Haha, and if you look in the diametrically opposite direction, you will find God! And clearly, God will kick the Devil’s ass, always has and always will! PS: this coming from an anti-thiest

Exactly, that’s another thing that I’ve learned recently - don’t lose your shit when things seem to be falling apart - one, it’s a system much bigger than your individual control, but two, and more importantly, those things tend to self correct for the better, like action-reaction, like a wave, or ying-yang and duality of life. It’s quite liberating to see this way at the bigger picture.

Climate change, wealth inequality, fascism, war, the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren’t distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution. We’d need a few things -

1. We will need to take care of all human essential services like healthcare, education, food, banking, technology etc. Only things that add positive value to society. We can have a singular globally coordinated effort.
2. We will need an economic engine, so as to provide a UBI for all, reasonably paid based on cost of living. To generate income we can sell our products & services at a markup to non-union members.
3. We will need an army because the enemy has one and we need to defend ourselves.
4. Decentralization is also a defence mechanism. Don’t build 1 giant bank, build a million connected credit unions all utilizing the same backend tools & processes. It’s such a nice defense mechanism that we might even be able to skip the army altogether, which bank are you gonna breakup when we can open a hundred more tomorrow.

Everyone alive right now must have ancestors who very literally did live & survive though the stone age and the ages before and after that. Wish I knew what my ancestors did to survive stone age, or better still if I could like watch them in a time lapse video. I guess I might have run away from stone lifting to go be a shepherd or something.

I just landed on this thread and choose to respond to you here, OP. I will say you’re my kinda person :) I’m also an ethical business person and came to conclude that federated marketplaces are the future. I put together a community here (https://lemm.ee/c/fedonomy) but never posted anything. I’ve been thinking / working on this for over a year now, more on the incentive/ economic model and setting up a real life business in a very specific niche. I hate typing on the phone and there is too much to type and it’s like 4 am. Please message me.

Only the ones who saw it coming a decade ago are the ones who feel this way, like a slow moving nightmare come true while you scream away at all your friends and family only to be called a lunatic.

The ones who are unable to reflect / reason / see clearly / are stuck in propaganda are hard to move from their position simply because of the nature of how they got there in the first place.

Look what I found - https://lemm.ee/post/54651420

Hugs to you. I’ve migrated once but that was 2 decades ago. Now I have family & teenagers who I can’t up & move easily and who still look forward to a future in America. I worry too.

Maybe humans go extinct, maybe they don’t, I never made any claims about it. But that your worrying makes no difference to nature and systems bigger than your individual control. I prescribe hope instead of gloom for reasons of self preservation.

I’m fully agreeing that climate change is a terrible and genuinely upsetting thing. But know that the animal in you wants to instinctively react to fear, and doesn’t want you to listen to reason. Only you can control this animal. Know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum (it’s from a song). Our ancestors lived in caves, lived through feudalism, through centuries of egomaniacal kings and ignorant masses, and sword fighting, and disease, and famine, you and I still made it here to exchange messages on the fediverse. I will not bet against human resilience and spirit of cooperation, which incidentally is also something you will realize is fundamentally human when you look deep in the mirror.

Depression is a natural state of deep self-reflection amidst conflict, a mirror so to speak that helps you understand who you are, and as an extension, understand what it means to be human. The way out is only when you’ve figured the underlying root cause of that conflict. What is anger, what triggers this anger, what are insecurities, what motivates you into action and what paralyzes you into inaction. Maybe not depression, but deep self reflection is a necessary path to self actualization. It took me many years in depression to realize the conflict is internal and eternal. That there is an animal in all of us that is that is reactionary and instinctive and is easily triggered by rage, anger, & fear and that all reason and logic hides behind this animal. That when we see the whole world turn into animal, our fears revive the animal in us. Like game theory predicts, when you become selfish, I become selfish. That explains all conflict in the world and I mean all conflict. You may gain clarity and find yourself out of conflict and depression, yet it can still be upsetting to see the current state of the world. And I will say that despite all the terrible news these days, I’m still optimistic about humans doing alright in the long run, afterall we’ve survived so far and our ancestors have gone through much much worse.

Self-awareness & anxiety, two common traits of humans.

And the rent remains the same!

It’s still not warm enough for population over a tipping point, you are just more aware of the boiling apparatus. I believe humanity will jump once it gets warm enough, much like a frog does, even in a slowly boiling pot of water. I trust humanity, after all we’ve survived so far, our ancestors overcoming much much worse. Can you imagine living in feudalism? Or sword fighting in medieval times? Or when we had to hunt?

‘Supposed to’ - yeah, we all wish. ‘Reality’ is that you are who you are. If you don’t recognize this primal instinct in yourself, you’ll never understand it in others. To understand the world, all you need is a mirror, and you need to look really deep in it.

The rise of nationalism / individualism world-wide is due to powerful propaganda targeting this exact instinctive behavior of man that tells him that he is superior to his neighbor with the different religion, county of birth, skin color, economic status. There’s a reason propaganda relies on rage, anger, & fear because those emotions evoke your animal instincts, bypassing all rational thinking.

We still possess our primal instincts, we still have fight flight response involuntarily to something new or unknown, we still fall in the us vs them trap, we cheer for our team, our country, our religion, and shit on the other team, other county, other religion. It takes wisdom to rise above labels, but it’s definitely not instinctive.

When you reframe the whole world as a jungle with 8 billion animals, your mantra translates to - don’t get hunted, but it’s okay to hunt, because that is survival instincts.

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

You are a very good person, because you are reflective of your past, conscious of your actions, and have morals that gave you the guilt that you feel. You’re alright little one.