You don’t owe anybody anything, just survival and freedom for yourself and that’s it. You can take care of others only after you are safe and content.
To give an analogy, in case of an airline emergency, you put your mask on first before you help others. You are only responsible for yourself and not others. But if you are all set, then sure you may help others and it is encouraged that you do, but not a responsibility.
Resources for how to apply yourself? Well, just focus on what you do best and do just that. We get the machine we get, we don’t get to choose, and we don’t get a manual or a fieldbook on how to use it, we can only observe, reflect, and do our best, and that is it.
It’s all good, your brain has automatically prioritized processing over rote memorization of useless info, which by the way can still be accessed given the right context. Otherwise, embrace the processing bit and apply your computational genius to the max, forgive your memory loss.
We need context.
You have as much free will as a leaf or a fish.
We don’t like being watched, it takes away our freedom, which is of utmost importance. My cats want to sit around me and stare at me all day, the moment I stare back, they don’t want to look at me, they don’t want to make eye contact, they get so uncomfortable, they’ll walk away pretending to be distracted by something else, thinking I’m a fool, I get their games and I beat them at it!
If you’re not weirdo, are you even living, lol? Embrace the weirdo! Chase joy with all your might!
If you’re not free, the world isn’t free.
Your friend is making you insecure for just being yourself. He is a manipulative bully, not your friend.
Climate change, wealth inequality, fascism, war, the global epidemic of loneliness & depression aren’t distinct disconnected problems. They are a singular globally connected problem. And it requires a singular globally connected solution. We’d need a few things -
Everyone alive right now must have ancestors who very literally did live & survive though the stone age and the ages before and after that. Wish I knew what my ancestors did to survive stone age, or better still if I could like watch them in a time lapse video. I guess I might have run away from stone lifting to go be a shepherd or something.
Look what I found - https://lemm.ee/post/54651420
Hugs to you. I’ve migrated once but that was 2 decades ago. Now I have family & teenagers who I can’t up & move easily and who still look forward to a future in America. I worry too.
Maybe humans go extinct, maybe they don’t, I never made any claims about it. But that your worrying makes no difference to nature and systems bigger than your individual control. I prescribe hope instead of gloom for reasons of self preservation.
I’m fully agreeing that climate change is a terrible and genuinely upsetting thing. But know that the animal in you wants to instinctively react to fear, and doesn’t want you to listen to reason. Only you can control this animal. Know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum (it’s from a song). Our ancestors lived in caves, lived through feudalism, through centuries of egomaniacal kings and ignorant masses, and sword fighting, and disease, and famine, you and I still made it here to exchange messages on the fediverse. I will not bet against human resilience and spirit of cooperation, which incidentally is also something you will realize is fundamentally human when you look deep in the mirror.
Depression is a natural state of deep self-reflection amidst conflict, a mirror so to speak that helps you understand who you are, and as an extension, understand what it means to be human. The way out is only when you’ve figured the underlying root cause of that conflict. What is anger, what triggers this anger, what are insecurities, what motivates you into action and what paralyzes you into inaction. Maybe not depression, but deep self reflection is a necessary path to self actualization. It took me many years in depression to realize the conflict is internal and eternal. That there is an animal in all of us that is that is reactionary and instinctive and is easily triggered by rage, anger, & fear and that all reason and logic hides behind this animal. That when we see the whole world turn into animal, our fears revive the animal in us. Like game theory predicts, when you become selfish, I become selfish. That explains all conflict in the world and I mean all conflict. You may gain clarity and find yourself out of conflict and depression, yet it can still be upsetting to see the current state of the world. And I will say that despite all the terrible news these days, I’m still optimistic about humans doing alright in the long run, afterall we’ve survived so far and our ancestors have gone through much much worse.
‘Supposed to’ - yeah, we all wish. ‘Reality’ is that you are who you are. If you don’t recognize this primal instinct in yourself, you’ll never understand it in others. To understand the world, all you need is a mirror, and you need to look really deep in it.
The rise of nationalism / individualism world-wide is due to powerful propaganda targeting this exact instinctive behavior of man that tells him that he is superior to his neighbor with the different religion, county of birth, skin color, economic status. There’s a reason propaganda relies on rage, anger, & fear because those emotions evoke your animal instincts, bypassing all rational thinking.
We still possess our primal instincts, we still have fight flight response involuntarily to something new or unknown, we still fall in the us vs them trap, we cheer for our team, our country, our religion, and shit on the other team, other county, other religion. It takes wisdom to rise above labels, but it’s definitely not instinctive.
Of course, you are the only protagonist of your movie and you must chase your destiny. You must follow your heart, and you must be honest to yourself, and you must chase with all your might, and if you’re lucky, you might find who you really are and what it is to be human, and only then do you find out what everyone else is and what humanity is all about, and only then do you find your purpose in life.