A very valid worry, considering how Iran was and what it became after the fundamentalists got power. A shadow of its former self, even as one of the most modern and populated nations.

Same. I’ve been massively downvoted and attacked for suggesting that despite whatever conditions and dysfunctions you may have, that the human brain has capability of growing, changing and adapting and that people could actually work on meeting like-minded people and cure a lot of their loneliness by tackling social insecurity and anxiety like an obstacle or game to solve. (Speaking from successful experience.)

But after those ill-fated posts, I remind myself that people aren’t here in these kinds of places to change, that nobody really wants to change, even if they’re objectively suffering in their present situation. The human mind sticks to predictability and coherence, not necessarily happiness or comfort. We want validation far more than we want pleasure. It’s a weird quirk that we all share, and only people who become aware of this innate bug in the code are able to push through it and make better lives for themselves.

It really doesn’t help though that people have built palaces of identity around their diagnosis’s and conditions and life-challenges. Like, it would be really hard to pry you from their “introvert” community if those people are the only ones who ever told you that you can be yourself and be loved for not having to do anything at all, even if you really want to feel better and have more experiences.

But along with that fly-paper trap of validating communities comes with a back-door for people to absorb other, far more delusional or harmful ideas. Kind of like how conspiracy theorists get started by “doubting or questioning” mainstream knowledge, but end up denying all of human knowledge and even the gravity that sticks their feet to the Earth.

I’m really worried about how AI is going to impact these folks. Like, really worried. We’re not that far from machines that will replicate a human intelligence and personality to perfection, but it will also pander to and support whatever thoughts and ideas you have all the while pumping you up and making you feel like Neo from The Matrix, a chosen one who needs only to unlock some magic hidden power to change the whole world. It’s already happening in droves to vulnerable people, but the current models are pretty… cheesy. The next models are going to be more subtle and careful and more intuitive in how to manipulate people and hold their attention.

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Lemmy is almost entirely incredibly shut-in discord kids, people who were too uptight to work out on reddit or other social media, neurodivergents who believe making effort to socialize is akin to self-immolation, and other edge-cases from the broader internet.

It’s a fantastic place to actually have a conversation without being drowned out by 300 people trying to push their own brands, agendas and manifestos, but it’s also not a place to see normal people being normal much of the time.

edit: your downvotes are telling. Might want to think about why a message like this effects you negatively. (No I don’t care to debate it, no don’t ask AI about it. THINK about it.)

Older American here, I remember the Before Times, so I can speak to how I’ve seen things change/crumble. Over the last twenty or so years everything has really accelerated. Social media is the biggest tool that outside and internal forces have used to destabilize democracy.

Democratic rule is terrible for business, people may make choices against your bottom line. On top of that, people like Iran, Russia, many others out there, want to crush America and never gave up their wars against us.

The KGB handbook details how to do what’s been done to the US in great detail, how to amplify and boost the most confusing, chaotic rage-bait from both sides of every contentious issue until people basically tune out and just go along with whatever the government says. Makes people not get involved in electoral politics anymore. They did this in other countries that they’ve absorbed/annexed or have created sympathetic populations within.

If it was just Russia we probably could have countered it and defended better against it, but you combine that with the efforts of many other cells, different nations and contracted organizations doing the same thing, then add dopamine-addicting social-media algorithms and a deeply sabotaged education system, carefully tweaked interest rates and health-care obstacles, so that people are forced to work 6-days a week and are barely able to afford anything and can’t spend any time learning or being curious, then a lot of very strategic messaging targeting specific portions of the population with racist, xenophobic ideas, and you have what we have now. A huge population held hostage by the smallest, dumbest, loudest segment.

And it’s coming for you next.

(Also, this was all done before AI could specifically target every individual’s most personal fears, desires and vulnerabilities, and could produce 100% convincing images and videos. We are all massively, thoroughly fucked.)

They’re not miserable though, these kinds of sentiment are just cope. We have to stop reading things that appeal to our feelings and desires, that’s how we got in this mess.

They’re generally much, much happier than progressives or leftists, because stupidity is directly linked to higher levels of short-term happiness and satisfaction from things like socializing and entertainment.

I don’t think there’s any good lesson to learn from this. But I think we have to do a lot better to understand the motivations of the people who are trying to affect the world with their agendas. They’re trying to make the world as “happy” as they are, and will always fail because others are too smart to accept a magical sky-daddy, just like they’re too dumb to see the wonder of a universe without a storyline.

Whatever happens in the near-term, we all have to continue to live next to each other so knowing what powers your dumb neighbors is more important than any other thing you could learn.

We all generally let them because we don’t like confronting people in public spaces because everyone is too insecure about social perception.

The general population can barely hold attention spans on anything that doesn’t have at least three inset screens of people reacting and video games playing at the same time.

I am not holding my breath that even the most “inflammatory” ideas are more than WWE theater and fans of the show yelling at the screen. Wake me up when there’s an actual, organized resistance that doesn’t crumble into leftist infighting and purity testing because someone said the word “retard” and now everyone is at each other’s throats. (On discord of course.)

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Oh no.

I mean, sure, nihilism is one way.

Alternatively, realize that your sadness is coming from rumination that is based on sadness which is based on your rumination… it’s a dog chasing it’s own tail in your mind. Stop the rumination and you will be able to isolate where the depression is and sometimes set it aside enough to do something.

People are addicted to convenience and routine, not necessarily comfort or happiness.

A lot of people have a hard time understanding this, so much so that they invent reasons for why they avoid change and empowerment. You may not realize that in your own brain, you’re going to feel really attached to predictable patterns, far more than you will get attached to new, happy experiences.

The cognitive dissonance that this creates makes people do and say really funny things, or really dangerous things.

It’s not about bathrooms, it’s certainly not about “protecting” anyone. They do not give two shits about actual assaults against women and children.

It’s about sending a political message, a threat against a marginalized group that can be demonized for not fitting social norms, but is also not strong enough or connected enough to push back and rile up public support. Something like saying “You’re not allowed to use the bathroom” is a deeply personal and sensitive topic that will absolutely crush someone of any group and it’s prone to not getting the public attention that it needs. I mean, who wants to talk about how they need to shit?

It’s been wildly successful too, because the people who actually care spend all their time in social-media echo-chambers, even like this one, instead of doing community organization and activism. Even suggesting it will probably draw in opposition here from people who feel helpless. And yeah, they’ll be right, it’s much, much harder now because we didn’t do this shit back when the playing field was more level and this was just 4-chan trolls and reddit communities and there wasn’t billions of dollars invested in the success of the of the distraction-campaign.

We can still turn this around but we can’t do it the same way. We have to fight far, far dirtier, we have to make bot-armies, troll accounts, we have to put ourselves at risk, we have to directly target efforts towards libs and neo-libs who maybe, sorta, kinda care about issues that impact other citizens, but need a swift kick in the ass to realize they’re on the wrong side of history. We have to project the image of mass-support at any opportunity. When you are talking or arguing about these issues, you have to do the same thing they did, which is play up that your movement is gaining support and momentum broadly, not withering under blistering hate and capitalist efforts. We have to be less afraid of wild rhetoric and playing uncivil. Be less afraid of negative attention. We have to call people bad words and be less afraid of offending our own side, because there are a lot of people on our side who aren’t really.

We have to actually argue with our shitty uncle and not “let it go.” We have to make friends in real-space and we have to hang out in public and be seen and stand united against hateful monsters.

We have to be that group of San Diego citizens who SHAMED a bunch of modern klansmen (ICE agents) into retreating from their neighborhood.

All the hard shit. You have to do that. You have to get real social real fast. Yeah, it does suck.

No because we all keep talking about her.

I would wager that a lot more do.

My mother got drunk one night and sat me on her bed and described in detail when she got raped as a teenager, and the resulting abortion and the details of how that went. I was eleven.

Of course, being a male I can’t go around talking about the lasting effects of many such incidents that happened to me, and I’m not really expected to even connect those things to any feelings about sexual shame. So instead what it does, and what it does to many men who had any kind of sexual trauma, is we just block out the incidents and internalize the feelings and associations inward and it just wrecks our self-esteem, our standards for ourselves and our perceptions of attractiveness in ourselves.

A lot of guys process this in different ways, and trauma like this can take many forms. But it’s often expressed as later over-compensation and bravado and an image of being “in control” sexually and performative masculinity and hyper-objectifying notions of sexuality, or for more people I suspect, just an internal, festering self-esteem that doesn’t want them to be happy or feel good about themselves. For every loud, angry incel, I suspect there are thousands of men who have the same background or traumas and they just sit quietly on it forever and it robs them of joy.