I’m guessing OP means it’s harder now than before the corporate siloing of the social web, not harder than handing out business cards on the street.

I have the same mutations. In me they caused severe depression for almost 20 years. Started megadosing l-methylfolate, and I wanted to live again practically overnight. So yeah, it can def make you feel different.

People don’t generally change their gender on a whim, so that doesn’t make the info less useful. (Even if it did, trans people are like 2% of the population, so it would still apply for everyone else.) Men and women have different perspectives and life experiences because the world treats them differently. Do you think knowing the age, race, or country demographics would be pointless, too?

Individuals don’t have to make their own decisions. A lot of people see that as a positive.

An event isn’t an activity. And yes, if an event I loved turned into a meeting place for those people, I’d find a new event.

If Elon Musk and I both enjoyed cycling, for instance, fine. That doesn’t put me in the same space as him. Which is fundamentally different than going to a weeklong party he’s attending. Have your fun, just don’t pretend it’s revolutionary or creating a better world.

You said I know “fuck all” about therapy after reading and comprehending a comment where I said I’d spent years in therapy, and I’m the one with a reading comprehension problem? Sure, buddy.

If you think biological addiction to heroin and chips are equivalent enough to use the same word, I can’t help you.

Can we please stop using the word addiction? No one in online discussion agrees on what it means, so it always ends with angry people screaming past each other.

Who drowned?

Well, I guess we strongly disagree.

Gee, maybe it’s because we’re talking about a group that’s extremely vulnerable, a group that a lot of people are determined to commit democide against. Even if you feel how you feel for completely innocent reasons, it’s reasonable for people to assume otherwise. Lots of extremists start out sounding vaguely reasonable.

Clearly, you didn’t read my post. Hard to spend years in therapy and not know fuck-all about it. I never said don’t go to therapy. I said don’t expect miracles. Therapy is good, but it’s not a solution to structural issues.

That’s good and healthy. All I’m saying is that therapy won’t fix the problems underlying this. It can be useful in processing, but I’m tired of people acting like therapy will solve structural problems.

Therapy? As someone who’s benefited from years of therapy, therapy isn’t supposed to end rational responses when the world’s gone mad. I’m afraid far too many people confuse therapy with magic.

Ok, but that’s not a useful statement. If you can arbitrarily change the rules or decide one person has the responsibility instead of another, you can decide the election without any direct involvement. And if they do that, I promise no one will give a shit whether it was direct. They didn’t directly stop abortion either, but birthing parents are still dying because doctors can’t help them. I guarantee their partners and orphaned kids dgaf if the Supreme Court did it directly.

Don’t. Frankly, I’ve stayed on top of the news for 20 years. The ideal of an informed citizenry comes from a time without a 24-hour news cycle, and a time before the US (if you’re here) was downgraded from a democracy to an enocracy. The only thing you’ll get from being informed 24-7 is unneeded stress. Look at a news website once or twice a week, that’s plenty informed for most purposes. (Within 6 months of a national election, maybe bump it up a little.) Don’t discuss controversial news online unless that’s fun for you. If I could follow my own advice, my mental health would be improved, honestly.

That last bit is not accurate. Search those terms with “is x real?” or “x controversy.” There is absolutely a debate rn about what constitutes addiction, and those things are regularly brought up.

100%. Weed kept me alive when no legal drugs worked. The second something else worked, I dropped my consumption significantly without a problem. After 15 years of daily use.

So addiction is a word so broad as to be practically meaningless, is what you’re saying.

Maybe start by not assuming everyone has normal brain chemistry. As someone whose brain couldn’t make “happy juice” on its own for years (I have a problem processing folate, which is an ingredient in a bunch of brain chemicals), if I hadn’t smoked weed before I found out what was wrong, I wouldn’t have lived long enough to do so.

I used weed to medicate when every drug my doctors gave me failed for years. Because of smoking weed every day for years, I lived long enough to take things that actually treat my problem, and was immediately able to drop my weed consumption as much as I liked. I do it maybe 2-3 times a week now. How do you tell someone who’s addicted from someone using it to medicate something else when nothing’s available, from the outside?

I also think the word “addiction” is so broadly used as to be practically useless at this point. I could stop weed, no problem. If I try to get off lithium, withdrawal city. But you don’t hear people talking about lithium addiction. Plus, if we’re using the same word for responses to heroin, weed, and porn, we need better vocabulary.