Yeah, true. I mean, there’s probably some that do, some that are in denial themselves, some that think they are on the winning side, and some that think anything negative will hinder the process. The formal parts of the process itself could have been coopted by the ruling class such that therapists are trained to perpetuate the system like cops and teachers are.

I’m going to push back but only slightly, as I agree that society itself and this hierarchy we’re stuck in is the root of a lot of mental health problems, maybe even the biggest sole contributer.

But where I’ll push back is that improving your mental health is different from improving your material situation. Both are important. The latter is about survival and between the two, arguably the far more important one. But the former is about how you react to the latter.

If you’re having panic attacks each time you think about your material situation, that’s going to make it much harder to deal with that situation. If you have trouble motivating yourself to get out of bed, that probably also affects your ability to do anything about your situation. If you lose your temper to the point where you destroy objects or relationships around you, that doesn’t help either.

Or on the perception side, if you’re constantly paranoid about everyone around you to the point where you don’t let anyone get close, it can help to recalibrate your expectations or where you draw your line for not trusting others.

Or if you recognize a pattern of using or manipulating people and want to break it or figure out why you keep returning to it.

I think in regards to how society is, therapy can teach you acceptance. I don’t mean “accept that this is the way it is and that it is fine”, you don’t have to do that second part. But the first part is true: the world is the way it is and unhealthy reactions won’t punish the world or change it, nor will allowing your nervous system to go into overdrive.

Whether you want to change it or just find a place in it, you need to first accept it for what it is, for better or worse. Then when you have that foundation of understanding and healthy coping skills, you have a much better chance of accomplishing, well, anything. Note that that is relative, I’m not going to try to push BS platitudes like “you can do anything!” It’s just “if you have a healthy mind or healthy ways of dealing with an unhealthy mind, you’ll have a better chance at doing anything compared to if you don’t”.

Anyways, therapy is one potential path to that. I see therapists as guides for a journey of introspection and getting to know yourself better as well as understand how you interact with the world and find new ways of doing so. Ultimately you are the one that needs to walk that path and the destination is still this reality, just with a healthier way of seeing and interacting with it.

Fixing this shit will involve a lot more than therapy, but it will require healthy minds.

Though I also don’t think the “gee thanks I’m cured” mindset is a healthy one. While I agree that it’s easier said than done, mental health is heavily influenced by your mindset and deciding “this won’t help” can be the reason why it doesn’t. Part of getting better, an essential part of it, is deciding that’s what you want and fighting the part of you that wants to just keep going like you have been because you’re comfortable with your habits, both good and bad.

Maybe, but they’ll patch that as soon as they notice people doing it, forcing you to slightly modify the method because they aren’t very good at their jobs, plus every now and then an update will just revert your changes for no apparent reason.

I’m appalled that you just assume it’s normal for your clothes to rub up against the toilet lid at all or that its position when you flush can make that not gross.

Iirc, things are looking better today than the ST timeline had. They predicted water riots and a breakdown of society in the 2020s and 2030s, leading to a devestating nuclear exchange in the 2050s. Though while we aren’t seeing water riots, it doesn’t sound that far off.

Buuuuut, ST also predicted that we’d have already seen Kahn take over and the eugenic wars, and that’s something that is worse than anything we’ve actually seen. I think they overestimated how much we could do after the progress seen in sequencing genomes when the original series was being made. They originally put Kahn in the 1990s/2000s.

So one could argue that we’re currently in a better timeline than Star Trek.

Wait, what if we have the “cat brings you kills because it doesn’t respect you as a hunter and thinks you need help and I’m doing it because I love you” backwards and it’s actually a “hey, look, I know you put remains of previous kills you do while you’re out of the house in my bowl, but here’s some proof that I’m competent enough to join you if you need me, so please don’t kick me out?”

Or maybe a “hey, I just did the killing part, can you show me how to do the make it delicious part like you do to your kills? I tried dropping it in my water but that just made my water gross (replace it at your earliest convenience or now, whichever is sooner). Or just do it for me and stick it in my bowl when it’s ready. If you do, I’ll let you gaze at my glorious belly and touch it but only for two seconds.”

They are tougher than bones.

It’s necessary information to solve the math problem.

… Why are the guards not at their posts??

Fuck auto-correct, especially Microsoft’s version of it.

No one’s ever accused me of being mature.

Or both for snake style eating.

One factory job had a couple days of orientation in a classroom before we started on the floor, but on day one we ended with a tour of the work areas. As we went around, someone working recognized one of the others in my group as a local methhead/rampant thief. We found out that’s why he didn’t come back when we started working with the others.

Canada, if it’s day one. There’s a 3 month probation period where the requirements before you can fire someone are non-existent, though you still can’t fire someone for illegal reasons.

Narrator: It wasn’t the last time.

Yeah, this is why that vger.to link is so annoying for me (other than triggering the reaction to the dark pattern, even if it isn’t exploiting it like what seems to be the industry standard these days), because most of the time when I use the share thing, I’m really just trying to get the url to open it in my browser, so that “open in voyager” link is the exact opposite of what I want, though I can see how it might be nice for actually sharing the link with others.

Yeah, it’s easily possible to set it up to save the original link somewhere hidden. Same reason why you shouldn’t reuse passwords because it’s trivial to set up a site to look like it’s doing it right from the outside but actually saves all passwords in plaintext for owners, admins, or disgruntled staff to look at later and see if it logs in to your email.

Even voyager gives a link to vger.to when you hit share instead of a direct link to the thing you want to share. No idea what they are doing with it (other than trying to redirect it to the app). Maybe it’s set up to just use the localhost and that’s all it does, but I usually strip that part out because I have no idea either way.

I’m a fan of Norm MacDonald’s style. Not sure why a long joke with a mediocre payoff is so funny to me, though thanks because getting ratio’d by this comment is even funnier. It’s like a committee deciding I deserve a participation trophy, though they did not appreciate the joke itself.

Yeah once a date invited me up for coffee and I was enjoying my time with her and thought another 15 minutes or so of conversation would be nice, but then it was suddenly like she forgot she invited me in or something because she just started getting ready for bed instead of making any coffee! I just politely said I needed to get going so she didn’t feel embarrassed about forgetting she had invited me for coffee, though I think I failed because she did seem a bit upset.

So I tried to be considerate and go through a coffee shop drivethru after the next couple of dates. Even then, she offered coffee the first time and I pointed at my cup and said I’m fine, though that seemed to make her feel even more embarrassed as she looked like she was about to cry after that.

Then the next time she said, “I think we’ve been having a miscommunication when I’ve been inviting you up for coffee, I didn’t really mean coffee, but I was being a bit immature and dancing around what I really wanted and then getting my feelings hurt when you didn’t get the message. So I’ll just say what I mean this time. Would you like to come up and have sex with me?”

I informed her that’s where babies come from and she already knew and still wanted it. Then she was trying to say something about being on a pill and I noped out of there. I am not interested in a relationship where my partner likes to get high on pills and have babies. That just seems irresponsible to me.