Meta-comment here:

Cynical opinions like this one that I am responding to may or may not be real. But ultimately, whether that user is expressing a genuine opinion or is a bot, the end result is the same. This comment and ones like it work hard to drag down morale for people who read these opinions and unconsciously internalize them without thinking critically.

Lost hope and cynicism turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, simply because it’s a numbers game. By that I mean, the act of saying and acting like everything is forever doomed and “nothing can change so why try” results in an end-state of such doom. If you don’t try anything, you’ll never win anything.

This is why comments about staying home, doing nothing, things don’t change, whine whine whine are so yummy for propagandists to post online. It’s how they put their thumb on the scale, by convincing people that all is lost before anything is even begun.

Zero effort to change something for the better means in a very concrete way that nothing will get better. It’s like multiplying by zero. Taking no chances to change things means you just dump any chance that might otherwise have been there right into the garbage. It’s like a dude who never, ever asks a girl out complaining that he never has dates. You have to TRY to get even the OPPORTUNITY to attain a goal. The overall chance for something good to happen might not be as huge as you’d LIKE it to be…but it’s bigger than zero if you try. But if you don’t, it’s an automatic “multiply by zero” and the chance for anything to happen is flat out wiped from the game board.

I just want to call this out because this dude’s comments are cluttered with the type of doomy thinking that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And you shouldn’t just nod with him or her unthinkingly. You should think carefully about why someone might post a lot of these “opinions” in a comment section. What, from a meta-perspective, seeing a lot of replies repeating this thing might cause a group of people to be pushed towards thinking or feeling.

I sneer at posts like his because I grew up in a shitty home. The adults all around me didn’t try to change anything for the better. Change was too drastic, or too scary, or was “breaking up the family”, or what-the-fuck-ever.

But I left. I got free. I leapt right into the unknown…and it helped a ton, having hope enough to try to change something, and then being able to wake up in a new place where I wasn’t called stupid or threatened with violence every day.

Did everything get totally better forever all at once? Nah. We don’t live in a storybook. But it got better. And as they say, perfect is the enemy of good. And I have seen in my own lifetime that you can make changes of some form or type if you try…but those chances completely wither away if you go into things from the start thinking nothing can ever change.

(That’s how depression gets you by the way–it hides from you many opportunities to change things for the better by altering your thinking so you just lay there and let opportunities pass you by, instead of grabbing them with both fists and hanging on tight.)