What do people think of the video?

I think this sounds nice, but often even with close people this doesn’t work well and a depressed person risks damaging the relationship. A spouse or best friend will sometimes deal with it for a year. They often won’t deal with it for yearS. I have a hard time envisioning you’ve been extraordinarily depressed before, even if you’ve been technically depressed and took Proaz for a month, and I doubt anything like that has even happened.

Thank you for acknowledging that this is a real thing. I wished when I first had depression I had been warned to never open up to friends about it. I got that advice a few years in when talking with a woman at a support group who went on to become a successful actress: never tell anyone you know. Although to this day I still wonder whether she was depressed or method acting.

Friends would genuinely care at first, say “Just try going out more” or something that I wasn’t capable of, and then when I would explain why I couldn’t, I could see the annoyance on their face.

Then, when the topic changed and they were talking, I could sense the annoyance when I wasn’t giving normal social feedback to some trivial story. Like, I would get a “my boss is such a bitch” story and instead of laughing or smiling during appropriate moments, which are things people often do voluntarily to feign social engagement, I just lacked the ability to respond in a normal emotional way.

Such an interaction would almost always result in later calls going unreturned.

That’s why tweets like this are so bad. If you have depression, the best advice is really keep that shit to yourself and jog and get better over time if you can and if it’s severe lean on professionals or join a support group. Your absolute closest friend(s) may be willing to tolerate it, like your bestie may stick around, but good friends won’t and acquaintances absolutely won’t.

And the people who ghost after discussing depression with you will never think of it in terms of what is is. The ghosting person doesn’t go “Man that shit bummed me out, he’s not depressed just lazy. His responses to my stories made me feel bummed out.” Instead, they just will suddenly not have time when they did before, thinking “Yeah, I want to be there but I’m just so busy. I’ll call in a few weeks” and then they will conveniently forget.

That’s why when you see someone like Selena Gomez proudly declaring her mental health issues and being open and transparent and the importance of living your truth etc, it’s really about making her feel good because she’s a sexy celebrity with a line of people angling to know her because of fame and if one person leaves the line there are others right behind that person. That is almost never true for anyone else dealing with mental health and openness and transparency are often terribly hurtful to those with these issues, however, it makes people feel good and look good to say “Be transparent and open” because they are selfish or naive and the truth “Lie about your mental health and stfu” doesn’t look good. This is even worse in corporate and institutional settings where the entire point is to look good. Never has there been a corporate mental health slogan "It’s okay to lie about your depression. We get it if you need to be out sick for ‘mono’ " because dishonesty is something people don’t like. It has never been about the depressed person, it’s always about people already happy. This is not meant to disparage Selena Gomez and she may not actually say everyone should be open and just be trying to show that real people have these issues, but she is just an example of someone very transparent when that transparency may be extremely unwise for others. The push for transparency in mental health is often really destructive in some ways to people who naively believe its benefit and these values and tweets tends to align more with government institutional and societal goals more than anything.

It’s way better for a depressed person to pretend to be super busy, then reappear when able to be the fun friend rather than permanently damaging the social connections they have. For this tweet, it’s like inviting depressed people into shark infested waters for a nice swim. Most people with these issues figure this out along the way, and then you get accidental gas lighting tweets like that in response.

So much of mental health is what makes non-depressed people feel better about themselves and what society would like to be effective, but makes things worse for people who suffer.

This is the view of someone who is slightly bummed out and not horribly depressed.

Some people have children murdered in war, damaged body parts, or people they love dead. Others have tried to date over and over, exercise and eat healthy, and are single virgins at 30 because no one finds them romantically attractive. Other people have extreme financial hardships while dealing with chronic incurable medical conditions like Huntington’s.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but for the people whose children were murdered in war, eating veggies may not improve things much.

The desire to thrive at any cost usually only exists when problems are theoretically fixable. You can’t bring back dead children, someone who has lost a body part and has chronic phantom pain isn’t going to become a neuroscientist and solve that problem while in chronic pain.

I feel like platitudes like that “Just overcome it bro. Exercise and veggies and grit” don’t help the majority of people with severe emotional problems. Once again, these ideas seem like ideas that help you, the reader of that post, feel better about depression existing rather than do anything for people who are depressed.

But I feel like you are in good company because it feels like 90 percent of mental health posts and slogans are really “Your depression is inconvenient for me and society and your possible suicide down the line may upset me. We support you! Call this number so we can lock you up and drug you, then bill you $30,000 and force you to work even harder while drugged up so we feel less annoyed about your ennui and sorrow.”

Like I get that your transitory sadness has been something you overcome with tech bro grit, but tech bro grit doesn’t overcome most reasons for severe depression that results not in brief suicide ideation but like getting to the stage of “What method will work best for me?” when people start buying tools to help them die or coming up with timelines and rewriting wills and debating whether to try to make it seem accidental so as to not harm loved ones.

I am glad you have grit and this works for you. Keep pushing. I just don’t like the messaging in society that feels like this needs to be a solvable problem because others are annoyed or saddened by it.

This isn’t realistic.

I’ve dealt with depression before.

People will say they want to support you and want to know what’s going on. If you describe a problem, the person listening almost always offers a solution. If you start to explain why their solution won’t work, they almost instantly get super annoyed and may suddenly become unavailable the next time you call.

People want to think of themselves as the type of person who would be supportive of a depressed person, but most “supportive” people who feel this way still adhere to normal social mores and expectations and get pissed or annoyed when a depressed person doesn’t follow them. It’s also super hard for a depressed person to simultaneously discus their depression and adhere to unwritten social niceties.

If I as a depressed person keep my feelings to myself, if I get better I still may have friends and if I die at least some people may show up to my funeral. If I lean on non-depressed people for support, they will expect normal social responses that adhere to unwritten codes and will get annoyed, the result being for me at best fewer friends and at worst a cremation with no one who cares about the ashes.

Honestly fuck that tweet or whatever. Shit like that is bout making society feel better with corporatesque platitudes like “Mental Health Awareness is Important! See something say something!” or whatever empty cheerleading slogan exists to encourage the workers while the most poor of all rot on the street (unless they fall asleep, causing them to be arrested, whenceupon they are fed in jail). Most people do not give a fuck, that’s why a homeless subpopulation exists, fuck this planet and fuck empty tweets like this.

It’s official: everyone hates the idea

Well, don’t blame me for my terrible ideas, blame my dealer

Oh, that is a cool idea. AITA-Bot or Human edition

No… This makes you seem real but based on that post I will always know you are AI.

That’s wild. Clearly AI.

So the value is getting a reputation on Lemmy to then influence or peddle shit?

Or is it a testing ground?

No human writes like that.

ew

time to become secretly addicted to netbsd

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Sometimes pretending to be too socially stupid to be deceptive has advantages. This seems naive.

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Your logic (“I can’t believe it so it’s likely untrue”) is flawed. “I can’t believe the world is round so Occam’s razor it must be flat because that I can understand.”

Putin is very smart and the KGB were smart and they bested US intelligence, according to the now deleted article, not in those exact words. Why is that so implausible?

There could just as easily be other bought or compromised US officials, not just Trump. The thinking “but this couldn’t really happen, it’s too sneaky and complicated!” is a pretty naive counterpoint.

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The idea that intelligence has no impact on computer skills and the ability to quickly learn computer skills is magical thinking. Intelligence differences are real and the solution is to make easy explanation to help people learn. I am not among the most intelligent people on Lemmy, the intelligence of the average Lemmy person probably at least an IQ above 115. It’s not about elitism, it’s about accessibility. I have terrible coordination. If someone tries to teach me advanced tennis, it would be bad, but if someone recognizes my coordination limits and is like, the goal is to just hit the ball once, then perhaps I have fun with tennis.

There is a reason such a large part of Lemmy is developers. There’s no confusion signing up for the developers. Federations and servers and instances are all crazy jargon to regular people. Although we may not want all regular types here, having some more regular people to balance out all the high IQ techies could make things more fun.

New users get overwhelmed with decision fatigue, especially when they have average intelligence.

When selecting a federation, new users should be told:

“Because Lemmy isn’t run by a large corporation, lots of small volunteers run Lemmy and run different copies of Lemmy at the same time. These different copies are called instances. You can choose 1 or just click the large red button and we’ll randomly select one of the most popular instances for you. If you aren’t sure what to choose, just press the button!”

I remember being curious about the fediverse and when I first looked and saw “instances” I got decision fatigue.

I didn’t know if an instance would limit me from interacting with others, could randomly disappear (ie hexbear domain), or if some instances would be a bad fit. I also didn’t know of it was unchangeable. Decision fatigue set in and I was less excited, but still registered.

To overcome that, there should be a “randomly choose for me” button with notes next to it that say you can change later, it won’t impact things, and you can interact with any instance. For random selection, just make it the top 3 most popular instances. Use a fun icon to indicate random change so the on boarding user has to think less.

Instances seem very confusing to an average user, as does federation. There could be an explanation like "Instead of 1 big company controlling everything, there are many copies of Lemmy that are in different places run by volunteers. These “instances” or copies are all Lemmy and can interact with each other, but having many copies means there isn’t ever 1 big company who can set all the rules and suddenly change thing in a bad way. " and then the random selection button which almost everyone would choose.

The average user dosn’t want to RTFM and also has an IQ of around 100 which is really low. The average reading ability of someone in the USA is like 6th grade level or something atrocious. You can’t overestimate average intelligence in an in boarding process.