immutable

A shame someone donated garbage

That sounds pretty terrible. Venting can help sometimes so I say vent away (the amount of rants I’ve gone on in my day is something).

I’m going to give you some crappy advice that is going to suck, but it’s something anyways.

The opposite of despair is not happiness, it’s not love, it’s hope. Despair is the loss of hope. I think you have many legitimate reasons to feel despair.

Now you have to ask yourself a difficult question, what do you want for your life? I’m going to let you know that in this situation, despair has a good chance of winning if you just see what happens. Despair has a chance of winning if you fight.

I struggled with alcohol when I was younger. I remember having to have a similar dialogue with myself. I remember thinking that alcohol was going to win and for some reason or another that made me upset. I’m a competitive person I suppose, and so the idea that I would lose to a chemical made me think. Alcohol winning the contest of what I was going to do that evening started off inevitable. And if I had done nothing alcohol would have won my entire life by now. I remember feeling a deep sense of despair and shame, I was the one actually pouring it into my mouth after all.

I remember thinking one day, what do I want out of life? It was easy when I thought about what I wanted that evening for alcohol to win, but at a long enough timescale no one is thinking “I’d like to die young from complications from alcohol abuse.” So it was easy for me to win when I thought bigger.

And I thought about the things I hoped to accomplish and I realized that I would have to really fundamentally change my life to make those happen. And then I dedicated myself to that task. It was not a miraculous one day event. It took time and effort and I had set backs, but today I’m winning and not the alcohol.

Despair though almost got me. It’s like freezing to death in a way, you can feel the peril you are in but in a strange way it’s comfortable. Getting out of the cold feels impossible and you are tired and it would just be easier to close your eyes and give in.

It was only when I told myself that I refused to give up that I could start making a plan to get out of the cold.

I don’t know what getting out of the cold looks like for you. Maybe it’s getting out of the city you are in, maybe the country. Maybe it’s finding people that aren’t awful, where ever they might be. Maybe it’s finding peace inside yourself and joy from within.

The thing that makes me hopeful is that someone who has given up wouldn’t make this post in the first place. They wouldn’t read the replies. They wouldn’t vent. There is a spark in you yet that is telling you not to lay down in the snow and close your eyes.

At least in an extortion scam you get to keep your store from being burnt down by the mob.

It’s an extortion scam coupled with a party that fucking refused to do anything.

Vote for us or a women’s right to choose will be gone!!! Ok we voted for you, you want to do something… no you can’t just ask the lady living her life like a chapter of the handmaids tale to pinky swear… and the Supreme Court just got rid of it… and I have a text asking for $20 to fight like hell…

Fuck the dems. They aren’t getting one red cent from me. Time for a new party that isnt crawling with consultants figuring out how best to milk donations

I have noticed that certain places seem to be easier / harder to live in. Many of my friends from South America love it there, but some find themselves in very difficult situations. I have found that my European and American acquaintances never face situations quite as dire. Except in America when it comes to healthcare and then even the most well off person can get wrecked.

I grew up relatively poor in America, but I was lucky. I grew up in a relatively safe working class area, our schools were in disrepair and underfunded but we had teachers that cared. It would have been very easy for me to fail, but on the other hand it was extremely possible to succeed. I think for many of my fellow countryman the math has certainly changed and there are a lot of people even in the US that are living through huge amounts of suffering.

It’s true what you say that even if someone is interested in the same things they might not have the same outlook as you. I’d hope you could bond over a mutual shared interest over time but the situation of feeling like an outcast (for lack of a better term) where you live must be quite difficult and is not something I can relate too.

I’m curious about where you are, do people eventually warm up? It’s unfair to have to put effort into making a connection with someone that’s initial reaction is to be mean to you, so I’m not saying you should have to do that, but I’m just curious how deep their initial reactions go. In any event it sounds like a very difficult situation for you and one that I don’t have much experience navigating.

I don’t know your interests but you could find some outlet on something like Discord. They have a lot of different kinds of communities for different interests where people chat and spend time together. It might be a good way to get to spend some amount of time with people that you could forge a connection with.

You are correct I’m from the US. I’ve also met lots of people from South America and Europe.

I also meet a lot of people through the things I like to do, largely writing code, I’m a weird engineer guy that writes code all day and relaxing by writing more code.

I won’t pretend I know what life is like where you are. Maybe though you can find people that are interested in the same things you are. I’ve also spent a good part of my life volunteering to help others. Volunteering at community food banks or a local hospital I’ve found the most kind and generous people, and it’s filled my heart with a love for my fellow man.

I don’t know what’s around you, and it might seem daunting to try, but finding a local volunteering group and spending an evening with them might be a good place to start. You might not meet your soulmate, but it’s a low cost step to connecting with whatever good people are around.

That makes sense. I’m an engineer and half the things I talk about don’t mean anything to my wife but she still listens. And half of the art things she’s telling me about don’t make sense to me but I love to watch her talk about things she’s excited about and try to understand.

I think the best thing you can do is exactly what this reply does, understand what things you appreciated about the relationship. It’s very important to know what you are looking for and what you value.

I might be an optimist, but I’ve gotten to meet a lot of people in my life and I’m of the opinion that there’s really a lot of good in most people. It’s not always at the surface, but it’s almost always there.

I really do hope the best for you. Life is a beautiful, wonderful, and limited experience. I’m not religious, but I am a mathematician, the number of variables that had to line up just so so that you could exist are a wonder. I hope you live your life to its fullest and look back at this time as nothing more than a speed bump. If a total stranger can care about you, so can the people around you.

Good luck, be kind to yourself.

I don’t know the person you are talking about, they might genuinely be amazing, they might just have excellent social skills, but the most important thing for you to do is move on.

This isn’t a riddle worth solving. Why did they mesh so well with you? Why didn’t they stick around? Let’s imagine a world where you have these answers with 100% certainty. Does it change anything? No.

I don’t say this to belittle you, but to encourage you. Your happiness, your worth, your life is not this other person.

You deserve happiness and love and all that life has to offer. There are billions of people on this planet and I guarantee you that if you move forward you will find many that will love you and care about you. And you will find many that don’t. And you will find everything in between.

Don’t fall for the trap of there being one true love out there. Take what good you can from that experience and also learn from it. It seems you placed a high degree of importance on sharing similar opinions and interests. That is important, but many people fall madly in love with people that are unlike themselves too. I love my wife with all my heart and we share the same core values but we differ in many ways. I’m loud, she prefers the quiet, I’m an engineer, she’s an artist, but we love those things about each other.

Take away from this that maybe you should bump up how important having a partner who is loyal and able to communicate well is, and notch down how important some of these other aspects.

It hurts going through heartbreak. It is natural and human to want to not feel that pain again. Sadly, love requires that we be vulnerable. Love is a stupid gamble that you can let someone know the real you and they will embrace that and stand by it. It is so special because it is so rare. But I learned something important in my time on earth, most everyone is capable of love, and everyone deserves to be loved.

At the very least, love yourself. We can not change what has passed, but we get to choose what happens next. You get to choose today to love you, and you get to choose it tomorrow and the next day and the next, and I hope you do. And when you love someone, even if that someone is yourself, you won’t be able to bear to see them persist in despair. Find your love of travel, or art, or science, or writing, or whatever brings you joy. Let that love fill your heart for a while.

I hope all the best for you, 20s is far too early to give up. When I feel despair in my own life I remember this quote by Mary Pickford and it’s always made me feel better

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.

Every thing she lists is fluff.

If you are an employed professional you are spending your year doing your job. Not going back to school to pick up a certificate for fun or finding a documentary to be in (what even is this?)

I imagine the husband biting through his cheek during this grilling thinking “yea I’m busy fucking doing things.”

How do you define “violent aggression” then?

If someone poisons the air you breathe or the water you drink, is that violent aggression? Because there’s a long history of corporations knowingly doing just that to communities they believed were powerless to stop them.

If officers under the color of law routinely harass members of your community, openly admitting that they can choose who they want to stop under perfectly legal pretextual stops and then find a reason to beat or intimidate you, is that violent aggression?

Violent aggression can take many forms. What does violent aggression look like? If I buy the company that employs the people in your town and then fire everyone and move it overseas so I can make more money, that’s aggressive certainly, it will cause suffering, is it violent? Is violence just physical force? If I put a sheriff between me and the violence, if I use economic means but then enforce them at the barrel of someone else’s gun, am I being violent or are they?

Violence up close is easy to define, but how many layers of indirection do we need for violent acts to become ok. Politics is all about choices and a lot of choices end up harming a great number of people. We are living through and will continue experiencing natural disasters super charged by climate change. Communities flooded and burned down and destroyed by hurricane force wind, all because a few people would like to have more money and convinced some politicians that it was ok. Is that violence?

Sure if I said I was going to burn your house down that’s violent, but if I aggressively pursue bribing (sorry, lobbying) politicians so that they will support policies that my own scientists tell me will result in your house burning down, is that still violence?

That’s the real question people struggle with.

This has real “let them eat cake” vibes

Eggs have traditionally been one of the cheapest staple sources of protein for the working poor.

I guarantee if this trend exists a statistically irrelevant portion of those doing it have ever even heard the term “zebra striping”

The right is living out their wet dream right now, in charge of almost every facet of the federal government.

And your concern is that people aren’t being nice enough to them and their supporters.

Collaborators can eat shit