Having to hold interviews was the worst part of the job, by far… Brings about a certain kind of guilt, to sit there and try to sell battery acid as ice-cold lemonade.

Well, to be fair, the whole thing has become a sick joke, although nobody’s laughing anymore…

The freest speech of all!

If this joke emitted radiation, it would be measured in kiloDads per second.

And that’s an obtuse and edgy fallacy. You do realise this wasn’t about the people “voting wrong,” but about the candidates themselves being demonstrated to have functioned based on false pretenses and hidden agendas while having Putin’s hand up their arses, right? Convincing people to vote based on lies and mass manipulation is about as far from anything to have ever been considered even marginally democratic. The result itself, thus, is undemocratic.

What you’re proposing is that Democracy should be as a herd of sheep throwing themselves off a cliff because, hey! The first one did it!

Cheap bait, m8. Like, really cheap, those worms are flaky…

That’s a fallacy, Democracy doesn’t mean “let any elected moron lead,” it means “leaders should encourage and further the democratic process,” to represent the best interests of the people. A Manchurian candidate is pretty much the antithesis of Democracy.

I’m not gonna say anything about Le Pen because I do my best to detach from shitheads beyond checking their legal status, but as a Romanian, I can say that Georgescu’s removal was a win for that very Democracy you’re talking about.

Agreed, and it wasn’t that type of situation, it was as I’ve described, they were trying to “teach me a lesson,” as it were.

To be clear, I don’t push decisions on my peers every time, there simply are times when I have no preference. Plus, like… I was at theirs, we were chatting, I didn’t feel the need to change the activity, they, instead, tried to force me to do so, after patiently explaining to them that I was fine with things as they were. After which the yelling started.

There’s a difference between being easy-going and being a damp towel…

Edit: plus, in all honesty, what you’re describing sounds more like a dynamic mismatch, in which case the best direction (imho) is reevaluating and adjusting expectations accordingly. People can be however they want to be, and it’s up to us to decide whether or not we want to accept and continue interactions.

That’s when you slap the “one per date” card on the table;)

What, cubes ain’t cool enough anymore, we’re doing triangle fractals now?

Oh, of course, there will always be exceptions! And I do believe some level of decency/empathy is intrinsic to human beings, it actually takes work to become a knobhead. Plus I suspect a lot (if not most) of us who dive deeper into online socialisation are a form of refugees, precisely because that shark stuff doesn’t float well with us. I’m generalising, but it’s my suspicion.

As for trying to get me to be a dick, it was little things, chipping away at my behaviours and approaches with pointed observations, stuff like “I don’t understand why you’re so polite, I would’ve blown up in their face” when attempting to defuse an argument with patience and communication, repeatedly hammering home that my being polite is a weakness to be abused and nothing more, talking shit about people with whom I’ve had minor disagreements, telling me to stop caring about others, and so on, and so forth. And there was a time when I almost started believing them, because so, so many people told me the same story. I almost gave into it, because I was deeply unstable in my faith in myself back then. Gotta say, feel ashamed that I questioned my values for… that…

As an extreme example, one of my closest friends once got pissed off with me - and I mean to the point where they were yelling - because they were insisting that I select an activity (they were trying to get me to acknowledge my preferences in a way, I guess), when I genuinely didn’t have a preference. I’m easy-going, the company is more important than the context to me, but it’s like they simply couldn’t understand or accept that about me.

I’m geuinely sorry to hear that… It really does feel like a lot of people are trying to drag others into the mud with them, especially out of envy… I can say with 100% honesty that, while I understand exactly what’s happening, I simply… don’t, can’t understand what’s happening. It feels like one of those not-quite-nightmares, where things look the same, but make no sense.

I wouldn’t necessarily put this on you, to be honest. I’ve noticed an overall decline in empathy and basic politenes all over the place… As a Romanian, I can say that it’s all the more pronounced around here, as people are falling for the same shit that’s been propagated in America - hyperindividualism and fuckboy-ism…

Most people don’t even respect their neighbors anymore, let alone strangers. It’s so bad that, as a person who enjoys being polite, I get a ridiculous amount of compliments for having basic decency, but only from older people. People my age and younger (35 and down) are mostly just annoyed and tend to mock me. A lot of my former friends even tried to get me to be as much of a dick as they were.

And all that’s left is to hope that alternatives will still be available.

Easier to just carry the groceries in my arms, the last accessory I’d need for people to fully think of me as a serial killer would be random lenths of rope…

You can obfuscate it so that people won’t even know what they’re eating, though… Wouldn’t be the first, or the last time… All you need to do is get the meat into the country, then throw it in the shredder and process it until it is unrecognisable.

Edit: or not even that, just slap whatever label you want on it. It’s not like the average consumer will do a chem test on every cut of meat they purchase.

I hate these… as a tall person, I have a choice between cosplaying as Quasimodo, or letting that thing wreck my boot heels…

Yyep!=))

Seriously, human existence is a collective learning experience, Stagnation started rubbing its hands with perverse delight the instant we forewent vulnerability and openness for excesive individualism.

Edit: I still don’t know how to adequately open up to someone else, after a decade of trying to figure it out. After being raised to be a soulless performance machine and being surrounded by people who cave in to the grindset, I don’t know what it means to be open and vulnerable with another person.

And it sucks so much long-term, I can feel it as though I’m being held back several grades, like I’m completely missing the point of my own lived experience and have no idea what to do with it, because I don’t have the framework of a big picture atop which to analyse things, and I think that framework would be having enough perspectives which aren’t my own in my life.

I’ve finally understood what Alan Watts said, that we can’t know ourselves unless we have other people around to help us see who we aren’t. It’s because we know too well who we are, but not knowing who we aren’t, that’s like trying to understand fire without knowing ice.

Guess I’ll just die, then!

That’s why I bought a watch;)

Hey, thank you so much for your answer and insights!

See, that’s my point, I’m trying to walk that fine line between being realistically pessimistic and genuine, and pure unsolved trauma. Thing is, I tried to go for positive, for optimistic, but the times being as they are, most optimists are, honestly… a bit deluded and in denial, from what I’ve seen… And don’t get me wrong, I can still enjoy myself, I can still have a nice time, crack jokes, goof around (i.e. I still have that zest for life), but right here and now, with the entire context around us, I’m angry and focused on most days, which seems to clash a lot with the intention of trying to look away from reality.

Heck, I even hoped I’d have the home team advantage with this one, as one of our national pastimes is making fun of the horrible, so I thought more people around here would be inclined toward seeing and calling things as they are. But nope…

And I do have many, many other things with which I try to relate in a potential partner, but this particular aspect has demonstrated itself to be necessary for smooth interactions with a potential partner. This is just who I’ve become, I am constantly paying attention to everything around me, so it inadvertently reflects off of me in one way or another. If the times are shit, I won’t pretend they aren’t.