Personally 2024 was ok for me even though I was laid off and unemployed for 6 months. Ok maybe it’s a little shitty.
If we’re in the darkest timeline, what was the last point where it felt there was so much hope and joy in the world?
Some options commonly put out.
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The day Pokémon Go released July 2016. So prepandemic and we went outside and and a girl told me where to find Weedles. Yep I’m in a videogame
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The day before 9/11 or when Harambe got killed
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When Endgame released, culmination of 10 years of marvel moments into a single movie, people cheering in the cinema. Still pre pandemic, maybe there’s a trend here
Things are still good for me, weird and increasingly concerned for the state of society, but presently still good. One can still work on making their own life and the life of those around you better as the world goes to shit. Increasingly trying to get more involved in the world to be one of the helpers but it’s hard to know what organizations will need to most help locally.
2021 (Ngl i feel like everything really went down hill in 2022,2024 Isnt bad tho and hopefully 2025 isnt bad)
Sometime in 2010. My partner and I got our first pup, work was fine, apartment complex was good. Things were walkable. Pup loved snowpocalypse 2010, we went to the tennis courts and just ran around in the snow.
Obama was promising awesome healthcare reform. I had hope.
My mom hadn’t told me that we were probably the sort of family who should only see each other at funerals. My mom hadn’t yet killed my dad with COVID (she claims she got it at a “mandatory unmasked Christmas work potluck” in December 2020. She retired 2 months later, so it can’t have been that mandatory. She knew he was immunocompetent and also didn’t take him to the hospital as soon as his oxygen dipped below 90%.)
November 6, 2000
Everything has been downhill since then.
The day before ChatGPT was released
2022-11-29
I’m not talking about substances, but things just don’t give the same highs as they used to.
Getting a new Nintendo game as a kid and you’re giddy all the way home, reading the back of the box.
Last time I bought a game I had been looking forward to for years it was lying in a drawer for a month before I even installed it.
I had my first kid this year, and it’s probably the best thing to have happened to me in the last few years. But I don’t think the joy I felt compares to that new NES game as a kid. I wish I still would get that kind of highs.
I’m pretty sure the last good day was sometime in 1996.
as a child we experience everything for the first time. this grows neural paths and releases dopamine. colors are more vibrant, food tastes better.
as we age our brains get used to the dopamine and we look for ways to increase its production. sex, drugs, illicit activities, etc.
you will never recapture the way you felt watching the dinosaurs in JP inside a theater in 1995. you will never stare at a color in bewilderment of its vibrancy again.
find new experiences that could blast your brain with dopamine instead.
buy a hooker. smoke crack once. gamble $10k at one sitting.
buy a hooker. smoke crack once. gamble $10k at one sitting.
Sure, but where do I go from there for my next high?
cheat on your spouse? with your neighbors? then rob a bank?
My last good day is always and forever today. My (or your) circumstances should never impair my (or your) ability to be happy 😁 it sounds weird, but you are allowed (it is your right) to feel happy even as your life is crumbling around you. And if you can’t find that feeling, that’s alright too.
While this is true, I would also add that it’s ok and valid to be sad and unhappy. There is no obligation to put on a smile. You can be happy and not smiling, or you can be unhappy and not smiling, just be you.
See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.
“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.
As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?
It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.
I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.
I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.
I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.
Well if you take the advice of randoms that far, you are just plain stupid and should not be in charge of your own actions
But I would suggest start looking in weird places
I feel like it’s not my right to be happy unless I can impress in some way, like through work or academia. Everyone else has surpassed me and I can’t impress anywhere, so I just feel like I don’t deserve happiness anymore.
Then im sure you don’t deserve it. No reason to not be happy just because you don’t deserve to
Don’t live your daily grind according to the highlight reel you see about other people.
We often don’t see the full lives of even our closest family members - thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams, frustrations, disappointments - and our window into our friends’ and acquaintances’ and strangers’ lives is even smaller. It’s like we only see the few triumphs they post on FB/insta and that’s all we know of them.
You can’t compare yourself to that. You know your full day of struggles, the long grind between wins, and you only see the big wins of your friends. You know your own dark thoughts and barely-held heated retorts but you never know either of those from anyone around you.
You will always feel inadequate if you’re comparing your everyday to the best days of your contacts. It’s okay to stop that; and, if you can, we often discover we don’t suck so much.
This is surprisingly uplifting, thank you for posting this
I had a pretty good one yesterday
9/10/2001
July 4, 2012. The day the Higgs Boson was discovered. Everything since has done nothing but get stranger and stranger. I won’t even say it’s all just gone to shit. It’s just to me, everything since has been… increasingly unreal.
I like to joke that the world actually did end in 2012 and now we’re in a weird purgatory type thing.
Ah shit, you figured it out. Ok everyone, the jig is up, you can stop pretending to be real now
Yesterday. I can’t remember the last bad day I’ve had. 2024 has been one of the best years of my life
My job moved me from Oklahoma to California. Took 3.5 months to sell my house but I was in Cali that whole time while my wife and daughter stayed behind waiting for the sale. The day I finally came back to get them after the sale was that day. I had never been away from them more than 2 days in 15 years. That 3.5 months alone was so fucking hard and depressing. Never been so happy to see them.
That day. For me.
Wait are you saying the day Harambe got killed was a good day? Or the day before he was killed?
That first day when I figured out masturbation was tops, all down hill from there
Ah. Yes.
June 26th 1996 while watching CBS 60b minutes. What a day that was.
Mike Wallace was hot AF so I understand
I don’t know about good, but today was an unusual day for me.
With a blizzard setting in, I figured my best chance to get to work was on the bus. So I was walking up to where I could catch it passing various houses with Christmas lights and decorations, only to stop dead in my tracks at one particular house.
It’s sole decoation was an 8-ft tall Krampus on the front lawn. It had a goat head with horns and demonic eyes and sharp claws holding a gnarled staff on one side and chains on the other. It’s dark burgundy cloak had a dusting of snow on its shoulders to complete the look.
Then I was on the bus trying to digest what I had seen when who should walk on but Polar Man! He’s a local superhero with a bushy beard and a mask. He helps people in distress shovel out their driveways. At one point as the bus was passing through a residential area, he got up and yelled “Driver! Stop the bus!” and leapt out dramatically to cheering passengers.
