Log out of social media, go outside, interact with real people. Life is not remotely as bad as all that, it just seems that way because social media has told you to be scared. Humans are extremely adaptable, we will overcome whatever the problems are.

It still gets cold outside. If you don’t work you’ll live there

Honestly, it sounds like you’ve been spending too much time in some online communities that are doom posting about everything. Do things suck right now? Yes, but they’ve literally sucked for as long as human society has existed. Things can always be better, or always be worse. However you can’t just sit around passively waiting for the times to change, or your life will suck.

The single biggest factor in whether your life is good or not is you and your actions. Don’t let things outside of your control convince you to give up. Do the best with what you have, and I promise you that you can find fulfillment and happiness in the life available to you.

Guillotine Party!

Universal healthcare, securities tax, punitive top-tier income tax. We can get rid of these parasites like we got rid of the robber barons, or we can do it like the French got rid of their first and second estate.

The amounts of copium in this thread are extinction-level.

Everything you just said is 100% valid and you are simply correct.

The thing is, it’s not a measure of a healthy mind to thrive in a profoundly sick society where the worst of the worst have won long ago.

There’s this thing called depressive realism which posits that depressed people, by and large, perceive reality much closer to how it really is than neurotypical people.

Essentially, “normal” people have an (innate or learned) positivity bias. Which is usually a good thing. People like us are the outliers.

But positivity bias in a world where it’s actually harmful is another thing. The majority of people are walking headlong into their own extinction while going “Ehh, it’s not so bad”, while we should ALL be positively irate and picketing the homes (not companies) of our owner class 24/7.

But it hasn’t happened yet and at this point I don’t know how bad things need to get before people realize what’s going on.

I enjoy eating and air conditioning. Gotta work for it.

MVW… Minimal Viable Work. Companies think only they can deliver shit? Just deliver the bare minimum… as they don’t do with their customers.

I feel you, but you need to remember that the world is generally a pretty chaotic place and predicting the future when complex systems pass tipping points and transition to new equilibria (as they are at the moment) is pretty difficult.

Invest in yourself, your ability to cope with new and unfamiliar things, and build resilience. Resilience being the ability to bounce forward when you hit rocky patches. Don’t expect to bounce back and end up where you left off, but learn to adjust to the chaos where you need to.

Develop your capabilities until you have a sense of being a competent, worthwhile and dependable person outside of the circus going on around us. Someone that isn’t quite so dependent on the big bad system we are often forced to be part of.

I have personal goals in life I want to reach and I’m going to do whatever it takes to do so. Try laying out your life goals… What do I want to do 5, 10, 20 years in the future? Then you make a plan to achieve those goals, keeping in mind employment with inevitably be on that path. It can be seen as a means to an end or more depending on how you shape your view.

Do you want to do a minimum wage job where you feel like you’re a worthless drone, or do you want a more meaningful career that could maybe even turn in to something more? You have the option to pave your own path. If you look at a job as nothing more than wage slavery, then those are the only jobs you are going to find. The companies that pay well and/or offer good benefits are definitely out there and they want people with skills who are motivated and reliable. Everyone has the chance for their big break, but it will never come if you don’t work for it. Also not every place to work is a faceless corporation, there’s a lot of small businesses out there needing talented people too, and those are often the sweetest deals as long as the business owner(s) care to keep their people happy. There’s such a thing as working for a company that you believe in and want to see succeed for a greater reason than bumping up your own paycheck.

There’s also such a thing as working a job and doing what you like doing at the same time. I work with computers. Do it at work, do it at home too. I enjoy all of it, I lean new stuff every day and I make a good living doing what I consider to be fairly mentally stimulating but also rewarding work. Sure, it is pretty stressful at times, but there’s always a light around the corner.

I’ve found that things have a way of working out, no matter how shitty things might look. Live your life for you and the ones you love, if you have to grease some corporate palms along the way or do some jobs you don’t necessarily love to get by, that’s just the way of things. The system is just kinda designed to work like that. Are you going to let that stop you? I personally say hell fucking no.

I see one of the most powerful and defining traits of human beings to be our adaptability. You have the power to handle just about anything the world has to throw at you, whether you realize it or not.

I’m not sure if you have any kind of faith, but it honestly helps. I’m not a religious person but I’ve found that having faith in myself and in the ones I love the most to be a very rewarding/fulfilling part of my life. I’ve found you have to find your own light in life, no one else will necessarily do that for you. Building a plan for your future and executing it is daunting and there will be adversity, but you can handle it. Balance out the hard/mentally taxing stuff with whatever it is that makes you truly happy.

The system has failed, but we still have to live within it. There’s a positive though, if we play our cards right and use the system to our advantage to the best of our ability, we will have enough smart and skilled like-minded people down the road and we can band together to beat the system. The next revolution, whatever form it takes, will require all kinds of different talent from many different walks of life.

I continue to live because the goal of the system you described is to kill us. As long as we still breathe, they haven’t yet won completely, and we still have an opportunity to chuck spanners into the gears to try and slow the enshittification. The bastards in power are the smuggest, shittiest, most vile excuses for human life on this planet, and any drop of satisfaction we can deny them is a victory.

“toss me into a torture facility”

What? Step away from the internet for a while.

I’m really pissed off right now, at both US political parties, at human nature, at a lot of things, so this may not be the best time for me to sound off on a question like this. This may go long. I get into some grizzly topics like Suicide, the Holocaust and how laziness is a fake thing invented by capitalists and Calvinists.

So I learned early on the fucked up nature of capitalism and the laziness rhetoric accompanied with the Protestant work ethic. My parents were glad to criticize my avolition (that’s the medical term for the symptom of not wanting to do anything), but then I was suffering from neglect on account that they both worked full work weeks and were too exhausted to parent.

This is to say, mental illness and family dysfunction often are intergenerational. They were also driven by their parents to work themselves to exhaustion, and they did, and I became a stereotypical gen-x latchkey kid. Anyway, Mom tried an experiment, of paying me by the chore rather than a weekly allowance while I’d have regular house-chore duties. She’d then not pay me if my work was not up to snuff, and I learned quickly that all my efforts couldn’t get it to snuff (I really tried, but I was a kid, and she wasn’t good at telling me what she wanted). Resigned to have no allowance, I stopped working, entirely, and that just wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t be diagnosed with Major Depression until my adulthood, and I’d discover that at my most symptomatic, I could lay down in bed for months, barely able to get up to eat or poop and having the libido of a lump of granite and the inertia of a neutron star.

Contrast the people who lucked out in The Great Resignation of 2021. During the COVID-19 Lockdown, people defied their industrialist bosses and Calvinist ministers and found they could not couch potato out for more than a week or two without getting a severe case of cabin fever. (People who winter in high-snow areas already know this phenomenon, and Steven King’s The Shining is inspired by centuries of worst case scenarios.) Most people took up hobbies, turned their houses into lego parks, took up wood carving or cooking or something, and a lot of those things became marketable skills, hence a lot of Take this job and shove it and a sudden dearth of people willing to suffer abuse, toxic workspaces and a less-than-sustenance wage.

Laziness isn’t a thing. If someone is healthy and happy, they’ll do all the chores. Granted some chores are tedious or arduous or hazardous. In my pinko communist fantasies, I imagine we take some queues hfrom Power Wash Simulator until we figure out how to automate the process, and then automate the maintenance and repair of the machines that do that job, then automate maintenance of the bots that do the maintenance and repair until one guy keeps an eye on the one dial while writing poetry.

Speaking of communism, Marx predicted enshiffication of products and jobs in Das Kapital and our industrialist masters made it clear they liked it when the working class was living in Hoover towns (of cardboard boxes and paint cans) and eating flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). And they don’t mind at all that their employees need food stamps and are living in their car (and sleeping roughly).

There’s a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth where the announcer (not the principal) is talking about the graduating class, and his well wishes and high hopes for them. And then he notes one species_who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead…_

That’s us. Human beings, in capitalism. There’s never enough work. Allegations of meritocracy imply that the least of us will be unfit and will be disposed of like Spartans tossing their imperfect infants into the Kaiadas cave chasm to perish on the rocks. The beggars, widows and orphans we’re supposed to watch out for (and is why Sodom was firebombed in myth) we leave to languish in homelessness, or in prison for failing to fit in and work hard enough.

And here in the states that class of undesirables continues to expand.

Granted more than 10% of us persevere, but somewhere between 66% and 88% of US households live in precarity, which means they worry every night about whether the next week is their last. Most of us are not within the hunky-dory threshold, by far.

In my case, staring blankly at the recent US general election results, I know I don’t want to end up homeless, or arrested and in a detention center (whether stuck in a crowded cell, compelled to forced labor or awaiting my turn in the genocide machine). I’m far away from these outcomes for the moment, but the coming administration makes my fate a lot more unpredictable. So I’m looking for an L-pill or other functional exit strategy, in case I need to evade arrest once I am unpersoned.

And this has led me to an interesting discovery. Society doesn’t want to think about its casualties. I deal with suicidality every day. Usually it’s just considering it. But even professional therapists tend to freak out when I talk about it. Also, in the aughts, I went on a deep dive into the Holocaust, what steps were taken from the concentration camps started by Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst to the Pogroms along the eastern front to the massive extermination machine of Auschwitz. So I’m familiar that societies don’t mind deaths when they happen quietly in the cold, or in the systems. They mind them when they’re out front and messy and require a lot of cleanup. This is why self-immolation protests are terrifying, and even though there’s not enough of them to change hearts and minds, they are a wake up call that our autocratic masters fear.

In reality, the US is suffering from a suicide epidemic. Our rate (about 40K a year in the 2010s and climbing) is worse than Japan (who is much more okay with suicide, though they’re trying to change that) and worse than Russia (Russia’s having a no-good very bad…Putin). For every one dead body from suicide, another three or four end up in the emergency room for trying, but survive, or are stopped by a friend. Also we’re pretty sure some families will obfuscate the cause of death and attribute it to accident (or in David Carradine’s case, literal ninjas) so they don’t have to deal with the public questions about suicide.

But curiously life does suck for most of us, and we’re waiting our turn in the showers, or out in the cold, or ultimately for the water to run out so we can’t make enough food.

I’m not going to advocate harming yourself or others, but I will say playing by the rules is silly, and there’s no way they’ll let you into the cool kids club. Ever. You were never meant to win. Go arty. Go renegade. Go crazy. Go unpredictable.

I’m tired. I’ll give this a grammar pass later.

TL;DR: The following is going to be dark and harsh but it all comes down to one thing. Life doesn’t get better, you get better at dealing with shit. Hang in there.

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You need to disconnect and find a way to focus on you.

It feels like the entire system is a scam and it’s pointless to even try.

It has always been a game where the only way to win is to cheat. Always.

It feels all but certain that I won’t be able to enjoy a prosperous life or get to retire.

The system is not setup with rest (retirement) as its main goal. The system is setup for you to play until you die. Even if you hoard more money than you and your descendants could possibly spend in a hundred years, you would likely still want to play, because you are winning. If your end goal is mere prosperity and retirement, then you should prepare to be under the boot and a slave until you die.

All of the wealth is going straight to the top.

Always has been the case. It hasn’t stopped people from finding a way.

All of the opportunities to move up in the world are being rug-pulled.

This has always been the case. You have to make your own opportunities and expect others to drag you down. We are all crabs in a bucket.

All of the federal agencies that help keep us safe and healthy are gone. The social safety net is getting flushed down the toilet.

Fantasy. These things has never existed in this country. At best, FDR gave us a yoga mat to land on when we fall off a cliff, where before it was a bed of nails. Fall hard enough in this country and you will get wrecked no matter what. It has always been that way.

We will live in disease and squalor, and the most vulnerable of us will die.

Same as it ever was.

Because I dared to not be a sociopath, I and anyone else who voted for sanity will be deemed enemies of the state and hunted down - which won’t be hard, because it would be trivial to build the most robust surveillance state in human history if it doesn’t exist already.

Take a breath. Here is a truth that will sound harsh but it is meant as a kindness. You do not matter. Just about nobody knows you exist. Nobody is coming to get you. This fact applies to almost everyone.

Since all we can do is live the life we perceive with the meat in our skull, we tend to see ourselves as the main character in the story of life. We’re not. We barely qualify for NPC status.

I myself have disabilities (which I don’t think qualify for benefits) that make it hard, but not impossible, to find a job.

That’s a problem, I am sorry. All problems have a solution, but one unlikely to be found here, with Internet strangers.

The problem is that I just can’t bring myself to do it because I don’t get what the fucking point is anymore. I have to work so hard to get out of this rut just for some fascist fuck to kill me or toss me into a torture facility before I can even experience life on my own.

Again. Breathe homie. That’s not going to happen.

Have you been in a similar headspace and were able to escape it?

100%…often. I have lived with chronic, sometimes crippling, depression and fairly severe PTSD since 1989. Long story short, a lot of trauma broke my brain. Combo that with ADHD, borderline personality disorder, heart disease and cancer, and we are living the life baby! Still, I have been able survive and rise from poverty to wealth without hurting too many people…I hope.

If so, what snapped you out of it?

Nothing did. I just kept getting up out of spite and contempt for this life. As time went on, i got used to it. The bullshit bothered me less until it just became background noise. A nuisance from time to time.

you unironically just have to cope with it in whatever way makes sense to you

I personally think of my career as: “some things I do are interesting and keep me from blowing my brains out, the rest I don’t care about”

when it comes to the company I work for: I treat everyone I meet well, no corporate bs, no yes sir yes ma’am. I do whatever I’m assigned and meet deadlines

but I never go above and beyond (because of burnout)

everything you’ve thought about hard work = reward or better pay is a scam

put everything into work-life balance and when you go home focus on things you really want to do, such as hobbies or hang outs

don’t do unpaid overtime, don’t bend over for anyone, don’t offer yourself up when shit goes down

you want to be as invisible as possible while not burning out AND not working your ass off (everyone has different standards for what this means)

tldr: just find some way to cope because there isn’t really anything else you can do

TL; DR Get in on the scam.

Pick something you like to do, or have a talent for, and plan a path to make money from it. You may still have to work for someone else initially, to develop skills and get experience, but it will be better than doing a shit job only for money.

Research what resources there are to support your startup. Even in places where there is no help from government or anything else for individuals, you will find they want to support business.

Especially if you have extra challenges, if you get good, they will make a narrative around your success and promote you as an example.