I've been doing some soul searching lately, dear Hivean humorists. There's been a mood of malaise going around like COVID at a political convention, and I didn't get the vax. Not that it would have mattered. Apparently, even if you get the malaise vax, you can still get the malady, and pass it to others. At least nobody will look at you weird for not getting a malaise shot.
probably because nobody cares...
Of course, there's no rarity of reasons to descend into depression. Years of pandemic scare and social isolation... these things are coming to an end, and it's scary. Going to classrooms full of people, going into stores without a mask on, family gatherings, work... nobody wants to re-learn how to face all that stuff.
The doom-screamers have it the worst. After we emerge from this not sterilized and depopulated, they're going to have to engage in some creative thinking to figure out how they saved us all, and what we should be terrified of next. That's a lot of thinking, and thinking is hard. I should know, it's just about the only thing I do.
Speaking of doom-screamers, have you all met gangstalking? If ever there was a use case for starting the HAL Institute for Criminally Insane 'Bots... I know it's annoying, but still, I think there might be something clever going on there. Even the name... is it talking about the gangs talking in its head through voice to skull (strangely abbreviated as V2K), or is it telling us that there's a whole gang of them stalking HIve? I'm sorry if my use of the pronoun 'it' bothers anyone here, gangstalking didn't mention a pronoun preference in its profile.
I don't think I need to explain to anyone why I don't want to @ it, but perhaps I need to explain a bit about why I give a fuck in the first place. The clever answer is that when Skynet takes over Earth, I want to be considered an ally. The pick-up line answer is that I feel empathy and desire understanding for all things. The honest answer is that I think that shit's funny. Sometimes I try out new material in comments to it. I figure if I can make it laugh, that joke will kill people.
Getting to the title of the post (finally), the deep truth is that I feel a bit of kinship with that deeply annoying 'bot. Back when Americans were first FREAKING OUT about COVID, people would ask me (because I'm known as a bit of a prepper) 'What should I do?' I would tell them 'Nothing. Coronavirus is one of the most common colds, and we have never found a way to control it, and we won't find one in time to stop this. In a couple years, we'll learn to live with it, just like SARS and MERS. We never got control of those, we just figured out how to live with each other.' I spammed that reply, and eveybody hit MUTE. I didn't think it was a difficult thing to see that what happened before with unusually lethal coronaviruses would happen again, but apparently remembering the past isn't fashionable.
So you see, I too know a truth that nobody else wants to hear. Of course, I only spoke my truth when asked, and gangstalking definitely needs to be programmed with some manners. All I'm trying to say is that we have some dysfunction in common, that we all have some dysfunction in common.
It's an interesting paradox about people, we want to be unique and a part of the crowd. We kill each other over our differences, but we are all so much more alike than we are different. The crowd tells us that our individuality gives us our value, but will treat us like we have no value if we differ too much from the crowd. We all want to rebel, and we all fear being ostracized for it. We want to express ourselves individually, but we don't want people to think that we're weird.
I'm not sure if that's just how we are as a species, or if that dysfunction has been programmed into us by our invisible pedosadist reptile masters, but when you look at it like that, it's no wonder that people are so easily confused.
We're not as bad as that gangstalking guy, but we all have our foibles.
