My parents lived in the mountains for much of the Cold War. We crowded around the radio daily to listen if the risk of the actual apocalypse was any closer. Several times we thought it was about to happen. Several times it really did almost happen.

I hope we don’t get to that point again. I really thought for most of my adult life that the USA’s deep trade ties to the rest of the world along with other super-powers would ensure some level of stability and peace. And it did.

Past tense.

The worst problem facing the younger generation is the widespread digital addiction we’ve built for them.

Their insecurity over the economy and their future doesn’t disappear, they don’t turn off the TV and go outside and talk to friends and neighbors and friendly old ladies with life advice. They retreat to discord channels of carefully curated members who only agree with each other, they learn to turn off their thoughts by watching 30-second comedy skit shorts that have ASMR clips and Subway surfers insets with horrendously misspelled captions.

Their anxiety and distress is going to be so, so much worse than ours (Speaking as Gen X) because there’s no adult generation to look to and all their worst feelings only get amplified by the media they seek out.

Gen X here, and yeah… “first time?” meme.

That’s why I said you need to keep working towards a goal, and why a balance between passivity and rigid planning is a must.

Any absolutist viewpoint is going to cause you more problems, and there are a lot of people pushing very absolutist ideas out there about what you need to do with your life to feel rewarded and fulfilled.

The dirty secret is there’s no such thing as a “wasted life.” Short of doing something so heinous that you have your life or freedom taken from you, there’s no “wrong” way to live, you simply existing is a miracle beyond all reason and explanation and even if you just sat on your hands contemplating your navel for 80 years, that’s still an experience of life, and any kind of experience you’re having must be appreciated, because the alternative is not experiencing anything.

As someone a bit older than most on these sites, I can say with confidence, if you have any kind of solid plan for your life you’re going to get royally fucked over.

If you want any chance of happiness in your life, you have to ride a balance between working towards goals, but also learning to love and appreciate wherever life takes you, even if it’s in the opposite direction. Because the harder you try to fit into an image you make for yourself, the harder life pushes back.

I know all this sounds like a wood-etching in grandma’s kitchen, but it’s 100% true and if you don’t get it now… you will.

Seriously, that was fire, either his coworker was a much worse social reject, or greentext had already fucked his reputation at work. Since it’s 4chan, I can easily assume he tried to hit on every female coworker in some really creepy way and now nobody wants to be near him. I had a coworker like that. Everyone hated him.

I could never count the number of times in my life I thought people were laughing with me. They weren’t.

When’s your next movie coming out

The common denominator in all of this is the fucking internet.

We didn’t have the internet to give us opinions about men and women before. Most relationships were formed with existing social circles and friend groups. People hung out and had fun and talked to each other until they started getting frisky and then we had babies.

Now when someone wants to go get it on, they start reading the internet stories and arguments and roleplay issues, and they get tense and worried and then have no idea what to do or say when they’re in the same room with a potential partner.

We HAVE to kill off the reliance on the internet if we want people to start liking each other again, which I don’t know how to do since we’re only getting more and more locked-in to our isolated routines.

before the advent of dating apps, 2/3 of all relationships were formed through existing social circles and friend groups. People don’t connect easily with strangers, but having a social group means that people feel safer reaching out or making the first move, they feel comfortable sharing more of themselves and being compromising so they don’t create negative ripples in their shared groups.

People who are scared to socialize now tout dating apps as the way most relationships are formed, which is true, but dating and relationships have fallen to an all-time low so that even though dating apps “work” that’s just because the other avenues are dead or dying, and people still absolutely haaaaate the dating scene, apps and all. It’s not better, it’s not enjoyable, it’s just that most young people think it’s the only option.

You want better results? Return to tradition, make friends, be a social person, force it until it becomes real and natural. Have interests that take you outside of the house and find even a tiny spark of passion for life, and you will have friends and relationships no matter how “anti social” you think you are.

For the same reason we don’t have productive political debates anymore, people don’t have productive interpersonal relations anymore. Everyone withdrawing to their internet safe spaces has made a whole generation of men and women who instead of talking to each other, read horrible stories from other men and women and retreat further and further from actually talking to each other.

Now when you put a young man and woman in the same room together, they’re both on edge because both their minds are consumed with anxiety about what the other is “planning.”

Wait, so you’re not subscribed to shitme™? For a low monthly subscription they send you a sealed, self-addressed and postage-paid container to deposit your feces in, it gets sent to a sorting facility and distributed via drones or delivery drivers directly to your home toilet, where the feces are flushed in the privacy and safety of your own home! The peace-of-mind alone is worth the $39.98 a month. Up until now, the only challenge has been flushing the toilet while you’re still at the office, this way you NEVER have to go home!

we could be a generation that takes power back

The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.

Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights… we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.

It’s such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We’re facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn’t work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.

It’s only because Don’t Look Up has supplanted it for a more accurate picture of how we’re going to end up.

This is the truth.

The economic crisis’s have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it’s just that they’re not accidental, they’re not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined… they’re engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.

And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say “I just gotta save up enough so I can…”

And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of “young, energetic pioneers.” (who they can pay less.)

The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone’s pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don’t own.

The only problem I’ve had with other dog owners in California or anywhere else, is owners who don’t pick up their dog’s shit. I see people bring dogs into stores all the time, they’re always fine, I never see problems with that.

Now when I step 6-inches off a popular trail to take a picture of a popular view and step in piles of dog feces that people don’t bother to clean because it’s technically not someone’s yard, that’s when I start to wonder if domestication was a good idea. (Of humans that is.)

And here we go treating Religion as a “group” again. I thought that was bad? Or is it only bad if you think someone is doing that to Science?

Jesus fucking christ, religion IS a group, it is an organized group seeking political power and social control. Science is a tool for finding truth.

I don’t get how you can pretend to have this neutral position and still make weird defenses like this. It’s dishonest. You are lying about what you’re trying to communicate here and I cannot stand dishonesty so we’re done.

I am done trying to pick apart who or what you’re actually condemning, I highly encourage you to re-read how you opened this fucking thread and what everyone’s pushback has been about and understand your failures to communicate, make this a learning experience.

I was raised devout and my parents wanted me to become a pastor, I know a little about religion and what it looks like out there. This is why I know the motivations of the Christian Right and the threat they pose to everyone on Earth. It’s a dangerous fucking death-cult.

I said already what your error of framing was, how you have been using the weakest, most neutral language here because you’re afraid of pushing away theists and think that being like “both sides don’t understand each other” that you will make more progress to get people to get along.

Maybe you could get a bite in a Christian forum, but it’s inappropriate in this community because most of us are not religious and see it for the threat it is. Religion is a threat to us all, it’s a scourge, a cloud of locusts that consumes the world around it. We don’t need to be told that the people who practice it are misguided and don’t understand science. We need someone to tell THEM that, because we’re the ones being attacked.

People who think Science and Religion are opposed to one another don’t understand either one.

This was your first paragraph, you are starting with the thesis that someone like me, who has defended truth from religious attacks for decades, that I simply “misunderstand” the people who are screaming that God doesn’t want us to get vaccines or learn about cosmology.

Science is on the defense against a powerful, hateful, spiteful ideology that has been wearing us all down for millenia. Religion is fucking HOSTILE so no, you need to focus your statement against the actual antagonist here. This isn’t a place to use this pathetic neutral language, we have active fucking book-burnings happening in the USA right now, as schools become defunded even more than they already are.

The people disagreeing with me seem to really want to use science to argue with religion

Science does not seek to argue against religion, it seeks nothing, it’s just a word to describe a system for finding truth if that’s what you’re after.

So the reason you’re seeing people using science to attack religion is because YOU STARTED IT BY EQUATING THEM. This is itself an attack on science.

You have the right premise that they shouldn’t be used to seek the same answers, but you are approaching from a dense mindset that science is a “group” actively out trying to fight religion and that we people of science need to also do our part to understand religion. This fallacy is why you’re getting attacked here and why people are saying things like “I’m 16 and this is deep” it’s because this is a tired trope, some teenager who was raised theist suddenly realizes that scientific ideas have merit but desperately wants to make them both work so he doesn’t offend his parents so he tries to make a “separate but equal” argument. It’s tired.

You don’t need religion, but religion says you need it and it actively tries to attack other systems for understanding the world. It’s a net negative in our modern world and entirely optional, and science broadly wouldn’t care one way or another if it disappeared tomorrow or if more people started believing in God, because again, it’s not a “side” and I cannot fathom why you’re being so self-contradictory in your efforts here.