Touch grass is what we need to do. I do as much as I can in my surroundings - raised beds, gardening, and sharing stuff with people. I work as much as I can in my local community. That’s how we beat this shit and keep our souls alive.

I feel you, I know what you mean. End of the world - as we know it. I hope that while everything comes tumbling down we re-learn how to be in community with others, humans and non-humans. I hope we re-learn how to be and not spend so much energy. The tiredness people feel these days seems to indicate that the great mother is taking care of that for us - nothing we have to do, just give in to feeling tired. In the meantime, I am coming to accept that together with many others I might die in this process of unraveling, but that’s not important.

Slow down, do less, achieve less, buy less, worry less. More casual hanging out with trees, birds and lizards in my neighborhood. Eat the rich.

To create is even more important now. To fight this machine, this soul-less destruction. I’m more of a crafts person and only rarely a writer. Everything I do can be done by a machine faster and cheaper, so there is seems to be no reason to keep making it. A lot of the time I stare at my little felt figurines and my plant-dyed yarns and wonder why I even bother, and lately have stayed alive only because it would make my dad and my kid sad. But every now and then someone’s eyes get a certain sparkle when they see what I do. There’s life in it. My wonky basket contains life and love - the plastic basket with the fake wicker pattern does not. People at the moment can’t afford to buy my basket instead of the plastic one, but it has to exist to keep the real craft alive. We crafters, writers, artists, musicians need to keep alive the knowledge of how to make the real things. Some day it will matter again, I believe at some point the machine will eat itself.

Got some of this as well, started with pain in the throat last week, I slept a lot for two days, came down with migraine a day after that, and the last week I have been mentally really unwell feeling more anxious and depressed than usual. Something is going round.

Lots of good advice here already, especially regarding IFS, which is a therapy approach that works with splitting one’s inner monologue into a conversation between different voices.

Since a lot of commenters seem to equate inner voices with schizophrenia or psychosis I’d like to let you (and them) know it’s not that unusual to have inner voices with different personalities! I found my inner voices very helpful to deal with my mental challenges and this never turned into anything uncontrollable. I had a similar very critical inner voice which I then recognized as mainly being my mother’s way of criticizing me - even after I went no contact with mom, she was still occupying space in my head telling me everything I did wrong.

The way out was really simple, CBT-based: a therapist reminded me to be kind to myself and I just practised - like giving myself an inner hug every time I used the unkind voice and remembering that kindness to myself is important (not beating myself up for being unkind!), and to avoid self-deprecating humour. It just took some time, maybe a year, and now I see clear improvements. The voice is pretty much gone. At the moment I have no need to separate into different voices and feel quite at home within myself. Hope you get there soon, you seem a be on a good path towards it!

Not knowing what number 3 is

What the fuck, that looks absolutely desperate! I’m sure it will have the opposite effect. Fuck reddit.

I found it easier after understanding that everyone else is also struggling, everybody feels like they don’t have their shit together, and everybody needs help. There might be a few people who claim they have it all figured out, they are not the ones I want to take advice from because they are full of shit (often they are some guru type and/or just want your money).

Also helps to realize that a lot of people feel bad because things are bleak - we struggle with climate change, alienation at work, being disrooted, at the brink of yet another war … it’s objectively hard to live during these times. The only thing that makes it easier is talking to each other. A woman visited me yesterday, told me about her problems with her health and her main problem seemed to be that she feels unproductive and too tired to get the things done she believes she should be able to do. After telling her that on most days I was pleased with myself for simply getting up, feeding the cat and brushing my teeth, and that I know so many more people who tell me they feel like this, she was visibly relieved, and I was as well.

So when we talk to each other it helps to realize there’s nothing wrong with us personally - we are not failing at being a person, we are just reacting to the best of our abilities to an onslaught of trouble around us. Plus, when we talk to each other we often find out how we can help each other out in very practical ways - like sharing resources, supporting each other with our different strengths, ganging up together against the hardship. Community is how we can survive the hard times!

So is there someone in your life you can ask for help? Are you thinking about enlisting professional help like a doctor or therapist? What do you need right now?

Not taking it as a joke - I feel the same about it. I guess every screen does fuck with the mind at some point, be it an algorithm making me feel in a prescribed way, the obsession to find the fake people in an online discussion, or just turning into a zombie watching TV - all is stuff that makes me sad or angry when I overdo it, so I’m careful to get outside enough and meet actual humans (and non-humans) and the sadness goes away. It can be difficult when living alone and working a screen job, but my self preservation instincts are improving with time!

The internet is devouring itself - I hope some of the useful parts remain, but I wouldn’t be too sad to return to my local library for information and slow down the flow of information again.

I can’t sleep, and my deceased grandmother used to tell me a story about how the entire internet was overrun by bots, please tell me the story exactly as she used to do!

Ah beautiful, that’s the way!

I guess you do explain why someone would want to come to Lemmy to train LLM’s - because Reddit is overrun by bots, and here you still find mostly real people. Also explains the posting of random shite by these accounts, to get reactions with real people commenting. Sorry if I sound rather naive, it’s because I am. I wasn’t meant to exist in this timeline.

I often rant about eating the rich. It’s because I’m genuinely angry about the situation at hand, and maybe ranting online helps with getting the frustration out without doing actual damage in the real world. Which I’m sure is exactly how the powerful intend it to be.

Interesting how many people here get hung up on downvotes and advise to either block the techies, the tankies, or both. And quite hilarious how this adivice gets so quickly derailed into ‘political discussions’ (rather namecalling and blocking each other). I wasn’t even talking about downvotes, I don’t care much about them, and I try to not get involved in political stuff where people consider it a useful way to discuss about any issue, because that’s just kindergarden stuff and I’d expect a bot to be able to be a little more convincing than just downvoting my post or comment. Yet another reason to spend more time offline - I’mma switch all of you off! And you! And you!!

What’s lemvotes?

Not if you could express it in a more accessible way without loss of meaning, and especially not if you claim to want a broader public to opt into your cause. Mostly it’s smartassery. I understand that there’s situations where you want to speak about scientific topics and need specific terminology for precision, but this is definitely not it.

I’m coming to the conclusion that might the best way of going about it. Being even more picky than before about who I interact with is actually a good thing. If one or another insufferable person gets weeded out of the focus of my attention that’s not really a problem.

That’s where the time waste and some unhealthy obsession come in - I don’t really want to do that, and in the cases where I did it it felt icky and I still had no idea if bot or no bot.

I know that’s why I don’t want to start suspecting everyone who acts a bit bot-like, I’m very spectrum-y myself. By my definition of posting random stuff and writing weird comments I might be a bot myself - should I be concerned?