I looked into that.

I would have to scrape together my sources but it kind of looks like millennials are the ones who cooked us. The last several federal elections have had the highest turnout of “youth voters” in American history, and in this context, youth voter means under the age of 27 or so.

A lot of Gen-X actually had/have pretty stable political leanings because we didn’t experience the full brunt of societal political brainrot through social media during our most formative years. The generation that grew up already in a sea of message boards and forums are the ones who started latching onto incel-culture, cynical group-think online, and memes that convey feelings without real thought behind them.

We have a lot of meetings trying to figure out ways to stay under the radar.

We’re the ones quietly keeping the place running and not being hyperbolic and infected with social-media spawned WWE theater and brainrot.

No, really, we are young enough to have a firm grasp on current events, but old enough to have lived in a time before ALL of this media/information deluge started changing people’s brain structure, and we have boomer’s work-ethic beat into us so we’re just getting our shit done and surviving as the world spirals into weird nonsense all around us.

When you hate certain people online but want to wrap that hate in some kind of societal prescription as if we haven’t had wealthy celebrities talking about social issues and infecting kids with brainrot since media began. Gen Alpha is going to be like every previous generation with their own sets of challenges and abilities.

If you want the influencers to go away, you have to stop baiting people to argue about them, just let them be.

Nah, it’s now metastasized through culture that it’s lost meaning. It’s now just a “style” and that’s okay. The world moves on.

Once upon a time, wearing blue-jeans or growing your hair long as a guy was considered a niche sub-cultural movement.

You can find new things to feel misunderstood about!

“This run, I will play a necromancer villain, I will terrorize the populace with dark rites and make the women and children cry in every conversation!”

Ends up playing an archer sniper who saves every lost child and fetches the old lady’s herbs without hesitation.

Me trying to do the hums and noises thing around my teenage niece thinking it’s still relevant but she just ignores it and keeps scrolling on her phone

You’re following me around.

You go on thinking you’re that important and not that Lemmy is small and people can tag users. Don’t bother replying, won’t be seen.

The modern slang term for it is simply a series of hums and noises not fully audible to people over the age of 15.

I think you may be doing something wrong, I would be curious what store bought kind you tried too. It’s very easy to mess up making it ingestible, you can’t just eat cannabis flower or even raw THC oil, it has no effect ingested unless it undergoes a chemical process, such as being extracted into fat/oil/butter with heat, but not so hot the THC breaks down. Some cheap store brands also are weaker than the label and count on people being suggestible.

I say this because if it effects you inhaled, then it’s the same chemical in your blood. It just takes up to an hour to work ingested, sometimes people give up waiting on it and go to bed and miss the effect.

All that said, ingested high feels different than inhaled usually, unless you’re using a strong tincture, that stuff can knock you on your ass and your family will find you laying on the floor as you travel through space.

Worrying too much about a problem just caused extreme anxiety and brain fog.

I beat the worst of my depression and anxiety by connecting this very idea to the realization that my brain would start writing stories to explain my feelings, and those stories didn’t necessarily need to even make sense, but those repetitions were reinforcing a feeling, which reinforced the thoughts, which reinforced the feelings… etc, etc. It’s called rumination and it’s the enemy of life and happiness.

Learning to identify where my feelings start attacking my thoughts helped me beat rumination but that’s only the first step.

So far, I can’t really even do that, I have a lot of disfunction to make up for, somehow. I tend to forget what I’m supposed to do for entire hours…

You’re on the next step, which is healing and trying to find new meaning. It will get better, but keep pushing yourself to discomfort, to doing things you’re not used to. Your brain is locked into “survival mode” and that means a lot of executive function is still in safe-mode, bare necessities for survival only. It makes it harder to experience joy or fulfillment from even the small things that people enjoy.

Some of my therapists have told me this heals and you will rebuild yourself. I can tell it is healing slowly, but it takes so much time. I wish I could tell you how long it takes. I’m still on that step.

“this too shall pass”

Having gone through a mid-life “reset” and having to say goodbye to nearly everyone and everything I knew for the first several decades was not an experience I would want to repeat, or even think back to most days.

But even through the worst moments of those years where I had to do some of the very hardest things that anyone would ever have to do, I chanted to myself under my breath “this too shall pass.”

And it did. It slowly, agonizingly, got better. It all passes. And eventually you will look around and realize it passed too fast.

I am still torn about free will. Some of my darkest crashes in life have been realizing that I don’t know the “source” of my own thoughts and cognition, meaning I found my “rails.” I realized that my thoughts are being generated and I’m only responding to them.

But even if we’re just riding along on basically a movie with the illusion of free-will, we are still experiencing it, and that is something that lay outside even our interpretations of the universe and freedom of choices. Sure, your entire cognitive experience might be generated by neurons simulating a reality from deterministic information input, but there is still some “thing” that gives you a singular experience of the universe out of that. It might not be free-will, but maybe our notions of free will are lacking, maybe there’s something else that means more than whether or not you can actually decide out of “nowhere” if you’re going to walk into the next room. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness and why no matter how many tests we do and how many brain patterns we scan, we can never actually know if you see blue the same way I do.

This is the only thing that’s separate from our memory, our experiences, our timeline, whether or not it’s on rails. Everything else is a simulation your brain is running and the structure of that brain evolving through time.

Forgetting doesn’t fixes mental problems, it can actually exacerbate them since you wouldn’t have the memory to explain why you have these seemingly random fears.

Sure, I agree but we’re still just talking about brain structure. There are massive parts of your brain, countless “layers” of thought, recognition, analysis and reasoning, but you’re not aware of them. This is why trauma can haunt you even if you don’t remember it, this is why someone who has a head injury can sometimes develop an entirely new personality, this is why if you have your hemispheres separated, someone can show your non-verbal hemisphere a picture of a cat, then instruct your verbal side to draw a picture and you will draw a cat without knowing why, and even make up a memory on the spot for why you decided to draw a cat.

six flags

Maybe unrelated but since we’re jamming with random ideas about consciousness, it’s a good time to make a small rant about how time-travel is portrayed in fiction. It’s utterly impossible to “go back” in time, since every point in time is just a potential configuration of space and particles. The only way you can see the past is reassemble the entire universe from starting conditions until it has that configuration again. If you were able to “rewind” time, your brain would also rewind and you would just be experiencing that configuration again without any knowledge of future events.

But really, we can’t even say for certain that six flags exists. We can’t say for certain that the universe didn’t spring into existence 5 minutes ago, and your brain is just assembling a reasonable explanation for your world, six flags and quasars and elephants and childhood trauma and all… it may be doing this at every moment.

All we can say for certain is that you are experiencing something right now and everything else is branching off that experience. This is idea can send people (like myself) into deep spirals of solipsistic despair, but I think at the end of the day I will take this over the alternative.

I’m sorry you went through that, my message is not meant to dismiss or invalidate what anyone has experienced, but to give you a better mental framework for deciding how literally any experience can or should impact you and how you can manage your thoughts to have more control over your feelings for a better quality of life to some regard.

Nothing is “real” in the strictest sense because there is no such thing as objective reality. Everything is just a personal experience or a frame of reference of changing events, but the only reason we think there’s a before and after “now” is because we have brains designed to simulate those evolutions. We’ve tested this over and over in very expensive experiments as well as experiments you can do at home, it’s a fundamental fact of reality, but I find this message empowering, not dismissive or downplaying our experiences, but rather it gives some measure of control over how we are going to let things like trauma effect our daily life.

Third party candidates never win.

The lesson here isn’t “we’re stuck on rails with no real choices because both dems and republicans make me feel icky” the actual lesson here is that if the party that most closely connects with your ideology doesn’t satisfy you, remake it, sweep out the dusty old corpses and artifacts from a century ago and bring in new leadership and new mandates.

THAT is the lesson that this election should be teaching every leftist and progressive out there. That and the power of actually unifying as a fucking community and not creating weird, isolated ideological factions purity testing each other.

We should take a huge lesson from Mamdani’s handling of his repeated grilling on why he won’t condemn this word or that phrase - STOP GETTING DISTRACTED.

Memory is a funny thing that doesn’t work the way we think it does. And when you realize how it actually works, you start feeling a weird sensation of weightlessness and unease that maybe we’re fundamentally, deeply mistaken about what this entire experience of existing is.

The brain does not write data and record things the way, say a memory card or hard drive does. The “snapshots” in a brain are more like linked together associations, a network of connected sensations and experiences that come together in a specific way to actually simulate an event.

You do not recall things. You simulate things. This is why memory is so unreliable and why we can remember false things. It’s very much like entering a prompt into a AI image generator, you ask the brain to create a scene based on the associations you had with an experience, and it runs what it thinks probably happened.

The deeply mistaken part of our experience is that our brains are somehow a logical device for storing data and then coming up with logical explanations. The brain doesn’t do that though, the brain is JUST a storytelling device, it links together experiences to create associations and then tells a story to make them connect. When you understand this, like when you really, finally internalize this fact, it can actually free you from a lot of mental health issues like ruminating depression. (The feelings of sadness will still be there at times, but it won’t be connected to your life, it won’t ruin your whole day or week or year.)

But it’s also deeply unsettling to realize we don’t really have a past or future, all we have is a simulating device that tells stories for the most likely explanation for why you’re here now, and what may happen next because of it.

A lot of unhappy teens and young people can’t imagine enduring a whole lifetime after they get even a short taste of how exceptionally bad life can be. And it doesn’t help that so many people hold onto this feeling through their lives that they don’t work towards a better tomorrow - making the societal problems even worse as so many people stop investing in their communities and their future.

If the movie had any actual balls it would have leaned harder into the parallels between his magic remote and suicidality, and it would have shown a lot more of the agony of choosing between experiencing the absolute worst things in life versus escaping entirely into nothingness.

But it was a kid’s movie so there we are.

Your time and energy here is being misspent. I have nothing against challenging people and their group think and biases and do that quite a lot here, but after watching you a bit, you simply do not possess the rhetorical abilities to sound like more than a troll or bad-faith contributor. You fail at both challenging anyone, and you fail at even hurting anyone because of your lack of effort.

You are baiting a ban or someone lashing out at you at least, and with that the same kind of emotional validation/masturbation you likely despise seeing in others.

Either contribute something meaningful that actually makes someone else engaged and think about something, or find a nice, big patch of grass and start touching.

The backache and frustration with the number 67 for existing already did that, but thank you for reminding me that we had a good Windows OS once.