Philosophically, I think the pursuit of truth and the exercise of compassion are worthwhile endeavors.

But when that’s too abstract, I remind myself that I have people who rely on me and benefit from my presence in their life. I work to make the world around me better than it was before, so that others can immediately, and in the future, have better lives.

Lay down for a minute, close your eyes and just let your brain babble about shit for a bit. Then, pick one at random and try to start it. Maybe try to find something engaging to think about, because then you’ll be more comfortable with doing stuff.

There’s this app on F-Droid called WikWok. It basically presents you with random wikipedia articles in a kind of feed like with TikTok.

If I were you, I’d download it and scroll until something that you find interesting appears and then read a bit of it. Then ask yourself a question.

This usually gets me up and pacing, and once I’m pacing I want to fidget with stuff so I go do chores.

May not work for you, but that’s what I got.

It’s a great dream, leaving. I’m not rich enough to make that happen, though. Maybe once things get worse, I can become a refugee- but, it’s more likely that I’ll cling to life here until it’s impossible to continue.

Oh God, I checked and I’m so glad the trans ban didn’t make it to the final budget. I was so worried about that.

That means, at least, it’s going to be a few more years before they try to ban trans people from existing.

There’s a conversation that could be had about how there are no truly public platforms on the web. Ultimately, everywhere you can speak is owned by someone, and any community you build exists at their mercy. This can exert a lot of pressure on a community’s standards and beliefs, and when I started using the internet, abusing this was a major faux pas.

However, that conversation requires a lot of nuance and patience. You are kind of transparently posting this in response to a moderator in another community removing your posts. If you’d like to complain about that, there’s actually a community specifically for that.

By the by, free speech complaints have become strongly associated with certain political movements as dog whistles. You might want to look into that and make sure you want to present that image.

How long have you been using the internet?

I used to drink an inhuman amount of caffeine. It made starting my meds kind of hard, because the caffeine started actually affecting me like it’s supposed to.

So I was suddenly very jittery and nervous. For a bit I thought it was the medication, but then one day when I was making myself a cup of black tea I stopped and went, “…hey, wait, caffeine?”

Weening myself off of it was brutal. I started trying to drink one tea a day, then switched to green tea and very gradually decreased the amount of caffeine. I still occasionally get cravings, but luckily I can trick my body by drinking decaf tea.

It made me so fucking cranky, by the way, caffin withdrawal sucks.

For real, for real.

Fancy savings account for retirement that’s stored in stocks so it can explode at any point. Basic perquisite to ever retire in the US. Many people don’t have them.

I wholeheartedly agree.

…so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?

Wouldn’t work out. World’s too complicated for simple answers like that.

Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There’s people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government’s trend to self destruction and fascism.

Even though it’s increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the “difficult to pass” territory and not the “a few compromises” one.

Thanks for responding, I appreciate it. What you’re saying makes sense.

When you say that about her being mentally ill with no empathy, what exactly do you mean? I’m asking because it’s easy to draw a lot of different conclusions from that statement, and I’m trying to make fewer assumptions when I don’t know people well.

Part of the problem is that sufficient wealth seems to destroy people’s understanding of consequence. They don’t experience them very often, and so reach a point where they can simply pursue whatever their feelings tell them to do and the world magically restructures itself to allow them to do so.

Combine this with how the incentives of the social system result in the people who are most likely to pursue a selfish course being the most financially successful- you get a recipe for short-sighted, ignorant and self-important nonsense.