I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
The expanding prevalence of loneliness
Yes, absolutely. As of right now I have zero friends either online or offline. It’s been that way for a while now.
Do you live in the US? If so, what region? Wanna go to a movie sometime and then get pancakes & talk about said movie?
I wouldn’t say that I have zero friends, but I certainly don’t have the social circle I wish I had. That worries me for my own future. I’m gonna die someday, and I don’t want to slip into the abyss feeling totally alone.
And the fact that I don’t seem to be an outlier makes me worried for the future health and resiliency of entire communities.
I live in South Florida.
Well, we’re a few thousand miles apart, so the pancakes bit might not be feasible lol. On any fun discord servers?
Haven’t used Discord in a while actually.
I like pancakes but I’m in Oregon.
I always thought it was just me
Nope. I live in the pacific northwest of the US and there’s something here called the “Freeze” and some people refer to it as the “ice out” but it’s a term for how people in this region don’t really like making new friends. A lot of people here are very against talking to strangers.
Same here. I lost most of my friends after COVID.
It’s because as we’ve connected more and more people together the less the connections are meaningful or need to be meaningful. If I disagree with you I’ll just go find another person to talk with instead of trying to find a middle ground. This is why extremism is in the rise. It’s much easier to just join a cult like community where everyone agrees.
You can see the obvious GOP Republican Trumpers but there is also a lot of left wing extremism on lemmy, creating an echo chamber which is like the start of a cult.
So the Internet inadvertently is causing loneliness and extremism due to our connections not being meaningful.
The left wing extremism is part of why I don’t have a lot of in real life friends anymore where I live. I’ve had to either distance myself from people or just stop talking to them at all because they don’t think I’m good enough or something.
Like earlier this year I joined a meet up group in my area and I guess I made the mistake of asking about pride events because somehow that conversation turned into someone saying “you’re a fucking idiot if you don’t question your gender” and other fantastic concepts like “if you’re cis you’re dumb”
That sounds tough. I certainly have had times that I questioned my gender but I am comfortable being a CIS white male. I can’t change how I feel. Equally though, I recognize that people don’t feel comfortable with what they were born with. I also understand that the line between male and female, biologically, is more of a spectrum. We all started as female. Men have emotional periods every month. There is clearly not a binary state between male and female. It’s not cut and dry as that. So I fully support LGBTQIA+. In turn, I hope they fully support me being who I am.
That said, I have run into the exact same types of people. People who call me an asshole just because of who I am. I try to point out the hypocrisy and they do not care. That said, fuck’em. I still support LGBTQIA+ because of 2 reasons. 1) Very simply one person does not dictate the whole community. 2) I’m not a hypocrite. I want them to support my right to live how I feel is normal for me and I am going to do the damnest that they get the same.
Realistically though, those people are just angry and upset because CIS white males are the people who attack them the most. Our human instincts are that if some type of person keeps trying to kill you or threaten you, you generalize that all those types of people are bad. That I totally understand. It’s really not their fault even that they’ve generalized me as a threat to them. It’s their survival instincts and the shittiness of the world we live in. The best I can do is be a point for them to look at and say “Yeah, I guess not all of those types of people are trashy assholes.”
So I don’t think that’s really the same left-wing extremism that I was originally talking about. There are left-wing communities like Linux, Open Source Software, Unionization, and Communism. Whereas if you aren’t 100% you might as well be -100%. If you have a slight disagreement on how the system should be ideally then you are the absolute enemy. Zero middle ground.
Yeah, I mean, I went to pride anyway and I’m bisexual so of course I support LGBTQ+ because I’m part of the group.
But I don’t get treated like I’m part of the group. I just had a trans girl the other day who felt the need to explain to me, what a bisexual is. Like she’s fucking explaining my identity to me and talking down to me and you’re right, they don’t see the hypocrisy because you know if someone explained her identity to her, she’d filp out and other people would be outraged. But being bisexual is seen as “whatever” so its okay to condescend to that group.
I don’t understand how that is left wing? Like what does Linux have to do with left wing politics?
Open Source and Linux are very communism-focused. It’s very heavy on working together and sharing everything even if that means ruining your ability to make a product in the capitalistic society we actually live in currently. The GPL license essentially forces you to contribute back to the original source. If you disagree with doing that you are seen as Microsoft-incarnate.
Yeah, when I think of left wing politics, I think of like abortion rights, social issues… that sort of thing.
Oh, fair enough.