways they will overthrow the country. As historical materialists, we know that it will take organization and agitation
i'm always hearing that right wingers are the patient ones willing to make small gains but why does it seem like maybe we are instead?
Take the Grillpill :grillman: Find a constructive hobby to engage with, log off so you stop wallowing in how awful everything is, try to organize and help your community.
Decline doesn't mean collapse, it just means you'll have less returns on your material and temporal investments.
If you live in the us and are under 40, you can still have a career that can afford you peace of mind in the long run with respect to cost of living. Unfortunately it'd require you to abandon hopes and dreams of self expression and fulfillment, to live a life of sustenance or comfort, but it can still happen within your job or personal life.
People endure through social relationships and finding meaning through them and one's own self reflection and discovery.
Just try to work for your own happiness, even if u fail
I've been thinking that I should sign up for some Mandarin lessons so that I can talk with people who are optimistic about the future.
我是学中国。 我是不好.
I butchered that but we have a com and posts with great resources and it is fun, and not as hard as you'd think to learn the most common language on earth.
Having a lot of fun with the duolingo course myself! It is such a vast language, a lot of it makes great sense though, much more so than English.
You said you're studying china (the country) in the first sentence. 汉语 are the characters for chinese (the language). EDIT: I was wrong! :sadness:
Ahem, studying/reading = 读
学 = learn
What @FidelCashflow said was he was learning China. If he said 中文 instead of 中国, he would be right but only partially since the sentence has another mistake at 是.
You mean 文？What keyboard are you using? Did you input the right pinyin?
I didn't input anything close to correct, so no. the default Samsung one on my phone. I sometimes have trouble finding the right character, but I assume that is just inexperience and not having a proper grasp of it's predictive system.
But can you type in 'zhongwen' in the keyboard and get the correct words?
both, once we get good enough we gotta know where to defect to. Climate in the northwest suits me and their and some nice lower tier cites that might still have white monkey jobs by the time I would be able to jump ship.
I mean I take solace in the fact that things can only get so bad before people hit there breaking point and the time for an actual leftist movement will come, obviously we are going to have to enjoy a giant slide into fascism first but fascism is so inherently contradictory that it will decay and crumble
Shit still sucks but the inevitable time of reckoning keeps me going (and antidepressants)
Honestly I just live for each day. Thankfully I don't have kids so it's not as bad as it could be. But I focus my energy on improving things around me if I can. I just try to do the best I can to be happy about the present and find things productive or just fun.
I use to dwell on the future in an extremely unhealthy (but understandable) way for too long. Maybe 4 years ago or so I read Deep Adaptation and it sent me into a spiral of depression for a long time. The best way I found to alleviate a lot of the anxiety was just helping people or things around me. The first thing that worked for me was doing beach and forest clean up stuff with a group I found on meetup.com. I met some cool people eventually and they invited me to other community based things and it helped me feel less hopeless being more involved with people who are constantly motivated to improve things even if it's a drop in the bucket of all the problems in the world.
The burden of all that stuff isn't on my (or your) shoulders and I use to let it feel like it was. It took time but a big part is just accepting some things are just going to suck and my response it to do stuff that that even just slightly improves things around me. The anxiety isn't completely gone but finding an avenue to channel some of that into an positive helped me stop worrying constantly about it.
Good luck, just remember you're only one person and just try your best to make the best of things. Letting the future control your present state of mind too much isn't usually going to accomplish anything and it becomes a feedback loop that is hard to break.
Play video games, make video games, foster dissenting thought amongst everyone I meet while playing and making video games.
Plotting a course so that within the next 10 years, I can provide a safe(r) haven for revolutionaries.
Decline presents a substantial opportunity, especially to my interpretation of politics. There's lots of room for people who want sustainable solutions to the world's problems. Even if 2 billion people are displaced and our teetering technological pyramid collapses, there will be a golden opportunity to build a new civilization with an emphasis on better social technologies.
We are not in the least afraid of ruins!
Tbh I'm hoping to get land that's within reasonable cycling distance of town. But yes, it will be encircled by hedges and be comprised of wofatis and other earth-bermed stuff, so it will look like it's all in one big bush.
Not to poo on any parades, because the design is super neat, but the dude that promotes them is an eco grifter. There was even a subreddit about how exploitative he is. Appropriate his designs but please don't ever trust him or agree to work for him. Just a warning to those interested
Oh, I know. Paul Wheaton is a total dick, wants to take credit for everything, largely holds back the potential of his own site by being intolerant of dissent, is a shitty capitalist, and isn't half as transformative as he fancies himself to be.
No one should give him a dime, but still, he has collected a lot of permaculture knowledge and created educational materials that should be spread far and wide. I haven't pirated his PDC so I don't know if that's worth doing.
You know how Minecraft was created by a collective calling themselves Mojang AB? Kinda like that.
Alright, dope. I was just almost taken in by his bullshit at one point and wanted to warn other comrades just in case. Whenever I see his stuff online I always put in my two cents
If I knew of a better compendium of knowledge on the subject than Permies, I would link that instead.
I’m at the point of emailing recruiters in China to see if I can teach English there. One of them just got back to me this morning. I just can’t take it here anymore. I lead a life that is probably better than 90% of Americans. I’ve lived abroad before and I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to relocate to the other side of the planet. But I also have a family and we live in a very rural area, meaning that we are dead fucking meat if a revolution does actually take place in the USA. The chuds will kill us. We have zero support out here. In an American city, you might have a chance, but not out in the boonies.
I don’t see anything getting better in America. It looks like we’re a few months away from total economic collapse. Either that, or someone in my family is going to get fucked up from covid sooner or later.
I’m very conflicted about this and honestly don’t know what the right choice is. It’s possible I’ll just stay here. It’s possible everything will just kind of continue to suck in the same way that it’s sucked since the pandemic began. But all of us here know that things can also get a lot worse than they already are.
This is the site I’m using if anyone else wants to go to China:
https://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/china
This is practically identical to the philosophy of Epicurus, who may have become a byword for shameless hedonism but really was all about (1) the power of friendship and (2) the occasional slice of cheese.
All men die (even you, me, everyone in this thread) and ultimately this reality appears to be an impermanent, fleeting dream that we won't remember. In short, it doesn't matter at all in the long run. We just seem to be stuck here, and what you see is what you get. Bear witness I guess, it's more interesting than being dead.
This is more or less the approach that I take, but mine maybe has a bit more of a positive slant. This is all so fleeting anyway, I feel very lucky to be able to bear witness to the majesty of the universe. The unique patterns of molecules and energy that come together in extraordinary ways, against near impossible odds, right before my eyes... it's really something when you stop and think about it.
That fact that we even exist and have consciousness at all is really incredible. Even if we are, in fact, living at the end of the world, the fact that we flickered into existence just long enough to witness some of it is incredible. There's an eternity left for non-existence anyway.
