The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.

It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people’s hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.

That’s fair, then if these things are negatively impacting you, which it sounds like they are, there is definitely no shame in stepping back or finding other ways to engage, or whatever works best for you.

I really never liked the idea of medication (for myself I mean, different people need different things), the idea of a medical intervention to a rational response to external realities just feels like burying my head in the sand. The three times I have seriously tried them despite this only reaffirmed it to me, they never actually solved anything, they just numbed me into only passively caring.

Instead I sort of drag myself through, getting by on the occasional chances I get to let someone not have to worry about those external realities that chafe against me so badly for once.

I hope that is expressed clearly enough for you to make some more sense of my perspective on all of this.

Happy to talk further if you would like to, but I would prefer via message rather than openly if I am/we are going to go into any real detail about anything.

Honestly, it sounds like you might be depressed, but if so I get that too. For the people you helped it got softer, it doesn’t have to directly relate to ourselves to be better.

Many of us feel that way sometimes, I have even recently felt that way after a couple of extremely rough years relating to a couple of friends who have needed a lot of support of various kinds (please forgive me, I would much rather not be specific with any of this, not my stories to tell and not the place to tell them).

Then another situation calls for it (I had a big one just today, possibly even the biggest ever one off example, for the sake of an ex no less- although I was furious until I spoke to them about it all, in truth) and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

The reward; although I feel a little dirty calling it a reward; is that when someone needed help they actually got it instead of just getting fucked over for the nth time. I don’t care if my impact is limited or even meaningless, ultimately so am I, and it wasn’t to me.

If you don’t feel like that, that’s okay, you took the step to try anyway and I genuinely respect that. You don’t have to give all of yourself, take a step back and look after yourself when you need it, but the world could always do to be a softer place when you feel ready again!

Being nice is an act of rebellion in a cold, uncaring world. If it is your nature to try to do good, don’t let other people not being there yet stop you being yourself.

If money still meant anything even in this scenario, I would be deeply saddened for humanity.

Talking from experience, if you write cursively whilst having bad enough handwriting, it can become a reasonably effective form of encryption in general.

That really just depends on the scale they are personally used to though, for a fair few years I lived ~5 hours from my family (relatively far within the country), but it didn’t feel like very much because I/we visited my partner’s family on the other side of the continent at least once a year. Prior to that, I don’t think that I would have visited anywhere near as frequently.

The lack of Schengen and now EU membership may make British people more prone to being on the smaller side of this.

Well, that and due to them being investigated for how they handle children’s data and access, it had appeared that a fine was heading their way.

My understanding was that any hitherto success of LLMs in mathematics was in its trying approaches and information from different fields where they weren’t traditionally applied (within mathematics), they have surfaced potential links but haven’t created anything in any real sense. Still, a potential legitimate use for them that I personally hadn’t anticipated.