I’m extremely happy with the process I’ve had, but I understand it’s very likely not representative of the rest of us here.

By and large, you’re right though. My wife has gone through similar struggles and hasn’t been medicated for over a year because of it.

I haven’t gotten back to that yet.

But I’m on meds now. So the next thing I’m gonna try to do is fill my schedule a bit more. If I’m doing more, that’s less time for my brain to fill that time with analysis paralysis and more time doing stuff I enjoy. The byproduct, hopefully, is that my brain will just be happier overall with the added stimulation. Or so the theory goes, at least.

I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

“Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

Do you think “frank” means “without nuance or care for how what I’m saying could be misconstrued as bigotry”?

Like, literally the only change I know I’d like to see is “there are some women who” and like… that’s hardly an imposition, y’know? Definitely not a “40 page essay” either.

Weirdos end up on Lemmy. Many of us are a splendidly wonderful, if pedantic, sort.

And then there’s the weirdos that… aren’t that. The ones who never built social skills or the ability to look at the world from beyond their own limited experiences. The ones who extrapolate with reckless abandon, usually in the traditional directions of punching down.

I’m sorry if they or someone they know got baby-trapped, but that is DEFINITELY not the usual nor should it be phrased like it is.

As an aging anime fan… I tend to agree with Miyazaki’s take that anime is made by weird people for weird people.

Sometimes being a bit of an outcast gives you perspective and you take that and make someone great.

Sometimes it turns you into an incel who creates characters that totally aren’t pedophile bait, no sir, they’re 2000 years old! They just so happen to have the body of an 8 yr old.

The conservative anti-woke scum of the Internet who love anime can’t tell the difference between the two. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

I think I’d put it this way - I like adventuring, exploring, and finding my way through an immersive world. I don’t like when I can’t seem to stumble into the exact right clue or secret passage or interactable and waste up to possibly hours scouring the same locations over and over.

That said, metroidvanias are my favorite videogame genre. I just had to accept that it’s okay to look up a guide or wiki before I get fully tilted.

Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.

Just read that, and it says they’ve only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would’ve been a lot more than that.

We have 335 million people in this country literally right now. I don’t think “350 million born since 1933” makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.

Edit: number fixin

We have over 300 million people in the US right now. Social security started in the US in 1935 with just over 127 million people then.

Yeah, we probably have gone through 999 million options by now.

Yeah, actually. But weirdly, it also makes me feel way less guilt. Like, the constant self put-downs about not being as “productive” as I should be. That all got way quieter on meds. Even if I’m still not doing what I “should” it feels like a controlled choice instead of inescapable guilt-inducing procrastination.

It’s weird. I’m new to both my diagnosis and the meds, so who knows.

Well, I think we’d have to give some of the Eastern seaboard to the UK. But some goes to France, some to Spain. And tbh a lot could be reallocated back to American Indian groups and councils. Oh, and a bunch would go back to Mexico, too.

I think the care for being not identified and covering one’s tracks provided in the above comment is a pretty obvious indicator for why their comment history is scrubbed lol.

I think JRPGs do focus on choice, but usually more in terms of the gameplay and deep combat systems with weird synergies to discover. Story-wise… yeah definitely more linear.

Here’s an important bit from the actual journal article abstract

This lower literacy-greater receptivity link is not explained by differences in perceptions of AI’s capability, ethicality, or feared impact on humanity. Instead, this link occurs because people with lower AI literacy are more likely to perceive AI as magical and experience feelings of awe in the face of AI’s execution of tasks that seem to require uniquely human attributes.

It then goes on to say you should target ads for AI to people who don’t know anytime about AI, since they’ll see it as magical and buy in. Kinda gross, if you ask me.

Comparisons to users on other social media networks would be useful, yeah.

I don’t think I ever learned how to properly source information from primary works until college. I didn’t really get it until grad school.

Kinda the same for the scientific method. In high school it was just a thing you learn and memorize, but barely ever applied, if at all, in the actual curriculum. I wish it had been impressed upon me at a much earlier stage of my life why the scientific method is so useful and how it led to the sheer boom in our knowledge as a species. Like, they do tell us… but we didn’t really get it. I’ve heard others had better teachers… But it really would be better if the system didn’t have to rely on winning the teacher lottery.

In contrast, I have never been able to see blue and black, even though that’s objectively what it is.