Can relate ! I first heard about you after the flood. I’m having trouble finding food that isn’t making me sick. That’s adding a layer to the ptsd here.
Hey Josh, no need to make excuses or qualify this feeling.
I agree that the last few years have been the worst of it. But, for me personally, this stretches back to 2009 when our Divider in Chief took office, and before that when "smart" phones came out, and before that when the Kardashians and social media trashed our society.
IMO they are the devil incarnate. How a family can ruin an entire generation (multiple generations, sadly) for such selfish financial and fame gains is beyond my comprehension.
I saw your post about this on X and I commented so I guess I will put the comment here as well. Really, what you are saying is so important.
Those of us who stood up for the truth lost everything. I started looking into it deeply when COVID first started and I was living in Luxor, Egypt, where life went on as normal. That part was great but for other reasons, because I stood up against a violent mob of men, life became dangerous and I barely got out of the country alive. I started writing about the psychological abuse we are all facing at the hands of what I call the "gods of tech and pestilence".
We can understand it better if we consider menticide.
“Menticide” is a “killing of the mind and the spirit.” Joost Meerloo explains this in his book, The Rape of the Mind:
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a [ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy.”
In order to accomplish this, the elite must manufacture waves of fear within the populace. Each wave is followed by a period of relative calm, but after each calm, the fear is brought back even stronger next time.
Joost further explains:
“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
Emotion, without reasoned thought to temper it, becomes the automatic response and, we feel, justifiably so. Meerloo again:
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal … than logic and reason. While the [people] are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault [them]with another.”
If we understand this, it helps. Because it isn't going to get better. It will get worse. Now with AI we no longer can tell what it true and what isn't. We have to become stronger mentally, spiritually
Andrew Tate (God, am I really going to quote him?) once said in a YouTube video: they will take away 100 of your freedoms and give you back 99. That is how they chip away at us. The goal seems to be disequilibrium. From that, all kinds of awful things happen.
This is why communist states don’t need to rule by Terror all the time. People know exactly what the government is capable of, and that it could dial up its insane campaigns at any time. They are daily humiliated (by design) by the regime’s absurd propaganda. They become resigned. I am resigned.
We can look back throughout history and see this practice, that not only destroyed individuals but societies.
It is a riding of a PTSD wave on that societal level, where each assault is addressed less and less, if at all, in deference to the next wave, that we can all see coming.
Coping mechanisms manifest appropriately, as with any trauma/abuse - but on societal as well as individual levels.
I put it this way - In order to manipulate the masses, you only need apply or relieve societal pressures, in varying degrees, which may include total destruction of a segment as an unspoken warning to the rest.
What we are living through today (the last 4 years especially) reminds me of a societal Gulag Archipelago. Meerloo and Solzhenitsyn, respectively describe the time tested mechanisms for control, manipulation and destruction - that are being used pervasively and on a global scale, today.
If one wasn't traumatized from pre-pandemic events in their lives, they probably are now. My brother-in-law already was an alcoholic, but an alcoholic in denial forced to work at home just accelerated his drinking. The pandemic added more stress to his life. He died 2 years ago before he made it to his 60th birthday. I left my job before the pandemic July 2019 as I needed surgery to see if I had cancer (I didn't that time, but 3 years later, a surprise). Although things were very stressful at work and coming to a breaking point - overworked, not enough people, promises over and over again of "getting more money for the budget" to get more people which never happened. It was a few years earlier than planned, but once the pandemic shut down happened and all the riots and things happened in downtown Los Angeles I was glad I didn't have to deal with all of that because I was retired. But in 2022 I had a symptom, tests, etc., and this time I DID have cancer (I'm sure the stress of everything going on didn't help). So far so good, I hope the cancer is gone for good. However, many things are not the same. Some places I used to go, restaurants, theaters, all shut down for good. I was hit with all kinds of unexpected expenses all at once including out-of-pocket medical costs (insurance does not cover everything), car repair bills, special assessment to replace all electric circuit boxes in condo complex (a unit caught on fire from old failed electrical panel and parts and work were delayed because of shut down). My Dad fell in his house 2 years ago, had Covid and pneumonia and he is 90 and cannot take care of himself or drive now. He lives with my sister and I make his appointments and take him to doctor and short outings, and also do yard work at his house. He is being tested to see if he has dementia, etc. My sister and I are fighting all the time about his situation (he has no long-term care plan and we have no money). She still works but wants to retire, but retire to what? I'm just getting by day to day and trying to be positive and distract myself with work, exercise, online classes, free concerts in park, etc. I guess many are experiencing a similar feeling of what I call "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Yes, I believe we have all been traumatized.
I wish you all the best Brenda! In my case, whether I am the walking wounded or not, I am among the walking dead. In 2021 while bicycling I suddenly died of a cardiac arrest, and was dead on arrival into the ER. After several hours of repeated defibrillation, I was presumed to be brain-dead, and yet the emergency physicians persisted, bringing me back at all costs. I was treated with fentanyl, refrigerated with ice packs for two days, and hydrated until I looked like a blimp. Eight days later I gradually emerged from a coma, and was miraculously cogent but clueless about my missing time. Being unvaccinated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, my only assumption was the Delta variant really got me, and took away my voice! A few days later when the ventilator was removed momentarily, I was elated that I did still have a voice. In a put down, my nurse told me I had Covid. Whatever it was, was so bad, I was drowning in my phlegm and found it next to impossible to breathe. I expressed to my nurse, my fear that I might die soon, which strangely made her very happy with a spring in her step! She went and returned five or six minutes later with a team of four men in zippered jumpsuits and a gurney, to wait for my expected passing at my ICU door. I protested, but she glibly said "This is protocol...". For the next hour and a half she checked on me through the door every five minutes to see if I was still breathing. Then I protested more forcefully with my flailing arms, since I had no voice. The nurse turned to the four men with the gurney and uttered in a sullen tone "You guys can go now. He's not going to die yet"! After this, doctors and technicians came to finally aspirate my throat and help me breathe again. I learned from them I never had Covid but had an extremely bad case of pneumonia from the ventilator. I vowed to myself to live no matter the challenge, and be very careful about what I say out loud. I might have been another digit on the officially burgeoning Covid death statistic. Then for a total of five weeks in the ICU, they gradually dehydrated me until I appeared as a toothpick. But the brutal medical interventions worked out. Thankfully, almost three years later, and several thousand more miles on my bicycle, I have returned to excellent health and life. I still have not ever had Covid. One would never guess what I experienced during the pandemic.
I'm adding your account to my catalogue of evidence that the medical profession is a magnet for psychopaths. I will never trust a single one of them again and it's about time they were informed of what contempt they are held in; for £50 a person they were prepared to discard ALL their ethics and get to work on a programme of mass murder.
Agree, most of us are walking wounded, especially since 2020.
We’re no longer a society at this point, we’re mass dissociation.
Aka Disaffection.
As you know, your thinking and writing publicly amount to a kind of damage control and even some movement toward healing.
At least, that’s my own experience and understanding of what I find when reading your work, though maybe I doth project too much.
Fwiw I’m glad you’re there and still standing and questioning, and it looks like other commentators feel the same way -- you help us articulate the unprecedented fright and assault we’re living through, and sharing this grief does mitigate it a little I think, which in turn can strengthen us.
Your accomplishments despite your obstacles are very impressive and inspiring. May you find ways to focus on positive things that lead to feelings of security and being supported. You wouldn’t have built this podcast community had you not lost your career, I assume? Your sharing of your vulnerable feelings helps others to feel less alienated and alone.
BEFORE we entered election season (and I still had my shut-down decorations up!) I recognized that we would have a society that as a whole was suffering from PTSD. The reaction of the attempted assassination of DJT has convinced me further; real emotions are shut down for many people. It's like people are sleep-walking through anything truly traumatic; that suppression is causing over reactions in check-out lines and traffic. We can only heal through truth and honesty; things in short supply these days. Glad I found you, Josh, to get some doses.
"Nearly everything we thought was stable and normal has been shown to be an illusion."
At risk of adding to the trauma, this statement unfortunately includes our putative hero, Donald Trump. I believe that "it's as if [the assassination] never happened" is because we can't even be sure that Team Trump itself wasn't in on, or even behind, what increasingly looks to be a psyop. Lots of strong evidence on this, including Vance's strong ties to Palantir. That perfect, iconic, statue-like photo. Come on.
I'd so like to believe it's for real.
Our seeming obliviousness is more attributable, I think, to a state called "hypernormativity" wherein everyone knows that the lies are coming at us every moment and from every angle, and social lassitude sets in. Steve Turley (who still pumps the hero patriot theme) explained a year ago that phenomenon, as it applied to the Russians while the USSR was still a thing.
Bitch please, I’m a War on Terror kid and Financial Crash millennial. My entire life from high school onwards has been one reality reasserting itself episode after another. I’m annoyed that others are noticing and are acting like they discovered some Earth shattering revelation.
While I don't like the "bitch please" part of your statement, I am sympathetic to your point of view. I've got a daughter who may never be able to afford to buy a home and it makes me genuinely sad for your generation. I pray things get better. Best to you.
You're gracious. I also hope for the best for your daughter and her generation, but they lack perspective on many issues and buy the divisive message they're sold (bc outrage sells) that they are the most downtrodden generation alive. In the early '80s it was easy to feel pessimistic and lots of us were. Mortgage rates went over 15% and unemployment over 10%. I never thought I'd be able to buy a home either. You never know what the future holds.
Unless your dad was in coalition forces or lost his job in 2008, you weren’t particularly affected by the war on terror or the crash. The ostensible stressors of the aughts were nothing like living through coronamania. It was true Old Normal, without smartphones even.
I think you are spot on, thank you for writing and for the livestream. My family, friends and I had the best experience possible through all this - we were all exactly aligned on what we believed - or did not believe - and how to behave. Nobody argued, nobody festered with resentment, nobody was ostracized or isolated. However just a couple months ago we had this exact same conversation. Lost capacity for trust, suspicious of pretty much everything and persistent sense of dread that we can't shake.
I am not going to start preaching here, but I think we're really close to The End of human rule. I will say this, though. I find it interesting that even non-religious people are feeling "a disturbance in the force." People have a deep sense of dread, as you mentioned, and sense that something big is coming. I hear people whose only God is themselves use the word "evil."
Josh I count my lucky stars that I have job that's in great demand and inflation is nothing more than a bug on my beach blanket. But I've had enough hard times in the past (including living in a homeless shelter) to know what today's inflation does to a $15 an hour worker. Along with trauma it's baffling and bewildering to what people think and believe. Men need tampons. Doctors more than happy to whack off the penis of an eleven year old. People walking around with a paper jock strap across their face even when their high priest (that should be going to the electric chair for mass murder) tells them it was all made up. A President that is a half step away from hospice.
And it might get worse, no matter who is "installed" as President in January 2025. Part of the coping mechanism will be to withdrawal to a very small number of people because like some kind of 1950s horror movie in which you won't know who is "infected." I look at the human race and just want to watch YouTube cat videos.
I really hate to say this, because it makes me sound dramatic, but I have never felt sad when somebody dies. Only jealous. I know that in the past, that was a product of my depression. Now, I know it is that, but also a product of the times we live in.
I strongly feel that certain powerful people figured, after Obama won his second term, that their time was never going to end. And then 2016 happened. And they had to punish us for it- not just Trump supporters, ALL of us. Their anger, contempt, and hatred is not merely directed towards those who directly oppose them. It's all of us- we're in their way. To them, we are subhuman, and we had no right to express free will in a way that thwarted their desires.
And so it has been punishment after punishment, combined with flailing attempts to regain control.
Things like how when the lockdowns and then the vax mandate came out, they deliberately set it up so that this also meant things like supply chain collapses and infrastructure failures. My state's evil governness explicitly connected these things, in fact. And so, for instance, in historic freezing temperatures, my kids sat in the cold and dark for a week long power outage. Could have been prevented. But they are punishing us. All of us.
They were horribly humiliated when Trump won. My husband --- who detests politics and is quite honestly as politically neutral as they come --- came home from his state job in CT, full of lib employees ---- and said, "I gotta admit, it's pretty funny. People are close to tears. I'm surprised they aren't wearing black arm bands."
Thank you Josh and all who have commented so far. I am with you in spirit. Can’t bring myself to detail my own journey (I call it the Rant Stew / Rant’s Due). Long story short, I’d already had complex PTSD and family mental illness pre-Covid and the last 4 years of increasingly deranged / demented leadership, societal breakdown and lawlessness have worn me out. Not much reality to hold onto.
I walk outside regularly to know what’s real. I paint to get out my frustration. I read fiction to escape into someone else’s story. I meditate to quiet the mind fleetingly. I give Buddhist blessings to the universe to try to be positive about the world. I make gratitude lists to remind myself of what I do have. Once an atheist, I’ve even started going to church and reading the Bible - because I feel the need to hold onto a faith that has been a solution and comfort for many over the years. Yet I’m on the verge of despair much of the time. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Hearing from fellow worm-out travelers helps. So thank you for being here.
I understand exactly how you feel. The fact that you are now reading the Bible could be precisely the point of all this. Maybe we’re all being redirected toward that which matters most.
I'm not the same person I was before 2020. Part of my soul was killed and can never come back. The world I knew is gone, forever, and the left wants it that way. Their forces of evil conspire daily to figure out ways to make it worse, and worse, until we are crushed. If anyone thinks that's overdramatic, too bad.
Can relate ! I first heard about you after the flood. I’m having trouble finding food that isn’t making me sick. That’s adding a layer to the ptsd here.
I’m trying to focus on the positives!
Thanks for doing your podcasts..
& watching our country’s reactions the last few weeks is mind boggling.
Hey Josh, no need to make excuses or qualify this feeling.
I agree that the last few years have been the worst of it. But, for me personally, this stretches back to 2009 when our Divider in Chief took office, and before that when "smart" phones came out, and before that when the Kardashians and social media trashed our society.
Hang in there, bud.
The Kardashians coven is very embarrassing!
IMO they are the devil incarnate. How a family can ruin an entire generation (multiple generations, sadly) for such selfish financial and fame gains is beyond my comprehension.
I miss Bruce Jenner.
😊
I saw your post about this on X and I commented so I guess I will put the comment here as well. Really, what you are saying is so important.
Those of us who stood up for the truth lost everything. I started looking into it deeply when COVID first started and I was living in Luxor, Egypt, where life went on as normal. That part was great but for other reasons, because I stood up against a violent mob of men, life became dangerous and I barely got out of the country alive. I started writing about the psychological abuse we are all facing at the hands of what I call the "gods of tech and pestilence".
We can understand it better if we consider menticide.
“Menticide” is a “killing of the mind and the spirit.” Joost Meerloo explains this in his book, The Rape of the Mind:
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a [ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy.”
In order to accomplish this, the elite must manufacture waves of fear within the populace. Each wave is followed by a period of relative calm, but after each calm, the fear is brought back even stronger next time.
Joost further explains:
“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
Emotion, without reasoned thought to temper it, becomes the automatic response and, we feel, justifiably so. Meerloo again:
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal … than logic and reason. While the [people] are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault [them]with another.”
If we understand this, it helps. Because it isn't going to get better. It will get worse. Now with AI we no longer can tell what it true and what isn't. We have to become stronger mentally, spiritually
Andrew Tate (God, am I really going to quote him?) once said in a YouTube video: they will take away 100 of your freedoms and give you back 99. That is how they chip away at us. The goal seems to be disequilibrium. From that, all kinds of awful things happen.
Yeah, he's one of my least favorite people but he is very clever with his words sometimes.
This is why communist states don’t need to rule by Terror all the time. People know exactly what the government is capable of, and that it could dial up its insane campaigns at any time. They are daily humiliated (by design) by the regime’s absurd propaganda. They become resigned. I am resigned.
Excellent comment Karen.
We can look back throughout history and see this practice, that not only destroyed individuals but societies.
It is a riding of a PTSD wave on that societal level, where each assault is addressed less and less, if at all, in deference to the next wave, that we can all see coming.
Coping mechanisms manifest appropriately, as with any trauma/abuse - but on societal as well as individual levels.
I put it this way - In order to manipulate the masses, you only need apply or relieve societal pressures, in varying degrees, which may include total destruction of a segment as an unspoken warning to the rest.
What we are living through today (the last 4 years especially) reminds me of a societal Gulag Archipelago. Meerloo and Solzhenitsyn, respectively describe the time tested mechanisms for control, manipulation and destruction - that are being used pervasively and on a global scale, today.
If one wasn't traumatized from pre-pandemic events in their lives, they probably are now. My brother-in-law already was an alcoholic, but an alcoholic in denial forced to work at home just accelerated his drinking. The pandemic added more stress to his life. He died 2 years ago before he made it to his 60th birthday. I left my job before the pandemic July 2019 as I needed surgery to see if I had cancer (I didn't that time, but 3 years later, a surprise). Although things were very stressful at work and coming to a breaking point - overworked, not enough people, promises over and over again of "getting more money for the budget" to get more people which never happened. It was a few years earlier than planned, but once the pandemic shut down happened and all the riots and things happened in downtown Los Angeles I was glad I didn't have to deal with all of that because I was retired. But in 2022 I had a symptom, tests, etc., and this time I DID have cancer (I'm sure the stress of everything going on didn't help). So far so good, I hope the cancer is gone for good. However, many things are not the same. Some places I used to go, restaurants, theaters, all shut down for good. I was hit with all kinds of unexpected expenses all at once including out-of-pocket medical costs (insurance does not cover everything), car repair bills, special assessment to replace all electric circuit boxes in condo complex (a unit caught on fire from old failed electrical panel and parts and work were delayed because of shut down). My Dad fell in his house 2 years ago, had Covid and pneumonia and he is 90 and cannot take care of himself or drive now. He lives with my sister and I make his appointments and take him to doctor and short outings, and also do yard work at his house. He is being tested to see if he has dementia, etc. My sister and I are fighting all the time about his situation (he has no long-term care plan and we have no money). She still works but wants to retire, but retire to what? I'm just getting by day to day and trying to be positive and distract myself with work, exercise, online classes, free concerts in park, etc. I guess many are experiencing a similar feeling of what I call "waiting for the other shoe to drop". Yes, I believe we have all been traumatized.
I wish you all the best Brenda! In my case, whether I am the walking wounded or not, I am among the walking dead. In 2021 while bicycling I suddenly died of a cardiac arrest, and was dead on arrival into the ER. After several hours of repeated defibrillation, I was presumed to be brain-dead, and yet the emergency physicians persisted, bringing me back at all costs. I was treated with fentanyl, refrigerated with ice packs for two days, and hydrated until I looked like a blimp. Eight days later I gradually emerged from a coma, and was miraculously cogent but clueless about my missing time. Being unvaccinated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, my only assumption was the Delta variant really got me, and took away my voice! A few days later when the ventilator was removed momentarily, I was elated that I did still have a voice. In a put down, my nurse told me I had Covid. Whatever it was, was so bad, I was drowning in my phlegm and found it next to impossible to breathe. I expressed to my nurse, my fear that I might die soon, which strangely made her very happy with a spring in her step! She went and returned five or six minutes later with a team of four men in zippered jumpsuits and a gurney, to wait for my expected passing at my ICU door. I protested, but she glibly said "This is protocol...". For the next hour and a half she checked on me through the door every five minutes to see if I was still breathing. Then I protested more forcefully with my flailing arms, since I had no voice. The nurse turned to the four men with the gurney and uttered in a sullen tone "You guys can go now. He's not going to die yet"! After this, doctors and technicians came to finally aspirate my throat and help me breathe again. I learned from them I never had Covid but had an extremely bad case of pneumonia from the ventilator. I vowed to myself to live no matter the challenge, and be very careful about what I say out loud. I might have been another digit on the officially burgeoning Covid death statistic. Then for a total of five weeks in the ICU, they gradually dehydrated me until I appeared as a toothpick. But the brutal medical interventions worked out. Thankfully, almost three years later, and several thousand more miles on my bicycle, I have returned to excellent health and life. I still have not ever had Covid. One would never guess what I experienced during the pandemic.
I'm adding your account to my catalogue of evidence that the medical profession is a magnet for psychopaths. I will never trust a single one of them again and it's about time they were informed of what contempt they are held in; for £50 a person they were prepared to discard ALL their ethics and get to work on a programme of mass murder.
Incredible story.
Agree, most of us are walking wounded, especially since 2020.
We’re no longer a society at this point, we’re mass dissociation.
Aka Disaffection.
As you know, your thinking and writing publicly amount to a kind of damage control and even some movement toward healing.
At least, that’s my own experience and understanding of what I find when reading your work, though maybe I doth project too much.
Fwiw I’m glad you’re there and still standing and questioning, and it looks like other commentators feel the same way -- you help us articulate the unprecedented fright and assault we’re living through, and sharing this grief does mitigate it a little I think, which in turn can strengthen us.
Your accomplishments despite your obstacles are very impressive and inspiring. May you find ways to focus on positive things that lead to feelings of security and being supported. You wouldn’t have built this podcast community had you not lost your career, I assume? Your sharing of your vulnerable feelings helps others to feel less alienated and alone.
BEFORE we entered election season (and I still had my shut-down decorations up!) I recognized that we would have a society that as a whole was suffering from PTSD. The reaction of the attempted assassination of DJT has convinced me further; real emotions are shut down for many people. It's like people are sleep-walking through anything truly traumatic; that suppression is causing over reactions in check-out lines and traffic. We can only heal through truth and honesty; things in short supply these days. Glad I found you, Josh, to get some doses.
"Nearly everything we thought was stable and normal has been shown to be an illusion."
At risk of adding to the trauma, this statement unfortunately includes our putative hero, Donald Trump. I believe that "it's as if [the assassination] never happened" is because we can't even be sure that Team Trump itself wasn't in on, or even behind, what increasingly looks to be a psyop. Lots of strong evidence on this, including Vance's strong ties to Palantir. That perfect, iconic, statue-like photo. Come on.
I'd so like to believe it's for real.
Our seeming obliviousness is more attributable, I think, to a state called "hypernormativity" wherein everyone knows that the lies are coming at us every moment and from every angle, and social lassitude sets in. Steve Turley (who still pumps the hero patriot theme) explained a year ago that phenomenon, as it applied to the Russians while the USSR was still a thing.
Bitch please, I’m a War on Terror kid and Financial Crash millennial. My entire life from high school onwards has been one reality reasserting itself episode after another. I’m annoyed that others are noticing and are acting like they discovered some Earth shattering revelation.
While I don't like the "bitch please" part of your statement, I am sympathetic to your point of view. I've got a daughter who may never be able to afford to buy a home and it makes me genuinely sad for your generation. I pray things get better. Best to you.
You're gracious. I also hope for the best for your daughter and her generation, but they lack perspective on many issues and buy the divisive message they're sold (bc outrage sells) that they are the most downtrodden generation alive. In the early '80s it was easy to feel pessimistic and lots of us were. Mortgage rates went over 15% and unemployment over 10%. I never thought I'd be able to buy a home either. You never know what the future holds.
We're all hurting. I'm a generation older than you and experienced the things you have, plus the things that happened before you were born.
It's not a contest. It's hard for all of us.
I would say it's harder for us who knew what life was like before this insanity. (I'm 58.)
Unless your dad was in coalition forces or lost his job in 2008, you weren’t particularly affected by the war on terror or the crash. The ostensible stressors of the aughts were nothing like living through coronamania. It was true Old Normal, without smartphones even.
I think you are spot on, thank you for writing and for the livestream. My family, friends and I had the best experience possible through all this - we were all exactly aligned on what we believed - or did not believe - and how to behave. Nobody argued, nobody festered with resentment, nobody was ostracized or isolated. However just a couple months ago we had this exact same conversation. Lost capacity for trust, suspicious of pretty much everything and persistent sense of dread that we can't shake.
I am not going to start preaching here, but I think we're really close to The End of human rule. I will say this, though. I find it interesting that even non-religious people are feeling "a disturbance in the force." People have a deep sense of dread, as you mentioned, and sense that something big is coming. I hear people whose only God is themselves use the word "evil."
Josh I count my lucky stars that I have job that's in great demand and inflation is nothing more than a bug on my beach blanket. But I've had enough hard times in the past (including living in a homeless shelter) to know what today's inflation does to a $15 an hour worker. Along with trauma it's baffling and bewildering to what people think and believe. Men need tampons. Doctors more than happy to whack off the penis of an eleven year old. People walking around with a paper jock strap across their face even when their high priest (that should be going to the electric chair for mass murder) tells them it was all made up. A President that is a half step away from hospice.
And it might get worse, no matter who is "installed" as President in January 2025. Part of the coping mechanism will be to withdrawal to a very small number of people because like some kind of 1950s horror movie in which you won't know who is "infected." I look at the human race and just want to watch YouTube cat videos.
All I want to do is SLEEP.
I really hate to say this, because it makes me sound dramatic, but I have never felt sad when somebody dies. Only jealous. I know that in the past, that was a product of my depression. Now, I know it is that, but also a product of the times we live in.
With you completely on this. I wrote a post about the same thing late last year:
https://olgasbirds.substack.com/p/forgiving-and-not-forgetting
I strongly feel that certain powerful people figured, after Obama won his second term, that their time was never going to end. And then 2016 happened. And they had to punish us for it- not just Trump supporters, ALL of us. Their anger, contempt, and hatred is not merely directed towards those who directly oppose them. It's all of us- we're in their way. To them, we are subhuman, and we had no right to express free will in a way that thwarted their desires.
And so it has been punishment after punishment, combined with flailing attempts to regain control.
Things like how when the lockdowns and then the vax mandate came out, they deliberately set it up so that this also meant things like supply chain collapses and infrastructure failures. My state's evil governness explicitly connected these things, in fact. And so, for instance, in historic freezing temperatures, my kids sat in the cold and dark for a week long power outage. Could have been prevented. But they are punishing us. All of us.
They were horribly humiliated when Trump won. My husband --- who detests politics and is quite honestly as politically neutral as they come --- came home from his state job in CT, full of lib employees ---- and said, "I gotta admit, it's pretty funny. People are close to tears. I'm surprised they aren't wearing black arm bands."
Thank you Josh and all who have commented so far. I am with you in spirit. Can’t bring myself to detail my own journey (I call it the Rant Stew / Rant’s Due). Long story short, I’d already had complex PTSD and family mental illness pre-Covid and the last 4 years of increasingly deranged / demented leadership, societal breakdown and lawlessness have worn me out. Not much reality to hold onto.
I walk outside regularly to know what’s real. I paint to get out my frustration. I read fiction to escape into someone else’s story. I meditate to quiet the mind fleetingly. I give Buddhist blessings to the universe to try to be positive about the world. I make gratitude lists to remind myself of what I do have. Once an atheist, I’ve even started going to church and reading the Bible - because I feel the need to hold onto a faith that has been a solution and comfort for many over the years. Yet I’m on the verge of despair much of the time. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Hearing from fellow worm-out travelers helps. So thank you for being here.
I understand exactly how you feel. The fact that you are now reading the Bible could be precisely the point of all this. Maybe we’re all being redirected toward that which matters most.
And to think this Kali Yuga just began.
God i hope not..could it possibly be a calculation mistake? I've seen some saying we are at beginning of bronze age?
I'm not the same person I was before 2020. Part of my soul was killed and can never come back. The world I knew is gone, forever, and the left wants it that way. Their forces of evil conspire daily to figure out ways to make it worse, and worse, until we are crushed. If anyone thinks that's overdramatic, too bad.
Neil Oliver once pointed out in a video that the push away from meat and toward eating insects is at least in part about humiliation.
So true.
The trans stuff: men in girls' sports and DQSH? Humiliation.
Biden the vegetable presented as the leader of the free world? Humiliation.
Anal/nasal swabs for covid? Humiliation.
Simon Says mask 'rules'? Humiliation.
DEI? Humiliation.
Take off your shoes at the airport? Humiliation. It does go back a ways.
Probably a number of other things you can all contribute as examples.
There's a concerted war on... against normal people and normalcy, no doubt about it. The bullets, other than financial, are psychological.
More Humiliation:
"JUST IN: Kamala Harris’ campaign called Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday to gauge his interest in running for vice president"
https://x.com/Suntimes/status/1816222688362254377
Please remember to use his full title: Enemy of the Human Race Governor Pritzker.
🤢🤮