I am totally on the bottom right group.
My people
Our numbers are uncountable
Yeah, I’m in the void. I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m sad.
Us, too! You literally have no idea how many of us assholes are in here with you…
Hope you are well!
I highly encourage a therapist and ssri’s if you are not doing well.
They won’t make you happy but you won’t be suicidal!
Me too ! I’ve cut off all my former high school / college “friends” for various reasons. Deleted all my accounts. I don’t exist online under my legal name, and I like it that way.
Same. There are about 10 people I knew before my 30s that I am still in contact with, family included.
A distinct lack of “drugs/degeneracy” category
I think that’s a subset of “disappeared”. If you followed up on the people who disappeared, it’s a coin flip as to whether they just hate people or have fallen on hard times.
Hey, just because I’m a degenerate doesn’t mean I don’t care about maintaining healthy relationships with my friends!
Also just because I am a degenerate doesn’t mean life is hard on me. Ignorance is bliss mf
Then we’ll work with the admission board to see if we can’t get you into “obsessed with work” on a “degeneracy” path.
Uh you have friends?
What about those of us who both hate people and have fallen on hard times?
Believe or not, that’s still a “disappearing.”
Might even be a double disappearing.
Lil bit of this, lil bit of that
yeah I feel severely underrepresented
Do some drugs, you’ll feel better.
way ahead of you!
unfortunately, the way I’m on is downhill.
Drugs / Degeneracy can fall into all 4 of these categories?
You think that workaholic doesn’t need a little help? That trainer, a boost? While the e family takes some to forget how stressful it is to works multiple full-time jobs.
Such a liberating feeling to finally understand that you’re not bound to follow some externally plotted life trajectory…
… and just debase.
I’m proudly in the “obsessed with work” category (organizing working class unions)
God speed. What’s the latest state of unions in the modern technological age?
I joined my work’s union.
No ones going to be working soon. Are you going to pivot?
Cant disappear from social media if you really weren’t there to begin with.
Though i fall in the bottom left corner, always training, though not for something. Training just to train more.
Im both bottom left and bottom right, disappeared to train for nothing.
So you’re training for trainings sake too?
Well, I train because its good for my mental health, I think it counts?
Of course it counts, probably one of the best reasons to do it.
trains rule tbf
I feel seen
Happy cake day!
Thank you!
What app you using?? Mine doesn’t show cake days!
Voyager - it’s great!
Downloaded and will check it out haha thanks!
Proud member of the bottom right. Oddly, it has made me a big topic of conversation among my friends, and I don’t get that at all.
How do you know this if you’ve disappeared? There are people like this in my life that no one has heard from in 20 years. Now that’s hardcore.
Meh, I’m not hardcore, I just don’t have social media and I don’t do weddings, birthdays, or anything involving children, so I pretty much just meet up with them at shows these days.
How are they in your life if you haven’t heard from them in 20 years?
They’re in his basement. Nobody else has heard of them.
That IS hardcore!
Ok bad choice of words.They used to be in my life.
Now they’re dead in your basement.
That would explain a lot.
I don’t think that’s odd. People’s lives are boring and not much happens, it’s interesting to talk about unknowns.
It’s like that scene in good will hunting. The best part of my day is when I walk up to the door and imagine you just left.
You know, for about a decade, everyone was pushed to share everything they did on social media. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on the scale of cigarettes and smoking inside and in airplanes and in hospitals and in schools. No one thought it was a stupid idea, and a lot of people pushed it as the only way to get jobs and show you’re a clever chimp that can internet so hard because interneting hard was the cool new thing.
Lower right is the hangover from that. Anyone I didn’t find or didn’t find me between 2008 and 2018 wasn’t ever worth connecting with. The people that did find me were nice to hear from once, and we haven’t talked ever again, despite being connected, for 10+ years.
My grandparents and their parents, etc. went their whole lives never seeing people again and not knowing what happened to them because they moved one time and they didn’t know their new address. Whole movies were about that. Elvis had a song about that. The last episode of the first season of The Real World ended with everyone moving out of the apartment, and once that landline and address no longer went to those people, it was 100% possible that those people would be gone from each others’ lives forever.
Y’all, we’re not supposed to collect and keep 27,000 casual contacts throughout our lives. It’s unnatural. Our brains are not built for it. We’re made to have a few dozen up to 100-ish close connections that mean something, including family you don’t pick.
Email some old friends you don’t text with daily. Send anyone you truly care about an email to say hi. If they respond, then great. If not, don’t worry about it. Enjoy high fidelity communications with those who mater to you.
We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.
The argument that something is “unnatural” has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity’s defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.
That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.
Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.
Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself “we’re humans, we change our environment to suit our needs.”
Though I think you’re excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don’t want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn’t feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It’s a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can’t participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.
Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn’t gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don’t physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren’t selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I’m so far out of it that I can’t tell.
Gen Z here. Burnt out of social media. Deleted every mainstream social media app. If you want the fastest way to never ever hear from me, it would be email. That shits incredibly overwhelming. I check my physical mailbox more than I check my email. The goal is to get away from the computer.
Based perspective on this, thank you. :)
Friends?
Ain’t nobody got time for that. I’m too busy working / raising a family / training for a marathon / [comment deleted by user].
“Why did you leave Facebook? Now we can’t talk to you!”
they never spoke to you once on Facebook
It’s on tv all the time.
We can say that we’re friends. That way we can have a friend.
I appreciate the offer but it could never work. I kinda hate robocalls.
Most people say that to me
No, I must disagree. Most of my friends are right in the centre. Many are starting families, but are also working on careers and are well intentioned gym goers who I speak to less and less because life is too busy.
How the fuck does anyone have the energy for all that?
Work means surviving. You either have the energy for it or you’re fucked.
“Training” can be a fancy way of saying you are very focused on one aspect of athleticism for your health, and you’ll discover that you have more energy for other things if you maintain your health and exercise. At first you feel like you don’t have the energy for it, then you do it, then you have the energy for that and more.
Also many sleep way better after getting healthier, so it builds upon itself even more. Some people struggle with sleep apnea and shit like that, and one reason is the tongue holds a lot of fat. Lose weight and you sleep better. Sleep better and it’s easier to lose weight and have energy to do other stuff. It’s the opposite of a downward spiral.
They don’t do all equally well, and none are done above average.
Discipline. Basically.
Discipline, also known as ignoring basic needs until one burns out with a whole bunch of different outcomes from addictions to suicide
Healthy outlook you’ve got there…
You sound like you need to learn discipline.
Sadly no, i had - and still have to - reduce it. I’ve always been proud of my discipline, but i never used it to take care of myself, but instead used to push myself harder than i was able to sustain long term (runs in the family too). Too much discipline isn’t a good thing, it becomes selfdestructive.
Discipline is a form of self care. I think you are conflating a method with outcome in that case. I’d argue that it takes discipline to take care of yourself AND others.
The only difference is the amount of self-worth someone has - if you deem yourself not important, then discipline comes at a cost.
I don’t have an answer for that. You just do what you have to do.
This is my experience, as well. It sounds like I’m a few years older than you, but almost everyone in my larger friend group is/was doing all of these things, particularly so if the bottom left is just “intensely focused on some new niche hobby.”
Yeah I was about to say - I’m all of these things. I feel like that’s pretty common.
I know a guy who is three of these things. Goes to the gym 6 days a week, works in a hospital, starting a business, has a wife and a kid, and he still manages to have time to hang out once or twice a week. Man is as successful as I am not
As someone who is some of those things as well, I would love to know what the wife and/or child are doing during all those activities. Because something has to give when you’re doing that much.
In my experience, that balance is really hard, and even in the most hospitable, high-quality-of-life places, that balance is not exactly always something that is nurtured and valued by the systems in place.
I think he really is just built different. I’m good friends with both parents, and knew his wife long before he did. Both of them are working on higher education, kid goes to daycare most days every week. It’s not like he never sees his son either. Usually when I hang out, we’re watching his boy while we play BG3, which is nice because he can just walk away for a minute whenever a diaper needs changed
Having recieved a large sum of life insurance money after his father passed away certainly helped with the house buying and the car maintaining and the education pursuing, but his time management is pure skill
I wonder if your friend can sleep only five hours and still function to the maximum. Apparently it is genetics. Napoleon and Thatcher could sleep less than 7 hours and could still think sharp and be fresh as a daisy.
Welp, don’t know about Napoleon, but Thatcher pulled some stupid and evil shit.
Maybe if she had slept more, we could have had a better world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
How successful can he be if he failed at using birth control?
Here I am going strong in the bottom right!
Same, I’ve come to realize life is best alone. Solitude is the best dude.
I’m loving how many bottoms there are in this thread
This could be funny if it wasn’t such a sad outlook on life.
At least you can pretend to Excel at something
Word.
Powerful Point.
Windows puns run out, Lemmy know.
Looking forward to being on the bottom right.
At some when people get too busy to be concerned I’ll delete my snap and insta leaving nothing behind. I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything they’re doing constantly or how they get upset if you don’t have the energy to react to it all.
I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything they’re doing constantly or how they get upset if you don’t have the energy to react to it all.
Dopamine hit.
Ive already done this at 24, no snap, insta, reddit, Facebook, and im slowly starting to get rid of tiktok now
I just don’t understand why people feel the need to share everything
Sign of life. Some people keep posting what they’re doing even if no one cares, just a reminder they’re still alive and breathing.
The disappeared ones. I’m one of those.
I’ll tell you what we are up to. We are
Yikes! You can’t just tell people about the
People are disappearing left and right! I need to tell the world about this before
40s is the same, but one of them is dead
I was going to say: There’s no space for dead, moved to Austin in the 10s, or crippling pain killer addiction.
All sub sections of category 4
Obsessed with work is the most obnoxious type of person. It’s a validation seeking behavior that I find intolerable.
In general I agree but a few people are lucky enough to have jobs that are cool enough to be obsessed with. That doesn’t excuse them from being able to talk about other stuff with other people, but I think it’s fine for them to be that way. I work in some fairly advanced science facilities and some of the people I’ve met are working on stuff that’s crazy enough and difficult enough that you almost need to be a little obsessed to succeed at it.
We do the best we can with what we know at the time. We’re products of our parents and environments. You can’t blame somebody for that.
this goes for literally everything. Someone might still experience it as obnoxious and intolerable. Me included
I am with you on generally trying to understand the reasons for a particular behavior. Does not always help with being annoyed by it though. Especially if they apply their world view to everyone else around them and start to judge you for enjoying work/life balance
I’m all for understanding, but my line is drawn when the understanding fails to lead to action. My oldest friend still chooses validation seeking over all else, despite knowing that it’s the crux of all his problems and knowing he has the support of everyone, he’s adamant that it’s not on him to change and it’s on his support network to accept this as who he is and accommodate it even at their detriment. 24 years, I can’t handle that. I’m not willing to undo changes I made for my mental health to accommodate a lifestyle he’s admitted to being toxic.
I agree wholeheartedly. I just don’t like this particular behavior. I’m a little more European in that way.
But my job is awesome and I really enjoy it and I’d do it for free if I didn’t have to worry about money. I just want to share the fun fulfilling stuff I did with my friends :(
Luckily we’re all autistic enough to tell me off if they don’t want to hear about it.
Counterpoint, the best way to organize unions is to become obsessed with everything happening within your workplace
I am not sure I’ve ever met a labor organizer but I’ve definitely met vest guy who just wants to talk about his job and if I try and change the subject a bit they ask me about my job…
Bonus points if they start telling a story with names from their work as if I know them.
