I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.

Yep. Alberta is currently breaking up Alberta Health Services in a clear “Divide & Conquer” attempt.

Not in my experience, haha. Love you guys though!

Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.

This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.

I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.

As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.

The only way to play, imo.

Man imagine this game with a proper modern physics engine.

I mean, I guess it inspired a lot of what we see in modern physics games, so I don’t really need to imagine, but still, I would play it.

I’ve done this a few times through my life, especially lately as I’ve finally been getting my own life stabilized. Here’s some more “notable” examples.

A family member, where I’ve been trying to mentor them and help them in every way I possibly can - sometimes at great personal cost - but as the saying goes, I’ve led them to water but I can’t make them drink. Still won’t give up, though.

Another family member I’ve done the same for has actually been trying to take me up on it. Still early stages, but they’ve started on applying for college in a field they’re interested in. I’m helping them study since it happens to be adjacent to my own field, and I’ll help cover the bulk of the cost if they don’t qualify for gov’t funding. I’m really hoping things work out for them.

The only time I’ve really actually seen obvious results is in my students where I volunteer teaching English. One student in particular really struggled to read even a single word, but in less than a year, they can now read most sentences on their own - which is honestly just insane to me.
Obviously it’s like 99.999% their effort rather than mine, but I like to think I’m helping lol.

…writing this all out makes me feel like I’m bragging or something. Really I’ve just been in a rough spot for most of my life, and now that I’m getting my life together I’m just trying to give back a bit where I can. I just want everyone to be happy, lol.

Some folks on Lemmy recently recommended StreetComplete, and I’ve been really enjoying it so far.

It’s a “Pokémon Go” style thing, but you go around answering simple questions about your surroundings which are then used to update/improve the data on OpenStreetMap.

One concern I considered after using the app was that because your contributions are uploaded to OpenStreetMap, in theory I imagine someone could use that data to track where you are / where you’ve been / where you tend to be. So just be aware of that.

I feel like it has to do with the “mystical” or metaphorical perception of mirrors, especially early on.

Like, as if looking “into a mirror” is analogous to looking “into a (or rather: the) mirror world”, if that makes sense.

Kind of the same reason we use the preposition “in” or “into” rather than the more physically correct “at”.

Wtf its been a year?? What a wild ride!

Aha, so I was right, you will give it to someone. >=3

What for?

Give it to someone that needs it.

Important distinction: Get a bin for your house - no sane educated person wants flour to be sold in disposable plastic bins.

(I’m sure you agree, but it bares mentioning in case there are ever any business folk reading this.)

Yeesh that seems a bit harsh…

You might want to use some of that self-reflection to examine why you feel that way about someone when you don’t know what kind of life they’ve had.

I had a shitty childhood, was miserable in my teens, was possibly even more miserable through my 20s. When I was 16 I told myself if I was still as miserable by 30 I would consider ending it there.

Fortunately around 30, after my low point of the pandemic, is where things started to actually fall into place for me - both in terms of external factors and, slowly, internal monologue.

While I still have a lot of mental holdovers from all that time spent in a depressed state, I would generally say I’m sustainably “happy” these days. Something I genuinely thought I would never reach.

To anyone in a bad place right now, just know that if you stick it out, life actually can be surprisingly worthwhile.

They may have accounted for this, but I feel like that study would be disproportionately affected by wealth.

Not to say I’m against your overall point, of course.

Honestly, since weed was legalized here, my entire social group pretty much entirely ditched alcohol in favor of cannabis. Definitely makes it easier for me to not feel pressured to drink, thankfully.

My family has a history of the bad kind of alcoholism, so I didn’t even try alcohol until my mid-twenties.
I was very introverted at the time, and I have to admit, I loved the person I was when I was drunk.

Fortunately for me, I had the willpower and the awareness to realize that just because I liked it didn’t mean I needed more. For about 10 years, I drank socially, in moderation, maybe about once a month on average.

I’ll admit it did get a bit dicey in University, where I had a drink most days with my friends after class, but I very quickly dropped that habit after graduating.

Not that it’s relevant (is any of this story?), but I recently discovered I have an issue with my liver - presumably not alcohol related - and as a precaution I’ve just stopped drinking entirely. Fortunately I’m a lot more “extroverted” these days, but I’ll admit I do miss it sometimes.

I completely agree that “third places” have been all but eradicated in favor of revenue-generating spaces. This trend alone has lead to the death of a lot of things, including a sense of community and local engagement. (Edit: Worth noting that I also agree with your point about atomization)

I think it also has a lot to do with how abstracted we are from reality. We’ve built all these systems to replace actual face-to-face communities, and people would rather surround themselves in that than to expose themselves to the unpredictability of real life - for better and worse.

It’s a hard sell to get people to reverse course because it’s so much more painless/numbing to engage with these systems. (Not to even mention AI promising to give every person their own personal Yes-Man.)