Personally 2024 was ok for me even though I was laid off and unemployed for 6 months. Ok maybe it’s a little shitty.
If we’re in the darkest timeline, what was the last point where it felt there was so much hope and joy in the world?
Some options commonly put out.
-
The day Pokémon Go released July 2016. So prepandemic and we went outside and and a girl told me where to find Weedles. Yep I’m in a videogame
-
The day before 9/11 or when Harambe got killed
-
When Endgame released, culmination of 10 years of marvel moments into a single movie, people cheering in the cinema. Still pre pandemic, maybe there’s a trend here
Things are still good for me, weird and increasingly concerned for the state of society, but presently still good. One can still work on making their own life and the life of those around you better as the world goes to shit. Increasingly trying to get more involved in the world to be one of the helpers but it’s hard to know what organizations will need the most help locally.
2021 (Ngl i feel like everything really went down hill in 2022,2024 Isnt bad tho and hopefully 2025 isnt bad)
Sometime in 2010. My partner and I got our first pup, work was fine, apartment complex was good. Things were walkable. Pup loved snowpocalypse 2010, we went to the tennis courts and just ran around in the snow.
Obama was promising awesome healthcare reform. I had hope.
My mom hadn’t told me that we were probably the sort of family who should only see each other at funerals. My mom hadn’t yet killed my dad with COVID (she claims she got it at a “mandatory unmasked Christmas work potluck” in December 2020. She retired 2 months later, so it can’t have been that mandatory. She knew he was immunocompetent and also didn’t take him to the hospital as soon as his oxygen dipped below 90%.)
November 6, 2000
Everything has been downhill since then.
Yesterday was great
I had a pretty good one yesterday
I’m not talking about substances, but things just don’t give the same highs as they used to.
Getting a new Nintendo game as a kid and you’re giddy all the way home, reading the back of the box.
Last time I bought a game I had been looking forward to for years it was lying in a drawer for a month before I even installed it.
I had my first kid this year, and it’s probably the best thing to have happened to me in the last few years. But I don’t think the joy I felt compares to that new NES game as a kid. I wish I still would get that kind of highs.
I’m pretty sure the last good day was sometime in 1996.
as a child we experience everything for the first time. this grows neural paths and releases dopamine. colors are more vibrant, food tastes better.
as we age our brains get used to the dopamine and we look for ways to increase its production. sex, drugs, illicit activities, etc.
you will never recapture the way you felt watching the dinosaurs in JP inside a theater in 1995. you will never stare at a color in bewilderment of its vibrancy again.
find new experiences that could blast your brain with dopamine instead.
buy a hooker. smoke crack once. gamble $10k at one sitting.
buy a hooker. smoke crack once. gamble $10k at one sitting.
Sure, but where do I go from there for my next high?
cheat on your spouse? with your neighbors? then rob a bank?
It’s also just been a tough period to grow up. Depends on region but housing, did and cost of living in many have been significantly harder than in the past.
Every year is harder to get by than the last, despite unprecedented advances in science and tech.
My last good day is always and forever today. My (or your) circumstances should never impair my (or your) ability to be happy 😁 it sounds weird, but you are allowed (it is your right) to feel happy even as your life is crumbling around you. And if you can’t find that feeling, that’s alright too.
While this is true, I would also add that it’s ok and valid to be sad and unhappy. There is no obligation to put on a smile. You can be happy and not smiling, or you can be unhappy and not smiling, just be you.
See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.
“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.
As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?
It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.
I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.
I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.
I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.
Well if you take the advice of randoms that far, you are just plain stupid and should not be in charge of your own actions
But I would suggest start looking in weird places
I feel like it’s not my right to be happy unless I can impress in some way, like through work or academia. Everyone else has surpassed me and I can’t impress anywhere, so I just feel like I don’t deserve happiness anymore.
Don’t live your daily grind according to the highlight reel you see about other people.
We often don’t see the full lives of even our closest family members - thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams, frustrations, disappointments - and our window into our friends’ and acquaintances’ and strangers’ lives is even smaller. It’s like we only see the few triumphs they post on FB/insta and that’s all we know of them.
You can’t compare yourself to that. You know your full day of struggles, the long grind between wins, and you only see the big wins of your friends. You know your own dark thoughts and barely-held heated retorts but you never know either of those from anyone around you.
You will always feel inadequate if you’re comparing your everyday to the best days of your contacts. It’s okay to stop that; and, if you can, we often discover we don’t suck so much.
Then im sure you don’t deserve it. No reason to not be happy just because you don’t deserve to
This is surprisingly uplifting, thank you for posting this
I would say early 2010 or maybe 2009. live 3 miles from work and regularly walked it. In the morning my wife would walk almost halfway to a park and we had our dog. She would turn around and go back while I would continue on. I could take a bus in incliment weather only having to be in it for a few blocks. Sometimes I would bike up to the lakefront which was nice and scenic and stretched it to 7 miles which was nicer for a bike ride. My wife and I had macbook pros which large powerful laptops with tons of ports and osx was great and applecare was still stellar (it actually went down somewhere around this time). I worked in a research lab and what was accomplished seemed magical.
That sounds awesome.
The day before ChatGPT was released
2022-11-29
That fateful day in July 2009. Parents were hit by a guy who was fucked up by a shopping list of drugs. Mom dead, the family that was quickly fell apart. She was no longer around to help hide my father’s alcoholism. Not even 6 months after her death, a foul harpy of a female human latched on to him and only encouraged the worst parts of him while slowly doing everything she could to remove or erase his family.
Wrong parent died that day.
Real sorry bro
I think you mean the day before that.
No, the day of. My mom had made a big deal about taking pictures and making a big family brunch before she left. I was alone at my grandfather’s house and getting to watch TV while playing a MMO simultaneously. Amazing day, until the phone call that upended everything.
I’m sorry this happened to you.
July 4, 2012. The day the Higgs Boson was discovered. Everything since has done nothing but get stranger and stranger. I won’t even say it’s all just gone to shit. It’s just to me, everything since has been… increasingly unreal.
I like to joke that the world actually did end in 2012 and now we’re in a weird purgatory type thing.
Ah shit, you figured it out. Ok everyone, the jig is up, you can stop pretending to be real now
I prefer the flavor that the LHC opened a crack in the multiverse and weird timelines are seeping through
Yesterday. I can’t remember the last bad day I’ve had. 2024 has been one of the best years of my life
Almost same. I’ve had many shitty years and days, but around this time last year I said something along these lines, and it holds true now as well: This year has been great. And next year is on track to be fuckin awesome.
Yeah I’ve had rough days and great days, but even the bad ones have been more inconvenient than anything else. The good has more than compensated for the inconvenience
When I got my first actual Job shortly after my 27th bday EDIT: 2022 December. And was convinced I would turn the company around with my hard work.
Well, I sure left an impression, but it broke me, as I realized now that I had a job, how much I lost before I got there, and that money won’t fix that. I started getting worse at my job as a result.
The poor mental health also lead to some poor choice of words on Reddit that got me several suicide care bot messages and a permanent suspension.
My job moved me from Oklahoma to California. Took 3.5 months to sell my house but I was in Cali that whole time while my wife and daughter stayed behind waiting for the sale. The day I finally came back to get them after the sale was that day. I had never been away from them more than 2 days in 15 years. That 3.5 months alone was so fucking hard and depressing. Never been so happy to see them.
That day. For me.
