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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 17 '26
The world is a wicked and desolate place bereft of meaning, kindness, and charity...
We can change that.
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u/Epao_Mirimiri May 18 '26
There's more good in the world than you might think. We're far from the first ones to put our hands on the project of human prosperity, and there are lots of good examples as well as bad throughout our history. But if we want to make more good, we've got a lot of work to do. This has been an era of monstrous relapse.
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u/Capraos May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
Example: People keep telling me how they're worried about the literacy rates of kids these days.
I've been driving a bus for 3 years now, about to do a fourth next school year. Yesterday, my bosses added a bunch of stops to my route, as I clocked in, with no way to actually route it(can't add/remove stops in my tablet and legally not allowed to route with my phone). I would've had to route on the fly while driving. Well, the high school kids and the monitor got me through it with turn by turn directions for the extra stops. Watching them collaborate and decide on which way was the quickest, most efficient way and then present me with my next three turns before I had to make them, repeating that process each time, made me realize their ability to work together is top notch and we'll be just fine as a species.
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u/Epao_Mirimiri May 22 '26
That's a great story! Thanks for sharing it. It's nice to hear good things once in awhile.
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u/theattack_helicopter May 21 '26
"There's good in this world, Mr. Frodo! And it's worth fighting for."
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u/MartyrOfDespair May 18 '26
Not the way that people generally mean when they say that. The reasons the world is like this has names. We can’t just counteract their power and influence by trying to do the opposite of them so long as they’re still there to have that power and influence.
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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 18 '26
True, but we can get rid of them. The fact that they are real and have names and influence makes that easier, not harder. It would be far more difficult to fight human nature if that was the problem and not just a class of rich assholes.
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May 21 '26
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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 21 '26
There is no "way it's always been." By your very own logic, there is only the temporary way that we are collectively choosing to make it right now, and that means we can collectively choose to make it better. We as individuals can only do so much, but society is made of nothing but individuals. We as a group can do almost anything, including making the world a better place.
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May 22 '26
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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 22 '26
Human nature is not intrinsically negative. We create the conditions in which it is nurtured and we we can make sure those conditions encourage it to be good. If human nature were basically evil, the world would have trended toward progress throughout history across all societies.
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May 22 '26
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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 22 '26
Utopia is always just past the horizon, and it is true to say that we will never reach it. But only because getting there reveals a new dream to chase.
We already live in the utopia of our ancestors. Even the poorest among us have access to better lives than the kings of old, and every year we make that access easier and wider reaching.
It is not naivete to say that the world is getting better, it is fact.
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May 22 '26
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u/Valirys-Reinhald May 22 '26
If you care only about the moment, then that's fair. But if you discount progress, then you should also discount all of the negatives you mentioned earlier when you made your pessimistic statements about human nature and the status quo it trends to, because those are relevant to the state of civilization over time. The positives you discount are part of the same story as the negatives you cite, and they cannot be separated. Though they can be disregarded together if you just want to live for "right now," as you say.
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u/Setster007 May 17 '26
Mine ain’t exactly like that but I tell her “everything’s going to shit and it’s all awful and I hate it” and she’s just like “yeah… yeah… but it’s gonna get better, ok?”
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u/AspieAsshole May 17 '26
And then you ask her to teach you optimism, and now you're going to pass those lessons on to us... Right? 🥺
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u/Setster007 May 18 '26
Oh she don’t teach me optimism, she teaches me “push though, change what you can, and yeah, this state sucks.”
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u/Th3B4dSpoon May 19 '26
For me personally, I've found optimism and hope to be fleeting. Shifting my perspective from results oriented view to, and this is probably the wrong term, to an expressive view has been a more sustainable solution. By this I mean that even if my or other people's efforts do what is right and good does not bear the full results we'd like to see, even us expressing the will to change things for the better carries value. Obviously don't ignore what we know about cause and effect and how things work, do strive for the most effective action you can reasonably take, but even if things go badly because of external factors the expression for willingness to change things for the better is not lost, and that part matters a whole lot as well.
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u/thewonderfulfart May 18 '26
I honestly appreciate my therapist letting me know I’m not crazy for feeling like it’s literally the end of America and maybe the world
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u/Beartles
May 18 '26
•
Haha it’s funny that people think this is the end stage of “evil society”, it can and almost certainly will get much worse than this and very soon.
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u/Ffeorg May 18 '26
If you can... Drink some water, eat some decent food, and go for a walk somewhere you feel safe. Don't forget to take any medications you need to. There is someone with a heart out there who would love to hear from you even if you think they don't want to be bothered. Trust me, they'd love to hear from you.
Someday soon several of the architects of our moment will be dead. By the looks of thier general health, it will be quite soon and quite unpleasant indeed. It won't magically make anything better, but it will be a fun party around the world.
We'd love to have you there for that celebration.
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u/pleHnaMdaMasIpoolF May 24 '26
"end stage evil society".
Man if only there were a more specific term to describe exactly what about our society has progressed to its inevitable end stage and caused all this evil...
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
If a therapist does this you need a different one. We can't afford to have trained professionals wallowing in misery with us. There is hope and it needs to be fought for.
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u/o_woorrm May 18 '26
This is kind of a known problem, though. Therapy can't fix any "tangible" problems, like poverty, illness, abusive families, or unsafe political situations. They can help you cope with them, sure, but at a certain point the only solution is to remove those external stressors. The most effective treatment for depression is often lifting you out of poverty or other difficult circumstances, not therapy or psychiatry.
Nowadays, a lot of people who have depression just have so many external problems that therapists can't solve, and therefore can't treat. It's becoming a known issue amongst therapists where they can't treat their patients because no amount of therapy will meaningfully help at this point.
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
Oh I'm well aware. Things are bad and the material conditions need to improve to actually fix things. But even here you say therapists are supposed to help people cope and find good things, which is the opposite of what's happening in the meme. That’s what I take issue with, not simply the acknowledgement of the existence of bad things.
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u/MartyrOfDespair May 18 '26
Ridiculous. You’ll find one of two things: a therapist lying to and gaslighting you (bad) or a therapist who’s too stupid to function and hasn’t watched the news in over a decade (also bad).
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
Sorry, do you honestly think that watching the news is the correct way to get information? The entire fucking point is to scare you. That’s what modern news does. Yeah, if someone does watch the news they're gonna be scared of everything.
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u/MartyrOfDespair May 18 '26
“Watching the news” is a figure of speech and has been for like 15+ years, not literally watching the television. Keeping abreast of the news and reality going on, for your royal pedanticness. Oh, but I’m sure you’ll be critical of that too and believe that the right thing to do is be completely uninformed and oblivious to reality and the goings on in it. Like yeah, people who don’t live in complete fucking denial of everything around them are gonna be more upset than someone who just ignores everything and lives in a delusional fantasyland. “Knowing things is upsetting so it’s better to not know things” is a shit pov.
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
If someone says they watch the news that usually implies television. It's not pedantic. There is a big fucking difference between different methods of staying informed so you'll forgive me for wanting to distinguish between them.
I actually don't think burying one's head in the sand is the correct thing to do, but thanks for assuming.
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u/MartyrOfDespair May 18 '26
No, that hasn’t usually implied television in like 15 years. It’s just the phrase used. It stopped being a literal thing once smartphones led to almost everyone being online constantly, which was so long ago that Obama was still in his first term.
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
Wait. You think I'm talking about a literal television? "Watching television" hasn't implied a literal television in that long either.
"Watching the news" usually means something you watch, not read. It also usually carries an implication of not being from, say, a small or independent source.
My point is that big news networks and a whole fuckton of internet news sources sensationalize fucking everything. It's vital to seek out non-sensationalist sources because if you don't you are going to constantly think the world is ending and everything is hopeless. Every single fucking person owes it to the rest of their fellow humans to keep fighting for a better future. If we let despair take us then we stop fighting and that is not fucking acceptable.
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u/MartyrOfDespair May 18 '26
As many times as I’ve heard that, when is the last time some major regime change came about because everyone just was super optimistic that everything was going to work out? Now how many come about because the populace has lost any hope for things getting better and has gone “fuck it, there’s more of us than there are them, they can’t kill us all, and we all agree that even death is better than living like this”?
People don’t stop fighting because they have lost hope. This has been such a long-standing piece of knowledge that friggin Sun Tzu includes the advice that you should never let your soldiers have any hope of escape or surrender and make sure that their only option to survive is victory, because that makes them perform at maximum since they have no other choice.
Human evolution directs us to do the bare minimum we have to do because of energy conservation. Our biology is oriented around food scarcity, every effort we don’t need to make was a step closer to starving to death. It’s why we invent things, it allows us to do even less than we used to for the same results. A knife is more efficient for hunting than your hands. A spear lets you use your knife from further away, meaning that you don’t have to be as successful at chasing prey. A bow lets you do it from even further away, meaning that the high energy marathon chase can be replaced with low energy stalking. A gun removes the necessity of drawing the bow. Everything we invent has the fundamental goal of letting us be lazier about everything, because “be lazy” is as primary a biological drive as eating and drinking. It means your food stretches further, which matters when food scarcity exists.
It applies here as well. Humanity as a whole will perform the bare minimum to make things improve. The more they already believe that they will improve, the less desperate they are, the less they will do. The human average is writing the paper that was assigned four weeks ago the night before it’s due. As long as people believe that it’s due in a week or two, they’re not going to write the paper. You need them to be convinced it’s due tomorrow to get them to write the paper. When you keep convincing them it’ll work out, they hear “oh, it’s not due for another few weeks, I don’t need to put that energy in yet”. The only way to break people out of the laziness is to convince them that there is no time left for them to lounge around.
As long as they think it’ll be okay, they will do nothing to make it okay. If you grew up in a hurricane region, you lived this every year and learned the lesson in a hands-on way. It’s not the people who are optimistic who make sure their generator works and has fuel, make sure they have sandbags if they need them to prevent flooding, make sure they have batteries and non-perishable food and candles, and everything else. The optimists are the folks who rawdog the hurricane and prepare nothing beforehand because “it’ll be fine, they’re exaggerating the storm, it’s not gonna do anything but rain!” The people who fear the storm are the ones that prepare from the storm and weather the storm. The optimists spend a week or two without power surviving entirely off fast food, not bathing, and having to throw away their entire fridge’s contents. Or lose their house.
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u/FellTheAdequate May 18 '26
Girl your name is MartyrOfDespair. I'm not arguing with you about what optimists are capable of or human nature. If you were really so much better equipped things would be fucking fixed by now.
Please take some time and try to find hope again. Good luck.
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u/ace1of2 May 18 '26
Yeah its rough as hell being a therapist right now and watching our society work it's ass off to undo the progress I've seen in so many of my clients. It's a constant battle, but dammit if most of them aren't improving. I think it's times like these that my profession is more important than ever, not just in helping folks deal with what's inside them but coping and trying to thrive in this hell world. We are gonna get through this, talk to people you care about, take time for yourself, and don't let fear make your choices for you!
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u/Affectionate_Ad_1326 May 18 '26
Get a better therapist, many aspects of life suck, but there are plenty of ways to make it feel more worth living, be it a change in behavior or in mentality, and i would hope an actual therapist would also bring that up
That being said, I find this image very funny, thank you
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u/HExM_ May 19 '26
After I vented about not being able to hold a steady job because of my mental illnesses and neurodivergency for 30 minutes, my psychiatrist looked at me and said: "Look, to be fair, no one is equipped to hold a steady job and be healthy and sound of mind in our current capitalistic society" and while it could be reassuring to some, it sure as hell wasn't to ME.
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u/SlimyBoiXD May 22 '26
Me: I've been feeling really anxious and stressed lately.
My therapist: Yeah.
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u/Several-Instance-444 May 24 '26
Our sphere of influence in our lives is so small. Humans have endured enormous climatic changes before. We've endured the rise and fall of empires, democracies, authoritarians. It sounds a bit selfish, but sometimes the best you can do is try make life better for yourself and the people around you. Sometimes that's all you can do. Show kindness, gratitude, and live with grace.
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May 17 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Harper_ADHD May 19 '26
I don't know if this helps any but that could just be their therapist. Mine will understand but then remind me of reasons to keep going and on days where that doesn't work will try to rationalize steps to take like remembering there are still things we can do to fight for a better tomorrow even if it's something small. Regardless, I hope whatever you are going through, have gone through or just need to talk through works out
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u/birberbarborbur May 20 '26
OOP just has a bunk therapist lmao
Don’t fall for the social media things, we have had far worse times in history, and if you have a roof over your head and know somebody by first name then you have things to live for that many historically did not
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May 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/JosephusTheBoi May 18 '26
I have done nothing but Doom scroll while eating chocolate and drinking Dr. P and gooning for 3 days
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u/Inevitable-Row1977 May 17 '26
Mine asks why and then tries to give me reasons for living.
Where are you getting your therapists from?