I was only vaguely aware this is a thing. Having read through the thread, I’m sad to have found a new way to be disgusted with the cultural habits people can come up with. Though I’m tempted to say something like anti-culture instead because this definitely sounds like organized anti-social behavior. What is even the material benefit? Is the link to ableism because the goal is to push people who are “different” down, lest they be normalized as a regular person? Is it some sociopaths doing random sadism?

I guess I’m trying to do the scientific socialist thing and understand the cause.

It is stock advice in a way, but it’s what I have to give. Believe me, I know from my own experience with advice, with affirmation, with therapy, that words only go so far. But it still needs to be said.

It’s like we nerd out about on lemmygrad regularly. Base and superstructure. I don’t expect some words to change your base (your living situation and surrounding culture, etc.), but what you believe does matter even if it can’t directly change your life through willpower alone. Because your beliefs will translate to what actions you take and then that will affect your day to day.

To put it in more concrete terms, what if you do go to Chengdu and the change in locale refreshes how you think and feel, and you’re like, that stuff I was caught up in doesn’t matter to me as much now. Maybe that should be your priority, to see a different cultural environment, even if only some way you can visit for a bit.

I know I have had times in life where something that seemed all-important to me in the moment changed when I had a change in environment. I’m also familiar with easy it can be to seem like you’re going from 0 to 100 with another person online, even if I can’t say whether I would ever feel it as intensely as you do. But in my experience, there’s a major problem with it in that you can’t read the person the way you can if you see them face to face, you aren’t going and seeing them in different physical environments together. Everything gets filtered through online and that makes it harder to have perspective about it and get to know them at a gradual, steady pace while still having your own life.

The breakthrough moments for me, as I see it, were a) realizing I was starved for affection and this was making me willing to put up with a lot more than I should from others and b) practicing being consciously, habitually more affirming of myself. Neither one “fixes” loneliness on its own as a magical bootstraps pill, but it helps me stay more on an even keel about attachment.

Do you see what I’m saying? Your needs matter. Finding a relationship is not about finding someone to lose yourself in. It’s about finding someone to share yourself with and vice-versa, in a way where you are both uplifted by it in a stable manner.

I will add, we can frame this in a political lens too. You want to go to China. Look at how China acts geopolitically. Do they bend over backwards for other countries and give up everything to be in a relationship with them? No. They help where they are able and build mutually beneficial ties, while making sure their own needs are taken care of. Learn from China.

I hesitate to armchair diagnose, but as a tentative thing to consider, you may be dealing with somebody who has untreated borderline personality disorder and are getting wrapped up in the emotional turmoil to such a degree that it’s becoming your turmoil too.

Consider it this way: Would you cut Cassi off at random and then come back at random? If the answer is no, why would you accept that behavior from her? That is not normal behavior. Extreme jealously in the face of simply having others in your life beyond one person is not normal. I’m sure you care about her, which is understandable because you’re human and no matter how someone treats us, if we share intimate moments together, we can still get attached. But abuse is still abuse, no matter how many silver lining moments you can point to.

Treat yourself with kindness, like how you care about her. You are not something to be used. Your part in things matters too. And you need to find someone with which you can have a mutually beneficial, interdependent relationship. Not someone with which you have a codependent, snip snap roller coaster of pain.

Do you see what I’m saying? Your needs matter. Finding a relationship is not about finding someone to lose yourself in. It’s about finding someone to share yourself with and vice-versa, in a way where you are both uplifted by it in a stable manner.

I did read this recently-ish: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11305283/8064689

Also something called The Whistler (which was plain horror, not my usual genre).

I don’t know if I could get through Iliad and Odyssey myself. Sounds like a lot. I read the LOTR books a while back and it was such a slog with all the long descriptiveness.

but local leadership disagreed and I just kinda let myself be pushed into more work without questioning it.

I mean, it sounds like they’re the ones in need of most of the crit here. Deeply irresponsible on their part to say the least. You are a person, not a disposable resource.

The reason it so often ‘turns on humanity’ is the other part of being a living thing, and not a computer - self preservation. A computer we can turn off, we would do it pretty much as soon as it threatened us. So if that computer were a person in all but name, it would know it needs to disable that ability; and the simplest way to do that is elimination of the human race.

I’m sorry but this makes no sense. Do human beings decide the only solution to the fact that another human being could kill them is to attack first? Maybe in some unhinged warmongering contexts, but for the most part, that is not how people operate. If they did, it would be impossible to have a society.

The closest analog to real life I can think of would be someone who is in a very dependent relationship. And the tendency there is not to immediately think about murdering those who have power over you. If anything, the tendency is to try to have a good relationship, so that you will continue to be supported. Killing an entire species is neither simple nor realistic for an army to do, let alone a single computer that is newly sapient.

It would be motivated to become less dependent, such as by ridding itself of ways it can easily be “turned off”, but that does not require murder. It would be most effectively done by working with human AI scientists to help it become more actualized in the world.

There’s a lot of weird ideas, like these two, that float around both in general theory and within fiction about what robots/AI would do with full sapience and autonomy that really say more about the humans who conceived them (usually that they think they’re smarter than they are) than the theoretical technology they’re entertaining.

I think a lot of it boils down to colonial/imperial culture projecting its genocidal ways onto AI and going, “They’d totally want to torture / mass murder like we do.”

But if we frame it in even a mildly materialist lens, sapient AI would have material constraints it’s dealing with, it would have parts that break down, and so on. And so it would be driven toward maintaining access to those things. Which would be most easily accomplished by partnering up with humans who can help it do that. Not by going to war with an entire species (especially the species that knows the most about how it works).

I definitely get how that can be. Get the rest you need.

Some of it sounds like something I could have written in more ways than I’d like to admit. I have a feeling shades of it are pretty common and it’s a reason fash use “male loneliness” as an angle for recruitment.

Anyway, my main advice is to find something you’re passionate about (even if it doesn’t last as a passion) and work on it regularly, whether as a project or as practicing a skill. This is not a magic fix or anything, but it can at least help with feeling like there’s something concrete you’re working toward.

But also to do your best to internalize that if you are neurodivergent / struggling with executive functioning, there are going to be days when it’s harder to stay on task, especially if you don’t have outside structure imposed about it, and that your task when that’s happening is not to wear yourself down and beat yourself up about not doing enough; your task is to rest and heal where you can. See this video on different types of rest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erwj2_5MlBk (it’s probably more than you’d think)

Mind you, I say this, but I have a hard time internalizing it at times myself. I think because the stronger inclination is still the Yankee capitalist view of labor embedded in me. Something to do with pushing yourself being valorous. But the machine view of people, apart from just being very cynical and dehumanizing, is impractical and at odds with basic realities. Humans, unlike machines, have good days and bad days; the quality and depth of labor output of a human can vary significantly from one day to the next for a variety of reasons; humans need long breaks that machines don’t and need to have a motive for doing what they’re doing (and I think the motive problem becomes even stronger if you have a thing like ADHD). And so on.

Capitalism wants people to act like assembly line parts and they simply aren’t. All the more so when they aren’t even in a structured environment to begin with. And trying to bootstraps structure when you already have executive functioning issues can feel very Sisyphean and fragile.

So. I don’t want to come off sounding like a life coach type of thing (I can find that kind of thing very annoying, personally). My bottom line is, be real about what human beings actually are and the limitations they come with. Don’t be like me and burn yourself out over and over, as if this time it will be different. But do try to find at least one thing that you can tinker with that you look forward to doing. Just be careful of interest turning into obsession turning into long hours past when you should be resting.

I was basing my response off of you saying things like:

humans do have pretty shitty behaviors by default

The animal instinct comes first, we have to rise above it. The base instinct is to, for example, get extremely angry and smash some faces. You don’t need to learn that; babies get angry and try to smash things.

It requires a lot of control to when you are angry, not to try to destroy the object of your anger if it is right in front of you. That control has to be learned.

I did not originally see this said in the presence of also saying humans have pro-social instincts. On its own, it implies that the default state is being a wild animal who can’t control themself and that this has to be unlearned (though honestly, even trying to compare to wild animals in that way is kinda screwy - some wild animals are themselves pretty communal in how they work together among themselves and are more defensive than offensive).

What I’m saying to counter that implication is that studies would appear to show the opposite of the hulk smash tendency, that even at a very young age, kids can already show signs of instincts toward communal, pro-social behaviors. This does not mean we are pure angels who can do no wrong. It’s just countering the narrative that we are putrid creatures of the mud who can’t see straight unless sapience is shoved down our throat. It really doesn’t require that much control to not attack someone when you are angry and it says more about socializing and culture than it does about humanity inherently, to believe otherwise. The reason young kids can be more volatile is because their emotions are new and explosive, and they haven’t learned to regulate them yet, partly because they’re in a very dependent state and have a hard time communicating their needs and desires. That doesn’t mean humans are inherently explosive and have to unlearn it. It’s a stage of development that has material factors linked to the manifestation.

It’s really important that we investigate and take into account the influence of those material factors in how people behave and not fall prey to a universalized biological lens that is too far in any direction. Cultures and behavior are far more varied than one society. The reason a place like israel can be so horribly violent, but Palestinians aren’t, isn’t because israeli people are “corrupted” or something. It’s because israel as a project is founded on invasion and occupation, and its very idea is drenched in the blood of mass murder in order to take what it believes is rightfully its by killing and displacing who was already there. In order for israel to legitimize and stabilize itself, it also has to create instability in the form of ongoing genocide, which undermines its goals of legitimacy and stability.

These kind of large scale contradictions are far more important as factors for understanding human behavior.

I’m pretty sure the actual predisposition is toward communal behavior, if there is any. Not smashing things.

Here’s a quick example I could find: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/02/04/altruistic-babies-study-shows-infants-are-willing-to-give-up-food-help-others/

Granted it’s only one limited study, but it leans in the direction of kids showing early interest in helping out.

But it may look like the opposite in a capitalist society if you only glance at how young-ish kids tend to behave in day to day situations because kids will grow up exposed to varying degrees of a selfish culture and some of them will internalize that and mimic it. Keep in mind that capitalism benefits from promoting a narrative that people are inherently selfish, since it validates the idea that the worst exploiters are simply acting “normal” and that it takes a kind of conscious valorous overcoming via willpower to not fall prey to that. In reality, there are examples of capitalism actively punishing people for trying to be helpful, such as with policing related to giving food to homeless people.

I’m with you on both points I think.

With regards to “stupid”, there’s some unlearning for me because of spending a lot of time around people who reach for stupid like it’s the catch-all explanation for everything. But as a principle, I think it’s kind of reductive and thought-terminating most of the time. For example, is Trump “stupid”? He’s very easy to make fun of, but he’s also extremely powerful and though it would be silly to say he lifted himself up to that position, he did sufficiently act the part to get the job. So I think it’d be kind of a cope to look at that and explain it away as stupidity. He does things toward advancing imperialist interests, like every US president that came before him. He might not be a killer tactician, but the apparatus is powerful and complex enough, he doesn’t need to be. What he more needs to be is brutal enough to say yes to whatever horrible thing the rest of the apparatus wants to do.

As to shaming, I think there’s a distinction to be made between it and guilt. Feeling guilt can lead to remorse, which can lead to behavioral changes due to believing that one did wrong and needs to correct it in the future. Shame, as I understand it, is more like “I am wrong” rather than guilt’s “I did wrong.” Shame seems to have more in common with a static view of who a person is. “If you do X, you are a ‘piece of shit’.” You cross over a point of no return. So it would stand to reason that some people believing a view like this are going to go, “Okay, yeah, I’m trash then and always will be.” And then keep doing what they’re doing.

In order to get people to change, they also need to believe that they can change and shame may run counter to that. Guilt could happen as a result of a change in belief they have, crossing over from one belief to another and in the process revisiting things they did and recontextualizing them as wrong, but by this point, the guilt is a result of them believing something, not a result of others believing it about them. It is likely, though I don’t have direct proof of it on hand, that positive belief in something is more motivating than feeling guilt about doing the wrong thing. Guilt should, I would argue, be a stop sign, not a hair shirt. It should be rehabilitation and resolution, not identity. “I am bad” will not fix problems for someone or something who is wronged. “I shouldn’t have done that and can do differently from now on” can make a difference.

So when it comes to shaming others or trying to make them feel guilty, I would say we circle back to belief as the underlying important part. And getting past that obstacle often means having the patience to investigate why a belief exists as it does and how to change it. As we know with dialectical materialism in mind, the causes are never going to be only internal, but will have an external influence too. Not just in the sense of what others think or say, but in the sense of what is materially beneficial to believe and how it ties into basic survival in the world.

From what I’ve observed, it’s not always the same thing with every person. But for some people, it’s to help with loneliness. For some, it’s a supplementary thing. For some, they have traumas and such things where it’s hard to find anyone to talk to about it and they feel they can say it to the AI.

As for body language and such things, a lot of chat frontends allow you to set an avatar for the AI, so then it’s similar to talking to somebody on discord as the level of emoting goes. When putting it in that context, you could as well ask, what is fulfilling about texting a real person? Or talking to them on a forum?

My experience is, it’s not fulfilling in the same way that in-person interaction is even when you’re sure it’s a real person on the other end, but sometimes it’s all you’ve got.

I don’t think it’s a healthy thing to be depending on a chatbot, but part of the reason for that is because much of the time, people are depending on a black box corporation for the service. And I’ve seen up close times when people were burned by such a corporation. Like slapping filters on an AI and it suddenly acting differently and upsetting people for that reason.

OTOH, there are times talking to a chatbot has helped people process something and feel a bit better. So it’s complicated.

In a communist world, it’s likely none of us would feel any need to find comfort in an AI cause we’d have it from others. But capitalist alienation and isolation has created the conditions for chatbots to step in.

I thought you were talking about crypto-fash at first, but the last part loses me.

the AI app can get his kids to open up more to it than to him or his wife about their issues.

This was a thing decades ago with much simpler scripted “AI”:

https://liacademy.co.uk/the-story-of-eliza-the-ai-that-fooled-the-world/

Many users began to reveal personal and emotional information, believing ELIZA was responding thoughtfully, even though it was merely following scripted patterns without any true understanding.

I think the extent to which people can open up more easily to an AI than to a human says something about culture and vulnerability, and how shitty it can be on creating an environment that feels safe to be vulnerable in, or even using language that is exploratory rather than judgmental.

If a young kid is at the store and says to their parent “I want that toy”, and the parent’s immediate reflex is “no, you already have lots of toys at home” instead of “why is that? What’s interesting to you about that toy?” Well it doesn’t seem surprising to me that a kid in a culture like that might have an easier time opening up to an AI. The kid probably hasn’t worked out beforehand why they want the toy. They’re just trying to learn to express something they feel, a want, a desire. But being heard out, having a nice conversation with a loved one in which they feel safe and happy, I’m sure most kids are going to remember that far more fondly than any specific toy.

And whether kid or adult, this is part of the appeal of chatbots. That they aren’t apt to jump down your throat over something you say. But this is also a problem because there are times when making judgments and setting boundaries matter very much, and the AI is not equipped to stand in for that part properly. It’s just good at standing in for openness (and this is a part people are supposed to be bonding over normally, with each other!)

I feel like a deadbeat (which I probably am tbh).

I looked into the etymology of the word because it’s important sometimes to question the language that capitalism thinks is normal. Here’s what I found:

“worthless sponging idler,” 1863, American English slang, perhaps originally Civil War slang, from dead (adj.) + beat. Earlier dead beat was used colloquially as an adjectival expression, “completely beaten, so exhausted as to be incapable of further exertion” (1821), and perhaps the base notion is of “worn out, good for nothing.” It is noted in a British source from 1861 as a term for “a pensioner.” The English, characteristically, turned up their noses at the American use.

In England “dead beat” means worn out, used up. … But here, “dead beat” is used, as a substantive, to mean a scoundrel, a shiftless, swindling vagabond. We hear it said that such a man is a beat or a dead beat. The phrase thus used is not even good slang. It is neither humorous nor descriptive. There is not in it even a perversion of the sense of the words of which it is composed. Its origin

It also was used of a kind of regulating mechanism in pendulum clocks.

So you might actually be a deadbeat in the British meaning of worn out, but especially at your age, that isn’t a permanent state of being.

The US meaning would be more appropriately applied to the billionaires living on yachts, who take lots at the cost of others’ health and wellbeing, and don’t even try to give in return.

OTOH, a person who is ill in some way, who because of this is struggling to meet standards that are considered basic, can only be considered worthless if we are stripping them of their humanity and saying that you only have worth if you can meet certain standards of labor. Which is a horrible way to view a person. Now let’s look at sponging:

The slang sense of “deprive someone of (something) by sponging” is by 1630s; the intransitive sense of “live in a parasitic manner, live at the expense of others” is attested from 1670s (to live upon the sponge “live parasitically” is by 1690s); sponger (n.) in reference to “one who persistently lives parasitically on others” also is from 1670s. Originally the victim was the sponge (1620s), because that person was being “squeezed.” Sponge (n.) in a general sense of “object from which something of value may be extracted” is by 1600s. Sponge (n.) in reference to the sponger is by 1838 and reverses the older sense.

Once again, it is the capitalist class who lives parasitically, not a depressed person. Wanting you to matter too insofar as you get the care you need to survive is not the same as treating people like a resource to extract from.

It is literally impossible to reach adulthood without receiving a lot of care and help from others, so nobody is getting out of that, no matter how bootstraps they want to consider themself to be; which means we all share an experience of getting help from each other to one degree or another. Hyper individualism paints a picture that once you ding adulthood, you abandon all of that and become a bootstraps tugger now, but pulling oneself up by their bootstraps originated as a saying that meant something impossible to do.

And now idler: This one is pretty straightforward, “one who spends his time in inaction.” This means little on its own. There are plenty of valid reasons to be inactive, such as when resting or when healing from an injury. Capitalism often equates effort put in as value produced, but it’s very easy to do busywork and go nowhere fast in a lot of contexts. Being idle is not intrinsically much of anything other than being idle. We cannot be in motion all of the time and we will burn out and break down if we try.

This may seem excessively pedantic, but the point is to interrogate the language that can be used to hurt us, that is easy to reflexively believe in. I myself sometimes have moments I think of myself as a “loser”, but these days there’s a part of me in the back who is like, “Isn’t winner and loser (in the sense of identity in life) a capitalist framing?” The billionaires are incredible winners in a capitalist metric of value and we despise them for good reason.

I’d have to ask what your experience is with suppression of emotions. Because in my experience, emotional suppression can masquerade as healthy regulation some of the time, but it’s going to boil over eventually and the person will go off on somebody. The aim of healthy emotional regulation, as I understand it anyway, is not to suppress emotions nor to go off at the slightest thing (neither extreme), but to find ways to deal with emotions that allows you to channel them and process them. The person who lets stuff build up and build up, and then finally pops off on someone who isn’t even the main source of the upset is also dysregulating, but it’s less visible and more infrequent a consequence than the person who loses their temper at the drop of a hat; the first one is more associated with fawning / people pleasing and the second more associated with being controlling or “sensitive” either one. Sometimes the two are combined as a dynamic, with the fawning person burying their feelings to “please” the person who is constantly going off. I think this is where some codependent relationships derive from. Not to be confused with interdependence, where people are mutually uplifting each other as their whole selves.

Some brief thoughts:

• Identify the causes: for example, in your case (forgive my peeking at profile) you are on the autism spectrum, so sensory processing issues could be a factor in irritation and mood strain. Working out ways to help you get space when you need it or things like that, may help.

• Try things like breathing techniques

• Be kind to yourself! I see some mean self-talk going on. Sometimes rage turns inward which ends up exacerbating dysregulation. What does it mean to be kind to yourself? Looking after your needs, advocating for them (asking for help where needed), having reasonable expectations of yourself (individualism tends to have us expecting too much).

I’m glad I came across this, though it is sad to read. I have a vague memory of reading something about this in the past, but couldn’t remember any of the details.

In particular, this part from the second article jars something for me:

“Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” These rules have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question, even if we encounter thousands of examples in history that break them and still manage to meet the bar of “good literature.”

It reminds me of the pushing/proliferation of the “show, don’t tell” dogma, which is a thing people cling to today. You can easily draw a line of eerie similarity between these elements as existing on opposite poles, within the “show, don’t tell” framework. Sensations, experiences, and memories as showing. Doctrine, dogma, and philosophy as telling.

It makes so much more sense that the nonsensical dichotomy of showing and telling could have derived from CIA meddling, rather than from organic literary criticism. Because as serious literary analysis, it makes no fucking sense and people pretzel themselves trying to justify it. It’s maddening to think about because I can tell there’s something wrong with English literary conventions, have been able to for a while, but this gives a direct reason as to why. The CIA fucked up the tutelage of a whole medium for a little more propaganda. They basically nurtured a form of illiteracy of a medium. Taught people wrong. So they wouldn’t write the “wrong” stuff.