I think I started therapy in late 2020 after seeing the horrifying response to COVID from countries and corporations. The visible lack of global cooperation ruined my mental health. To me, this implied that if we can’t work together to deal with a global pandemic, then what hope is there for the environment?

My therapist kept pushing me to use CBT as a way to cope with the issues I brought up. I ended up feeling more worthless because I didn’t understand why I was failing at yet another thing.

I don’t think I ever went deep into conversation with my therapist about climate change. There were so many external stresses clouding my mind that I was unable to stay on one topic long enough to do any meaningful management of my thoughts. Since everyone around me were so unconcerned about the environment, I sort of played along. All I really could understand at the time was that learning and trying CBT felt more like CBT. I hated it.

I was thinking of finding another therapist since it felt like I hit a wall with my current one. Fortunately, through random chance I happened to find a couple people who shared my views. Through them I’ve come to terms with my climate anxiety. Accepting a lot of uncomfortable truths. About me, about my relationships and about the future in general.

My mood these days ranges from indifference to frustration but I’m no longer in the depths of depression that I used to be in. I’m hoping to use my past experiences to help others who have yet to experience these thoughts and anxieties when the time comes. I want to help in some way because that’s what I like doing and what I think will be useful. It’s one of the many little things I use to motivate myself to get through the days.

I don’t believe all raccoons live near roads. It is entirely possible for some animals to have minimal or no contact with human infrastructure. The world is a big place even if it feels small at times.

Country raccoons aren’t aware of the dangers of motor vehicles. City raccoons would have been taught by their mother how to wait and avoid such obstacles. Foraging for food in bins is also a lot different than hunting for food in a more wild setting. The diets are vastly different with the mother again showing the young how to search and obtain food in their respective environments.

Yes, racoons can teach each other but from my understanding, a lot of that teaching is from mother to child.

I do not expect a city human to be able to head into the wild and survive without a considerable amount of training before heading out. A wild human would have a difficult time adjusting to the city life without starting out with some money.

I still stand by my original statement unless I can be proven otherwise.

I watched a documentary about racoons. It mainly focused on raccoons that live in the city and how they adapted to city life. City raccoons adapted so well that city racoons and country raccoons would not be able to survive in each other’s world.

If I recall correctly, cities helped the spread of racoons throughout North America. Any animal that has is able to adapt so easily is far more clever than we give them credit for.

And since they aren’t bound by human laws, I fully support them in vandalising and trashing these Cyber Truck monstrosities. I’m eternally jealous that they can look so cute while accidentally rebelling against Musk.

This seems like an idea spawned from an evil madman obsessed with both owning a clone army and eternal youth.

Human creativity can be so unsettling sometimes…

As with many travelers in Australia, we both had work/holiday visa’s that allowed us to stay in Australia for 1-2 years. This wonderful comment was thrown at me within the first week of arriving at a hostel in Sydney.

Fortunately they left a month or two later but I still avoided them when they did still live there.

Amazing. Layers of ignorance for an already dumb thing to say.

I’m a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.

My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up “white.” My voice, appearance and behaviour are “white.” I was born and raised Canadian. I’m far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.

I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.

The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I’m not “Indian.”

West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I’ve never visited any West Indian country. Then I’ll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.

Then there are the white people… No matter how white I act, I will never be “white” enough. I’ll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.

In fact, I have a “friend” who is a cop. He’s not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I’ve known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I’d be a perfect “UC.” Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I’m just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.

I’ve never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.

Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means “House Master.” You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.

A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.

I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.

This game has caught my eye. The visual style alone is what really draws me in to the world.

There’s something about the Half-Life-ish graphics and unique style that sort of hits a personal nostalgia for me. It has a wonderful combination of weird and abstract with a touch of familiarity. It also feels both vibrant and gritty at the same time. Something I didn’t realize I was missing so much. Especially after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 which has absolutely gorgeous but very busy graphics.

After I get over my Caves of Qud hyperfixation, I am definitely going to pick this game up.

I got into Arduino through my electrical apprenticeship. We had an electronics course to teach us electrical flow, sensors and boolean logic with integrated circuits. I was working on a project for lights and lighting patterns. Also had a couple other smaller ideas but eventually gave up on all of them.

My world view at the time was being challenged and changing rapidly. It’s far to easy to get lost in tech crazes because there’s always something new to distract you from the truly destructive nature of tech.

I kept a couple parts but sold off everything else for the price of a lunch. The person who bought everything from me was a teacher and said his students would appreciated the box of parts. I didn’t feel so bad since they would get used instead of collecting dust.

I’ve since been focusing on less tech related interests. I’m attempting to work towards a minimal tilling garden. I maintain my own bicycle. I’ve recently picked up whittling. I have a bunch of untreated wood I can use and the wood shavings can be used in my garden. I am working towards simplicity after burning out hard from technology related complexity.

I never planned on staying in the automation industry for long, planned to complete my apprenticeship and run. Management delayed my apprenticeship and then covid further delayed things. All the new revelations of abuse, waste and destruction ate at me pretty hard and little voice in my head wouldn’t stop screaming at me to get out. In an attempt to offset the damage feel like I caused, I planned to get fired and somehow took down the HR manager with me on the way out. Still got my severance pay and a ban from a large, international automation corporation. Maybe I didn’t offset my damages but it was still very satisfying.

If I was only focusing on the end product, industrial plastics would seem logical. The issue I have is that it takes an incredible amount of resources it takes overall.

Extracting, refining, forming, shipping, and right down to installation requires a lot of energy and waste. Forming a wire requires heat for the metals and plastics involved. Metal and plastics are heavy and require more fuel to transport it around. Often shrink wrap is used in transportation. Shrink wrap is worthless after a single use and it takes a lot of plastic wrap to safely secure a load cables on on a skid. Installation creates a lot of waste that rarely gets recycled.

Any electronic devices involved are always shipped in single use plastic wrap. This is to ensure no moisture damage in storage and transit. All those devices are likely to be shipped with other devices that require even more plastic wrap.

Often when a line becomes discontinued, many of those dirty and used cables do not get reused. The new assembly line that comes in to take it’s place will be built with new cables. A company does not care about reusing old material, they want as little downtime as possible and so installing from new materials will be preferred.

This is all just one trade within many trades that help create and automated assembly lines. Each trade has their own use of fossil fuels. It adds up really quickly.

I strongly believe that we can not technology our way out of this situation. I believe it’s a completely unsustainable path to continue on.

Rarely do I see talk of doing less as an action for dealing with the climate crisis. Less work, less transporting, less consumption, less expectations. Rarely do I see discussions of creating stronger, local communities as a form of dealing with the climate crisis. Often the main answer to the climate crisis is more technology without questioning how to create, sustain, maintain or recycle all that tech.

If I am wrong, I’m wrong. I am merely reacting to the situation I found myself in and the things I’ve observed in those situations. If you think my view is extreme, it’s because I now believe the unsustainable use of resources to keep our trades and tech going is absurdly extreme.

If the world truly wants to use tech to deal with the climate crisis, it would have to address the waste and dependency on fossil fuels. Ignoring it will do nothing but hasten our current declining climate health.

As a covid lockdown hobby, I got an Arduino starter kit. I found myself buying all these little parts for these projects that I had thought up. I ended up losing interest in Arduino because of all the cheap and tiny bits that get made in China and shipped to the rest of the world. All those tiny parts must be shipped in more disposal packages that help protect the parts from moisture and shock.

There’s so much energy and waste involved in all these tiny parts and integrated circuits when you look at the whole picture of manufacturing, packaging and shipping.

Robots, technology and open hardware/software concepts are all really interesting. It just gets hard to justify the environmental impact of all this fun tech.

I probably meant up to 600 voltage. After I went out of my way to get fired from that awful place, I quit my apprenticeship and left the absolute toxic culture of the trades world behind.

Also found it hard to justify being an electrician when electric cables need plastic insulation. Hard to separate electrical needs from the oil industry when the insulating material comes from the oil industry.

I used to work in automation and it’s amazing how much waste is created just in the process of creating an automated assembly line.

My company built lines that required power to motors and devices than used up to 600 volts of power. Computers and sensors everywhere. The newer lines tend to have so much more crammed into them to increase production of units. More robots and tools means more power required. Power was usually not shut off during any downtime unless we were working on something that needed to be disconnected.

The automation field is pretty amazing until I stepped back to really notice how wasteful and unsustainable automation is.

I had to leave the industry. It’s become clear to me that automation is far too destructive to the environment. Corporations and businesses have no care to make automation cleaner or more sustainable.

I don’t know how people can expect automation to create more green energy equipment when automation itself is so dirty and demanding.

It’s much easier to understand that shorter, milder winters means you can make people be even more productive. Now winter can’t slow down that road widening project.

No car.

I’m “content” where I am now. I understand you want to help in some way but sometimes listening to someone vent helps more than any advice anyone can give.

People like to talk. People like being heard. People like being understood. Being too proactive can easily get in the way of listening sometimes.

I need to be involved locally and physically. My ADHD and impatience with the increasingly complicated technology we use today just doesn’t vibe together anymore. A brutal lesson I learned after my trade school courses I was attending went to an online format.

Lemmy’s userbase is just too small and my physical location is a bit too remote to organize anything. I have an alternate lemmy account at another server where I can connect with like-minded people online but that’s as much as I can get out of Lemmy until it’s userbase becomes significant.

I still search for events happening it the big city but time and distance is a factor I have to take in to consideration.

I’m completely disinterested in working for another faceless, soulless entity which only focuses on wealth accumulation. I’m also disinterested in meaningless jobs that do nothing to help make the world a better place for the people that come after me.

At this point, I believe that the only way forward is direct action against unjust hierarchy and those who enforce it. As each day passes, I become more firm in that belief.

If I ever come across people who share the same views as me, I would gladly join them. That would give me the meaning and purpose to move forward that a standard job could never provide.

Until money becomes an issue and I’m forced to work to survive, I’d much rather spend my time around my parents and closest friends.

I do recognize that I am super fortunate to be in such a position, the painful majority of the world must work just to barely exist. I feel awful everytime I have to participate in society and enable the misery machine.