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Elmo’s wellness check uncovers existential dread and despair on social media, nobody's ok right now

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Elmo’s wellness check uncovers existential dread and despair on social media

117 comments
  • yeah. this may be a little better or worse depending on where you are in the planet but its grim.

    i'm either wasting away at work all day every day because now bosses act like they own you too much and don't owe you for what you do so i have no time to live, or i'm a depressed and unemployed wasting away because i have no money to live.

    not being able to afford anything for a seemingly infinite amount of meaningless work where you are not respected. that feeling we are just deluxe slaves working though the apocalypse. your worth is calculated based on how good of a slave you are.

    capitalism enshitifying not only tech, but just about everything is getting ever more crappy expensive and disposable. we are on this hamster wheel where we need those expensive gadgets and a shitty app for everything, but they are expected to break soon so you need to pay for another and another and so on while contributing to the end of the planet because of it.

    the fact we are products/cattle being monetized in all sorts of unhealthy ways and watched 24/7 by our own appliances. they use advanced psychology to control and make us submissive. dont you dare actually trying to improve things or we will use our vast surveillance network to strike you the fuck down.

    culture of everyone being hyper individualistic, alienated and self centered (possibly including myself here) contrary to our nature. everyone has less and less friends, everyone is alone and we hate on eachother because of distractions.

    ...and the internet is now a dopamine trap instead of the beautiful place for connection and knowledge it used to be, but somehow everyone is way more dependent on it for socialization. corporations mediate our relationships and making us alone depressed and angry is more beneficial for them.

    capital is literally destroying the planet, poisoning the air we breathe, turning it into an oven, killing massive amounts of life just so a handful of sociopathic people can be god-level powerful over us.

    and the sheer amount of death being brought upon us by them for trivial reasons, like a convoluted way someone can have more shitty pieces of paper by murdering people everywhere around the planet.

    we cant afford to start families or even be completely financially independent. life is an eternal struggle for meaningless pieces of paper (more like stupid numbers on a shitty bank computer now) and they are always finding new ways to oppress us financially and making us pay more for basic, low tech and low cost necessities that werent a problem for past generations to have.

    we know we have no future, no love and no hope. we know we will starve or suffocate to death, but are being played on by the system to turn on eachother instead. the future is looking more and more like apocalypse-techno-dystopia. if it isnt that already.

    and nothing we can immediatly do about any of it. people act like i am batshit insane for wanting to throw this shit away and have a revolution to remove our current kings. people immediatly try to excuse them even though their life garbage because our fear of change is probably being weaponized against us, like seemingly every single human instinct. hell, it seems some people dont even want to admit to themselves they are suffering because that would make them lazy leeches or something.

    do i even need to keep going? you can tell i woke up on the wrong fucking foot today cant you?

  • He hasn't read this many disturbing responses since he was introduced to Sesame Street in the first place.

  • I am legitimately trying to figure out why the fuck it is I am seemingly the only person in the world who is okay right now.

    What the hell are you all doing or going through that is ruining your life, and how can I help alleviate your suffering?

    • I think asking is good, and this may be worth getting into for other reasons - but know that this is a one way trip.

      I'd suggest starting with the things that helped me unfuck my shit (partially, anyway!). First, if you haven't already, check out Kurzgesagt's Optimistic Nihilism video. If you find that interesting, continue on to absurdist philosophy, especially Camus (Sisyphus, Stranger) and Sartre (Nausea). After that, existentialism - I think I'd probably start with Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

      Once you begin to get a feel for these ideas, I think a high-level reevaluation of deeply held beliefs and how you perceive the world around you becomes inevitable.

      In terms of your question and what you are seeing, I believe these trends represent a larger collective awakening. Not a miracle, but something borne out of necessity: for anyone brave enough to take their head out of the sand for thirty seconds, environmental concerns alone are completely fucking overwhelming, and obviously that's just a start.

      I do take solace in this development, though. Somehow, even without actively studying philosophy, teens today (and even younger!) appear to have, to a degree, an intuitive understanding of these concepts. That's wild! When I was in high school in the late 90s, genuinely thinking for yourself wasn't tolerated the way it is today. Sure, there were punks and goths and whatever, but for anyone who dared to question the paradox of asserting one’s uniqueness through group affiliation, the road was much bumpier than it seems to be today.

      I actually had to remind one of my children at around 10 years of age that she should be careful telling her peers things like "god isn't real and nothing really matters" ... admittedly she was raised in a "we always respect people with different beliefs even if we find it difficult to respect their beliefs" home, so the "god isn't real" part wasn't a surprise, but she found existentialism on her own.

      Consider the complexity of the humour in memes today - I think a lot of older folks dismiss it as vapid and banal, and while some definitely lands there, the baseline tends to include a lot more irony, sarcasm, and even elements of these more abstract philosophical ideas in ways that older generations tend to struggle with. At first glance it appears completely nonsensical, but upon superficial understanding it quickly becomes "antisocial" and offensive: how dare you find camaraderie in joking about suicide, and do you really think the collapse of civilization would be a good thing? This is more than gallows humour.

      And perhaps your comment was more flippant than my initial interpretation and this will just come across as obtuse and condescending - I hope not, as that is definitely not my intent. If it was sincere and you are just beginning down this path, I hope my perspective makes a difference for you. I suspect it is obvious, but my own experience with this was not pleasant; it took me many years to find my way through and feel ok about continuing, in the broadest sense. With a bit of discipline and thoughtfulness, I think you should be able to mitigate the psychological risks inherent in exploring some of the more fundamentally challenging implications of nihilism.

117 comments