Try to understand where they are coming from or why someone might be writing something. Usually when people write disturbing things online, it’s because they did not have a normal, healthy childhood. They weren’t taught to have proper relationships with other people. They may have been abused and excluded from society.

the day my work friend got so mad at me that he cut me off. to keep it short. there was a traumatic few weeks after that where he was taking out his anger on me.

President Taft riding a water buffalo. Always gives me a chuckle.

they’ll figure it out eventually.

I have a lot of Republican family members who are personally affected and still Republican. They don’t see any alternative. You need to remember why we got here: our party has done nothing for the past 20 years but fail. Fail to prevent the collapse of the middle class, fail to create a comprehensive re-training scheme, fail to address the consequential homelessness and drug addiction epidemic, fail to lift the south out of poverty, fail to create a rational healthcare system, fail to stop the environment from getting worse, fail to govern effectively and bring the national debt into line, bowed down to trillionaire oligarchs instead of stopping them. I could keep going. I say this with full acknowledgement that Joe Biden had the most positive direct impact on my life and family of any president in my lifetime. I say this with full acknowledgement that the republicans also failed. But when all people hear is that we can’t help them, people will turn to ANYONE saying they can help.

I would assume it went the other way, that the tech companies gave the school money to try to hook young consumers. You will see that with other companies on your campus as well, such as door dash, uber eats, drink companies handing out samples, etc.

It’s not possible for it to not happen. Even if every republican area was complicit, so that they only had to attack democratic cities, they simply cannot attack every place in the country all at once. Also, most authoritarian governments still have elections. They just engage in election fraud, which again, he can’t do in every single place.

They need to recognize there is a problem and want to change it.

Well, red voters need to stop voting red this election. That’s the only way we have to hold our elected officials accountable.

Check out The Conquest of Bread by Kropotkin. It’s an easy read, I had no trouble with it in high school. It doesn’t need to be violent at all. Very much a “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” kind of book. People focus a lot on “Why should that person have what I have, when I worked so hard?” when the real question is “Why should that person go without what all of us have, when it’s completely unnecessary?”

It’s completely normal for 30 year olds to interact on social media. That wasn’t a thing 20 years ago when we were your age, but we grew up with social media in our teens. Your dad sounds like a normal 30 year old.

Those are some brave cats.

I don’t think so. it’s like, explanatory. why am I freaking out? oh, I am as mentally fragile as a butterfly and can’t handle literally anything. that’s why.

That I have zero coping skills for stress at all. Not that therapy helped.

I was in 8th grade, so it was much better than 2007. My 7th grade teacher liked the popular kids more and absolutely couldn’t stand me, but my 8th grade teacher liked our outcast group more and vibed with me. She was an older teacher, so more skilled, but also I think their generation had a different perspective on weirdness. That was the first year I made online friends. My parents got through the crisis unscathed. Both rented, so no house lost, and neither lost their job. It definitely instilled the belief that I would graduate high school and fail to get a job, which never faded through high school. I would say that time reinforced the messages I received from the Iraq War era, that America was in decline and the old narratives are now false.

When they start getting wet when it rains. Currently my favorite pair wears out in less than a year.

Evan Eddinger’s video on quitting kratom. “This gas station drug nearly ruined my life.” I had no idea what kratom was even though I had met many users. Less recently, Lindsay Ellis made an amazing video discussing the Palestinian genocide and the problems of refusing to talk about it. “The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel” I think it’s fair to say it was the best video essay I saw in 2025.

Everyone loses a lot of memories. The brain only stores what’s important. You’ll keep your most defining memories until Alzheimers starts destroying your brain.

My experience from my teens and early 20s was that I simply did not understand that the unhealthy aspects of my life were making me feel bad. It was only once I corrected them for a long period of time, and felt better, that I realized how problematic the irresponsible behaviors were.

If you get to a point where you start experiencing depression, burnout, really have no motivation for your studies and want to drop out… it’s because you’re not taking care of yourself. You’ll need to learn to balance life with work.

Everyone who is saying “I’d agree with it in theory” is not thinking about the practical reality of what that’d mean. If you actually want to enforce that, the only way to do it is with violence. Dragging kids away from their parents, physically beating the parents away, parents shooting law enforcement officers to try to keep them away from their kids, forcible sterilizations, children born who are never allowed to go to schools or hospitals out of fear that they’ll be found, etc. It’s just needlessly cruel. It’s a lot worse than accepting that human beings are not perfect.