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My whole office went to WFH as soon as the pandemic started, the plan was to move back to the physical office as soon as possible, but there was so much resistance in the company that eventually the owners sold off the building and we never went back.

As for productivity, I was in charge of transitioning my team and ensuring they weren’t slacking. I had the exact opposite problem with 9/10 out of them, mostly everyone was working too late and putting in time off the clock just because they were bored. We ran out of work to do every week and started taking on new tasks for other teams.

Except Terry, he got a second job and tried to work both at the same time. He never appeared on camera in our meetings because he was at his other employer. It took me a bit to figure out something was off, when I confronted him he abruptly quit. He was a sour and deeply repressed dude and after he left everyone celebrated.

I don’t drink or eat a lot of carbs, I am trim and lean. But I still wouldn’t dress like that simply because bare midriff doesn’t look good on men unless you’re fully trying to imitate the 80’s movie aesthetic for laughs.

if i dressed like that, she would probably injure herself laughing.

That’s not a definition of middle class at all.

Christ that’s the point of what I wrote and the point of this post. That’s some reddit-level density my friend.

If you define “middle class” as having a phone and a car and a job, then yes, there are countless middle-class families who get some form of assistance.

Middle-class, working families who live in their fuicking car.

It’s the same phenomenon of de-socialization that was radically accelerated during peak Covid that has led to everything from a 1000% increase in unruly passengers on airlines, to a drastic decrease in relationships and dating, to a whole host of people just checking out from the social contract and embracing ludicrous conspiracy theories and retreating to online safe-spaces where any crazy thought will be validated and praised.

As a species we were not meant to have constant exposure to millions of people’s innermost thoughts and feelings and unrestrained impulsive ideas. It fucks with your head. Combine that with the economic incentive of keeping people in one spot, scrolling their attention-span to sawdust, and you are training an entire generation of people to turn off their inner monologues and to stop thinking entirely, just seeking validation and things to click on.

I feel strongly that AI ruining the internet will be a net-positive, as it’s going to drive more people to human spaces to connect with each other. Sure there will be a whole segment of people raised in the AI slop of the next decade, but there will also be a subset of people who want more and create their own spaces with other real humans.

The biggest reason for declining marriages is that people can actually make choices now and people don’t want to be shackled to someone they hate their whole lives.

People had radically different attitudes about marriage in olden times, when marriage equaled survival in many ways, and survival of your family, your connections, your career and your status, which was held through generations. It wasn’t thought of normally in terms of love and that’s a very modern view of marriage.

Romance and marriage for love certainly existed, but that was usually considered fantasy or stageplay.

And coming soon to a developed nation near you!

As an aside, some people with issues have used the falling birthrates around the world as an excuse to push for far-right, draconian policies regulating people’s bodies like banning birth-control, criminalizing abortions, and lowered age-of-consent laws.

We need to all make it very clear when this shit comes up that the problem has far more to do with economics and infrastructure than any social moral failing. We need better heathcare and safety nets so couples can afford to have a baby. We need lowered housing costs so people aren’t afraid they will have to raise a family in a single-bedroom studio apartment. We need paid time off and parental leave. We need mass-transit so a family with two working parents don’t also have to afford two cars. It’s fucking ASBURD how much American families are getting fleeced.

If our policies and politics actually cared about taking care of our future, they would be making it easier for families to have babies and adjusting the world, not still expecting people to have to work two-jobs for twenty years to save up enough for a downpayment on a shitty house.

Or thought the child was a small dog.

Yes, from holsters that require special training to simply remove the gun from.

Even if they weren’t special holsters, try unsnapping a leather or ballistic snap with a dino toy.

It’s just fake funny shit that gets distributed waaay too far because our species has lost all capability to think.

And here we thought it was bad trying to get a coherent message accepted on the left. Leftist infighting is legendary because the left has no idea how to dog whistle, which is a good thing. But the fact that there are 900,000 splinter groups with wildly different ideologies perfectly willing to fight tooth and nail to be the One True Leftism means the left knows infighting. Experts at it even. That’s why leftist policy is so timid and careful usually.

The right has ridden long and hard on the basic fact that most of their base are too stupid to think hard enough about ideology that they could worry about having to make them all work together. You easily get anti-vax moms riding alongside armband-wearing nazis on the right, because they’re both too dumb to realize that they’re supporting each other.

But all that is finally starting to come to a head (hopefully) as the current Democrat contenders are talking actual policy, as in, things they will do on a legal, prescriptive, professional level to enact changes. The right has gotten away with not doing anything for a long time because the left became basically the opposition group instead of actual challengers.

So they have to put their actual desires on paper, AND get them universally accepted by everyone on the right. It all looks a little different in that light. Seeing abolishment of birth control right next to their desire to abolish Civil Rights is making them sweat. These are NOT universally held positions of people on the right.

And honestly, most on the right, even the most frothing zealots, they don’t really want social disruption and rollbacks to the dark-ages. They are children. They are toddlers. They want to be heard and be recognized that they are angry, and they want to share that anger with the rest of their own little WWE Wrestlemania audience that lives in a fantasy world. That’s all. They don’t want to work on coalition building, they don’t want to phone-bank, they don’t want to have debates, they don’t want policies signed into law that will change their comfortable lives.

These are people who really need to discover some kind of Dungeons and Dragons gaming system that appeals to their anger and stupid worldbuilding.

Conservatives clearly don’t even understand words.

Which is wild because these are the same people who treat words like we found them in a fucking meteor crater and have to uphold the ancient definitions of gender, sex and relationships between people AT ALL COSTS.

I want seats next to nobody. How hard will that be to pull off?

No, you don’t.

You miss who you were when everything looked like this.

You were young, you were discovering the internet like a new frontier, every new app you tried or new album you found or new comedy website was like discovering a new country. You could while away hours without responsibility or care or trauma, or at least nearly as much. You were not cynical and jaded yet.

Nostalgia isn’t a longing for when things were simpler, it is a longing for when you were simpler.

You have obviously never been in a movie theater men’s restroom, a sporting event men’s restroom, or any busy gas-station restroom. The floor is entirely pools of piss. I rather stand on a grate that someone pissed on.

There’s a reason many homes ask guests to take off their shoes.

Kind of like asking if we can stop picking up stones and rocks and using them to beat each other and instead use them to build homes.

This isn’t a new fight. There will always be people who take our tools and abuse them by using them to hurt others. That’s what we’re fighting against, people who use our tools to hurt people instead of doing good. Unfortunately, if we just let people who collect stones and sticks for hurting people be, and not push them out of our village, they will just grow in number and strength so we can’t just block it out, we can’t live and let live around those who would take your life if they grew strong enough.

If it’s tiring and annoying to see people have to always yell at the club-and-rock-wielding thugs and throw rocks back at them, you don’t have to get involved, but don’t decry those who DO have the courage to throw rocks back. If they didn’t do this, the rocks would start hitting you next.

Why are people so confounded by these things? Have y’all never used water to bathe before?

I feel like some people were never given actual hygiene instructions from their parents growing up. I can only imagine the way some people are so hung up on genitals and waste products that they can’t even think about it, those kinds of people going on to have kids… do we really think they’re going to pass on useful information on self-care?

And it’s not like there’s tons of social messaging and helpful guides all over the place on proper bathroom habits, it’s purely a passed-down skillset.

Every time this comes up on reddit, there are a lot of people sharing stories about knowing men who literally don’t wipe their own ass or touch it while showering and just constantly walk around with shit all over their ass. I used to think it was a meme, but then met people in real life who also had encounters with men who thought touching their own ass would “make them gay.”

So yah, people getting anxious about using a bidet? That tracks. I think a lot of people are at very least, just anxious because they’ve never really been shown anything and might be doubting their own habits. Basically the bathroom and poop and related topics are just this mysterious realm that nobody talks about. Insecurity over our most intimate and private acts is a tradition as old as time itself.

I too am taking advantage of the summer sale and am about 20 hours in and still wildly infatuated with this weird, weird amazing game.

After a while you start getting a slightly better idea of what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it more “game like” if anything, the more you learn about the game, the more it reveals itself to be a giant tool to explore meta-narratives and there are some moments of conversation regarding this that are absolutely chilling.

I have this feeling that the “X months” we have, as well the other periods of special recognition, serves a primary purpose of just setting people off.

For real, the ONLY people who really have a strong reaction to things like Black History Month are racists. The ONLY people who really care that there’s a “Gay Pride Month” are the frothing homophobes. For everyone else, particularly the people whom those days or months celebrate, it’s just Tuesday. Or some such normal day where nothing changes and they still have to constantly look over their shoulder.

If all it does is make some backwards, broken asshole lose his mind and rage about how “unfair” it is that nobody is giving them their special day, then it’s a victory. If all these recognition periods do is remind us all that there is a sizable segment of our population who hate you personally then it’s actually doing good on the long-term, because we can use it as a barometer. We can use these days and months to gauge how much more work we have to do squashing nazis and purging hate groups, and how much protection our friends and neighbors still need simply for existing outside the “white CIS straight male American” spectrum.