So far it's been alright for me, but it's still early.
I'll take a wait and see approach for now.
A bit late to this, but i must bite. It's hard to predict the future. One thing I am very confident about, though, is that AI is likely to radically transform the labour force within the next seven years. The old wave of AI only affected blue-collar jobs (think some manual jobs like warehouse work). Now we're building AI systems that can take intellectual jobs, will soon be fully agentic and autonomous, and will be capable of self-recursive development loops. When this happens, expect mass layoffs in white-collar jobs too. Expect upto hundreds of millions of jobs to disappear over the next ten years. What once took ten people will now take one person with AI. The population will keep rising, but the total number of jobs will shrink. The government will try to hide the statistics on unemployment at first and will count people working two hours a week doing Deliveroo as "employed" to pad the stats.
Moores law and just looking at history will show technological development is speeding up massively, not slowing down. It took us thousands of years to go from the stone age to the iron age. Yet it took us only 66 years to go from the first powered flight to landing on the Moon. Don't underestimate how fast this shift will happen. Big tech and governments are pouring hundreds of billions into this now, it isn't stopping. Follow the money.
I liked the animation style though, very cute.
Also wish there were more paths. :/
Orange man bad, huh?
ICE raiding my midwestern school bad.
I think that's pretty good tbh.
Global recession though... probably not.
Shhhhh don't tell the orange man
And you've gotten a lot more retarded than I remember.
I had no idea that was an actual word lmao, I figured you just bashed your head against the keyboard. Why do you even know that?
I cannot believe I know about this but I think I understand the meaning of education now lol. Our school just made everyone do an impromptu speech on a book and someone did the Kite Runner. I was unfortunately chosen to ask an 'insightful' question at the end.
You have black people in your town? I'd move.
You live in a town with a lot of blacks and Mexicans then?
She was supposed to come back and accuse me of being racist for assuming the drugs meant there were massive amounts of minorities living in her town.
Now you've ruined the fun.
Still finding it amusing that she said what Cel said was only "a bit racist"
He's either slipping or it was a slow day that day.
2025 still hasn't been bad, so still disagree with this statement.
That'd be 2016.
I had a big blizzard that year
I mean things have been pretty fucked up for awhile worldwide wise. So things getting worse wouldn't surprise me.
I'm more or less just judging the years based on how much its effecting me personally and so far 2025 hasn't been too bad.
It actually started last year, so more like 12 months. Funerals you get used to. But I am almost 50 now, and people start dying who are my age, i.e. friends I thought would be around forever. That was a new one to me.
Pro tip: Hang out with your friends while you can.
Losing people generally sucks. I lost a family member on Thursday. My nan. She was 92, but I thought she'd be around for longer.
For stoic philosophy, it's really easy: Hands down Marc Aurel is my clear favorite. To get into it just install a phone app with stoic quotes; there are lots of free ones. Reading a quote a day and thinking about it for a bit, is the way to go.
For horror, I like the classics. Poe, Lovecraft, etc. Poe's Ligeia is a great short story. A lesser known old master of horror is F. Marrion Crawford. He has a short story collection that is really good. It's called "For the blood is the life".
Also this quote which is a bit more recent
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
--Richard Dawkins
He makes a good point. We ought to be grateful, considering the alternative. Yet I feel like our attitude about life can be an anvil pulling us down into despair.
Lately I've kind of drifted toward disengagement as a coping mechanism when friends, family or pets are lost. Just sort of repeating the mantra that "life is but a dream." That is, maybe a lot of our pain comes from the mistaken notion that life is anything but a temporary roller coaster ride. We demand permanence from the universe—a universe whose only real constant is change—and this colors our entire outlook into a bleak canvas that amplifies grief.
Maybe that's kind of a Buddhist idea. I'm not particularly versed in philosophy (only took the Philosophy survey course and a course that was 90% Nicomachean ethics), but I feel like our outlook and expectations tend to obliterate what little joy we can still hold onto in moments of loss.
Like Dawkins says, we should be happy to be here. And maybe if we stop living for tomorrow and start living for now, these moments would be easier. Especially if we do like he suggests and focus on the absolute miracle it is that we're sitting here as thinking beings contemplating these big mysteries and the pain and joy of being alive. I think if we let go of the counterfeit expectations of what life is, we might be able to stand in awe at the awesomeness life brings, despite whatever flaws that come with it.
Besides, if there was nothing, and then us, and then nothing again, then nothing is gained and nothing is lost. And who knows, maybe being too close to the carpet keeps us from seeing the true pattern. All I know is that taking life less seriously seems to make things better.
Much love Fab. I'm at least happy that you seem to be keeping yourself occupied with healthy and productive mechanisms :)
I used to emotionally wall off my friends growing up, but recently I've been going out with them a bit more and even joined a football team with some of them. I was a bit nervous at first since I hadn't seen some of them since high school. Not building those in-person connections properly back then or staying in touch more is probably the only thing I've wholeheartedly regretted so far in life. So I can relate to that warning more as I get older. It’s nice to remind people.
