wonderingwanderer

Get used to it. Seriously. The world is designed to keep you down (unless you’re a nepo baby, which it doesn’t sound like).

Trying to hold all those pieces of the puzzle together is stressful, and things will just keep piling up, and sooner or later it will all come crashing down.

Just take it a day at a time. Prioritize the things that are important, keep a list of things that require regular attention, and have some general idea of where you’re going and how to get there. But don’t stress too much about everything working out exactly as planned; be flexible because real life is dynamic and things always change, including your own priorities.

Make time for yourself and doing the things you enjoy, get plenty of rest, drink lots of water, and don’t be afraid to “do nothing” from time to time. Spend a little bit of time each day outside breathing fresh air. It’s all you can do, really…

Would something like Anubis or Iocaine prevent what you’re worried about?

I haven’t used either, but from what I understand they’re both lightweight programs to prevent bot scraping. I think Anubis analyzes web traffic and blocks bots when detected, and Iocaine does something similar but also creates a maze of garbage data to redirect those bots into, in order to poison the AI itself and consume excessive resources on the end of the companies attempting to scrape the data.

Obviously what others have said about firewalls, VPNs, and antivirus still applies; maybe also a rootkit hunter and Linux Malware Detect? I’m still new to this though, so you probably know more about all that than I do. Sorry if I’m stating the obvious.

Not sure if this is overkill but maybe Network Security Toolkit might have some helpful tools as well?

If someone is posting about you downvoting them, then they’re a seriously flawed individual. Some people will take any reason they can to call other people racist. I think it’s a fetish, honestly.

You’re fine.

Is anyone who’s backed into a corner there because they backed themselves into it? Cause that seems concerningly adjacent to victim-blaming mentality.

We don’t do it for abuse victims, we don’t do it for people in poverty, and we don’t do it for people with chronic (physical) illnesses or permanent injuries. So why is it okay to do it for people with depression?

I think that’s the spirit of this post.

And just because I don’t have a viable miracle solution doesn’t mean I can’t tell you what doesn’t work. That’s a silly notion. If the solution is so simple, I wouldn’t have been suffering from depression for so long.

People like you seem to believe we choose to be depressed, because why? You think we just like the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness? You think we enjoy constant despair and don’t ever want to be lifted out of it?

Oh shit, you’re right. My weed-addled brain got “1/8th = 3.5g” mixed up with “1/4 = 7g” and came up with “7.5×4=30”

These things do happen…

“He was gonna feel stuck at a dead-end job, burn out in a few years, get hooked on drugs or alcohol or netflix to distract him from the pain of a mediocre existence, and ultimately settle for a life that is much less than the one he dreamed of as a child, just like the rest of us.”

“DON’T SAY THAT, HE HAD SO MUCH POTENTIAL!!!”

When there’s a big, performative event for Suicide Prevention Month, everyone turns out and it’s a big thing with mock sympathy and moral pedestal standing. Everyone tosses around mottos like “seeking help isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength” and whatnot.

But when you personally struggle with suicidal ideations, even during Suicide Prevention Month, and you try mentioning it anywhere, everyone shrieks and treats you like an asshole, and then nobody comes near you for the rest of your life…

If everyone decides to hate you and treat you like you’re contagious for having depression because mental health stigma has come back with a vengeance over the past five years, then that absolutely is your problem.

If you can’t land a job because potential employers always ask about that gap in your resume that you can’t explain cause you were too depressed to function, that’s definitely your problem too.

I’m sick of this “Oh just stop caring what other people think of you, it’ll be fine.” It’s no better than saying “Why are you depressed? Your life is fine. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, get out of bed, take a shower, eat healthier, get some exercise, find a hobby, go out and meet people, make friends, yadda yadda yadda.”

It puts the impetus on the person suffering from depression to somehow magically bootstrap their way back to perfect mental health by some imaginary force of will as if it were as simple as flipping a light switch, when for many people with depression the reality is that they’ve tried all things and can’t manage to do them with any consistency, the depression itself makes them infinitely harder, and often some of these options simply aren’t on the table (like “making friends” in a word that’s collectively allergic to depressed people). If you cant remember the last time you were genuinely happy, because you were basically a young kid at that time, then your physical brain has developed in ways that leave it deficient in the structures and functions that produce the experience of happiness.

What is so hard to understand about that?

Except I never claimed that prices literally quadrupled. I merely explained how OP is utilizing a hyperbole to riff on a common experience that many people are having, which is that the buying power of the USD has been in sharp decline for long enough that people can already feel the difference.

What’s true is that $20 used to feel like a decent amount of money, and now it feels like barely anything; the way $5 used to. Nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to go anywhere and spend $5 or less.

You’re literally in the showerthoughts community, it’s not meant to present literal, accurate statistics. Its MO is basically to have at least some inaccuracy or logical inconsistency, because when you’re in the shower you don’t have a computer in front of you to immediately verify every heuristical thought process that “seems about right.” The “sounds close to truth, but technically isn’t” is what makes it a “shower thought.”

We live in a world of scammers and scammees. Some people even scam others while getting scammed themselves. It’s scammers all the way down.

My point is that those high-level macroeconomic metrics are completely divorced from the financial realities of ordinary people.

If you think the cost of living has only risen slightly relative to the buying power of the average wage-earner, then you must be sheltered and insulated by having wealth and income levels that are well-above average.

Everyone who lives under capitalism is getting scammed to high heaven, I don’t know why we should limit that statement to encompass only one market…

I’ll allow OP a little bit of hyperbole to get their point across; this is an internet forum, after all, not a peer-reviewed journal…

Ah yes, people no longer going to jail over a flower to be exploited for slave labor and lose all future job prospects is such a scam 🤷‍♀️

If your ounce weighs 28g, you got shorted 2g…

I guess for that price it doesn’t really matter, but it’s about the principle!

Now they advertise $5 shorties and the millennial in me has to do a doubletake of incredulity

Relative to what? Gold? British Pounds? Crude oil?

All measures of value are relative; they only mean anything based on their value relative to other things.

Commodity prices might drop significantly when an economy crashes and there’s low demand (look at the price of soybeans in 2025), but consumer prices either stay the same or continue to rise (didn’t see your grocery bill shrink when commodity prices dropped, did you?)

Economists might measure the value of the USD against high-level metrics such as commodities and precious metals, but what matters to the average person is the value of the USD relative to consumer prices.

Maybe technically the USD only increased in value by $1.85 in ten years, but if the cost of bread or toilet paper or a meal at a restaurant doubled or quadrupled in that time, then really the value of the dollar dropped significantly as far as the consumer is concerned.

•Splorf

•Splorfolopolis

•Splorfolopeltron

•Splorfonemoene

•Splorfemonetruvya

•Splorficklenepplestein

•Kroink

Just replace meat with some type of legume once, twice, or thrice a day.

Save your colon, and the planet.

Oh, and replace most of your carbs with whole grains.

Edit: and leave the skins on your potatoes!

Even as a kid I knew the adults were full of shit. Like, “why are you bullshitting me? Do you think I’m dumb?”

Obviously kids weren’t supposed to have critical thinking skills, and that was my problem, apparently. It sure got me into a lot of trouble…