I've been having a difficult time recently, which has been leading to my absence here and a lot of crying in my real life. I don't deal with letting go too well. I keep texts and pictures and messages and every once in a while I like to look back at them and remember that somebody out there at one point was capable of loving me.

It's not like I don't have friends that love me either, I've spent days and days at other people's houses just crying, people have taken me out to eat and cry and just feel my feelings, and people have been reminding me about the things they like about me too. I mentioned it to a friend that I've been having trouble letting go and we dug into it a bit more, about why I want to keep these things. My friend asks why I need the love to come from other people first. Where is the self love?

My core issue has always been needing to be reminded that I am loved. It's really silly sometimes, because on some level I know that I am. But something is missing.

There's an old saying that we judge other people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just a bad person. Or if I think I am. Because if I didn't have that, why would I have such a hard time forgiving myself?

I don't really know how to self love, to be honest. I spent all day today barely working, just mindlessly staring at a screen playing a stupid game and not leaving the house. I dunno. Maybe I just need some ideas. I set up a couple more appointments with my therapist this week, but sometimes when it's 2 in the morning like it is now I just can't sleep and spend more time hurting myself in my own head.

Edit: This thread went off the rails a little in that the top comment is an indictment of religion (and me as a purportedly religious person) rather than an answer to the question. For the record I am not, and have never been, religious. I did go through a spiritual period, long ago now, but it wasn't associated with religion or God. Cheers, though, to the non-proselytizing religious Tilderianites who are trying to be good humans.

Clearly I should have done a better job of anticipating the potential misunderstandings but the ship has sailed.

I didn't want to steer the conversation by leading with my own thoughts about what the answer might be, but I've posted them now that the thread, like religion, is waning.

Don't let it stop you from posting your own take!

The question, rephrased is: As religion plays a progressively smaller role in society, how will we fill on the gaps that leaves? See below for example gaps.
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I realize that the title is maybe evocative because it presumes that religion is going to wane but statistically it's reasonable. The percentage of the population that identifies with a particular religion correlates inversely with the education level and wealth of a country.

As countries develop, religiosity decreases. There are probably exceptions, but I don't think the numbers leave room for much debate about whether or not religion is declining globally. In fact, if you look at just the western world, excluding developing countries where both religiosity and fertility are high, the numbers are even more stark. Presumably as education level and quality of life in developing countries improves they will have a similar decline in religion to other developed countries.

Assuming climate catastrophe doesn't dramatically set development back for everyone of course. Totally a possibility but humor me and, for purposes of this thread, let's not speculate too much about that.

I realize also that none of this is really new information, just establishing context, in that spirit...

Historically religion has served some very important needs. Among them:

• Community. Religion has been a key part of community in much of the world. We know humans need it, for all sorts of reasons, and I believe that right now we can see some of the problems that arise when they don't get it.

• Meaning. Vitally important to mental wellbeing and well covered by most religions. I think some of modern society's ills are partially attributable to the meaning void left by declining religion. Meaning here referring both to meaning in the personal sense as well as meaning in the larger sense of being part of something bigger than yourself that feels deeply important.

• Mortality. A key selling point of most religions is that they answer the question of what do do with the problem of impermanence. I think it's clear that, under the surface, many people are deeply insecure about their mortality and that it subconsciously informs their behavior in often not so great ways. So solving that problem with eternal rewards or whatever has been very important to the health of societies.

• Decency. Religion usually lays out what constitutes being a good or bad person and establishes rewards and punishments to encourage people to be good. Note that I'm not saying an external set of guidelines is required for people to be decent, only that historically that role has often fallen to religion. As a result, a lot of our modern values have their roots in ancient belief systems.

• Organization. Religions have often been at the core of important initiatives to improve people's quality of life and step in during disaster. They provide an ostensibly well meaning third party around which to centralize efforts.

• Faith. There are definitely downsides to believing things without evidence but as a temporary coping mechanism when things fall apart, faith is hard to beat.

And more of course, I'll stop there for brevity.

I'll skip laying out the downsides of religion, for better or worse it's declining and will likely continue to decline. I think that's enough for purposes of the question: How do we replace it?

What are we going to fill the voids opened up by waning religiousity with? I have a lot of thoughts about the topic but no real universal answers. And I think it's a question we're going to need answers for, especially as we go into worsening global insecurity caused by climate change, wealth inequality, fascism and so on.

We're going to need foundational shared values. Is that possible without a centralized authority?

I realize it's a giant topic, I won't bias it with my own thoughts going in, feel free to take it in any direction you want.

Was listening to a pod where one person shared a funny, and having fun is taking care of your ~mental.health

This is my kind of humour, an 'article' about it: https://pleated-jeans.com/2023/08/29/disappointing-affirmations-dave-tarnowski/

And a link to the instagram account https://www.instagram.com/disappointingaffirmations/ for those who use instagram.

The episode in question: Divergent Conversations: Episode 106(mp3)

Maybe this isn't really a good topic, but maybe you'd like to share what makes you laugh, good podcasts or how you use humour for ~mental.health.

I also wrote something related in one the monthly check in topics, so maybe @chocobean would like to give an update! (Sorry for calling you out like this, just trying to have some fun)

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Do you base it solely on age? On the year/console of release? Graphical style? Vibes? Divination?

Additionally: based on your criteria, what are some complicated edge cases?

For example: is DOOM 3 "retro" because it's over 20 years old and its series was rebooted, or is it modern because it's got nice 3D graphics and lighting and whatnot? Is Crow Country retro even though it came out last year?

The point of this isn't to find the hard line of what is/isn't retro -- it's to play around in the gray areas for what "retro" potentially does or doesn't describe.

I'm considering installing some abandonware games, and, as anyone who trawls the internet for old executables knows: they are often rife with viruses/malware.

It's easy to avoid the ones that are clearly malicious using tools like VirusTotal, but it gets trickier when the "is it clean?" is more of a "maybe" than a "no" because you're not sure if something is a false positive.

I'd rather not take chances and will generally avoid anything I find even slightly suspicious, but it did get me thinking: if I ran the games through Linux instead of Windows (e.g. via WINE or Proton), am I equally vulnerable?

Does something like that sandbox the virus? Is the virus rendered ineffective by being in a system it's unable to exploit as intended?

Or is this wishful thinking and it's still risky no matter what?

I'm not asking this as a "help me play abandonware games" plea (though, if there are best practices out there feel free to enlighten me). Instead, it's a curiosity -- a "help me better understand Linux vs. Windows" from someone who's not super techy.

I'm not sure where to bring this up and I wanted an outside perspective. This may seem like I'm doing the same thing here but I honestly just want to know if anyone has any insight. The trend in talking about is the act of creating a reddit post in the form of a question. I've seen so many posts on Reddit popup that are just questions or screenshots/pictures with a question as the title.

For instance in gaming subreddits I'll see a post with the title of something like "What do you think is the best game in X series?" And they will have a screenshot of what would be the perceived most popular game in a franchise like final fantasy or halo or something. This is only one example, I see so many questions constantly in my home feed.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to train an LLM or is it simply some unspoken advantage that karma farmers use to drive engagement? Or am I simply just diving into conspiracy theories created by my own ignorance?

Edit - Nominations are closed

This is the fourth nominations thread for Tildes book club.

If you think you might be interested to read with us, please name between one and five books you find intriguing and think others might enjoy. We will later have a voting thread so that each nomination gets an equal shot to win votes with no early nomination advantage. Our next book in August is Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Followed by Ted Chiang Stories of your life and Others in September.

Please feel free to nominate both fiction and nonfiction. Books should be 600 pages or shorter. The first books in series are fair game for nominations if they tell a complete story.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This is the first time in my career that a Mac is the preferred machine for an organization. I've been using Windows for 30 years. This is a big change for me but I want to learn some useful tips and tricks on Mac os.

This could be "what are some changes you made on the Mac settings to make your Mac experience feel more comfortable?" Or "what tool on Mac can you not live without?"

There aren't any rules really, I want this to be a fun conversation, thanks everyone!

Hi everyone, I'm feeling inspired to start a tool library out of a community space. I am resisting the urge to roll the software myself and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions about existing projects that I might look into, ideally leaning towards the lightweight side of things.

What say you, Tildes community?