Initiateofthevoid

> In 2023, renewable energy represented 24.5% of energy consumed in the EU, up from 23.0% in 2022.

They're working on it a lot faster than (most of) the rest of the world!

I don’t think I’m depressed. I’m not miserable. But I feel… detached. Like I’m watching my life from the outside, waiting for it to feel like mine again. There’s this quiet emptiness running underneath everything, like background static. Not loud enough to break me, just enough to make everything feel slightly out of tune.

I am sorry to say that this is exactly what depression feels like. It feels like nothing.

It isn't a presence of misery, it's an absence of joy. A void of emotion. The peaks and valleys become hills and ruts, the horizons dim and the colors fade.

When your emotional landscape is flat and gray, very few emotions can still paint the world a different color. Namely, anxiety. Anxiety isn't really an emotion, it's a complex interface between stress and thought. Anxiety taps into the same fear centers that can wake us up from a deep sleep - it's a primal, fundamental neurological circuit that can and does break through the general malaise of depression.

This leaves you with the constant feeling of pressure. Normally, anxiety is dulled by the constant wash of normal human emotions, but when it's the only thing you can feel... it's rough. I'm sorry for what you're going through.

Depression is a deep, tangled mess. There are environmental and genetic factors. Causes and treatments might be purely psychological, might not. Treatment for depression - pharmaceutical or psychological - is very often flawed but almost always better than no treatment at all.

There is no single solution, and depression tends to wane so slowly and subtly that it'll be hard to point to when or why you started to feel better. But you will feel better. And then you may feel worse again, so make sure you keep doing things that make you feel better... even when you don't feel bad right now.

Depression also mutes the emotions you feel from your own memories and the emotions you feel from your predictions of the future. We always live in the present. Our past and our future are just simulations running in our minds. When we're depressed, our past and future also becomes gray and anxious... even if the memories were once perfectly happy and the plans were once exciting and vibrant.

Whatever you do, it must be a part of a greater whole. Holistic treatment is key. Adjusting thought processes and habits, managing emotional responses, maintaining or improving your bodily health, speaking with professionals, taking on new hobbies and social engagements and personal responsibilities... all of these can help. All of these are hard to start.

Best of luck. Happy to talk more.

Remember gang, do it anyway. There's nothing better to vote on, because the majority controls the votes anyway. Get every single nay vote to forever be a black mark against these fucks, and yes, do it again when it fails.

Keep doing it anyway. Every single time they commit a crime, fight to get every last Republican congressmen on the record supporting every last crime this administration ever committed. At the very least so that history remembers: this was never just one man.

It is especially fucked and hypocritical. He is a piece of shit. I already addressed that.

But it doesn't change a thing about addiction. Wealth does not prevent addiction. Access to rehab does not prevent addiction. Wealthy addicts aren't any more or less moral failures than their impoverished counterparts.

Wealthy addict hypocrites are moral failures and worthy of ridicule. But perpetuating the falsehood that addiction itself is a moral failing - that the only reason a wealthy person becomes an addict is because they are weak - that has just as much impact on the impoverished as it has on the wealthy.

When you claim that poverty is the only moral justification for addiction, you directly hurt the impoverished addict - you limit the nature of their addiction to nothing more than a product of their environment. If they just had money, they wouldn't be an addict. That is wrong.

Firstly, mental health is not a poor problem, it's an everyone problem.

More importantly, addiction is fucked. Wealth does not protect you. "A good life" does not save you. A loving family, a dog, a white picket fence.... they don't stop you.

There are a billion very valid reasons to criticize this fuckup, and he is absolutely a hypocritical piece of shit for ruining the lives of other addicts. But addiction can fuck up anyone, and it's not entirely their fault. Please don't paint addiction as nothing more than a moral failing and a symptom of poverty.

Daily reminder not to feed into bullshit talking points about fentanyl from the borders. Nothing this administration does is about fentanyl, fentanyl is just the new marijuana or crack - a justification for exploitation and abuse. For blaming minorities and foreigners.

Don't get me wrong - fentanyl is fucked. There is a real crisis out there.

But this administration doesn't give a shit about that crisis. They never have, they never will. Here is exhibit A.

Yes and no. Lot of cheap land out there, very little in taxes.

The bigger problem is someone owns the supplies you need to survive, and there's not a lot of jobs out there to make ends meet.

Almost every colony ever: gets oppressed and exploited, fights for independence, gains sovereignty, becomes either a tense ally or a hostile rival to their former empire

Earthlings: "maybe we should colonize space"

You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.

• Blazing Saddles

That being said, it's not entirely their fault. Something like 80% of young people don't move farther than 100 miles from home. For the midwest.... 100 miles away is just more midwest. One of the biggest, emptiest landmasses in the entire world. Overwhelmingly white. Overwhelmingly undereducated. Overwhelmingly propagandized.

With "new" technologies like the internet, high speed trains, advances in agriculture... farming counties should be in a goddamn golden age. But they've always leaned republican, and that means they'll always be republican, because they're chronically underfunding infrastructure, education, and healthcare, and so they're chronically suffering but don't understand why.

They just know it's wrong, and it's always easier to blame somebody other than themselves.

Compound all of that with not meeting anyone new or seeing anything challenging to change their beliefs... and you have that 77%. Their horizons are far, but their world is small and self-contained.

They'll occasionally realize "oh, this is hurting us" but the truth is they have always been hurting. Pain isn't new to them. So it's very easy to convince them that temporary pain will be worth it in the end... even if nothing gets better.

Retailers in wealthier areas have larger budgets, higher profit margins, and more attention by the executives. The favorite managers get assigned to the better stores and regions because obviously it involves better bonuses and better quality of life. They then invest in bullshit security upgrades because they can, and the C-suite believes they work because, well, the managers saying they work were already the favorites.

Retailers in lower income neighborhoods literally can't afford long-term investments - corporate runs them on razor-thin margins, assigns them the worst managers by default and doesn't trust those managers, and underpays their staff such that they're constantly dealing with turnover.

Even if they found the temporary budget to install the security measures, they would still need a permanent budget to maintain them, and it still wouldn't be worth it because:

1. if $X worth of shopping carts walk out the door, and you add $Y worth of security measures... now $X+$Y are walking out the door.
2. if shopping carts are constantly locking up and malfunctioning due to underfunded maintenance, $Z worth of shopping carts are now sitting in the store doing nothing, which in the corporate world is almost as bad as that money walking out the door.

Great... because we all know that famously, American police need more military assets. That's what the problem has been all along. For fuck's sake...

It's going to get worse. This is the kinda shit that keeps piling up and lasts for decades - they harass local officials out of office, arm local thugs, and dismantle all the safeguards. Then when someone else comes in and tries to fix it, those same thugs will suddenly find the word "fascist" was in their vocabulary all along.

If you're outside the major cities, police forces are generally managed locally. Small enough for citizens to have an immediate impact. Your local reps, your town halls, your state legislatures - those people actually make decisions. They are the ones who this Administration is going to bully and harass and bribe. It's time to show up.

If you're inside the cities, get ready to start marching. These fuckers are doubling down on using DEI as nothing more than a smokescreen for blatant oppression.

The amount that’s being excused, sanewashed, and just drowned out with other absurdities…

This is why articles of impeachment need to be introduced anyway. They need to do it every fucking day if they have to, every time it's voted down. it's not like the House or the Senate is voting on something better. They're voting on something worse.

It needs to keep being said that there is no sanity and there are no excuses and that something has gone fundamentally wrong.