Location: USA, Lower 48 States, East of the Rocky Mountains The weather's been a bit cooler than normal in my area, but nothing too crazy lately, although I've seen some more unusual-looking clouds lately. The slight chill in the air feels nice but the fact that it's starting to get dark out at fucking 6:30 pm is making my seasonal depression start kicking in. I do have coping mechanisms for it, but if I told anyone on this subreddit what they were, I'd be fielding a litany of questions that don't have answers that wouldn't just leave people even more confused than before.

There are a lot of bumpy, uneven roads in my area full of potholes, cracks, and other signs of damage. There's some kind of road work being done in my area on a regular basis, I see road crews fixing something pretty much every time I go out but somehow, the roads are still almost always in bad shape.

Finding accurate, reliable information on current covid case numbers isn't like looking through a haystack for a needle, it's more like hunting through an entire farm to look for a single needle. Nevertheless, from what research I've managed to do lately, cases have declined somewhat from a peak that occurred in July/August of this year, but are still higher than they have been for much of the pandemic.

https://x.com/michael_hoerger/status/1845695053819474252

There are also new covid vaccines out that are geared towards the JN.1 and KP.2 variants, though there's not concrete information as to how well they prevent infection. However, being up to date on your covid vaccines helps reduce your risk of severe illness (as in, being hospitalized or needing oxygen,) and death. Whether or not that's worth it is up to you to decide, but if you have decent health insurance, getting vaccinated is likely to be cheaper than winding up in the hospital and/or missing a lot of work due to being sick. Of course, as I know all too well thanks to an assortment of variety pack bullshit in my own life, finding out what your health insurance actually covers is a lot like wading through the Dashcon ballpit while being covered in molasses and having ten ton bricks tied to your ankles so I don't blame people for deciding not to navigate all that bullshit and just hope that nothing bad happens.

Bird flu is also picking up steam, although there's still a chance that it won't blow up into a human pandemic like covid has (and given how society has decided to respond to covid, we all better hope bird flu never gains the ability to spread human to human or else things are going to be about as hairy as the front page of Fur Affinity (Fur Affinity is a furry fanart website, and if you're wondering why I know what that is even though I'm not a furry myself, the most sensible answer I can give you is that over the course of my bizarre, incomprehensible life, I've met a very colorful cast of characters.)

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/cid/dcdc/pages/Bird-Flu.aspx?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My dog, who has some health problems, has been very anxious and fidgety lately and I can't figure out why, I take care of him as best as I can and make sure he gets all the food, medicine, exercise, and everything else he needs to stay healthy and happy but he's getting up there in age and I can't help but worry about him sometimes. He had to switch to a new type of food recently lately because he's been having some kidney problems but he hates the food because he doesn't like the taste and it's also expensive as hell but the vet says he needs it so I'm not sure what else I can do for him.

On a more mundane and less morbid note, Discord keeps on making weird beeping sound for me. I can't figure out where the hell they come from or why they happen (they're not from notifications or from people messaging me or tagging me,) but they just keep on popping up any time I open Discord on my laptop. The internet in general has been very slow and laggy for me no matter where I use the internet or what device I use it on. AI bullshit is everywhere and it just clogs up every damn site like a frozen pipe in the middle of winter in Antarctica. As far as AI goes, I'm about as much of a Luddite as you can get, I firmly believe the creation of artistic images, especially those that are unfathomably weird and bizarre, should only be the domain of sentient beings. Robots and machines can stick with mundane work, they have no business replacing humans in the creation of any kind of art, whether that be images, music, movies, or anything else. Art is part of what makes humans human and to outsource the creation of art to machines is too deeply dystopian for me to think about without getting as steamed as a bunch of hams on Christmas Day.

Everyone I know is finding the cost of living stressful, aggravating, or just outright untenable and it hurts me to see so many people I know suffering so much when I know I don't have the ability or resources to make anyone else financially secure. Life is needlessly difficult for so many people in our current society and while I don't claim to have all the answers, our current economic system isn't doing anyone except the richest 1% of society any favors. It feels like I'm trying to tread water in a stormy sea surrounded by countless other people all trying to do the same thing and being forced to watch some of them drown every day while I wait for the day I can no longer tread water and wind up drowning myself. Due to various physical and mental difference in how my body and mind work compared to what you might consider an average or normal person, I don't have the type of personality or skills that allow me to find success easily in the modern world, and sometimes, my hopes of finding a niche where I belong feel a hair's breadth from slipping away from me forever.

I struggled a lot to find a place in society before the pandemic, but the introduction of covid and all its downstream consequences in our culture, in public health, and in how it's changed the economy, has made everything so much more difficult that some days feel like I'm just waiting for a ticking time bomb to go off, awaiting the moment where I find there's absolutely nothing and no one I can count on for any kind of support and I'm left with absolutely nothing but my own strength and intellect to try to navigate my way through every problem and issue that comes my way.

I miss pre-pandemic life, but more than that, I miss having any sort of feeling that anyone in charge who has any real power to change or influence anything has our best interests in mind and I mourn how difficult it feels to find decent people IRL every day. I don't believe the majority of people are bad or evil, but I do believe that our society rewards bad and harmful behavior more than it rewards altruistic, healthy, and un-selfish behavior, and that the level of importance our society places on hustling and grinding and getting ahead at the cost of other people is incredibly toxic and that it often motivates people to act in selfish, thoughtless ways. In particular, the way society has chosen to handle covid, which is still a significant problem that results in a lot of pain, suffering, and death, illustrates how easy it is to convince people to act in selfish, destructive ways and throw away both their own health and well-being as well as that of others for quick, temporary material gains. I don't want to go into any prescriptive ideas or wishes I have in this post, but for what it's worth, I've been derided for being both too cautious and also not cautious enough by people at opposite ends of the spectrum.

On a less depressing note (because even if this a collapse related subreddit, it's still healthy to discuss happy things too,) the opportunities to reflect on what's going on and what I want to happen have helped me understand myself and have a more solid, grounded sense of who and what I am and to me, that kind of knowledge is worth its weight in gold. I may never fit in with other people as well as I'd like or find the type of healthy, supportive relationships (platonic only,) I want to have, I can still do things to make the world a better place for other people and fling a light into the future for other people to find so that maybe someday, other people who feel like me will be able to take comfort in knowing they're not as alone as they think.

We may be on a bumpy ride right now on a metaphorical road filled to the brim with metaphorical potholes the size of an average politician's ego, but that doesn't mean that we can't all look for ways to make the world a better place than it was before we showed up, even in the smallest of ways, because you never know how even one single tiny action can make someone's day or show them that they're not as alone as they feel. Stay safe, stay healthy, and look out for yourself, your loved ones, and your community, these times that we live in may be full of a metric fuck ton of pure, unfiltered swamp ass right now, but that's all the more reason to do what you can to be part of a solution, even if it's just for a problem that feels so small you don't think it matters, because at the end of the day, you never know what might make a difference to someone else, and sometimes that can mean the world.