I've been looking for a job and jesus it's really gotten to me. Half the listed jobs are either the big tech companies like meta/aws etc. or defense contractors like lhm, northop-grummann or even dodgier glowie orgs. I'm pretty sure when such a large chunk of the economy is fucking defense contractors that it shows in the job market for something utterly unrelated (IT), that's fascism. Then I see they're selling off the UK military to palantir. Great.
It wasn't like this before. There were your goofy startups and your B2B SaaS companies, the latter I work for and it's been going under for years because it simply was never a good idea.
But that's just the straw that broke the camel's back because it was so real in a way reading news stories on the internet just isn't, it wasn't just a fact, it was an element of my life now, no different from the weather outside.
The absolute onslaught of anti-intellectualism, it's like a virus tearing through the population, a psychological blight, much worse than any coronavirus could be. The hypernormalization of it all and the sheer whiplash of the overton window has even got me shifting rightwards, through sheer osmosis and pressure.
Every time I hear my coworkers mention "grok" I get like a reaction, like "oh, that's the internet thing" and the compartmentalization of brain rot falters, I'm forced to acknowledge it is in fact - real, that what is going on is in fact real, and not just something I can laugh at. Being queer and an immigrant it's frankly shocking I've even been able to maintain this defense mechanism this long. My very future is on the chopping block, always has been, but maybe the city walls just can't stand the seige anymore.
But while I can take care of myself, I worry about the world, about others, distant and close alike. I don't need everyone to believe what I believe or align with what I think, but I feel insane at times because it seems like even the simplest rational thoughts are few and far between, everyone seems unhinged or some sort of insane grifter. It makes me want to grab the world and shake it like "why can't you just be normal".
And then there's people who plunge headfirst into the hypernormalization, realigning with the status quo, maintaining a pretense of continuity, when it is clear there's absolutely no real belief beneath. The pretense just intensifies to compensate.
Nonetheless I don't think there's much I can do, I don't know where to even start, I'd happily fight against the world that's coming but I can't do it alone, and it sure feels like I'm pretty much alone.
The burden of our time sucks, is all. Anybody got some good strategies to disconnect for a bit, so I can recuperate my psych defenses? Smell the roses and all?
EDIT: thanks everyone who responded. Think I'll check out of Lemmy for a bit, I'll make sure to read your insights and experiences when I get back. Thanks, and be well.
Yeah, you're right, but also, the commenter above isn't just being mean for the sake of it, there is a real issue at the heart of it.
The issue is that having 1 person come around to your side implies the millions that don't and won't.
Some of those people simply don't share any underlying morals in common so that's fine, you'll never see eye to eye in ideas because your goals are ultimately different.
Some of those people also just don't care and/or don't know.
Some people will never care, and that's fine too, but some of those people will care if they do know.
Spreading information to those people is tough when you don't have backing of the govcorp media ecosystem and it doesn't help when the ideas you want to get across are sophisticated, boring and fairly nuanced and require lots of context.
It also doesn't help that this would-be progressive in their ignorance could be damaging to the cause when misinformed, which means that sometimes you have to argue against this person and potentially turn them off the movement forever, because you never really know whether it's possible to sway someone until you do.
That's what makes ignorance trolling or JAQing so effective because progressives will either have to waste time explaining openly to someone who will never agree and only feigns ignorance, or risk being potentially a confrontational asshole with a genuinely ignorant person.
It also doesn't help morale of said progressive when confronted with all that, that many of us simply learned about this information on our own, we never asked anybody of anything, we just explored enough perspectives on issues we cared about until our bullshit-o-meters were finely tuned enough to find truth and construct a path from reality now to future we'd like.
On the other hand, convincing some people who are actually sway-able to not want the world to function like a war crime can be like pulling teeth, people are zealous defenders of their opinions because it reflects badly on their self-esteem if they are misinformed and someone else isn't, especially in the Information Age.
I speak from a progressive viewpoint but it's just as true for any real ideological position, information is the fuel that turns simple moral beliefs into functional ideology.
For as long as we live in a democracy, we need to somehow solve the systemic issue of ignorance at scale without inventing a ministry of truth type situation and being able to effectively counter trolling and JAQing/sealioning while also treating those asking questions with the utmost care and having the emotional stamina to do that when many of us had nothing of the sort.
It's a tough position, even describing it or explaining it is tough enough already when fewer and fewer people even seem to even just read at all.
Then there is often just confusion over what someone open to information actually wants, e.g. the Adam Something guide to dating video he made where he said that teenage and adolescent men want instructions and not philosophical musings on the concept of dating and purpose and approach came as a genuine shock to me, because from my, non-male perspective I can't imagine anyone needing instructions or explanations of that sort of thing.