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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2024

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  • The correct answer is telling your asshole relatives that they need to do a match with the mini-goliath themselves if they think they’re so tough. Then they either have to play along with the bit or else they’re the asshole who hurt a child’s feelings. (Spoilers if they’re like my family: they will, but then you and the lil bro can bond over that shared trauma. Ah, family!)


  • In Daoism, you don’t necessarily even care about “happiness” as that’s a quality internal to oneself. It is understood though that all things have a Way (a dao) which they ideally align with. Being at odds with your dao causes strife.

    So a fish, swimming in the water “like it’s supposed to be,” can be thought of as happy because it is living it’s Dao. Zhuangzi perhaps interprets the “how/where do you know” question as bad form on his friends part. Daoists often dismiss a lot of learned knowledge as obfuscsting one from the dao (a principle I don’t fully agree with the old masters on) so trying to dig deeper into the question “but how can you know what a fish thinks?!” is missing the point entirely. Fish are “happy” because, as animals, they naturally live in accordance with Dao.











  • Millenial here, I had an existential crisis in my mid to late 20s because the job market was shit, my romantic relationships were in shambles, and prospects for the future looked grim. I managed to shake myself out of it and find a path forward after moving and changing a lot of my expectations for how life should be. I realized that I’d been lied to my entire life about what was important and how to achieve it. I realized that I was struggling so hard because the path laid out for you is one that benefits owners and rulers, not yourself.

    Nothing in America has gotten better since then, and all those factors are worse. Jobs are less stable, less interesting, and lower paying. Relationships are even more alienated and hard to form. The future looks totally fucked.

    I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis, but I had another big breakdown in early 2020 as I realized that the pandemic response was indicative of how we were collectively going to handle all the other issues of the 21st century: climate-change-enhanced disasters, wars, famines, and plagues. All my faith that humanity could pull together in crisis to handle the looming apocalyptic challenges evaporated from seeing people hoarde toilet paper and cheer on mass death from avoidable disease.

    So now I’m just trying to enjoy the downfall. Either I’m wrong and the hateful, spiteful, shitty people are correct in which case I guess there’s nothing to worry about. Or I’m right, people suck, and I’m privledged to have been born at the very peak of human progress before the whole species dies back to the low fuedal periods, if not extinction. Might as well enjoy the ride!






  • This was also my understanding and I begrudgingly agree with NDT that borders and states and tribalism are bad. I don’t agree with complaining about lines. Damn dude, sucks to have to be a regular participant in society, maybe of bureaucrats got paid better or there were more people working the passport desk.

    Or… and i know this is fucking wild, he made up that story because in the US you get passports in the mail. Yeah, you have to maybe wait in a short line for some steps but overall you just send in your info and wait 6 weeks.


  • Eh, that’s one view. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow propose that the State arises from the intersection of three forms of social power. These are sovereignty (control of violence), bureaucracy (control of information), and politics (control through charisma and culture). Historicaly each of these has existed as the basis for societies alone and in combination without the concept of a state.

    The State is a meme, a technology like religion or money, which provides a framework for the distribution and application of those 3 forms of power. It isn’t the only possible framework for that, but it’s outwardly destructive nature and self-propogation have ensured that the modern world is structured around a narrow set of configurations of the State.