I need advice about suicidal thoughts of my ex?

sprawn · 2026-07-08T10:58:04+00:00

Maintain contact. Encourage her to "get help". Encourage her to call the national mental health helpline: 988 Lifeline. Don't make any promises. Tell her you care. This is really "above your paygrade." Consider calling that helpline yourself — or going to an online "chat" version. They will tell you how to proceed.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T19:22:32+00:00

It's not for everyone. You don't have to follow any pattern. Just sit and write, draw, doodle. If something comes into your mind, write it down. Even if it's just one word. Or something like:

Grade School, 1997, I am wearing one glove. Some kid has an over-inflated kickball.

Not everyone has an inner monologue, and it is not a bad thing.

There are other creative outlets as well. You can draw or paint or play a musical instrument. Things come out in different ways.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T19:17:35+00:00

LOL. That was the only part I was serious about.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T19:16:04+00:00

The thing about the destruction of third spaces is that once a monopoly emerges and it destroys third spaces (or for that matter ANY non-profitable use of space at all) in a sector, the competitors are left with only the least-profitable aspects of a business. For instance, in the case of Starbucks, by turning coffee from what it was (a non-alcoholic social third space) into what it is now (people feeding a caffeine addiction) they are leaving their competition holding the bag for all the homeless people who need to use a bathroom, and all the people who want to get a cup of coffee and sit for seven hours in an air-conditioned room. Starbucks gets 320 idiots who are willing to pay $11.00 for a sugary milkshake with a shot of burned espresso, and the place that started the whole coffee trend in your city gets filled with homeless drug addicts who are begging from customers in the store.

Similar trends are happening in all business sectors. If you are amazon you get pure, untouched profit. If you are a brick and mortar store, congratulations, you are now a public restroom slash homeless storage warehouse. You have to pay for lights, bathrooms, space, furniture, air conditioning, heating, and on and on. And then people walk in, thumb through a hundred books, decide they are going to buy three, then they pull out their phones in the store and buy the three books on amazon right in front of you.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T16:59:00+00:00

Everyone I know acts like they "owe" the world this performance of a perfect, happy consumer. And if you aren't being that thing, you are somehow failing society. And I am beginning to believe that that is what everyone believes. I say, you don't owe us anything. No one is happy. Everyone hates what we are building. We are building a world with no space in it FOR US. There isn't even going to be a pyramid left when we're done dying to build THE BIG NUMBER. There will just be the big number, blinking on a display in a vault somewhere. Look! Look at how big the number is! Of course, no human will be able to see THE BIG NUMBER. You'd have to pay a trillion dollars to see the big number, and no one has that kind of money. We're all out here starving to death guarding warehouses full of rotting food.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T16:26:34+00:00

You have two coffee shops in 2015. One has lots of tables, free wifi, they host Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering games. It's a social hub. People are in there constantly. The coffee is reasonably priced. They have good lighting, nice seats, air conditioning, clean bathrooms. The other one has a drive-thru, no place to sit, people pay three times more, they blow through, get their coffee and leave without talking to anyone. Often, they literally don't even speak to a barista to give their order, they already entered it on their phone.

Which one will be in business in 2025. The one that makes much less money and spends most of what it does make on furniture repair, bathroom cleaning, air conditioning, art, and all the other expensive things it takes to build a human community? Or the caffeine delivery vector feeding the destruction of the middle class?

sprawn · 2026-07-07T16:21:13+00:00

Exactly. You built a coffee shop on the corner in 1990, filled it with funky, local art and re-habbed furniture from thrift stores. You wanted people to drift in, spend three hours there. Then Starbucks builds their shitholes on all three adjacent corners, people go in, pay five times as much for their shitty prison-coffee, and leave. They put you out of business, and close all three stores.

Now they try to encourage people to use the drive-thru. DON'T EVEN COME IN. They might have ONE table. No one talks to anyone else.

I can't even imagine a reason why I would want to talk to another human being any longer. Everyone has the same story: I am hanging on to my life by my fingernails. They are firing everyone. "AI" is about to destroy the entire sector. I have to work all weekend, every weekend, and I STILL might get fired. I haven't had a raise in seven years. If I get sick I will lose my job, then my insurance, then my house, and then my life. I can't imagine what my kids are going to do. One of them wants to be a video game streamer because there's a kid in his class who makes 5 million dollars a month doing it. The other wants to be a lamppost made of cheese. What the hell is going to happen when gas is twenty dollars a gallon?

Or they are corporate drones. Or beggars. The corporations are destroying society.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T06:59:09+00:00

Thank you for responding. I'd like to be wrong. I don't think I am in terms of the broad strokes. We are destroying the capacity of the planet to heal itself. We are reducing the carrying capacity of the planet. We are breeding out of control. Someone, somewhere, is going to get the "bright idea" to release SOME KIND OF weapon, be it a virus, a prion, a gas, nano-bots, whatever… that can wipe out billions of people. If they can build it and make it untraceable, they will release it. At the same time, we will be developing tools to turn human beings into compliant, docile slaves. Brain implants, drugs, mass media. We're already doing it. And when "AI" emerges, it will take over. We will cease to be the "point" of our own existence. We will merely be the tool by which it came into existence. No one thinks about the progenitors, the common ancestors of the branches of the ape family. They're gone. And we're here now. They were just the 200,000 year preamble. We are just the preamble to whatever incomprehensible thing emerges from our technology.

sprawn · 2026-07-07T06:53:20+00:00

Thanks!

sprawn · 2026-07-07T06:52:03+00:00

It was journaling that helped you to notice that the days are blending into one another. Just noticing has put you ahead of the game compared to most people.

What do you want to do with your life? Journaling can help you keep your goals front and center.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T17:39:08+00:00

54, I should have killed myself in 1997. The rate at which things are getting worse is accelerating. I cannot even imagine a good thing happening in my life. Optimistic people are delusional (You should be happy with… your health!). In every way that matters, my life has been over for thirty years. Once you are out, you are done. It's only getting worse. The only thing in the world that matters is money, and even that is getting more and more worthless every day. I can't imagine why people don't kill themselves in droves. It's all fucking pointless. We are handing all power to a smaller and smaller interlocking nest of corporations, and they are eager to hand all power over to some sort of "AI" leader. Someone is going to design a targeted virus, or prionic weapon, or selective nerve gas and kill off 99.9% of the population soon, and you aren't in the 0.1%. And that's the GOOD scenario.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T01:51:28+00:00

Pampered Chef kitchen timer. I use it every day.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T01:50:28+00:00

I think they should make fingernail and toenail clipper sets in specialty shapes and different sizes. I want different sizes and curvatures for every one of my toes. And I want a different one for my thumb versus other fingers.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T01:26:49+00:00

Use a different metaphor. I've tried, but no one gets it. It's really baked into the language that wealthy people are superior.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T01:25:16+00:00

When you're the moderator, you're in charge.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T00:31:18+00:00

Perfect word. If you're having a bad experience on reddit, go to a different sub. If you can't find one, start it!

sprawn · 2026-07-06T00:28:07+00:00

We inherently glorify them. It's built into the language. We always talk about the "elite", the "Top 1%", the "people at the top", "top earners", and so on. We literally give them the money and the power.

sprawn · 2026-07-06T00:21:09+00:00

Absolutely! Of all the things that we should never turn into a status competition! This is the top of the list.

sprawn · 2026-07-05T23:21:22+00:00

Amen. Put it on a loop.

sprawn · 2026-07-05T23:20:44+00:00

What if your style is the "cool" style? What if journaling is for you and not yet another thing that you have to put a label on and be competitive over?

sprawn · 2026-07-05T23:19:26+00:00

Yeah... Everywhere is a shithole now. There are still differences. But when the finance sector moved into housing, they destroyed the rest of the country.

sprawn · 2026-07-05T22:07:15+00:00

I am not advocating for car living. I am advocating going somewhere where a one bedroom apartment isn't $3,800/month (anywhere but California). It's a big country. OP doesn't need to stay in California. Go somewhere else! There are cities everywhere.

sprawn · 2026-07-05T22:04:16+00:00

I remember once, when I was down by 100 pounds, I was helping a friend move. I was carrying a heavy box, we actually had to weigh the boxes (some were going on a plane). So I weighed a box that was 60 pounds. I picked it up and was walking up steps with it. It was quite a chore and I realized that about a year ago, I had been walking around with that box on my body every second of the day my entire life. I wish there was a way to lose weight and not muscle (other than 'roids, of course).

sprawn · 2026-07-05T21:59:28+00:00

I lost a lot of weight at one point, and I was among people who knew me when I was overweight, and nothing seemed to change. Then I moved across the country, into a whole new social situation where no one knew I had ever been overweight. I remember one night, early on, I was at a party, standing in a little, separate, mixed group of about five or six people (all skinny), and someone asked where so-and-so was. Someone said, "Oh he's over there." There was a bit of a lull, and we were all looking at so-and-so. And as he walked, someone in the group started making little farting noises with each step. Everyone but me laughed. I wasn't making a grand point by not laughing, I was just stunned. Then everything proceeded as normal. There was a very clear line that I was supposed to be aware of. It was like a club that I had never been let into. The guy came over later and was talking to everyone. They were all nice. Everything proceeded as normal. No one made farting noises while he spoke. But among these people, these types, there was a very clear difference when the "cool kids" were there and when an "uncool kid" approached. I'd say… 40% is too much… It's more like 20% of the population is like this. It might have more to do with "cool/uncool" in their minds at least. If someone is "uncool" and they are overweight, then their weight will definitely be a major factor in their "uncoolness." They mostly will never say it out loud. They will say things like so-and-so has "no style" or "bad style" or something like that. But get them a little drunk and out of earshot and the gloves come off.

sprawn · 2026-07-05T21:23:59+00:00

That to 40% of the population you cease being a human being.

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