The American dream is now an outright lie, one perpetuated by boomers who lived the most charmed existence before pulling up the ladder behind them. Billionaires stole our future.

Posting here is a great first step. AA meetings can be intimidating at first, but if you’re ever white knuckling it, they can be a godsend.

I try to look at my drinking this way, I just can’t anymore. Much like how I can’t breathe underwater, I can’t drink alcohol. My life is no lesser for it, in fact, it’s far better than I ever could have achieved if I had kept drinking.

I remember when I quit… I was thinking about string theory, and how there are different timelines of my life which deviate based on my decision making. I thought that, surely, if there was a timeline in which everything in my life went to shit, I lost my marriage, my will to aspire, my everything, surely that would be the timeline in which I kept drinking.

So I decided to explore a different timeline. In this one I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, with money in the bank, and dreams I’m reaching out to.

You can do it too. ❤️‍

P.S. I also have CPTSD, and quitting drinking was essential in my path to facing it. It was only when I got sober that I could confront my past, and move beyond it. When I was an active alcoholic, I was using alcohol to run from my demons, but when I stopped and faced them, my symptoms let up immensely.

disgusting. Funds should be taken and given to the family of the boy she traumatized.

Wu Tang Clan and Wilco

Millerey González, 32, was raped, had her hands, arms, and legs broken, then was thrown into a stream in a deep ravine to drown in Colombia on April 4

Rather than helping, some witnesses recorded her on video trying in vain to escape the ravine and stream, which they later posted to social media.

What in the actual fuck. You see someone struggling to not drown and you just fucking film it??

Create art. Writing screenplays and books. Painting, gardening, working out, traveling, seeing live music, volunteer with whatever great organization I happen to be into at the time. Spend more time in my community. Have children.

The way I console myself is by saying that likely, the only way the US elects a true socialist democrat (AKA Bernie Sanders / AOC) that can bring about a Brand New Deal, is by having the pendulum of American politics first swing so far to the right, that everyone with a conscience is forced to get out and vote in retaliation.

But the idea that we could simply vote our way out of a rising fascist dictatorship seems a fleeting fantasy.

we’ve been given too much bread and too many circuses

For a while I celebrated the idea that we were in the “Golden Age of Television.” So many amazing shows, stories being told so exquisitely. But the more I think about it, the more that the ancient roman proverb of Bread and Circus seems more apt. I sit in front of a computer screen all day for work. On my breaks, I browse Lemmy on my phone. When I get off, I work out while staring at another screen in the gym. While making dinner I put on whatever NBA game is currently playing. While eating dinner I watch a show. After dinner I watch a comedy series while I eat dessert, occasionally browsing the internet simultaneously. My whole day, from when I wake up, to right before I go to bed, consuming content from a screen.

I wonder how many are like me, and how many of us are successfully using this constant stream of info- and entertainment to dull the pain of living like this. And what would it take for us to truly resist.

I think you’re right in that it would take hardship. We’re all mostly two missed paychecks away from our living standard collapsing, that could do it. But then that begs the question, how does one resist the rise of fascism? Because I’m beginning to think that voting may not save us when those in power are completely divorced from public outcry or consequences. When peaceful opposition is made impossible (or illegal on certain college campuses), when they round up and deport those that would publicly question their authority, when our elected leaders wring their hands in mocking frustration over all the nothing they’ve tried… well, perhaps violence is the answer after all. What other means have they left us?

The everything is already awful enough without us having to carry around a device that connects us to all the awful everywhere we go.

nobody would care

Information Overload. The march doesn’t matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we’ve started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn’t matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it’s just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of “staying up to date” when it’s impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn’t matter because there’s a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there’s a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it’s back up by the time you check and you should’ve bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won’t be temporary.

That is an insane thing to have to do. Having to manipulate your TV into not doing something you don’t want or require it to do.

Can’t force the memory to resurface. It comes when you’re ready for it, not before (i.e. when you’re not running from it anymore). Took a lot of effort, therapy, and breakthroughs… Then, when I least expected it, several memory triggers hitting all at once and BAM. All came back like lightning. Every detail, like it happened yesterday.

From what I remember, it was visually overwhelming, while the story and dialogue were the opposite. Additionally, for how simplistic the story was, it seemed like they could have done it in less than it’s 2hr 15min runtime…

But I dunno, maybe I’ll give it another shot

Avoidant, checking in! Everything is awful!

And I don’t really think I have ‘repressed memories’

Funny, I said this exact same thing. Got pissed at the therapist, never went back to him.

Then it all came back.

Things don’t stay buried.

Releasing her doesn’t matter, the message has already been sent, the intention is clear. To intimidate those that would defy their fascist operations. To silence critics that fear retribution. To say for all to hear, “if we can do this to a judge, imagine what we can do to you.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA couldn’t have happened to a more deserving shitstain

I still don’t really understand how we ended up fumbling the ball so hard at the end of the season. One game Russel Wilson is throwing for 400+ yards, and the next, we’re being made to look foolish. Both QBs gone, and we bring back our old third string guy who’s more famous for getting beat with his own helmet more than anything else… We just went out and got another amazing WR, but got nobody to throw them the ball! Mike Williams, George Pickens, and now DK Metcalf, but who’s gonna give them the ball?? So many questions. This years draft is gonna be interesting.

Just please for the love of god let aaron rodgers go somewhere else.

I don’t agree. I think what was originally dubbed masculine, was thinly veiled stoicism. It was a philosophical approach to how one should live a good life. It was be a hard, strong, quiet man that takes it all on the chin because you know that your work will come back and benefit you in the long run. Masculinity was akin to boomer-isms of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” or “work hard and you’ll be rewarded.”

But through the lack of social economic reforms over the last half century, there is a profound disconnect between hard work and wealth. Wealth generated passively from capital has surged, while earnings from actual hard work has dried up. Young men are not so stupid that they don’t see this. So what happens when someone swoops in with seemingly a massive fortune, that is selling a new version of masculinity? He’s selling a new philosophical approach to the dire economic hardship of today, and it’s basically one of the gangster. The same people that idolized Al Pacino in Scarface, now, instead, worship online toxic figures selling similarly thought out get-rich quick schemes.

His philosophy could be surmised into “Use everyone around you in order to accumulate wealth.”

It’s really just a terrible philosophy that destroys lives, but within it, he offers the same snake-oil that most religions do, “it’s not your fault.” Which is the barb that sticks in people. “It’s not your fault, it’s XYZ (whether that’s the woke or women or immigrants or whatever, it doesn’t matter who they blame, so long as they blame someone else for your problems).”

So, instead of focusing on figures of true positive masculinity (Steve Irwin, Mr. Rogers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lebron James), they flock to the simpler, easier answer. They can imagine how to use people, how to sell drugs or prostitute women, because they see it depicted in movies, and think that they could do it. It’s far more difficult and far more convoluted to grow into a fully realized man that values others, and works hard despite not garnering massive wealth. To live a life of charity and humility isn’t sexy, and doesn’t make one a millionaire. So why would they flock to it?

Fix wealth inequality, and you’ll fix a LOT of issues we have today, including (I think) the rise of toxic male influencers.

Aw heeeell yeah. I have my doubts about the influence Disney will have on the outcome, but hopefully we at least get a couple more great seasons!