Hi. I’m alienated, living in the imperialist core, I have no political representation, and none of my friends are communists. Except from this website I feel extremely isolated. How are the rest of you faring?
i dont, and have embraced bimbofication
I did that for a while last year, my brain just snapped and I had to shut all of it off so I got really into formula one
Speedy cars go neeeowwwwm
Me but fashion, making healthy desserts, and reading increasingly esoteric literature on ancient alchemy
What does this entail for you exactly?
Try my best not to think about bad things when I’m doing well mentally. Esp by pursuing hobbies
Oh good. I thought you meant something completely different.
Same, I’ve just taken the grillpill, even my guilty pleasure hobby of anime is a lot better than doomscrolling.
some of y’all are sane? that’s crazy
you’re crazy fuck you
sorry
I’m an indigenous non binary person. It’s very hard. My parents are reactionary ten o clock news juice drinkers. My older siblings are hardcore Trump lovers. The town I live in are full of “you will eat bug because woke” fascists. All my income is vacuumed by landlords and greedy corporations while being slashed by my hog boss who’d rather sink his workers than sacrifice endless first class flights to vacation in Singapore. Every corner I turn it seems like Guy Debord was right.
I cry myself to sleep sometimes and every day I wake up wondering how tf did I make it yesterday.
I’m so sorry to hear this.
Not an option for everybody, but I had to make a very difficult decision (at the time) to leave the only place and people I ever knew to go live somewhere with opportunity and generally political beliefs that wouldn’t kill me/see me as subhuman.
It was the best thing I ever did for myself even though I had to restart my “career” if you could call it that at that point. I still miss the place I’m from very deeply. It’s like I live in a completely different world now, which I love in its own way, but every time I go back to visit I think about how I could just not leave this time. I love it. But there’s nothing and nobody for me there.
I was in a similar situation to you. No friends with tolerable politics, feeling isolated. Now I don’t have a single friend who would hear the words “I am a socialist” and think anything poorly about it. It’s been life changing. I know that really there are shitty people everywhere, but in areas with a lot of people you’re far more likely to find some who aren’t.
This is basically it. To me, America feels unsalvageable, or at the very least going to get a lot worse. Your options boil down to leave or suck it up, and leaving is hard!
Stop taking western media outlets seriously. Recently, I stopped getting mad about the media’s spins on current events. Occasionally one still really annoys me, like the BBC posting a sob piece about blatant Azov patched Nazis wearing Kolovrat earrings. But I can only really laugh at it. Otherwise, just take the spin as ‘the usual’ and either get on with your day, or truly do something to counter it. Don’t just mald in solitary confinement.
Most people aren’t communists, but you can make friends with people who are mostly sympathetic to that sort of thing, or are interested in imperialism and stuff. All of my closest friends are. But then again, I live in a big city, which makes it easier. I’m in the arts, so everyone is at least lib-left.
I see your pronouns are they/them. If you’re in a big city, LGBT groups tend to swing left and are generally very accepting.
This. I found the idea of “mediated experience” in Anthony Giddens book about late modernity to be very good in sort of really understanding what media is (and the whole risk culture thing). Even though the author is the ultimate neoliberal thinker, this part in his theory was helpful to read and expand further. And sort of helped me land in this same position of just laughing at the latest spins, because once you see it, almost everything is a spin and it is all mediated to us, from points of interests that aren’t explicit. And it matters a lot less than we think, on an existential level.
Yep, that’s a better explanation.
It was crazy. I found myself consuming news, almost excited to be annoyed at the next thing, to go out of my way to poke a hole in it by researching, for nothing but my own satisfaction of being right. Eventually I realised it was very easy to poke a hole in almost everything. I was accumulating counter information for the moment, then sharing it with no one and then forgetting it. Totally useless. Absolute waste of energy.
Yup and the way this stuff can dictate lives is honestly sad. It’s been interesting to follow how people locally have been made to think they are constantly in some kind of danger to a point where they replicate that feeling in their communication with other people all the time, warning others of burglers or “youth gangs” (there isn’t any). Buying expensive security systems or services to feel safe when in fact it is very safe. Opting for nato and so forth.
But they have been consuming the tabloids warning about someone stealing their shit or attacking them in the dark or those scary russians for so long that the danger becomes real in their minds. And then gets replicated in the everyday by mouth to mouth warnings like “you shouldn’t leave your bike outdoors here because x and y” yet when you ask if anyones bike has ever been stolen it typically turns out it hasn’t. Same with all these things “human nature” where the media loves to push that one anecdotal story of the shitties behaviour that then gets turned into how the world works, when it in fact doesn’t. The term moral panic fits this very well too, it’s what so many of the lib “dangers” are.
you make a good point, but this made me chuckle.
“you shouldn’t leave your bike outdoors here because x and y” yet when you ask if anyones bike has ever been stolen it typically turns out it hasn’t. Same with all these things
I know multiple people who’ve had bikes stolen and I had one stolen off my my front porch, and another cut off the racks at my uni dorm (they cut the lock). I know this is just anecdotal.
Honestly fair enough, bikes do get stolen a lot. But I kind of think it’s still less than how much the stories of stolen bikes get popularized. Anecdotally me and mine have always had such old crappy basic bikes that nobody has bothered. I keep mine in front of my door outside and my racist neigbours have told me many times how I shouldn’t and how it will get stolen by immigrants. They told me that I shouldn’t even put flowers by my front door because those will get stolen for sure.
At this point my bike has stood by the door a year, same as my flower pots. And if someone is in such a dire need of a bike or a flower pot, I think I’ll live.
When I did community gardening the racist boomers there told me to not even leave a bucket at my plot because “the russian women steal even soil”. Then I ran out of spoons and forgot all my stuff on the plot for two years, went to see it this spring and all my crap was still there.😂
But yeah, this is more about the mindset of “this is known” and how it feeds things like racism. I think this is why the media loves making a big deal of those anecdotal events and then they seem common. When they in fact are not.
Another anecdotal story about this. There are cows on pasture in my city, always has been. I took a pic of them and sent it to my family chat. The first question was “don’t people hurt them”. There’s been maybe one or two stories about people being dumb and harassing some pasturing sheep near an urban area or something and it was all over the news as an example of “human nature as evil”. And now it’s common knowledge. Of course the cows are ok and people just love them, nobody hurts them. But this is a good example of what I am trying to say. It’s the Parenti “Gaddafi is in your house”-rant applied to all things news.
Honestly, whenever I hear someone say things like this I can’t help but think they’d be perfectly ok with doing that thing themselves - or at least being ok with someone they know doing it because, “the rest of them do it”
I just left. Moved to Vietnam almost two years ago. Moving to China next month.
What do you do for work if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve always considered this but I don’t think they have much need for white westerners without college degrees :(
My partner does TEFL-teaching which does require a degree of some kind. I work as a per-hour contractor for the company that I was a W-2 employee for back in the states. I’m losing that gig in a month though, because they don’t trust my network from China. I might have to go the TEFL route too.
Ok, thanks for the response!
It seems the only options are TEFL or being very high up and specialized in your industry. No PRC for me any time soon
Thinking this is my only real option to be honest.
That’s my goal as well, it need not be an AES country, anything but the great satan.
Join an org. I don’t regret leaving the last one I was in but having the work to do and feeling like I was doing something I cared about with people like me was extremely helpful and I do miss that feeling.
I fucking do not dude
Yeah, that was a pretty bold assumption for OP
Listen to “Once in a Lifetime” and “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads at least four times a day
When the Cool Zone arrives, will you switch to “Life During Wartime”?
I know there’s an emoji called cool-zone, but what is the “Cool Zone” supposed to be?
I had to look up the origins just now myself.
The Cool Zone is usually defined by people on Twitter as a period in history that’s super cool to read about, but much less cool to live through. This definition is usually attributed to Matt Christman from the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkypdg/were-all-living-in-the-cool-zone-now
I go to a therapist and talk about everything but the rising nihilism i fear will actually kill me because she doesn’t understand how capitalism is a mindless thrashing beast busy sucking the bones of all things joyful
I need a commie therapist ha haha. Ha haha
Ha haha
in my experience if my therapist isn’t a materialist it won’t work. they don’t have to be a communist necessarily but if I get the idealist vibes I may as well be talking to a Catholic.
I’ve sent out lil probes to see if she’s alright… And at least she’s no Bide or die lib. I’m suspicious or perhaps simply baselessly afraid that she’ll end up giving me some lib platitudes and then i would really show her crazy
i will more or less bring up communism a couple sessions in to test therapists. my last one didn’t work out as her response was to bring up greed being human nature. like, if we see the world in such fundamentally different ways you can’t help me.
Seriously though, it’s hard and for me, I do find people I can check in with to make sure I’m not being too off in my perceptions.
I’m extremely fortunate to have comrade brothers that help me through. Playing music is therapeutic for me too. Do you have any artsy hobbies? I’ve found comrades more commonly in creative avenues. I don’t know if I’m exactly maintaining sanity though, I smoke a lot of weed and eat too much sugar.
Watch out that sugar’l kill you (and me, the guy giving advice he can’t take)
My family has a history of diabetes too -_- I’ve always planned to get my shit together and phase it out, it’s the toughest habit for me to change though
That is literally my same coping mechanism. Cannabis and sugar
I’ve got a dog; that does wonders for my mental health. He’s my little guy and he forces me to go on multiple walks a day. My motorcycle helps since it’s probably the funnest thing I do on a day to day basis.
my landlord won’t allow pets.
ALAB!
Drugs and alcohol. Spending all my free time playing music. Never going out.
I’ve had to stop drinking to avoid my liver giving up and boy do I miss it. I really need someone to invent Alcohol That Doesn’t Kill You™ and I’ll be able to live the life I truly desire and never be sober again
