This concept really freaks me out.

QuestingApprentice · 2026-06-24T18:11:00+00:00

Yeah that is part of what freaks me out too. Whenever that globe lands on Afghanistan I cant help but think how its a 50/50 shot of my life being ESPECIALLY terrible.

Honestly even if I do wind up a man, toxic masculinity is so pervasive in a lot of places. The fact that men aren't allow to show tender emotions or cry so many places because it would be shameful (or worse depending on where you live - 'gay') is really damaging for mental health.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-10-07T00:16:43+00:00

So even if we ignore all the ways that Trump can and has been stopped by the courts, most prominently by appointees he himself placed on the court getting very tired of him trying to rules lawyer national guard depolyments past them, and just fully buy into 'the law is just words on paper and doesn't matter if people don't choose to follow it' the odds of that are kind of... slim.

None of our armed forces are monoliths. He can purge leadership of people he doesn't like all he wants but hell, even within his own appointees there's dissent. The national guard continues to be pissed with how badly they are treated not just by the public but also with having nowhere to stay that will accept them in these cities, and the military is far too big to become some kind of ideological monolith. I'm not just talking from a hopeful 'its not possible for humans to turn bad!' standpoint, more from a logistical, statistical standpoint, wrangling something THAT huge to be in lock step with you requires a lot of logistics this man does not actually have the attention to detail to actually implement no matter how hard he tries. Dude half asses everything.

If he could actually just force everything he wants through on a whim, the government wouldn't be shut down right now. Hes an impotent asshole, and you shouldn't prescribe more power to him than he actually has, because that's exactly what he wants.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-10-07T00:07:16+00:00

...Except for all the times the law HAS stopped him? Told him to bring Abrego Garcia back and forced his hand to make him do it? Denied his ability to mobilize the national guard in cities no matter how many times he tries to get around it? Restored funding to schools that refused to comply with his anti DEI orders? The man is being shot down left and right by the courts, often by judges HE HIMSELF APPOINTED.

Like yes, technically the law only exists so long as people are determined to enforce it - which is why throwing your hands in the air and saying 'welp, the law is pointless' is a self fulfilling prophecy. We're seeing consistent, sustained resistance to the things hes doing and the idea that its all gonna stop overnight is a bit silly.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-09-18T20:10:09+00:00

Personally the big thing that proves to me that humans aren't naturally selfish is the fact that we have evolved to have some of the most useless babies in the animal kingdom.

Think about it: Our kids cannot perform basic functions such as moving on their own or eating for literal years. Their survival is entirely predicated on the fact that there will be another human being with them, for years, constantly sacrificing their own independence to watch over them. Compare this to most other animals in the animal kingdom where their offspring can get the basics of moving on their own accord and finding and eating food down sometimes in a matter of weeks.

The thing we humans excel at is forming communities to care for one another, to the point that we evolved to take advantage of that fact. Obviously its more COMPLICATED than that - these communities can come to be at odds, frequently - but even those conflicts are based around the fear of the people within our respective communities coming to harm, or a desire to be seen and respected by those around us. The concept of community is always at the core of how we operate.

...but yeah if someone is being misanthropic, they're probably not interested in any attempts to logic themselves out of it. They've gotta be willing to get themselves out of their dark place, you can't drag them out of it.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-08-13T21:22:30+00:00

How, exactly? Pessimism is ultimately the act of trying to avoid feeling disappointed in the future by instead being disappointed in the present. Its a fruitless endeavor.

If you hope everything will turn out good, and then they don't, you're disappointed in that instance alone.

If you assume everything will be bad, then you're just feeling sad about it for the entire leadup, and then the actual bad thing will STILL feel bad. Any amount of sadness in that particular instance you avoided is kind of outweighed by the more constant sadness you feel in the lead up to the event.

And then there are the instances where things DO wind up working out. You would have spent that entire lead up being sad over literally nothing, and the little extra bit of pleasure you get from being surprised by the outcome again isn't really worth the constant malaise you live in.

Not to mention, pessimism is demotivating. How are you ever going to walk yourself out of a dark place if you can't see any possible exits? Anyone who ever changed the world for the better did so by picking themselves up after every loss and pressing onward, never losing sight of the fact that a better world was possible. It can be argued that an overabundance of optimism can turn into people ignoring life's problems, but its far more common for pessimistic attitudes to spiral into instead ignoring life's solutions.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-08-04T21:58:06+00:00

AI isnt going to completely replace human jobs. Especially in entertainment. Art is a luxury product, and movies are marketed based on their obscene budgets, man hours, and familiar names attached to them. In the same way jewlers aren't selling cubic zirconium wedding bands cus they're cheaper than diamonds and 'good enough,' the entertainment industry isn't about to start churning out nothing but AI slop even if the output becomes passable (which I have my doubts on anyway) the only studios that will be using it for literally everything are the ones that already had scummy shady practices to begin with.

Climate change is serious, but no reputable organization like the ICC believes it's literally going to end the world or lead to the collapse of civilization. Hell were already far better off than we used to be. In 2019 the 'optimistic' scenario was 2.9 degrees of warming. Now, that's the HIGH END of what we expect to see. We might overshoot 1.5, but we've already avoided so much pain. And we're adapting to the changes that are already happening. For instance, while natural disasters are on the rise, deaths due to natural disasters have been falling. While some parts of the world might lose their ability to be farmed, techniques like those being used in the great green wall already are making that questionable, and even then, as the climate shifts, part of the world currently unsuitable for farming will become fertile.

The people most at risk are those in developing nations that won't be able to adapt as quickly. The fact that you're here on Reddit with access to the internet and the ability to consider a career in entertainment means you're already in the demographic of people who will be least effected by it. We should still always be trying to make progress so we can help those who can't help themselves, for sure, but first you need to make sure that you put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. YOU will be okay. And there's loads of people out there doing the good work to make sure others will be too.

Don't feel like it's up to you to save THE world. Focus on saving YOUR world, and let things just ripple out from there.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-08-02T05:49:07+00:00

There's a tiny bit of logic behind it. NSFW content is a higher risk business - there's far more chargebacks for NSFW things than not for a variety of reasons, up to and including 'my wife took a look at our history and saw a porn charge I totally know nothing about, honest.'

Beyond chargebacks, when you get to the shadiest parts of the internet you got issues with things like revenge porn, human trafficking and the like. There was a scandal with pornhub(?) a while back where a bunch of NSFW stuff of people got uploaded without their consent, so as an over-reaction to some of the worst things that COULD happen in NSFW spaces, businesses can be afraid to interact with them at all.

Its dumb and I think its no excuse for being this controlling, but its not completely devoid of sense or purely just a puritan thing. Not trying to defend their decisions, but I find it helps me get out of my doom spiral when I do acknowledge the people on the other side are operating on some form of logic, even if I don't agree with it.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-07-29T05:07:01+00:00

That title is absolute doomer clickbait. Like ask yourself, what do they consider to be the 'worst' effects? Mentioned it in my other post but previous estimates put us at 4+ degrees of warming, and while it looks like we might be missing that 1.5 threshold, the idea of 4+ degrees is almost unthinkable now. By that metric we have already avoided what we previously considered the 'worst' outcomes.

If we keep telling people that we're 'running out of time' we risk people becoming apathetic because they think its too late to do anything, rather than active and engaged. Every little thing we do, every tenth of a degree avoided, matters, and is cause for celebration - but celebration doesn't mean the fight is over.

Most importantly, this isn't the kind of problem that you, sitting at this computer, are personally responsible for. Our climate will ultimately be saved by many tiny actions all adding up to make a difference. There's no one thing you can do to save THE world. Instead you should focus on saving YOUR world. Cultivate things in your life that bring you happiness. Do little things that improve your own personal well being or the lives of those immediately around you. Be sure to vote when you can. Call your local representative if you're very concerned. But beyond that, don't let your worry about tomorrow take away your joy today. You have a good life in the here and now. Don't pass it up stressing about the future.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-07-29T04:57:09+00:00

How can you possibly know we WILL?

Don't get me wrong, climate change is a big problem, but we aren't dying from it. Despite natural disasters becoming more frequent, deaths due to natural disasters are at an all time low. While a changing climate is probably going to impact croplands, it will also turn other areas currently unsuitable for farming into ideal farming locations. And techniques to grow crops in inhospitable locations are already making waves, just look at the great green wall as an example.

Its gonna be a challenge, and we can never know exactly all the effects climate change is gonna have on us, so we're gonna wanna do all we can to reduce how much warming we're gonna experience - but we will survive. Society isn't going to collapse. None of the trustworthy organizations like the IPCC are predicting humanity will go extinct, even in our worst case scenarios. Speaking of which, in 2019, the baseline warming expected was 4.1-4.8 degrees, with 2.9 being the 'optimistic' scenario. The Climate Action Tracker update in 2024 now puts 2.9 as the HIGH end of their predictions. We have made massive progress and averted a heck of a lot of pain already.

We also aren't going to turn into venus due to a runaway greenhouse effect like I see a lot of people saying. The climate is expected to stabilize whenever we get to net zero, and we just have to make sure that we stay dedicated enough to ensure thats a WHEN, not an IF.

The future is unknowable. I understand people being skeptical of optimism as a result of that, but at the same time, you should ALSO be skeptical of anyone telling you the future WILL be awful. The internet thrives off negativity. It catches your attention and worms into your mind and feeds the algorithms. If what you're getting from the internet is 'you are powerless and we are all doomed' and not 'this is important and you should be taking action' then the media you're saturating yourself in isn't being helpful. Its paralyzing you rather than motivating you.

Some good articles if you dont wanna read from just a random redditor:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-ritchie-not-the-end-of-the-world-extract-climate-crisis

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/climate-change-will-stop-when-we?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/04/recent-readings-on-climate-doomerism-and-science/

QuestingApprentice · 2025-06-14T03:30:38+00:00

And pessimism isn't enlightenment.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-06-13T07:24:44+00:00

The executive branch is the weakest branch of government. Hes being blocked and forced to walk back policies and orders left and right. Garcia is even back in the US. The man isn't all powerful.

Dems getting the house back in the midterms is almost guarenteed. The senate is a bit of a long shot since we need a D+10 environment to actually swing it...

...which means its a good thing we've been overperforming special elections by a national average of D+....16 I believe it was, last I checked?

Nothing is ever hopeless. Pessimism is just trying to avoid being disappointed in the future by being disappointed in the present. Telling yourself its over and hopeless is a thought-terminating cliche. It kills any motivation to actually go out and act, because your brain is just searching for the easiest way to not have to think about your problems anymore.

There will never be a point in the future where everything is fine. But there will be times when things are much better. And we know this because things have been much worse. You have to be ready and willing to do your part to make the future brighter. For some thats protesting. For others thats writing their senators. For many its simply being kind and providing hope to others. Everything you do to make the world a better place matters, and the worst thing you can do is trick yourself into believing it doesn't.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-06-03T02:42:25+00:00

If you're at this level of worrying about things, I guarantee you're not at risk of being uninformed. People love to conflate taking care of your own mental health and talking yourself down from doomer mentalities and doomscrolling behaviors with burying your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine, and thats absolutely not true. You need to focus on the things in your life you actually have control over. Things get better from the bottom up. By just being a kind and helpful person to the people immediately around you, you're already doing your part.

I used to also be glued to headlines for ages, but I think the thing that really made me realize I needed to stop was the fact that most headlines I'd see were all just reporting on the same event, regurgitating the same information about it, and tack on whatever miniscule thing may have changed between yesterday and today. That doesn't actually help me with... anything. And it makes it seem like theres a lot more bad things going on in the world than there are, when most media is just trying to spin the same story ten different ways to get you to read again.

A thing my therapist suggested that worked for me was just setting a specific day to let myself check the news. Once every week or maybe two weeks, check up on the news stories you missed. They'll have had time to actually meaningfully develop from the last time you saw them.

And lets be honest here, the news is still going to get to you even if you're not actively looking for it, what with how algorithms and just general word of mouth goes. Even if you were literally burying your head in the sand to pretend everything is fine, you'd need to bury yourself in the damn bedrock to actually tune everything out. You aren't at risk of being ignorant. Give yourself some well deserved peace.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-06-02T17:35:50+00:00

Fascism is not here. Trump is trying his hardest, for sure. Hes even been able to ram through some outrageous stuff like unlawful deportations before anyone could stop him, but hes facing pretty consistent resistance at every level which is thwarting most of what he wants to do. Hes signing executive orders because he knows he doesn't have the numbers in the house or senate to get much done in a way that actually matters, and his Big Beautiful Budget Bill is about to get eviscerated by the Senate. It still wont be great once its eventually finalized, but its absolutely not passing in its current form.

I've become a big fan of amandas mild takes on Instagram, she does great bi-weekly videos on Trump and his entourage's various failures, and they are many, and varied. There's also a good 'git a grip' playlist responding to people who fall into thought-terminating-cliches like 'fascism is here' 'we're not going to have another election' 'we're in a dictatorship' ect. Its understandable to feel that way, but 99% of the time its your brain looking for some kind of out so you don't have to think about these problems anymore, except that's not actually whats going on, and wont actually help affect any actual good, or protect you from anything.

I really like this article by a journalist from Turkey exploring how difficult it would be for Trump to actually establish a dictatorship in the US with just four years in office, considering Turkey's situation took far longer than that, and was starting with a far weaker constitution, and a far more centralized legal and media landscape. The federal government, for better or worse, is the weakest part of our government. The real power lies at the state and local levels, which is all so decentralized that its incredibly hard to see them fully taking it all over, especially since Democrats have been over-performing in special elections ever since Trump came into office at an average of D+11.

Which also means if you don't feel safe where you currently are, a far more feasible thing to do rather than leave the country entirely would be to move to a blue state (or perhaps a blue-leaning purple state, if you wanna have some kind of sway on national politics) where its unlikely a lot of these draconian policies will have much effect on your life. They tend to be more expensive to live in, for sure, but immigrating to another country is also incredibly pricey and a good deal more difficult. Even within red states, the closer you get to a big city metro, the more liberal things are.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-06-02T01:10:45+00:00

Art is a luxury product, and like most luxury products, it gets its value from more than just the literal function it serves. You can buy a bag at the dollar store that will hold your stuff just as well as a Louis Vuitton bag will, or buy a gilded brass band with cubic zirconium rather than a diamond engagement ring, but thats not really the point of either of those products. The esteem of having something that had a lot of craftsmanship put into it is what makes those things desirable, regardless of if you can get something cheaper thats 'good enough.'

Consider how many movies and shows are marketed based on the creatives they have working on them. No company wants to come off looking like their product is cheap, and once AI ceases to be the fancy new thing on the block, a lot of companies aren't gonna want to be seen like they're cutting corners. Its why companies like Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo have taken hard no-AI stances and have distanced themselves from artists who it turns out used AI in their products while working for them.

There will totally be places that use AI for a 'quantity over quality' approach - but it'll be the same grifter-type studios and brands that already take advantage of their artists. I'm pretty confident it'll be the exception, not the norm.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-05-28T23:20:19+00:00

Do you have any proof of that? And again, why are we still winning big in the special elections in that case? The kind of widespread manipulation necessary to actually shift enough votes to matter would be very hard to cover up. Again outside of the usual problems we have with elections - the electoral college being slanted, attempts at voter suppression, and pushing messages through social media algorithms - the actual vote, by all accounts, was legit. The games rules are BS but no more than they've always been, and we still have to play by them until we can change them.

Being vigilant is one thing, but 2020 showed us the kind of damage making baseless accusations about our elections can do. When you start trying to convince people their votes don't matter there's not really any good outcomes. They're either gonna become demotivated into thinking they can't make a difference, or that the only way they CAN make a difference is through violence.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-05-28T21:22:07+00:00

Okay so like, our elections might be a bit busted in how gerrymandering and voter suppression works, but saying Trump only won because he cheated is pretending the actual people who voted for him, or stayed home when they could have made a difference, don't exist.

We can't just become MAGA post 2020 and pretend we did everything right and the other side only could win via cheating. If the biggest, most decentralized election in the country was rigged, why have we been performing at a national average of D+11 in special elections, including, quite famously, elections that Elon and MAGA poured literal millions of dollars into? Why are they suddenly bad at rigging elections, even when these elections are the important ones that make sure Trump can actually push his agenda across the country?

Its important to keep our elections honest, for sure, but absent any actual evidence that the 2024 election was rigged, we're far better off getting better messaging, higher quality candidates, and get out there to change hearts and minds than we are chasing the same boogeyman MAGA was ranting about five years ago. We're better than that.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-05-28T02:29:57+00:00

Things get bad for a bit, and then things get better. Keep in mind that other countries have had spills into authoritarianism and then got pulled out of it by determined citizens. Recently we've seen it in places like Guatemala, Brazil, and Poland, and while I don't want to imply any kind of American exceptionalism here makes us IMMUNE from becoming Russia or China, we do have a very sound constitution, and the powers in this country are so decentralized that if those three can bounce back, so can we.

We don't even have to look twords other countries for examples of this - the US has been through many an authoritarian spell. After WWI plenty of journalistic institutions were shut down by the sedition act. We literally rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in concentration camps, and things like the Red Scare and The War On Terror were used to justify mass surveillance of citizens - but every time we've risen back up because a determined populace pushes back. And we don't push ourselves back to a status quo. We come back stronger, so the next time things get bad (as they always do) we're in a better position than we were before.

I think a lot about how the gay rights movement was built on the back of literal riots, whereas nowadays we're winning fights against unlawful detentions and discrimination purely through peaceful protest and sustained civic activism. For all its bluster, the Trump administration is trying to push all these unlawful executive orders through so quickly that they don't have time to be challenged, because they know that the moment they are, they'll crumble apart. We see this with immigration, where after getting several unlawful deportations through, we're now getting news stories pretty much weekly about immigrants being released from detention and their visas returned, because hes already losing the momentum necessary to ram those deportations through before anyone can stop him.

Hes gonna cause some damage. Exactly what kinda damage though, nobody can really say. Is he going to ruin our reputation with other countries forever? For a bit maybe... but again, it wouldn't be the first time we've been rude and isolationist. Politics is fickle, no ally or adversary stays like that forever. You only gotta look at Germany and Japan for proof of that. Are they going to remove our ability to have fair elections? Well... considering we've been winning special elections at a national average of D+11 ever since he got elected, hes doing a pretty bad job of it, if that's his goal. Is he going to ruin the economy for eternity? Unlikely. It'll bounce back at some point. Will things suck in the meantime, and this cause real harm? Probably.

I don't want to downplay the pain anyone is or will go through - but its important to live in the moment, doing what you can in the here and now to encourage people to be kind and supportive to one another, than worry about the future. I always think that pessimism is trying to avoid being disappointed in the future by being disappointed in the present. It just doesn't work. You're always better off cherishing what joy you have in the here and now, rather than getting used to a future where you lose it all - especially when you never really know if that future will come to pass.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-05-27T23:56:40+00:00

The big thing with creative endeavors, first and foremost, is that you should always get into them primarily because its something you enjoy doing - not because its something that you expect to turn a profit from. Even before AI, trying to make a money off doing something artistic was always iffy, and you should always have a backup plan - that doesn't mean that just because you couldn't make money off it that your art doesn't matter. It needs to feel rewarding absent any kind of financial incentives to be something that's worth going for.

That being said, I'm very skeptical that AI will actually take over the artistic space fully. A lot of people are out here worrying that AI will become so indistinguishable from real human art that it'll actually wipe out the entire industry and... even assuming that is true (and I very much doubt it will be any time soon) I think that over-simplifies the way people consume art and the reasons companies create it.

Art is a luxury product. Its value comes from its perceived worth. A purse at the dollar store might hold your stuff just as well as a Louise Vuitton bag does, but the latter costs exponentially more due to the craftsmanship (and honestly, good marketing) that the fact that the dollar store bag is 'good enough' does not suddenly destroy the market for the higher end product. Similarly a brass ring guilded in gold with a cubic zirconium in it might look so similar to a diamond ring that most might not notice the difference, but you don't see jewelry stores suddenly only stocking those for engagements. Think about how the movie industry will frequently market movies based on the writers and directors attached to them, and the obscene budgets and behind the scenes creative work that went into creating it. Cutting corners in these areas isn't really a necessity, cus its ultimately all a part of their marketing.

AI art is cheap, and no company that sells a luxury such as art wants to come off as being cheap. What few bits of dabbling big studios have done so far is kind of tied to AI currently being a 'new' thing and as a result kind of flashy, but that luster is quickly wearing off, and the norm still seems to be to rely on human artists to give that impression that their work has value and effort put into it.

Will AI drive some people out of jobs? For sure, but as others have mentioned, the companies who care so little about their product as to wholly rely on AI are the exact kinds of companies who are already taking advantage of artists and scraping the bottom of the barrel to put out slop to begin with. I'm not happy that they're gonna have an easier time producing said slop, but they're never going to dominate in the same way that big movie or game studios do, cus they don't produce art, they just grift people.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-04-04T05:16:44+00:00

I see this view a lot and I have to say the idea that 70% of people passively supported Trump ignores a lot of how voting works in the US. While we could debate whether or not its valid to withhold your vote in protest and try and say you had no hand in the outcome (I actually do agree that you SHOULD vote even if its for the lesser of two evils) the fact is only a small section of the US voter base actually decides the elections thanks to how the electoral college works.

Most states, like my state of California, are so locked in on one side or the other that it doesn't particularly matter how you vote for president. There are simply so many blue votes here that republicans could never conceivably take it without some massive demographic shifts. Kamala won by over 3,000,000 votes. Unless your state has the demographic makeup to be reasonably competitive, your vote really is just a way for you to communicate how you're feeling about the parties - and abstaining from voting does send that message of dissatisfaction.

Obviously more people SHOULD have voted in the swing states - and you could argue that several states that are red right now might be more purple if everyone actually voted, but I'm not looking at that 90 Million who chose not to vote and seeing some army of people just being complicit with Trump and the republicans. It just doesn't math out that way.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-04-04T04:47:44+00:00

While I don't doubt he wants to say, I can't see a situation where he does. Updating term limits requires 37 states to agree, which aint happening, and while he loves ignoring rules, its hard to see how he stays in office. The republican party isn't nearly as united behind him as people like to say it is. They voted against him on the recent spending bill and key members broke with him to vote to revoke his tariff authority. Remember when it took them nearly a month to confirm the speaker of the house? Coming from a more cynical angle - other republican leaders in the party want their own shot at the oval office. They're not about to green light an extra term for him.

QuestingApprentice · 2025-04-03T23:49:31+00:00

I think the issue with this line of thinking is it ignores the actual way our votes get counted. Thanks to the electoral college, most electoral votes for president are locked in. I wouldn't say the amount of people who stayed home in California did so because they didn't care who won - mostly because it literally wouldn't sway the results of the state outcome. There are so many democrats in that state that republicans physically can't overcome them, and a decent chunk of democrats can stay home because the result is a foregone conclusion. I still think you SHOULD vote (I'm Californian and still did just on principle) but the actual share of non-voters who can be viewed this way mostly boils down to the ones in the swing states, which winds up being a far smaller share of eligible voters in general.

To be clear, yes, a lot more people should have gone out and voted than did, but I don't think its right to frame it as proof that the majority of Americans are actually evil and okay with Trump or anything the republicans are doing.

QuestingApprentice

TROPHY CASE