Indeed. Nicely worded.

And couple this with the fact that we are actively being conditioned that it is up to us to change things: “it’s your personal footprint that matters”, “vote with your wallet”… It’s not even that I disagree that personal action is important. It’s mostly that these narratives are a way for the corporations and governments to shift the blame from systemic to personal. And then we end up with feelings of paralysis because you can only do so much and guilt about not doing enough.

For me it comes down to basically having more and more things to feel worried/anxious about and fewer and fewer things to feel excited about every year. Partially I guess it is normal part of aging (but I’m supposed to be in my prime year for fucks sake) but there are also objectively shitty things that make it difficult to be hopeful that my mood/feelings about the world will improve. The acceleration in enshittification of the internet doesn’t help. At least Lemmy is a breath of fresh air in this regard.

One of my first weird (culture shocky) experiences from USA (Tennessee) during my first trip there was with a drive thru.

I wanted to grab something to eat in the evening and there was a fast food place just across the street from my hotel so I decided to walk there. Once there I realized that the main part of the restaurant is closed and only drive thru was open. Then as I was there on foot they wouldn’t serve me so I ended up walking to a petrol station down the road to actually buy something to eat which was quite scary as there were no sidewalks and I had to cross 6 lanes to get to the station.