Part of the problem, that I’ve personally witness, is groups/communities that form male social cohesion get attacked. They are considered wrong and bad for not including women, and therefore they must be evil.

So men are basically damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

yep. the popular read on male lonliness skips over the detail that a huge chunk of these men are in relationships.

they are just in relationships with people who don’t care about them, and are aware of it. which, for me personally, is far worse than being actually alone.

the cognitive loop goes like this:

If I am not a mass murdered/pedophile/etc, and those are the worst people, and I wish death on them, then I am good.

It’s basically shitty people trying to justify to themselves that they are ‘good’ by their dislike of ‘bad’ people, but taken to an extreme.

It’s also the loop that causes mentally unwell people to justify violence. Because while killing is bad, if they do it to bad people, it must be good.

It’s largely an exercise in ego-inflation and blame-shifting, like the ‘I am shit, but someone else is shittier so I’m not that shitty’ mentality that just entrenches negative behaviors. Further, there is no ‘reason’ to improve your life if the evil rich people stole your life from you, so your justified in wallowing in your misery and fantasy-projecting rather than… taking actionable steps towards improving your life.

I don’t really care about my gender.

but everyone else does. It is very annoying. and they never listen to me because their gender assumptions are so visceral and emotional and they love to shove them in my face and get pissed off that I don’t take the ‘compliment’ they are giving me. whenever i ‘open up’ about myself honestly I am met with hostility and rejection for not being ‘a real man’. this could be as simple as talking about how i like to cook, or read, or ride bicycles.

i also don’t relate to the ‘privilege’ of being a straight male. my gender/sexuality has often been used against me to justify abuse and sexual assault, as well as the policing of my opinions, behaviors, and interests. I simple don’t understand why people are so angry at me for me being me and not conforming to some idea they have of ‘people with a penis must be this way or we feel entirely justified at screaming and hitting them until they act that way’. which of course, talking about my abuses… results in more abuse because it is ‘wrong’ for men to talk about abuse, especially at the hands of women. never once has anyone IRL who I was ever open to ever received me positivity about those experiences. oh, and often too about positive things in my life i get the same negative reaction because my gender is not supposed to ‘be happy’ about the things that make me happy.

it’s funny when people go on about ‘male privileged’ as if we are free from all these expectations and fears of abuse that apparently only women supposedly have. Because I’ve had them my entire life and frankly I hate them.

Welcome to being an adult. It only gets worse as you get older. Other adults do not want to hear about your feelings.

You realize it’s a futile cause and learn to live without it. Or you hire a professional therapist to listen to you.

If you are physically attractive you can also try dating. Lots of people on on first dates and use the date as a therapy session.

The Cloud sucks.

a lady in the grocery store once told me i look really nice today.

that sounds like it tastes gross.

because fiber tastes like ass.

more fiberous versions of breads, flours, etc exist. but nobody likes how they taste.

just swap all the white flour in your life for whole wheat or whole grain bread and all the sudden you will quadruple your fiber intake

medical tech.

nobody wants AI fucking up their patient file.

yes.

feelings are not love. the yare feelings. love is the actions you take.

it doesn’t exist. but i work for a company that does real work.

somewhat. early reddit was a lot more mainstream. it was mostly a link aggregator for news stories in its early days and subreddits were not really a thing until later. i started using it in 2007 and it was much different by 2010.

the dominant ideology was also libertarian and auti-authoritarian, not extreme leftism of various flavors that are pro authoritarian. there was very much a lack of controlling the narrative and language policing… that didn’t take hold until mid 2010s as the reddit ‘scandals’ caused the admins to start cracking down.

life is reductive. it’s not my job to have ‘empathy’ for militant losers who sit around flipping between whining about their lives and then engaging in violent political fantasizing about how they will kill the non believers to the communist cause to usher in the utopia.

because most lemmy users are extreme leftists who think everyone is a fascist. i am a facist and a nazi according to lemmy. and think think nothing of harassing and banning anyone who doesn’t agree with them. at least here i can on be banned on the .ml or extremist instances, not lemmy wide.

if there is anything i’ve learned, online or not. miserable people hate anyone who isn’t as miserable as they are and will harass and insult you for not being miserable just like them.

for example, i like my job. this makes a lot of people immediately hostile to me when they find out because they hate their job.

i don’t see any of that. just normal porn that is blurred.

most small business in my city are vanity businesses supported by a wealthy consumer base who will pay 6 bucks for a lb of flour to virtue signal their status and wealth. or stuff like the lesbian book store, the knitting/fabric store, the ‘gift’ store full of useless trinkets like a paper weight that’s $200, etc. these shops are empty 90% of the time, but they aren’t being run for a profit, they are run because some bored rich person wants to run a business for funsies.

outside of that, very little legit small business left. very few mom and pop operations and the ones that are left are closing up, or use political corruption/bribery to keep competition out such that they are a monopoly. the closet is probably hardware stores, salons, and dry cleaners, other ‘i need this today’ type of businesses.

most ‘small business’ is stores/retaurants that are run by corporations but pretend they aren’t. like in the square by me there are 7 different bars… they are all owned by the same corporation. they just have different decorations and some different items on the menus but are 70% the same.

yeah, zero of my niche reddit interests are here.

i never got banned or harassed in those communities. i got banned/harassed from my city subreddit over politics and pointing out how entitled and crazy a lot of the posters there were. but the mods love the drama so they encouraged those posters.

reddit was niche until the 2016 elections. that’s when it really started exploding and you started hearing abotu it in the mainstream media and boomers had heard of it.