2mo ago

What was the "last good day"?

Personally 2024 was ok for me even though I was laid off and unemployed for 6 months. Ok maybe it's a little shitty.

If we're in the darkest timeline, what was the last point where it felt there was so much hope and joy in the world?

Some options commonly put out.

The day Pokémon Go released July 2016. So prepandemic and we went outside and and a girl told me where to find Weedles. Yep I'm in a videogame
The day before 9/11 or when Harambe got killed
When Endgame released, culmination of 10 years of marvel moments into a single movie, people cheering in the cinema. Still pre pandemic, maybe there's a trend here

57 comments

That fateful day in July 2009. Parents were hit by a guy who was fucked up by a shopping list of drugs. Mom dead, the family that was quickly fell apart. She was no longer around to help hide my father's alcoholism. Not even 6 months after her death, a foul harpy of a female human latched on to him and only encouraged the worst parts of him while slowly doing everything she could to remove or erase his family.
Wrong parent died that day.
- Real sorry bro
- I think you mean the day before that.
  
  No, the day of. My mom had made a big deal about taking pictures and making a big family brunch before she left. I was alone at my grandfather's house and getting to watch TV while playing a MMO simultaneously. Amazing day, until the phone call that upended everything.

My job moved me from Oklahoma to California. Took 3.5 months to sell my house but I was in Cali that whole time while my wife and daughter stayed behind waiting for the sale. The day I finally came back to get them after the sale was that day. I had never been away from them more than 2 days in 15 years. That 3.5 months alone was so fucking hard and depressing. Never been so happy to see them.
That day. For me.

July 4, 2012. The day the Higgs Boson was discovered. Everything since has done nothing but get stranger and stranger. I won't even say it's all just gone to shit. It's just to me, everything since has been... increasingly unreal.
- I like to joke that the world actually did end in 2012 and now we’re in a weird purgatory type thing.
  
  Ah shit, you figured it out. Ok everyone, the jig is up, you can stop pretending to be real now
  
  I prefer the flavor that the LHC opened a crack in the multiverse and weird timelines are seeping through

That first day when I figured out masturbation was tops, all down hill from there
- Ah. Yes.
  June 26th 1996 while watching CBS 60b minutes. What a day that was.
  
  Mike Wallace was hot AF so I understand

Yesterday. I can't remember the last bad day I've had. 2024 has been one of the best years of my life
- Almost same. I've had many shitty years and days, but around this time last year I said something along these lines, and it holds true now as well: This year has been great. And next year is on track to be fuckin awesome.
- Yeah I've had rough days and great days, but even the bad ones have been more inconvenient than anything else. The good has more than compensated for the inconvenience

For me, Tuesday, 2/25/14 was a pretty good day. Normal day at the bike shop, receiving some preseason stuff, arguing with the boss over some BMC bikes I didn't think were a good deal for the shops. Ate my usual dry salad at the local joint with the pretty girl I enjoyed talking with a little bit each day. I had just started a cut phase for my push to get under 190 lbs to get much more competitive for crit racing in 2014. I wanted to actually win a race or two. That was going to be my big finish for 5 years going from 350 lbs in 2009 to 7% body fat. I felt like that was a good tradeoff for having worked for peanuts in a bike shop. Then I would get a real job at the end of summer when I turned 30... Instead I got a broken neck and back 2/26/14 from a terrible driver.

May 5, 2019. The last chance to avoid a series of mistakes that ruined my life. Yes I put way too much thought into this.
- What did you do?

I don't know about good, but today was an unusual day for me.
With a blizzard setting in, I figured my best chance to get to work was on the bus. So I was walking up to where I could catch it passing various houses with Christmas lights and decorations, only to stop dead in my tracks at one particular house.
It's sole decoation was an 8-ft tall Krampus on the front lawn. It had a goat head with horns and demonic eyes and sharp claws holding a gnarled staff on one side and chains on the other. It's dark burgundy cloak had a dusting of snow on its shoulders to complete the look.
Then I was on the bus trying to digest what I had seen when who should walk on but Polar Man! He's a local superhero with a bushy beard and a mask. He helps people in distress shovel out their driveways. At one point as the bus was passing through a residential area, he got up and yelled "Driver! Stop the bus!" and leapt out dramatically to cheering passengers.

I would say early 2010 or maybe 2009. live 3 miles from work and regularly walked it. In the morning my wife would walk almost halfway to a park and we had our dog. She would turn around and go back while I would continue on. I could take a bus in incliment weather only having to be in it for a few blocks. Sometimes I would bike up to the lakefront which was nice and scenic and stretched it to 7 miles which was nicer for a bike ride. My wife and I had macbook pros which large powerful laptops with tons of ports and osx was great and applecare was still stellar (it actually went down somewhere around this time). I worked in a research lab and what was accomplished seemed magical.
- That sounds awesome.

My last good day is always and forever today. My (or your) circumstances should never impair my (or your) ability to be happy 😁 it sounds weird, but you are allowed (it is your right) to feel happy even as your life is crumbling around you. And if you can't find that feeling, that's alright too.
- While this is true, I would also add that it's ok and valid to be sad and unhappy. There is no obligation to put on a smile. You can be happy and not smiling, or you can be unhappy and not smiling, just be you.
- See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.
  "I'm in charge of my own emotions" is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.
  As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don't have to?
  It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that's what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I'd feel happy.
  I'm in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.
  I can't picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I .....don't remember what sad feels like.
  I remember what vomiting feels like, because that's how my body has reacted to "sad" recently.
  
  Well if you take the advice of randoms that far, you are just plain stupid and should not be in charge of your own actions
- But I would suggest start looking in weird places
- I feel like it's not my right to be happy unless I can impress in some way, like through work or academia. Everyone else has surpassed me and I can't impress anywhere, so I just feel like I don't deserve happiness anymore.
  
  Don't live your daily grind according to the highlight reel you see about other people.
  We often don't see the full lives of even our closest family members - thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams, frustrations, disappointments - and our window into our friends' and acquaintances' and strangers' lives is even smaller. It's like we only see the few triumphs they post on FB/insta and that's all we know of them.
  You can't compare yourself to that. You know your full day of struggles, the long grind between wins, and you only see the big wins of your friends. You know your own dark thoughts and barely-held heated retorts but you never know either of those from anyone around you.
  You will always feel inadequate if you're comparing your everyday to the best days of your contacts. It's okay to stop that; and, if you can, we often discover we don't suck so much.
  
  Then im sure you don't deserve it. No reason to not be happy just because you don't deserve to
- This is surprisingly uplifting, thank you for posting this

The last day I hugged my best friend in elementary school, because it was the final time two male friends could openly love one another without being questioned or ostracized... sigh.
EDIT: The last time in the region I grew up in, which seems to be more on the conservative hellhole side of things
- Where do you live where you can’t hug your best friend?
  
  I live in Hicksville Indiana and I openly hug my guy friend and tell him I love him. I have never had an inkling that anyone thought we were gay... Nor have I ever cared.
  
  Rural Ohio... I don't recommend it
- The poor straight males, can't openly be affectionate to other men :(
  
  Nah, they just haven't realized that they actually CAN if they're willing to band together and fight anyone who tries to stop them
  I just didn't have to deal with homophobes before middle school lol
  Nobody can stop your cuddle party if you've got the bigger army >:3

November 6, 2000
Everything has been downhill since then.

I don't even remember.

I'm not talking about substances, but things just don't give the same highs as they used to.
Getting a new Nintendo game as a kid and you're giddy all the way home, reading the back of the box.
Last time I bought a game I had been looking forward to for years it was lying in a drawer for a month before I even installed it.
I had my first kid this year, and it's probably the best thing to have happened to me in the last few years. But I don't think the joy I felt compares to that new NES game as a kid. I wish I still would get that kind of highs.
I'm pretty sure the last good day was sometime in 1996.
- buy a hooker. smoke crack once. gamble $10k at one sitting.
  Sure, but where do I go from there for my next high?
  
  It's also just been a tough period to grow up. Depends on region but housing, did and cost of living in many have been significantly harder than in the past.
  Every year is harder to get by than the last, despite unprecedented advances in science and tech.

I had a pretty good one yesterday

Sometime in 2010. My partner and I got our first pup, work was fine, apartment complex was good. Things were walkable. Pup loved snowpocalypse 2010, we went to the tennis courts and just ran around in the snow.
Obama was promising awesome healthcare reform. I had hope.
My mom hadn't told me that we were probably the sort of family who should only see each other at funerals. My mom hadn't yet killed my dad with COVID (she claims she got it at a "mandatory unmasked Christmas work potluck" in December 2020. She retired 2 months later, so it can't have been that mandatory. She knew he was immunocompetent and also didn't take him to the hospital as soon as his oxygen dipped below 90%.)

Not sure of exact date, but it was around 2005-2006 and I had saved up enough money to get me a lego N1 starfighter kit from star wars. Last time remember feeling genuine joy

When I got my first actual Job shortly after my 27th bday EDIT: 2022 December. And was convinced I would turn the company around with my hard work.
Well, I sure left an impression, but it broke me, as I realized now that I had a job, how much I lost before I got there, and that money won't fix that. I started getting worse at my job as a result.
The poor mental health also lead to some poor choice of words on Reddit that got me several suicide care bot messages and a permanent suspension.

May 11th, 1995

The day before ChatGPT was released
2022-11-29

Wait are you saying the day Harambe got killed was a good day? Or the day before he was killed?

Things are still good for me, weird and increasingly concerned for the state of society, but presently still good. One can still work on making their own life and the life of those around you better as the world goes to shit. Increasingly trying to get more involved in the world to be one of the helpers but it's hard to know what organizations will need the most help locally.