my whole childhood in the 90s was the “ozone layer is dying” but at the same time optimistic outlook on life?

Eh. It didn’t really start going to shit until 2001. Things stayed pretty darn good after 92. Not a lot of decades with that track record.

I mean, in the 90s we bitched about mostly distant global things because things were pretty good in general for most. And we had time to worry about less-catastrophic domestic things like Mumia or Peltier or what have you.

Now things aren’t so good and we end up bitching about far more local things because things around us are so bad.

It’s a great trick

But is it worse than tricking other people to work 40+ hours a week doing whatever you say and giving you most of the value they create? Because that’s the other option.

Plus if you buy a bunch of houses you can get them to give back most of the money you pay them.

Just accept the fact you’ll never own a house and will forever live in a shoebox.

Funny fungus is cheap, quick, easy and low stakes with decent margins if you’re careful. Or so I’ve heard

I’m not sure if selling weed alone would be good enough in a legal state. I could corner the market on LSD tho. Ain’t nobody got that 'round here!

I do like that theory. Unfortunately my wallet disagrees with it. Thankfully we’ve locked it in for 2.2% for 20 year, and semi-realistically we should be able to pay it off before that runs out. But the official period is 30 years, since that’s the legal maximum.

Once I hit my 40s, massive home diy projects have either become necessities (too expensive to hire out), pipe dreams, or like PA DOT working on route 202 in my youth (never ending with incremental steps that never improve the experience of driving). The energy loss is off the hook, and I’m not a flubbynutter.

I am! I am also sleep deprived lmaooo.

First time in years though I felt genuinely content with my life and it’s over something as insignificant as this!

Yes and no! It’s a difficult initial process if you have no idea but becomes extremely easy once you know how PCs work.

Knowing how to diagnose problems is I feel a more difficult part. It’s more complicated than knowing “These parts go there and have cables that connect to the CPU switch, main power and hard drives” because cables and parts, to a huge degree, can only fit where they belong.

I imagine in the line of PC repair work you’ll encounter much more complicated issues and often multi-part damage. Also probably a lot of filth, I heard most normal people NEVER clean their PCs, change Thermal Paste or even let some nasty bugs accumulate in their PC.

Bonus points for if it’s a laptop instead of a PC. Their tight compact nature makes repairing them hell I’d imagine. BONUS bonus points if you’re working on an outdated PC who’s parts you can’t just easily swap out.

If you had written “hot burrito with melted cheese on top and inside”, i would be craving it now.

i was and still am confused that chimichanga isnt a universal term

if i may ask are you from southern usa area?

scientifically proven ecological collapse

This is a pretty specific thing, but the general “we’re all doomed” vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that… well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.

Imagine how you’d feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.

None of this is to say that today’s challenges aren’t real and serious. Just that we’re not the first to face such challenges.

Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I’d say this parameter is a little arbitrary.

The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).

In 535AD, during Justinian’s reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.

It’s not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.

The greatest and silent generations saw some shit

This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It’s all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.

I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.

… and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.

This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.

The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just “stay calm and carry on”, we’re totally fucked. Inaction isn’t going to save us this time. We can’t put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.

I think that’s a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.

Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they’re largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.

There hasn’t been a “good one” since WW2.

Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn’t that interesting?

Long explanation: It’s all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It’s difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it’s certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.

Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn’t like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!