I'm gonna be honest i'm asking this cause mentally it's driving me insane. I feel like I can't bring this up cause most people don't care enough. The general sentiment I feel from gen z is that the world is heading for some big collapse soon and if that's the case I don't want to be unprepared. I also don't know what to do to prepare.

I understand that there are a lot of people who just take things one step at a time but I feel like there can be more done. Is this a valid concern or have I gone full doomer basement dweller?

I feel like I lost everything. I spent 10 years healing myself through chronic illness just to finally fully heal start looking great after 10 years of being bed ridden. Enjoyed my good looks and pain free life for 6 months and then lost it all by breaking my spine in a car accident. Currently only sleeping 3-4 days a week in extreme amounts of pain. Lost my good looks. My teeth enamel is thinned way out, gained tons of weight. Idk. I was so happy and excited to live this life. Now I'm back to my cage.

I effectively escaped chronic illness, lives in normal life for six months and then got catapulted back into chronic pain hell.

What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you that didn't need to happen?

TLDR; I used to believe everything happens for a reason (still believe in god) but now I soley just believe life just happens.

I want to preface this by saying that I am in no way, looking to invoke feelings of division or asking you to choose a side on anything I speak about. I’m simply asking you to think openly.

Think hard about what life was before 2020… Just take a long moment and really take the time think about it.

For a lot of people, the overwhelming response will be something along the lines of life was way better or not as difficult. Let’s consider about how many people, particularly millennials and younger, long for 2016 and the modern vibes of the very recent past. What I think people forget is that life was not easy before 2020, but certainly not this difficult.

In America, 2016-2019 was largely marked by massive protests, large-scale political division, and a general vibe that the world was moving in the wrong direction… then IT happened. The pandemic locked us in our rooms, forced us away from our families and friends, made us choose between vaccination in a larger population that was increasingly skeptical and paranoid of the information being given to us by the people we were to trust. After over 7 million confirmed COVID deaths (an estimated range of 19-36 million overall if you include complications related to COVID).

We have a massive portion of the population that are children and had their social lives permanent altered made digital. Those unbelievably important years of childhood in which you learn how others work learn social skills such as empathy, cooperation, conflict resolution, self-control, etc… Kids came out of the pandemic under educated, while also being years behind on the social aspect of being a younger individual.

More than 6 years after the pandemic, the world has no clue who we are, what we’re doing, and what we should become after the pandemic. The cost of living has increased DRAMATICALLY. The rate of homelessness has increased by 33% since the pandemic. We are currently being governed by individuals who have very little care into what happens to the everyday person, while we are constantly exposed to the massive injustices that are happening around the world. Constant battles about who belongs where and who doesn’t.

If you look at the world in 2026, all I ask is the simple question. What is the direction that the world is going into? Constant surveillance, minimal privacy, massive price increases, affordability at an all time low, leaders who care more about obliterating each other rather than working together.

There should have been a time after the pandemic ended, that all the nations came together and declared a period of peace. Time for our world to breathe and come together after having one of the most life-altering events of the past few hundred years. A time where we could’ve sat down and figured out who and what we want to be after we were locked in the house and watched so many of our loved ones perish.

I worry that our world is moving closer to Cyberpunk 2077 than everyone and our government realizes… Or maybe that’s by design.

Think about how much money, talent and resources it takes to seriously pursue something like colonising Mars. Now imagine if a significant amount of that same effort was put into empowering people who are currently being held back simply because they were born poor. There are probably millions of extremely intelligent people around the world who could become scientists, engineers, inventors and researchers but never get the opportunity. Some kids are born with incredible potential but grow up without access to quality education, technology, healthcare, proper nutrition, universities, laboratories or funding. We will never know how many potential Einsteins, engineers or inventors humanity has already lost simply because they were born into poverty, and this is where I think billionaires like Elon Musk can be criticised.If your goal is genuinely to advance humanity and push civilisation forward, why focus so much of your wealth and influence on your own vision of what humanity's future should look like? What if empowering millions of talented people would advance space exploration even faster?

That is why I sometimes see this type of billionaire-driven space ambition as selfish not because exploring space is selfish, but because it concentrates humanity's future in the hands and vision of a few extremely wealthy individuals, i don't know maybe i'm just naive

If a people like the Na'vi from the movie *Avatar* lived in conditions where they were almost always at peace with one another, nature was gracious to them, and they weren't overly curious, would that justify them having a lower IQ or being considered extremely underdeveloped compared to humans?

Is this sleep paralysis? Or do you think she is actually awake? When I sleep next to this one friend, there has been multiple times where I’m fast asleep and feel someone staring at me, you know that feeling… it almost wakes me up and I open my eyes to see hers wide open. Then she shuts them immediately. If I say hello? She responds straight away. Like she’s not fast sleep… the most recent time she was actually mouthing something at me in an aggressive way. Her face dropped and she stopped quickly. I spoke to her and said what? She immediately responded what? I said you were mouthing something at me she said was I??? I said are u ok? She said yes and I went back to sleep. Every time this happens I cover myself with the blanket and feel very freaked out. But I cannot tell if it my mind playing tricks on me and I’m actually dreaming it? It just scares me how fast she responded as if she’s not actually sleeping. And what was she mouthing at me? She denies it if I ask her.
Edit: answering some questions… 1. She is my best friend, we always spend the night at each others houses.
2. No I have never experienced sleep paralysis before. 3. I don’t have a good feeling about it when it happens I feel in my gut that I need to turn around or cover myself so she cannot stare at me anymore.
4. Never happened with anyone else at all.
Thankyou for all the responses!!

The American culture of individualism is unnatural and inferior compared to eastern nations like Japan whose culture is collectivist. there's an emphasis on community, sharing and caring for others, people work together as a team instead of doing things by themselves. neighborhoods are so socially connected to the point that you can leave your kids alone to go run errands with no fear because they'll be watched by your neighbors. multigenerational living is the norm where families stick together and build wealth, which not only reduces loneliness but is also more financially efficient since you're not paying for childcare, rent, food, and other expenses solely on your own. that whole american belief of separating from the people you love in the name of "self-sufficiency" and "independence" is just ridiculous to me and never made sense. do they not realize that their lives would be so much easier and more fulfilling if they operated as a group instead of lone wolves?

There appears to be a certain sociological trend that occurs within various different nations on a worldwide scale. Involved in this trend are a number of different racial or ethnic groups that are known to have endured various kinds of oppression. The ethnic groups are typically minority populations that coexist within a country with a larger, more politically powerful majority population. The oppression faced by such minority groups frequently involves an indigenous population that has been historically displaced through foreign colonization. Additionally, the trend includes examples of non-indigenous minority groups that have historically been victims of systematic persecution, enslavement, racism, discrimination, and segregation with their host country. A pattern that seems to often emerge amongst such populations is the incidence of that group's over-representation in crime and incarceration statistics.

Using AI services as a guide, I have been able to compile some statistical data involving crime amongst various ethnic groups worldwide that follow this pattern.

One example of this pattern is the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. The Maori make up roughly 15-18% of the New Zealand population, yet "make up ~50–53%+ of the prison population (higher for women, often 60%+). Imprisonment rates are typically 6+ times higher than for non-Māori. They are overrepresented at every stage (charges, convictions, remand, sentencing), with higher rates of prison sentences even after some controls in specific offense analyses. Recidivism rates are also elevated" (Source: Salvation Army).

Another example of this pattern are the Aborigines of Australia. “Age-standardized adult imprisonment rates are typically 14–15+ times higher than the majority population (e.g., ~2,100–2,500 per 100,000 for Indigenous adults vs. ~140–150 for non-Indigenous in recent years). Crude rates can exceed 18 times. Indigenous people (~3–4% of the population) account for ~30–33%+ of prisoners. Over-representation appears at charging, remand, and sentencing stages; youth detention disparities have historically been even larger (20+ times in some older data)" (Source: Australian Government Productivity Commission).

In the United States, "Native American and Alaskan Native people are incarcerated at rates several times higher than Whites. Prison rates have been reported around 763 per 100,000 (vs. ~181 for Whites in state/federal prisons; overall national ~350). Jail rates are also elevated (~316 per 100,000 vs. ~157 for Whites). Tribal youth placement rates are ~3.8 times those of White youth nationally (199 vs. 52 per 100,000 in recent data), with much higher ratios in some states" (Source: Prison Policy Initiative). "Native Americans are incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and are the most over-represented racial group in prisons in 19 states; in some states the gap runs up to 6–7 times the white rate" (Source: Safety and Justice Challenge). "Native youth face similar gaps — nationally, Tribal youth are incarcerated at 3.8 times the rate of white youth, and in some states (Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin) at 10 times the rate" (Source: The Sentencing Project).

Also in the United States, "Black Americans are about 13% of the U.S. population but accounted for roughly 33% of sentenced state and federal prisoners in recent years" (Source: The World Data). State and federal imprisonments rates for black adults in 2023 were approximately 1,218 per 100,000, as compared to approximately 231 per 100,000 for white adults (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics). "This equates to a Black adult imprisonment rate roughly 5 times the White rate. The overall U.S. imprisonment rate was about 360 per 100,000 residents of all ages" (Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics).

Among the indigenous (First Nations, Métis, Inuit) peoples of Canada, there is a strong over-representation in crime and incarceration. "Indigenous people account for ~25–33%+ of federal/provincial inmates and higher shares of youth custody (vs. ~5% population). Crime rates reported by police in majority-Indigenous communities have been ~6 times higher overall (violent crime ~9 times). Homicide victimization and accused rates are several times higher. Overrepresentation occurs at charging, court, and custody stages" (Source: Department of Justice Canada).

In the state of Hawaii, "indigenous Hawaiians make up about 39% of Hawaii's incarcerated population according to the state Department of Public Safety, despite being roughly 20–24% of the general population — meaning they're incarcerated at closer to double their population share."

"A 2014 Office of Hawaiian Affairs analysis found Native Hawaiians were the largest single group admitted to prison for drug offenses, at 32% of drug-offense admissions in 2009 — well above their population share."

Yet another example of this pattern is the Roma/Romani (gypsy) people, populations of which are scattered across much of Europe. "Roma populations in Europe show clear over-representation in available crime and prison data relative to their share of the population, particularly for property crimes, organized theft/burglary groups, and incarceration" (Source: Agence France-Presse). However, crime rates for specific ethnic groups are often unclear in European countries because of policy-related avoidance of gathering justice data broken down by ethnic identity.

In Greece, "Hellenic Police annual reports on organized crime repeatedly document heavy Roma involvement in property crime. Domestic (Greek-citizen) groups dominate solved thefts and burglaries; among these, Roma members predominate at rates of ~70–81% of domestic groups, with figures such as 53%+ of thefts/burglaries linked to Roma gangs, ~76–86% of Greek groups involved in those offenses being Roma-dominated, and similar patterns in related reports. Roma are estimated at roughly 1–3% of the population" (Sources: Rodiaki, Greek City Times, and Protothema).

According to Fair Trials 2020, Roma in Bulgaria "accounted for more than 50% of new prisoners, as well as more than 50% of those serving prison sentences, despite making up only 10% of the population." "In Spain, studies have estimated that around a quarter of non-foreign, female prisoners are Roma. This amounts to a twenty-fold over-representation of Roma in prisons compared with their representation in the general population" (Source: Fair Trials 2020).

"In the Czech Republic, lawyers’ estimates of the proportion of Romani defendants in the criminal justice system ranged between 20% to 50%, whereas prosecutors’ estimates ranged between 5% and 50%. In Slovakia, police officers interviewed estimated that Roma accounted for between 30% and 80% of those arrested within their precincts. While prosecutors, judges, and defence lawyers were more reticent to provide estimates, most conceded that there was some degree of over-representation. Lawyers estimated that Roma accounted for between 20% and 50% of criminal cases in their respective practices” (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In Serbia, where Roma are estimated to account for 8.2% of the total population, prosecutors estimated that Roma account for between 10% and 20% of the total defendants they encountered in court, and most judges said that they encountered Romani defendants often or very often, and estimated the proportion of Romani defendants to be between 10% and 35% (Source: European Roma Rights Centre).

In North Macedonia, official data suggests that Roma accounted for approximately 29.2% of juvenile offenders convicted in 2017, while according to the official 2002 Census, Roma represented 2.66% of the total population (Source: Roma Integration 2020).

Question: Is there any established research regarding this correlation between historically oppressed/displaced minority groups and disproportionate crime outcomes? Has any kind of sociological explanation been determined for why this pattern occurs, or how the problem can be corrected? I have noticed that this pattern does not necessarily occur in every instance of a historically oppressed or displaced group; for example, Native American groups indigenous to Latin America overall tend to lack the same crime over-representation compared to Native American groups in North America. Is there any sociological explanation for why this pattern emerges in some contexts, but doesn’t emerge in others?

OFC, best-case-scenarios are ideal. However, the thing where those who all ready take on so much are pushed to take on just a little more because so many others refuse to take on anything at all isn't sustainable.

People in various care fields, like teachers, are tossing in the towel because they've had enough. Yet we seem to be getting more self-centered and inconsiderate, not less.

I just don't see this ending well.

I’m a student of leadership and I am very aware that what I say has weight to it because of the unspoken power dynamic that exists between leader and follower (or employee, mentee, etc). So, I’m curious. What is something a leader, mentor, coach, etc has said to you in the past that’s had a positive or profound impact on you for some time after? Has it changed how you show up for others?

Has anyone experienced a situation where someone genuinely stopped being in love with their partner, rather than just needing space or being confused?

Can those romantic feelings ever come back after that?

I mean actually falling in love with the same person again and wanting a relationship with them.

If this happened to you, what changed, and how long did it take?

Since images are not allowed here the more detailed description:

We’ve all seen the clips: leaders like Modi, Xi, and Putin standing together at these big summits (recently the SCO submit), laughing and nodding like they’re locked in, with zero translators in sight.

Realistically, none of them speak each other's native language natively, so what is actually going on here?

What are they actually saying in those 5-second interactions? Is it just basic English, pre-planned icebreakers, or straight-up faking it for the camera?

How do they avoid awkward silence when their official translators aren't standing right next to them?

Are there any hilarious unscripted moments where leaders were caught on mic trying to chat without a translator?

TLDR: same as title

Lately, I've been thinking about a framework I call scarcity vs abundance environments for us humans. In short, most of our lives (especially here in America) we are in scarcity mode and we usually have competition - to get into schools, in school itself, work life and so on. When we encounter people, we usually find them to be self-protective, closed. Many purely social social experiences can have this quality as well.

In contrast, we also find ourselves in environments - usually when we're part of some collective activity - where the scarcity starts to be forgotten/recedes into the background and a group shifts into abundance mode. What was zero sum becomes greater than the sum of the parts. My most recent experience with this was at a concert. Once everyone settled in, everyone's interests became 100% aligned on having as much fun as possible in order to vibe with the band (and inspire them). People became way more open. The more an individual contributed, the more everyone got out of it. I've noticed the same dynamics in other locales as well - group exercise for example.

The terminology I most used before would be something like "it had a good vibe" to refer to abundance and maybe "toxic" for scarcity. But I've realized that there's benefit to being more fine-grained than that. I really like abundance environments and I'd like to be able to seek out more of them. I'm highly conscious of when an environment has moved into an abundance mode, and I'm trying to be in abundance mode as much as I can.

I'm also interested in thinking about the nuances of this framework. One type of activity could just as easily be scarcity or abundance (think of an overcrowded concert) however certain things (music for example) have abundance properties. Being part of a group is a requirement, but not a guarantee. Candidly I wonder if part of this is awakening our dormant hunter-gatherer selves.

Hi, I'm writing a plot for my comic that touches that topic and I would really like to hear multiple opinions for inspiration.

The question is too abstract so I'm going to specify with the following questions:

Can a person committed a horrible act be redeemed? Can you call a person good if they are that way just for validation? What does 'good' actually mean?

I would like to hear your thoughts even if it might be controversial! This will help me a lot.

Sometimes I think about how expensive it actually is to be poor.

I know it sounds a little weird. Like, if you don't have much money, you're supposed to spend less, right? You buy cheaper stuff, try to save wherever you can, give up things you don't really need. But somehow, the less money you have, the more you end up paying in the long run.

For example, let's say you have a bad tooth. If you have money, you go to the dentist and get it fixed right away. If you don't, you wait, deal with the pain, take painkillers, tell yourself you'll get it treated later when you have some money. A year passes, and what could've been a simple filling now needs a root canal and a crown, or maybe the tooth can't be saved at all and you're looking at an extraction and an implant. You didn't choose the more expensive option, you just couldn't afford the cheaper one while it was still an option.

The same thing happens with shoes. You can buy a good pair that will last for years, or you can buy whatever you can actually afford right now. They fall apart after a season, so you buy another cheap pair, then another one, and after a few years you might have spent the same amount of money, maybe even more. You knew the expensive pair would probably be cheaper in the long run, you just never had enough money at once to buy it.

I think the same thing happens with time. If you have money, you can order food instead of spending time cooking, take a taxi, pay someone to repair something, buy appliances that make your life easier. When you don't have money, you spend your own time instead, you take a bus across town because something is cheaper there, fix things yourself, cook everything yourself, carry everything yourself, wait 40 minutes for a bus because a taxi costs too much. Then you go to work and sell the rest of your time anyway.

Personally, I don't even think the worst part of being poor is not being able to have nice things, because you can kind of get used to that. It's everything else: the extra money you end up paying because you couldn't pay earlier, the time you lose trying to save money, putting off medical treatment, the constant stress over some random expense that would be nothing to someone else but can completely fuck up your month.

That's why the whole "poor people just need to learn how to manage their money" thing annoys me sometimes. Obviously financial literacy matters, and yeah, people absolutely waste money on stupid shit sometimes, I'm not denying that. But there's only so much you can do with a budget when there simply isn't enough money to begin with.

Sometimes someone buys the $30 shoes instead of the $150 ones not because they're stupid or don't understand that the $150 pair will probably last longer. They understand that perfectly well, they just don't have $150.

I've been thinking lately about whether keeping up with the news constantly really does us any good. I get why we do it because staying informed matters and knowing what's happening around the world has real value. Plus the media does give us hopeful stories and political comedy that people from all sides can actually enjoy together even when there are serious worries about free speech.

That makes me wonder why we spend so much time getting so frustrated with each other over the headlines. Political coverage always feels like it's forcing us to pick a side. We want our team to win and we get stressed out when it doesn't, only for the whole cycle to reset the moment a new story breaks. It is easy to forget that the people we disagree with are living in the exact same world we are.

Maybe that is the part we lose sight of when we glue ourselves to the news cycle. We focus so hard on who is winning and losing that we forget we many of us are dealing with the same basic human experiences. No matter where someone stands politically we are all navigating life at the exact same time. We all have personal struggles and things we care about, meaning we can disagree on politics while still sharing the same fundamental reality.

So what are we really getting out of this constant consumption? Being informed is important but if taking in more news mostly just drives us to resent our neighbors then I don't see where the benefit lies. The real question probably isn't whether we should follow the news at all but rather how much of it we actually need before it stops being useful and just starts dragging us down.

Reddit opionion is always divided on almost anything and anyone ( prolly as it should be )

But over time I found that everyone here loved Dolly Parton. If not loved , seemed to say she was the ideal of good human .

Loved some of her country numbers, but honestly don know much about her . Asking what was it about her ?

Rest in power Reddit good human.

When I say one thing I mean it could be anything. Anything from quitting a bad habit to starting a new healthy habit, maybe finding a new job. Anything you’ve done that made you proud of yourself.

Or maybe something you’ve changed that you aren’t proud of and want to stop.

In the age of ai where everything is so easily available, ideas are everywhere, friends, followers, connections in 1000s but still why we feel so disconnected in real life? Why do people have to cry to chatgpt rather than their friends. Everyone is aware that social media overconsumption is bad it's continuously bringing constant comparisons, ai over consumption is making us dumber still why screen time of people of every age group is spiking.. what's needed to not let people in their 20s, youths waste 10+ hours in social media rather than making real life connections, memories, friends and actually living life..

Answerrr guysss.. pleasee.. what's really are we missing?

My father was in Easy Company, so I have watched it more times than is probably healthy and I have never been able to see it as a war story. To me it has always been about what happens to a group of men depending on who is put in charge of them.

What surprised me is how many other people came to it that way. A man told me last week he had to watch it in a leadership class. Another said they used it when he was an officer. I understand it is still shown at West Point.

That is unusual for a television series. Most things from 2001 are gone.

What I keep thinking about is that the show gives you the same company under four or five different men, so you get to watch what each kind of leadership actually does to people. Sobel breaks them in training and they hate him, but they survive Normandy partly because he broke them. Winters leads from the front and they follow him anywhere. Dike is absent when it matters and men die for it. Lipton holds the company together with no rank and no authority at all.

For anyone who has watched it, did any of that change how you think about leading people, or being led? And if you saw it through a class or the military rather than on your own, did that framing change what you took from it?

The days as a kid felt so long, i could do so much stuff back then. And now i blink and it's over. I am not sure if my memory deceives me or we start to experience time differently when we grow up?

Here's my story for that.

When I was in middle school back in 2011-2012, there was an old still-running Pepsi vending machine in my (very small) town that was owned by a local business. It sold pretty much all of the major soda varieties at 50 cents per can. They were ice cold, too. I happily used it like I was supposed to for quite some time, often stopping by it while walking home from school. But of course being a broke young teen who wasn't old enough for a job and whose parents weren't terribly well off themselves, I didn't always have change on me for the machine, so getting my 50 cent soda was still more a privilege than a daily thing.

Well, eventually, one of my more streetwise friends found that the machine could be easily opened up, and you could reach through the outside cage and take the sodas for free. And well, us being the roaming group of bored poor kids we were, once he told us, we all got in on nabbing sodas from that machine. Most of the time 1 or 2 of us would just swoop by and nab 1 or 2 sodas, but there were a handful of times where we came over as a group and made a whole organized heist out of it, with 1 or 2 kids working the machine and filling a backpack with sodas, and the rest of us posted up all over the area keeping watch in all directions, even using hand signals to warn each other if a car or person was coming nearby. There were no cameras nearby that we knew of, and we generally did this at night, but there were a couple more bold operations carried out in broad daylight.

This happened off and on for... I wanna say around 6 months before we realized hey, maybe some of us don't want to get in trouble. The business owner almost certainly knew what was up as well, as he installed a motion light over the machine and eventually fixed the lock that we kept prying open. But, he never confronted us, we were never caught, so, after growing out of it we sorta just forgot about it.

Until a few years later in High School, when the business owner came to the school to be one of those motivational guest speakers. Me and much of the old squad happened to be sitting together attending his speech, and towards the end of it while talking about how your actions can affect others and whatnot, he brought up how some years ago some kids were stealing sodas from his vending machine, forcing him to fix and secure it better which was very difficult for him. He was a disabled Veteran (ofc we didn't know this at the time of the soda stealing), and he kept repeatedly looking right at me and my buddies during that specific part of his speech.

We all agreed that the old man more than likely knew it was us, but for one reason or another, chose not to confront us, call the police, or say anything about it until that day years later. If his goal was simply to make us regret our past stupidity, well, it worked. We all felt terrible for the rest of the day.

TL;DR: Stupid Middle School Me and his equally stupid Middle Schooler friends stole cans of soda from an old vending machine repeatedly, came to deeply regret it years later when we found out the owner was an old disabled veteran who struggled to restock and repair it- something he seemed to directly tell us during a school speech.

It’s strange how easy it is to spend years working toward something because you assume it’ll make you happy, successful, or fulfilled. Then you finally get close to it—or actually get it—and realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all.

I'm not even sure that there's such a thing, but I feel like I'm not interested in life itself, it goes deeper than procrastination or fear of failure. I feel like nothing sparks my interest anymore, even when I play a game and it poses me against some kind of challenge, I just don't feel the desire to do the work to overcome that challenge. Now I must say I'm not sad, I don't hate existence, I just play along when it's necessary, but other than that every activity that people do just doesn't spark any joy (dating, hooking up, gaming, learning a skill.....), other than reddit and YouTube I don't have social media because it feels like social noise and emotional pollution.

One might ask: then what do you do all day? I just play Sims half mindedly and listen to podcasts without paying much attention, I'm not even sure what to call that.