That’s a terrible comeback.

Yah, you sound so balanced and happy bro. I wish I was as satisfied with life as you. 🙄

You’re not a victim, there is no truth other than what you make for yourself and your life.

Your negative feelings, outlook and ruminations are all your own and only your own. Actually growing up and being a man means accepting that you can shape your life any way you want and the reason you’re unhappy is because you’re holding onto it for some reason, usually because you desperately want someone to recognize how unhappy you are.

Nobody is coming man. You gotta do this on your own. You’re never going to get the recognition and compassion you wish you had, at least not from other miserable people on the internet who also are just desperately seeking validation for their sadness.

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I’m sorry your youth was tough on you and that you accidentally discovered the internet just amplifies whatever you’re feeling until it takes away your happiness and hope entirely.

I promise if you get better at talking to people and listening broadly, you will have better experiences in the future and you will feel very, very silly that you ever held these thoughts, much less shared them with the world. Trust me, your future doesn’t have to be alone and angry.

The alternative is not good. You only get once chance at all this, don’t ruin it by letting the thoughts, words and rantings of other angry people take away your free will.

Healthy relationships are about sharing all the odd things going in your head with someone receptive to and interested in those odd things.

This is called knowing somebody and it really feels like it’s an utterly lost concept now. It’s no wonder people are abandoning relationships right now, people never talk about the rewards, only made-up problems and conflicts get circulated.

The furry community has always been a haven of sorts for people who don’t fit in to mainstream society in some way and themes in the furry fiction/media sphere align well with ideas like transformation, social stigmas and dealing with prejudices. Added to that, the anonymity and escapism of roleplaying as a cute, cuddly animal appeals to people trying to escape from the harshness of reality.

A massive swath of the furry fandom is LGBTQ+ and probably a few letters and symbols you didn’t know existed because of it’s broadly accepting and welcoming nature. This has always been one of the draws for people to the fandom even if they don’t have that weird flipped genetic marker that makes them attracted to wolves with boobs.

Okay but what about if you’re slowly turning into a mummy, frankenstein’s monster or fishman? What are those analogous to?

What if we made an orbital mirror that uses special coatings or lenses to exactly replicate moonlight, but in an intense, focused beam that can specifically target areas to trigger localized lycanthropy strategically?

Shit I probably just wrote the plot for the next Call of Duty game.

There’s a whole spectrum of anthropomorphic art that delves further and further towards an uncomfortable level of realism. You want multi-belly-boob werewolf babe? You can get it, it’s out there.

There are a lot of people with a lot of money but not much else in their lives except their niche hobbies and interests. It’s just that they don’t normally talk about it or advertise themselves as such.

I did commissioned art for a while back the internet was still young and various subcultures were on the rise, I got a good share of furry commissions and the people were very, very generous and often paid me more than I asked for. Usually very nice folks, even the weirdos were nice. I didn’t care for some of the poor socialization skills and the parasocialism that cropped up right away with a small segment of the population. I know if I were to have told them to just leave me alone they would have, but I felt bad for them. Many were obviously neurodivergent in some way and likely had few friends outside of their roleplay fantasy worlds.

I realize that I probably collected a good share of disability payments to draw fox babes, and that’s kind of depressing.

It’s even worse when you take the time to learn how they’re made, and then you realize just how very far you are from being able to even comprehend the basics of such an operation. The amount of money, time, equipment, resources and training for something as simple as a goddamn overpass is staggering.

Our whole system is so incredibly complicated and fragile that it’s reassuring at least we pick the very best, smartest and most qualified leaders to manage all this.

Wait, I’m being told that we do the exact opposite of that. Welp.

I really am an old man screaming at clouds, and I am trying to pass on life advice I wish I had learned sooner, as someone who once identified as a sheltered introverted chud, my life and opportunities improved many times over when I put some effort into challenging myself to socialize more and learn how to small-talk properly and make people feel comfortable around me.

It’s wild because there are “influencers” trying to spin this as some kind of jedi mind trick that it takes courses and books and techniques to get good at making people like you, when literally all you have to do is listen and ask a lot of questions. Coworkers, classmates, people at the checkout counter, people who smile at you at the coffee shop, it’s all opportunities to get to know other humans and make connections. Just don’t have an agenda, just learn to actually like people. “I hate people” is a great bumper sticker or meme text, but you can’t internalize that lesson, you will live a lonely life if you can’t find things to appreciate about other human beings. We’re all in this together and nobody gets out alive, the sooner you start learning to “party up” and form groups with random players the better your end-game loot will be.

You dipshits need to practice talking to people.

Seriously, it’s going to bite you in the ass sooner than later that you’ve embraced being “introverted” as an identity or virtue. You are the product of several millions years of successful social evolution and small communities banding together for survival, you are hard-wired to talk to people and have physical and emotional closeness with others. You will only become more depressed and more alone feeling the longer you put off exercising this survival-essential muscle.

The aversion to social experiences broadly is becoming more than an annoying problem, if people continue to avoid meeting, socializing and forming relationships at this rate, our society may literally collapse. The weird fear of phone calls is just a symptom of a deeper de-socialization problem that’s ruining a lot more than dating and friendships.

Lack of community and involvement is allowing our politics to control us, instead of the other way around as a democracy should be, there are fewer people caring about issues outside of their phone screen, and there will be an aging population and not enough people to do the physical labor needed to keep society afloat.

People now call themselves “introverts” or “antisocial” like it’s a disease they can’t control and make zero effort to get better at talking to others.

The “Gen Z stare” is real and it’s disturbing as fuck. If you can’t act normal when taking a fast-food order, you need to think long and hard about your personal habits and behavior.

As a leftie, I actually agree.

A lot of the young progressive “movement” in this country has become so neutered and sheltered that they can’t socialize much less mobilize movements or political action, and then talk about unrealistic ideals and fantasies about revolutions.

Our world’s general intelligence level is flagging all around and that’s more concerning than the momentary differences in ideology that we’ve seen swing back and forth for the last thousand years.

I’ll at least be strong and fast enough to kill some fascist scum

If a major civil disruption were to happen in the US, we simply do not have clear ideological or geopolitical lines that are defined enough to create two different sides. How do you know you’re fighting fascists and not just some dumb father of four who literally thinks ISIS-funded Antifa-members are coming to kill his kids. Do we really want that kind of endless murder like we’ve seen in the middle East? we should be thinking about every possible way to avoid that, because there’s no ending for that scenario.

You’re going to see many, many years of escalating, isolated violence and “insurgence lite” type events long before we get to an actual “civil war” and we would need actual opposing armies, and right now the military is loyal to the US and the constitution, which means office of the president, etc.

We are going to be served a lot better in the next several decades with people exercising community and political involvement, we can still turn this boat around but if everyone defaults to some dumb Tim Pool narrative that there’s going to be “civil war” people are not going to want to do the logical and reasonable thing.

Well that’s just stupid.

You probably live in walking distance of people who have survived forced marches, famine and starvation, deaths of family, military oppression and extreme survival situations that they made it through and went on live in the better world that follows.

You literally cannot know what’s going to happen a week down the line in any situation, that’s why I advocate for stocking up for a few weeks, because that’s generally how long major social disruptions last before things either calm down or get worse. Always bet on the better outcome and prepare for the worst. It isn’t over until it’s over and you have no idea if what happens after death is better or worse. You might stay dead 10¹⁰10^56 years and suddenly pop back into existence as a kind of sapient bug being slowly digested by a pitcher-plan type life form, or worse. We lived over a half million years as relatively modern primates, and you could have been born as any of of them struggling to survive, you already won the lottery once, why try again.

Fun fact: great filters don’t necessarily have to wipe out the species, they just need to be obstacles unsurmountable by our current resources, mental capacity and evolutionary state.

It may be that for any species that develops spatial reasoning and language while still carrying survival instincts, that they can never get past a certain point where their tech keeps outpacing their own mental/cognitive capabilities and they keep bombing themselves back to the stone age, or creating some kind of technological wonder that they can’t control because they’re still unevolved primates/reptiles/insects/cephalopods despite having individual potential for thought and self-awareness.

There may be millions of civilizations out there just like us, who can look out at the stars and dream of a larger universe, but can never make a progress past their own prejudices and fears to ever get out into the universe until eventually their species just evaporates away into the great sea of entropy that comes for every world.