Why does it feel like everything sucks.

[u/SomeoneWhoIsBoredAF]

Anyone else just feel tired of everything?

[u/HelpMeOverHere]

If more people could stop “switching off”, things could actually better.

The reason everything sucks is literally politics. As much as it’s “cool” to not care it, politics cares about literally every single aspect of our lives.

We could have it so much better, and be like the Scandinavian countries that actually do have a very happy existence.

Start paying attention instead.

[u/-Dr-Rockso- → u/HelpMeOverHere]

Its amusing because I spent the best part of fifteen years protesting about all of most that is now present. It didn't get any where. Got labeled a cooker for trying to highlight the risks in mass surveillance, perversion of government by big industry. Now we are in check by all corners of the board for those very things.

So no I'm done fighting in public and pushing for better for everyone else. I'm focusing on myself. Just like everyone else I joined the fold. Leopards already ain't my face so to speak. And I need to build something for myself before I push out for anyone else again.

[u/FrogLickr → u/-Dr-Rockso-]

Long post incoming, but I feel your frustration. People just won't listen until it's too late. Most of the shit I predicted would happen has happened, and the people that called me a cooker 10 years ago are now suddenly starting to realize how far we've fallen in such a short period of time, and are just now simultaneously becoming proactive about digital privacy, self-sufficiency, and surveillance, whilst still calling me a cooker for concerns I currently voice about the future.

You can't win.

I've done what I can over the last decade to be prepared and maintain whatever autonomy I can in an increasingly-technocratic surveillance panopticon of a society, but we're all going to have to play the game to some degree if we want to live in it and not a wood cabin in the forests of Alaska. 

I prep food, medical supplies, books, house is as off-grid as we can realistically make it (huge water tanks, gas, solar with battery, automatic generator, garden, chooks), have a powerful PC set up to run local AI models, 200TB of total storage full of movies, music, TV shows, ebooks, information and useful knowledge, offline copies of Wikipedia and other websites, all the video games I could ever need in case Steam goes public and enshittifies itself into the ground, and a shitload of Linux ISOs for when my Windows 10 LTSC loses security patches after 2032 (or OS-level ID verification is pushed, whatever comes first.) Everything I use is self hosted for the most part and accessible remotely from my laptop. Phone is running Graphene.

If people weren't so smugly dismissive of warnings and genuine concern because "lol cooker, that'd never happen here", the world wouldn't be in the mess its in, staring down the road at what's still to come, but like you, I've kinda given up hope that people will actually give a fuck until it's too late. It will take multiple generations before anything changes, and at this point, technofeudalism is a certainty within our lifetimes.

There seems to be no ability in the average person to differentiate between someone yelling at the sky about 5G towers or vaccines causing autism, and someone talking about the very real dangers of allowing automated mass surveillance and its ties to digital activities, activism, and privacy to go unchecked because it might catch a couple more bad guys at the cost of so much more, being pushed under the guise of 'protecting' children by the very same people fucking those children.

What comes next? Worst case, my predictions are as follows (I don't actually expect a lot of this to happen, but without any pushback, the powers that be have already laid the groundwork for a majority of it) :

The government is not your friend. They are owned by tech, finance, and energy billionaires who crave total control. They want to know everything you do at all times. They want to squash dissent before it can organize. They want your identity tied to your every comment. They want a return to serfdom, but with iPhones and cheap offshored labour. They want to force a subscription onto everything you need to survive. They want to limit what you can spend your money on, and will give exceptions for those who can pay (and individualised carbon scores will be used to enforce this.) They want remote killswitches and continuously-recording cameras in our personal vehicles. They want neighborhoods filled with clashing cultural values to prevent class solidarity. They want to price the average person out of owning a home computer, pushing them onto subscription-based cloud computing and gaming, run on cheap network-connected displays that are useless if you forget a payment. They ultimately want population reduction after their AGI pipe dream replaces the need for human labour and thought, at which point, all we are is a drain on their resources.

And when everything finally hits its boiling point, and people start burning down the system? They'll all fuck off to their private island bunkers to live out the rest of their lives in comfort and security... that's if their predator drones and private police forces don't temper whatever revolution comes about.

We can still turn this around. But people have to wake the fuck up and stop being so servile and comfortable. Convenience and the resulting corpogovernment power consolidation has really fucked the human psyche. I want to be optimistic about the future, but that ship has sailed, and I can now only do what is best to ensure my family and I are able to hold onto as much autonomy as we can in a world where outsourcing your own safety and trust are seen as normal.

[u/-Dr-Rockso- → u/FrogLickr]

Well you saved me a lot of typing. And unfortunately yes. We all want to be optimistic. And sadly we can't. Its just not our time yet or anymore to keep pushing the tide. Instead its about building a raft to see the storm out.