I don’t think society across the whole planet will collapse, short of a nuclear war in which case gold won’t help one bit

Much more likely that certain areas will experience famine, war, disease, and reduced access to medicine.

Really the best bet is to be able to be mobile if an area has a significant decline you can move to where it’s better

You are grieving the loss of your old life. The freedom, the lack of responsibility. This is normal and healthy. Taking time to be sad and properly mourning is important.

Maybe it helps to write about your travels, to fully remember the good and the bad of it.

Take time to process that sadness and sit in it. Recognizing this will help you grieve. This could take months, maybe longer! Maybe you are also a bit resentful that you didn’t live in the moment more then, and that you tried to grow up too fast.

Then you’ll be able to assess your life right now and decide if it’s the life you want or if you need a change. And being honest with your wife will go a long way, so she understands that you’re sad and mourning a life you used to live, even if you prefer this life.

It’s normal to feel depressed while grieving.

I’ve lived a lot of different lives, traveled and adventured with nothing a lot of different ways. Sometimes I look back at what I had and have strong regrets. A few years ago they got so strong I decided to blow my life up and go for a big backpacking trip with just enough work to sustain it indefinitely.

It was really fun, but it was a new kind of hard. After about six months I realized I missed deep connections with friends. I missed staying in one place, in building a life with folks I cared about around me - a real community. I missed hosting backyard BBQ parties, playing games with folks, spending time with each other, supporting each other through life’s challenges.

At the end of the day, the adventuring was great but it wasn’t enough, it was fun, but too souless to continue. The new friends every day, the new scenery, it was a grand adventure, but adventure isn’t enough. I need a deep community.

So I picked a place to settle down and started building that life. Today I’ve got more neighbors as friends than I can possibly spend time with. I’m building deeper connections with people I care about. This was the missing piece.

And sometimes I look out window and feel regrets. I see the moon and want to be out in the woods again. I want to be done with working so many hours to afford this life. But I remember being so lonely I could hear my heart knocking around in my chest, of meeting people every day I’d never get to see again. And I focus on being grateful for what I have. The gratitude goes a long way to making me feel better. I have possibly the best life I could, and part of that means trade-offs, of all the other lives that have to die so this one can live. I grieve those other lost lives, but then celebrate this one with things that make me happy and grateful.

I hope my rambling helps. As you reflect I hope you find out what kind of life you want, and at least get a chance to feel the sadness and regret, and know it’s possible to regret and move forward. It’s possible to grieve an old life and still be grateful for the one you have.

And maybe, yeah, at the end of that you need to blow it all up and go do something else. I wish you the best. Feel free to write me if you want to chat more about this

wow she does look like Linus

Finally, the last piece to stop using Google Drive

I use Kagi chat all the time for random shit:

• scheming about food forest ideas
• learning about Linux
• helping me get inspired to write DnD campaigns
• journaling about stressful shit and getting encouragement to relax and breathe through it
• inspirations for cool projects to do

it’s like a great resource to just see like an average of what people would say in that situation. I think of it like a faster more focused reddit thread full of good and bad ideas, and I sort through them

I cannot beat Roland in Another Crabs Treasure and I’m tired of trying to grind / learn new builds to beat him. I tried even cheesing him with a wall clip bug that’s probably patched now. I am just tired of it.

I haven’t finished ER, I am savoring it, not done, just pausing for a bit

I never finished Sekiro for the same reason as ACT, I keep getting to the drunken house fire boss and getting my ass whooped. I want to try it again sometime, give it another go. I’m pretty sure this will be my 4th attempt to start over.

This is exactly why I’ve been on such a kick to plant perennials in my yard! There’s a resilience to be had, even if psychological.

The other day I noticed my favorite dark chocolate bars are nearly $8 each, this time last year they were $3! I am obviously distressed to find I can only afford half as many bars as before, but it’s comforting to know I’ll be getting a lot more treats of grapes, kiwi, asparagus, strawberries, elderberries, goji berries, and mulberries. Sure they aren’t chocolate, but they are a fun sweet treat anyway, and if I miss the sharpness of chocolate I’ll make some into tart jam or kombucha.

Rather than see the chocolate prices and despair, I’d rather take comfort in adding more to my little food forest, and then I’ll have more to share with my friends!

Indeed, you have restated my position in fewer words.

What baffles me is how truly compatible science and religious faith could be, only in that religion attempts to provide answers that science cannot. But rather than pushing hard to only provide those answers, and reading the texts in the context of the time, these religious leaders get unbelievably bent out of shape and decide to die on hills that are just trivially and demonstrably false.

Like evolution, the age of the earth, heck a few years ago even a heliocentric solar system. It does not matter at all if this is a heliocentric solar system, and yet folks were happy to die on that hill (even killing others who just point out the truth) turning away everyone who won’t submit. That’s what finally got me, the constant claims to seek truth, and yet inevitably ignoring it completely when it slaps you in the face.

It’s so close-minded and completely misses the point. If all they did was say “here’s some moral teachings on how to be better to each other” at least I could get on board with that. But no, it’s somehow required to buy into all the false teachings too.

It feels like a dead sea effect, where the only people left are those who comply when they see red plate and the leaders tell them to call it blue. To me that’s not about seeking truth or trying to live a more moral life, but rather about control and power.

Absolutely agree. I know much more about operating systems and software that the average person, and I’ve only been able to handle a number of Bazzite issues with Kagi Assistant. Trying to find how to fix something on forums and regular search is extremely time intensive.

Of course keep in mind that if you’re messing around with your OS you might just screw something up and have to reinstall, but so far I’ve not had anything even close to that. Bazzite seems to be pretty hard to break.

Really for me, Linux only became fun once I started using chat tools to help me learn how to make it do everything I wanted. And I’ve been using Linux off and on for work and at home for twenty years. It’s just sometimes really arcane, and the differences between opensuse, Ubuntu, fedora, and mint made it feel like I never could learn how to fix things.

Sometimes things are harder than I want or just aren’t working right out of the box. But then sometimes I’m able to do things that are actually impossible on other operating systems. So it’s really a trade-off. Also it’s getting better every single day. There was an issue I had last month with a controller, I messed around for 30 minutes but couldn’t get it to work. I tried it last week and it just worked. So don’t lose hope entirely.

I always heard they were larger and ate a specific diet of plants that are now extinct, and so have adapted to only eating low nutrition bamboo and it’s caused them to barely be able to reproduce.

I am well aware of said history. That’s why I wrote what I wrote

I’m reading Slaughterhouse Five for the first time this week, and clearly the man was tortured by something. Was it the endless injustices of the world, a love lost, the horrors of war? Plenty of folks grew up being told by our nanny that gays should all be thrown off roofs, were beaten for acting too femme or swish, were told eternal pain was the price. So it goes.

Maybe Kurt was one of the vast multitude of folks so deep in the closet no one would ever know or have guessed. The unsung millions of queer folks who had that crush they couldn’t act on, the midnight fantasies held close, the whispered confession of love that was rejected, the true love just out of reach.

Who hung in the balance friendships, job opportunities, family connections, and physical safety and decided that unrequited love was an easier burden to bear.

All that weighing, maybe seeing your love be happy but could never love you back the same way. All that held tight could forge the soul of a poet, and yes, maybe a sardonic and cynical poet. One with a sharp wit who tells his own truths outright on the page but with a mocking tone to help the medicine go down smooth. Easier to put on the motley of a clown and make a sarcastic quip about being gay or a writer than it is to speak deeper truths that have gotten millions of folks ostracized or killed. So it goes.

Work is the great equalizer, the tedious dance we endure.

Ages are 18-40.

Yeah that is pretty close to my experience, but thankfully none have been that fluid about it. Just changing week by week instead of minute by minute

I think this one happened rapidly because of conquistadors and plague. A rapid empire collapse making the elite location untenable and unaffordable.

I recently read 1491 and it was excellent. It describes how these immense civilizations were in the New World, and how rapidly they collapsed as hogs infected with diseases accidentally escaped the explorer’s camps and killed of 90% of the populations.

It talks about De Soto seeing the banks of rivers filled with dozens of cities of thousands of people, and then two or three years later explorers coming by and finding nothing but ruins.

That seems much more of the type of collapse that would just leave entire buildings empty and abandoned.

Not looking for sympathy or advice, just here’s my trend over time to deal with this.

I am making considerable effort (and regularly failing because damn verbal ticks plus ADHD got hands) to avoid using any gendered or gender neutral terms as the folks in my community change pronouns and names regularly. I just got pretty harshly scolded the other day for using a gender neutral pronoun to refer to a person who told me to use it two months ago, but now it makes that person feel bad and this was the first I heard of it. Almost all of these people are not fully out so I have to keep a mental map of who gets what names and pronouns get used with what people.

I cannot learn and unlearn them fast enough, keep the right context of who is is the room, and keep up with current preferred names and pronouns which change semi-regularly. I cannot overstate how hard this is for my ADHD ass.

Especially when person A is out to B but not C, and D is out to C but not B, and I’m talking to B but C walks in the room, but then B leaves and I’m alone with C. This seems to happen to me several times a week. The mental gymnastics is absolutely thrashing my CPU. And I am trying my damnedest but keep fucking it up and making my friends sad.

I think I’m too ADHD to use pronouns, so I just attempt to use people’s current names directly (still keeping attention to who they are out to) or just never speak about them to others and use no names or pronouns at all when talking directly. The latter is easier overall, so that’s generally what I aim for. Never talking about these people feels like erasure or something but that seems like the best way to avoid causing what seems to be significant emotional pain and/or accidental outing.

There’s some where it’s stable enough to at least use names directly, but those are few. And those still aren’t out at large, so I’m still faced with the accidental outing issue which is very real.

I guess I’m doing something right because it seems I’m always in the know. I legit want to be an ally to folks and support them in whatever. Just damn I’m not smart enough. I need like a universal translator.

friendzone potion, you give it to someone crushing on you or hates you to turn them around. Some might argue showing up with beer / weed is a friendzone potion.

If you’re thinking of this, consider that those who buy clothes in XS have to pay the same amount as the XXL size for that same shirt or pants. Despite the XS garment being a third as much material and stitching.

same! We stayed up all night taking turns playing