LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]

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  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 14th, 2023
  • LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do you deal with your loneliness (to those of you who feel it)?
    91·
    1 year ago

    Assuming this is coming from a lack of friendship:

    Start with a pet, if possible. Then work your way up.

    Getting my cat a few years ago helped take the edge off so I didn’t come off as so desperate or distant (oscillating between the two extremes).

    Then slowly picked up effective habits and retrained bad habits in interacting with people. Still working on it.

    If you mean you feel lonely within your existing friendships, there’s a degree to which that is “normal” or at least somewhat universal. Some philosophers would say true connection with another person is fundamentally impossible. But even if that’s the case, we can find meaning and beauty in the process of trying to achieve the unachievable. Happiness comes not from finally filling an unfillable lack (a mythical ideal), but the novelty or enjoyment of the process.

  • LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is an absurdity that has been normalized by society?English
    14·
    1 year ago

    People have lost sight of how much of our “free” time is actually just resting and recuperating in order to perform better during “work” time. Like, the 8 hours a day I sleep isn’t really my time. The commute to and from work isn’t my time. The basic maintenance and upkeep stuff, the unwinding from a stressful day, all that isn’t truly my time, it’s just preparing for and recovering from work time.

    A two-day weekend makes this exceptionally clear. At least one of the days is usually spent catching up on all the stuff you couldn’t do because you were working. The second day is rushing to try and get any enjoyment out of it before you go back to work. There’s barely any actual agency or freedom, it’s all part of the cycle of producing value for someone else.

    Even worse if you’re in a job without set schedules or weekends, like most service industry workers.

  • LinkedinLenin [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.nettoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is your favorite quote of all time?
    2·
    1 year ago

    Might be stretching the bounds of this question because it’s a passage from Grapes of Wrath, but it always gets me.

    long

    The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

    The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?

    And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

    And the smell of rot fills the country.

    Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

    There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

    The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.