I remember, as the Biden admin had more or less erased covid from consciousness, critics mentioning the cognitive load involved in having the vast majority of people no longer be able to acknowledge the million dead, the measures we had taken for each other, the seriousness of it. They attributed this cognitive load to people in the public becoming shittier drivers, and more impatient and short-fused in general.
It's a double-whammy. The load of one's own denial, and the load of having to live within everyone else's denial.
Could be both.
One thing I've learned from studying ecology is that systems can usually handle one or two stressors. When they collapse it's because they have so many stressors that they can no longer handle all of them at once and they crumble under the weight.
Even societal systems are like this. Empires fall not from a single problem, but from many problems eating away at them for years until the threshold buffer is gone and the floodgates open.
Long covid coming along to fuck up everyone's brains just in time to pick up where lead poisoning left off
I'm not convinced it's safe to assume it's worse. Lead exposure is SO widespread, and the neurological damage lead causes is really severe. I think it could go either way.
I hate forced positivity so fucking much. I've been told by adults, teachers, bosses, whoever since I could speak that I had an Attitude Problem. My mental response to this has pretty much always been "fuck you, the world has a bullshit problem and im not gonna change my core personality magically and I certainly dont wanna do so to appease these cretins" well before I could articulate it. A positive outlook on a pretty grim reality isnt something to be proud of, it's delusion. There's keeping hope, but that ain't what this is.
Whenever I was visibly in a bad mood my mom was fond of telling me "change the attitude." One of many things that drilled into me the skill of keeping my face expressionless.
I will give myself this. I never backed down and kept it up and still do. Suffering in silence just leads to further suffering, fuck that noise. Once my parents got their heads around me they've been cool af but maaaaaaan did we fight hard when I was younger. They adjusted to life in this hellscspe so naturally. My mom only ever had one job from age 19 to retirement. My dad worked around a lot when I was young but eventually got a sick union gig with the post office. Once moved out and all that and they stsrted seeing how high rent was and how little wages had increased and high school people I knew graduating with degrees and working the same kitchen jobs as me, they noticed how much worse things are and gained a lot of sympathy for my perspective.
But yeah, as a kid id get that all the time, it was dismissing my feelings and I knew it and would often call it out and then there would be a whole fight and my mom would cry so she could win. She eventually cut that manipulative shit out, and my dad intervened regsading it. I think its mostly cause I stopped feeling bad when it happened and we would hit a reallt uncomfortable for him stalemate. We had some harsh times. Im in my 30s and like both of em a lot now and a big part is that we have gotten comfortable with the fact that we are fundamentally different. Things oddly chilled out when I becsme a teenager, I think they figured out that I was gonna do and say what I wanted and they'd be better off encouraging it towards the best direction possible and not opposing it entirely, which was a reslly smart move on their part or id totally be dead from an OD by now
I don't even see it as positive. If anything the "fix your attitude" stuff comes across as nihilistic to me, because there is always this message of "The world sucks, that's just how it is. Stop complaining and deal with it in a way that isn't a burden on the status quo. No one cares, or we do care but we can't deal with you right now."
Yeah, i feel like my attitude is pretty tuned intonthe state of things and generally has been. It's like when I was a Gifted Kid who wasnt Living up to My Potential. Potential for what? I didn't know I was in training for a job that needed doing. Like im fucking anakin in the prequels and not a child who was good at reading and talking. It was never about anything specific, if they had a gig lined up id have probably worked toward it, it's the fact that it was this abstract notion of always being okay with what you're supposed to do according to someone else. Ill do that if it serves a purpose, I'm happy to be a cog in a machine that works, but dont tell me to eat a shit sandwich and smile while I do it. Irs bad enough I gotta eat the shit sandwich. Complaining is fun and cool
A lot of times when they talk about "Potential" as something unique about someone, it is a code word for class. They want you to pick up a career path that is prestigious and high-paying so that they can point to you as a success story. They want to see you get in to the exclusive group, and to sustain the hierarchy that money creates, that some people are overall quantifiably superior to others. It's part of the reactionary outlook that sees allies around them not as people to celebrate in their own right, but as agents that advance the same cause.
These days I can use elementary business knowledge, middle school math, and LTV to demonstrate that the positions I've worked create upwards of $100 of net exchange value per hour, sometimes upwards of $200 or even more. I don't need to impress or validate anyone anymore, there are things that I gravitate to because I like them intrinsically, not because there's a carrot dangling by them. And coincidentally many of these things are weaponizable for a counter-economics.
At a pizza place where I worked, the menu cost of what each cook on the line could produce per hour was at least $200. Spreading this out across all restaurant staff, it became closer to $80.
Of course it's easiest to do this when you are directly making a product. In other sectors, for instance at larger retailers, it is much harder to quantify, but if you have access to company overview info then you can easily divide revenue by total workforce and get a productivity metric. The nationwide average is a little over $160k per year ($29T GDP, 175M workers). It's not unusual for companies to hit $300k a year per worker.
but if you have access to company overview info then you can easily divide revenue by total workforce and get a productivity metric.
My accounting career has radicalized me far more than any other factor.
yeah, it's like a intersection of
- a chronically invalidating social/cultural environment
- a kind of semiotic capitalism ("attention economy") that extracts wealth by pushing people's social/emotional/behavioural control to the limit
- and an increasingly small window of what is considered "normal" emotional/social/behavioural functioning (as opposed to what is pathologized)
See also, the rampant misuse of "trauma dumping" and "emotional labor"
It sucks because on the one hand I totally get it. I have had the job of being someone's makeshift therapist many, many times. However I hate hate hate the reaction to this being "the person who is dumping trauma on me is bad and should be shamed" instead of "We need to improve mental health services, but we haven't, so while this sucks for everyone involved, it's something we as a society have to deal with right now because this isn't either of our faults therefore neither of us deserve to be punished."
I have never once felt frustrated at the person reaching out to me. Only frustration that they had to.
I started looking to go back to therapy recently and have been mentally preparing how I might explain, to this nearly certainly not communist therapist, one of the many issues weighing on me and this feels like a good start to explain a sizable amount of that. Thanks for the help
I hope you have good luck with them. It can take like, a while before you know have found a good one or not.
Well, jk. Both the options my PCP said used sliding scales don't actually. So I'm back to being unable to afford it I guess.
Fuck means testing
Currently the only way I can afford to see one is because I'm seeing a provisional psychologist. Maybe you could try that? Although I'm not sure what your situation is.
Where do you find one? I just need someone I can see in person who costs less than fucking $150 a visit... That's like 1/5 my monthly free budget, which also needs to go to food for me and my dog among all the other random incidental things
I'm in Australia. I pay around $140 for mine.
Argh, I wish I tell you more but I can't doxx myself. Maybe try asking your GP if they know of any provisional psychs?
It’s more like the average Westerner doesn’t truly give a fuck about anything but themselves, therefore no one cares about how miserable my life is so why bother being open about it
Even people who are supposed to be caring don't care. Therapists, medical staff, Christians, all treat me like worthless trash now that I can't work or perform any longer and need help.
This is why I like bimboism/himboism. Society wants us to be smart and you can reject that. It's okay to be dumb and present yourself as dumb. Honestly, it's freeing and it's something I need to exercise more.
I think it's okay to not know things, but willful ignorance should be avoided. Knowledge is good.
Virgin "you're so smart so here's some extra task for you to do because they're a breeze for a genius like you" vs chad "thanks for offering to help, but you might not get this, but don't worry I'll get help from the genius smarty-pants instead"
at best a "Let's get that mask back on."
Ugh that's basically what all my years of being medicated was. I'm never touching a psych drug EVER again.
